5/15/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with Elliott Drago’s latest post at the Jack Miller Center’s American Arc blog, which explores the history behind Arlington National Cemetery. “Overlooking Washington, D.C.,” Drago writes, “Arlington National Cemetery today serves as the final resting place for approximately 400,000 Americans.” But he contends that most Americans don’t know its full history, which stretches back to the founding era. John Parke Custis, George Washington’s stepson, once owned “the land that became the nation’s cemetery” and envisioned Arlington House, the house sitting high up on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River, “as a memorial to the nation’s first president, complete with Washington memorabilia and family heirlooms.” Private William Christman was the first soldier buried at Arlington on May 11, 1864. “By 1865, almost 16,000 soldiers would be buried at Arlington,” Drago notes, with Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs “ordering that a tomb for over 2,000 unknown soldiers be placed in the estate’s acclaimed rose garden.” Drago concludes that “Arlington’s motto ‘Honor, Remember, Explore’ reminds Americans that the conflicts to preserve a nation…required courage, confidence, and a tremendous amount of work.” Americans today can “honor those who died for our country by remembering their sacrifices and exploring ways in which we too can perform the difficult yet life-affirming work that brings us ever closer to realizing our nation’s founding ideals.”

At the Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim reviews Joshua’s Zeitz’s new book on Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln’s God.” Swaim writes that “Zeitz chronicles Lincoln’s early years in the home of his Calvinist father, his rejection of the faith in which he was raised, and various attempts to sidestep questions of religious commitment during his rise to political prominence.” Zeitz catalogues the seeming change in Lincoln’s relationship with Christianity in the waning years of the Civil War, in which his public speeches became “so richly biblical that the supposition of a newfound acknowledgment of God is impossible to ignore.” But Swaim argues that Zeitz’s imprecision on the floating term of “Calvinism” and his lack of familiarity with nineteenth century American Christianity mars what seemed to be a very promising premise.