America - In Memoriam

Posted by Jew from Jersey
7 July 2026

One of the most unique war memorials in the world can be found on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, site of the Battle of Fort Sanders. The memorial commemorates the New York Highlander Regiment that fought there in 1863. What is unique about the monument is that it depicts a union soldier and a confederate soldier shaking hands and underneath them is the following poem:

• The hands that once were raised in strife
• Now clasp a brother’s hand
• And long as flows the tide of life—
• In peace, in toil, when war is rife
• We shall as brothers stand
• One heart, one soul, for our free land.

Fort Sanders Battlefield, as viewed on Google Maps, March 2022

This monument was placed by the victors of the bloodiest war in American history on the territory of one of the states who lost and it still stands, slightly neglected, a century and a half after the battle was fought and over a century after the monument was erected. If it is in any danger of being removed or defaced, it will be at the hands not of neo-confederates, but of those who delight in tearing down war memorials and monuments of any kind that honor the people who made America possible.

The Civil War ended slavery in America once and for all, making good on the promise of the constitution. It united a country that had since its founding been divided between north and south, preparing it to become the greatest nation ever known in the history of the world by any objective metric. And this would not have been possible had not northerners and southerners learned, as the poem says, to stand as brothers. It was these brothers who won WWI and WWII, ending Nazism. But all of this came at a great price. It took over a hundred years to make real progress in healing the scars of the Civil War. In the 1980s, Tom Petty was still writing songs about “those blue-bellied devils” who “burned our cornfields and left our cities leveled.”

The denigration of confederate symbols, monuments, and battlefield reenactments in the 21th century is a horrific thing. For a century and a half since the end of the Civil War, these symbols have been preserved among us. We have finally begun to move beyond the scars and the bitterness. We have never been safer from the evils of the antebellum era. These symbols have never been more harmless, nor have they ever been more needed lest we forget where we have come from and what makes our present lives possible. It is the people who want to eliminate these things who threaten to push us back to an age of secessionism.