Arlington House, a white-pillared Greek Revival structure, sits at the highest point on Arlington’s grounds. Before the house belonged to the federal government, it belonged to Mary Custis, the step-great-granddaughter of George Washington and the wife of Robert E. Lee.

The first remains interred at Arlington, in August 1864, were 26 Union soldiers laid to rest by order of the quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs, whose son died in the war. When it came to these first burials, Meigs was particular. He instructed graves be dug along the border of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, with the hope that their presence would ensure Lee would never want to return.

Today, among the 400,000 graves at Arlington are those of approximately 500 Confederate soldiers, as well as a memorial to them. Unlike the other graves there, which are laid out in rows easy to elongate, the Confederate graves are arrayed in concentric circles, making it impossible to add even one additional plot.

The Confederate section at Arlington has a complex political history. It was conceived by President William McKinley in 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, when he needed support from the Southern states in Congress to ratify the Treaty of Paris, thus ending that conflict. After noting the poor condition of many Confederate graves on a tour of the South, McKinley thought the gesture could result in the Southern votes he needed.

Then as now, controversy erupted around the issue of Confederate memorialization, and not always in predictable ways. Although objections came from groups that believed Confederate traitors had no place in a national cemetery, opposition also came from groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy that, reluctant to support any gesture they felt appeased the federal government, wanted full control over Confederate graves so they could be used to galvanize sustained interest in Lost Cause mythmaking. Nevertheless, against a tide of controversy, McKinley’s initiative succeeded, and in 1901 the Confederate section was dedicated at Arlington.

Arlington, like our nation, is defined by its contradictions and flaws. I’ve always felt ambivalent about my own space reserved there, granted because of the nature of my combat service in Iraq, where we waged a far-from-popular war. Despite the honor of an Arlington burial and a desire to be close to my friends buried there, I’ve often wondered what peace exists in ground consecrated by the eternal, often violent chapters of our American experiment. When I imagine someone disinterring a grave at Arlington today, I can’t help but imagine a future generation disinterring my grave or that of one of my friends.

It seems the prospect of digging up the dead unsettles most Americans. The legislation introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren to redesignate military bases named after Confederate generals includes a provision that ensures all graves remain undisturbed.

Another area of our complex past that should be left untouched are battlefields. Like cemeteries, battlefields belong to the dead. When President Abraham Lincoln dedicated the Union cemetery at Gettysburg, he said: “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” Yes, blood consecrates a battlefield, and it is never the blood of only one side.

Gettysburg, like many Civil War battlefields, is strewn with statues, placards and memorials. Many of these were erected by veterans’ groups, Union and Confederate, who returned for reunions in subsequent years.

The Virginia Monument is the most prominent Confederate memorial at Gettysburg. It marks the departure point of Pickett’s Charge, an ill-fated assault launched 157 years ago on July 3 on the final afternoon of that three-day battle. The monument, which depicts a mounted Robert E. Lee on a pedestal surrounded by seven Confederate soldiers, was started in 1913 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the battle, the last time a significant number of Gettysburg veterans gathered together.

Even then, old antipathies lingered. A fight broke out at the Hotel Gettysburg after a Southerner uttered a “vile epithet” about Lincoln, leaving several men hospitalized. On the afternoon of that July 3, though, old Northern and Southern soldiers gathered at a low stone wall called the “Bloody Angle,” where Pickett lost 3,000 men. The soldiers shook hands across the wall. A photograph was taken. It was a remarkable gesture of reconciliation.Continue reading the main story

Today we speak more in terms of reckoning and less in terms of reconciliation. The former can seed animus while the latter is the root of progress. We are living through a profound reckoning, but if we hope to not pass along today’s battles to our children, we must begin the shift toward reconciliation.

A Confederate monument removal process that respects graveyards and battlefields and acknowledges them as monuments to the dead to be visited by the living, is the quickest way to eradicate painful Confederate symbolism from our public spaces and reconcile the country.