What will we choose to remember -- May 27, 2021 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Dozens of small white flags flutter on green grass at Rivergate Park in Old Town Alexandria. Each flag represents one city resident who died of the disease caused by the coronavirus. 

Titled Alexandria Remembrance, the flags -- set off by white picket fencing and a bed of red and white geraniums -- are a temporary memorial where, signs say, “With love, we remember our 137 friends and neighbors lost to COVID-19.”

On April 6, when City Council authorized the memorial, 129 residents had died, but the numbers have had to be updated. Family members are invited to write a message or the name of a loved one on a flag. I took a closer look:

“Our beloved Ray, I & the kids will love you forever and ever. Please watch over us. XOXO Vicky.”

If that doesn’t break your heart, well, you may not have one.

All around, life on a lovely weekday afternoon in May went on almost as usual. A father and his young son played catch. A shirtless man sat cross-legged, drinking in the sun. A couple sat talking in the cool shade.

They, I, you reading this – we -- somehow survived. With vaccinations and luck, we hope to resume our lives. Our long, international nightmare appears nearly over, but not yet. Look at Japan.

The pandemic has been a shared experience. Though some groups have suffered more than others, we all have been affected. Each of us probably knows someone who has died of COVID-19.

As we go maskless, what will we choose to remember – and how -- of this year of loss, lock downs and fear?

Television networks and local stations as well as other media run pictures and bios of individuals who have succumbed to the pandemic -- nice words, a few seconds on screen, done.

Alexandria’s memorial with a beautiful vista of the Potomac River does what a memorial should: It invites passersby to pause and reflect. It will be on display at the foot of Madison Street until June 21.

The memorial happens to coincide with Memorial Day, which has become the unofficial start of summer. After the hiatus last Memorial Day, Americans are boarding planes in record numbers, planning barbecues and beach trips, and checking ads for mattress sales.

Memorial Day was originally Decoration Day, a day to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers with flowers. In time, it became a day to honor all who gave their lives in military service, and now many families take time that day to visit their relatives in cemeteries.

We have lost upwards of 590,000 to COVID-19, more than the number of Americans killed in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

The toll of the Civil War was even higher. Historians now believe perhaps 750,000 were killed – most by disease, not in combat. As a country, we’ve struggled recently to reassess and remove memorials to the men who led the rebellion and sought to destroy the union.

Now we face the challenge of memorializing the worst public health crisis in American history. Almost no monuments commemorate the devastating 1918 influenza, which may have contributed to our lack of preparedness for the coronavirus.

On the eve of his presidential inauguration, Joe Biden did something his predecessor never did. He acknowledged the pain of the pandemic. At a sunset ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial, where 400 lanterns representing those we have lost were illuminated in the Reflecting Pool, Biden said:

“To heal we must remember. It’s hard sometimes to remember. But that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation.”

Forgetting is easy. In 1996, children touring Washington, D.C., were asked what Memorial Day meant.

“That’s the day the pools open!” they responded.

So, in 2000, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a measure calling for a Moment of Remembrance at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day, a time when most of us are celebrating our freedoms.

Whatever you’re doing at 3 p.m. Monday, take one quiet minute to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

And, though we may want to put the horrible pandemic behind us as quickly as possible, we do need to heal. That means we must remember all we lost to COVID-19.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Monuments to Union generals tell stories we need to hear -- May 23, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Last Saturday, 17 people gathered at hectic Thomas Circle, where Massachusetts Avenue, 14^th Street and M Street intersect in Northwest Washington.

It wasn’t a protest or a line for concert tickets. We were doing something most people don’t – looking past the bumper-cars traffic to the equestrian statue smack in the middle of the traffic circle.

With journalist and history enthusiast Keith White, who leads walking tours for friends, as our guide, we looked closely at about a dozen monuments to Union generals in the nation’s capital, answering the 21^st Century question: “Who ARE those guys?”

Until controversy engulfed Confederate monuments across the South, many people knew only the big names -- Lee, Jackson and Davis. The Confederate statues have made us rethink who and what we should honor and why.

Similarly, in Washington, people flock to the monuments to Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson, while hardly noticing many others. But the uncontentious monuments to victorious Union generals who helped preserve the Union also tell compelling stories.

Two monuments we saw honored Civil War generals from Virginia who made the agonizing decision to stay loyal to the United States -- when doing so meant an irreparable split from friends and family.

(It’s worth noting some Northerners also fought for the South; New Yorker Samuel Cooper and Pennsylvanian John Pemberton became generals in the Confederate Army.)  

Thomas Circle is named for the best Union general you’ve never heard of.

George Henry Thomas was born in 1815 into a slave-holding family on a plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, near the North Carolina line.

A West Point grad, he served with distinction in Florida and Mexico, and his proud hometown presented him with an engraved silver sword for his bravery in the Mexican war.

He became an artillery and cavalry instructor at the military academy under Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, who was superintendent. Yet when Lee and other Southerners resigned from the U.S. Army to join the Confederacy, Thomas remained.

His sisters, avid secessionists, were so distraught, the story goes, they turned his picture to the wall, denied they had a brother named George, returned his letters unopened, and refused to send him the sword he’d left with them for safe-keeping.

Thomas was a brilliant military strategist. He managed to hold his position and avoid a rout during the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, earning the valiant nickname, the “Rock of Chickamauga.”

When his statue in Washington was dedicated in 1879, 14 years after the Civil War ended and nine years after Thomas died of a stroke at 53, the federal government shut down for the day and former soldiers flooded the city.

But Thomas never reconciled with his sisters. Near the end of their long lives, they gave his sword to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

Another Virginian who stayed loyal to the Union army was Major General Winfield Scott, born in Dinwiddie County in 1786.

A hero of the Mexican War, Scott was known as “Old Fuss and Feathers” for his love of discipline and pomp.

By 1861, when the Civil War started, Scott was the army’s top general, but he was in poor health and couldn’t even mount his horse. He recommended President Lincoln name his fellow Virginian Lee to lead the Army.

When Lee refused, Scott is said to have told him: “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.”

Scott resigned, wrote a two-volume autobiography and died in 1866.

The sculptor of Scott’s monument put him on a small mare, his favorite mount. But Scott’s family insisted a great military man should be shown on a stallion. The sculptor made an adjustment. Today, most people don’t notice, but in 1874, the statue was widely ridiculed.

The Scott monument is in busy Scott Circle, where Massachusetts and Rhode Island avenues and 16^th Street NW meet. 

On Memorial Day, we honor those who gave their lives in military service.

We owe respect and a deep debt of gratitude to all who serve and sacrifice, and especially to Virginians Thomas and Scott who made the wrenching decision to fight to preserve the United States.

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Gettysburg address still powerful at 150 -- Nov. 7, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Rarely has a president been so wrong.

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here…” So Abraham Lincoln predicted in his brief, eloquent speech at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863.

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War mostly has commemorated bloody battles. Now we turn to the powerful words that shaped our views.

    

At Gettysburg National Battlefield Park, Dedication Day ceremonies are Nov. 19. A series of lectures, book-signings and other events Nov. 16 to 23 will commemorate the Gettysburg address.

 

The address is one of the most noted and quoted speeches in history, but Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker that day. The orator was Edward Everett, a former senator and secretary of state who delivered a two-hour address. We laugh about long-winded Everett, but, historian Garry Wills reminds us, in the 19^th century lengthy dramatic speeches were a kind of performance art.

Four months earlier, on July 3, 1863, the Union had won the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. More than 50,000 Confederate and Union troops were dead, captured, missing or wounded. Bodies that had been hastily buried in makeshift graves on the battlefield were still being interred in the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery.

Lincoln had been invited to make “a few appropriate remarks.” His 272-word speech changed forever the way Americans think about our country and the Civil War.

“Up to the Civil War `the United States’ was invariably a plural noun: `The United States are a free country.’ After Gettysburg it became a singular: `The United States is a free country,’” writes Wills, author of the 1992 book “Lincoln at Gettysburg.”

In his remarks, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration of Independence to reframe the war as a fight for liberty and freedom. The nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he said.

And, “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln did not mention the Emancipation Proclamation. In effect for less than a year, it had freed many, but not all, slaves. The war would grind on for two more years, but in two minutes, he assigned surviving Americans the task of renewing the promise of freedom for all. His critics were livid. Some complained that the president was deliberately misleading the public about American history. The country was founded on the Constitution, which had avoided any mention of equality.

A Chicago newspaper called the address “a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful,” historian David Herbert Donald writes in his 1995 book, “Lincoln.”

Donald says Wilbur F. Storey also wrote that the soldiers who perished on the battlefield died “to uphold the Constitution and the Union created by it,” not to “dedicate the nation to `the proposition that all men are created equal.’”

It seems odd in our word-flooded society that a few simple words could have such lasting impact. Our politicians blab constantly, their every forgettable syllable and gesture recorded, tweeted and analyzed.

In contrast, there’s no definitive account of the Gettysburg ceremonies. We don’t know when Lincoln wrote his remarks. Historian Wills dismisses as a silly myth the familiar story that the president scribbled his remarks on scrap paper on the train from Washington. At least five handwritten, slightly different copies survive.

The crowd interrupted Lincoln multiple times with applause -- or not at all, depending on who’s telling the story. The Associated Press reporter who transcribed Lincoln’s speech inserted brackets five times to indicate applause, but years later said he’d arbitrarily included the brackets and wasn’t sure there had been any applause, says historian Glenn LaFantasie.

   

Some say Lincoln thought the speech a failure. “That speech won’t scour!” he supposedly said afterwards. “Scour” referred to plows used on the prairies that failed to turn over the heavy soil, Donald explains. Wills says Lincoln was satisfied with the speech.

One thing is clear. When we read the address 150 years later, Lincoln’s ideas still speak to us. It’s well worth remembering the power of words.      

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Summer's almost over -- think local -- July 3, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I have it on good authority that the economy is improving. Auto sales are the best they’ve been in five years. House sales over the last year have jumped by double digits. And the entire American population is on vacation.

OK, I made up that last one, but, seriously, doesn’t it feel like August in France?

My neighbors are staying cool on the Maine coast, meeting Mickey at Disney World and nibbling croissants in Paris. Facebook friends post endless pictures of their road trips out west, mountain vistas,  celebrity-sightings in London and bridges in Rome.

   

I’m home, and I’m OK with that. Really.

   

I’m glad my friends are having fun, and their absence makes driving on the Beltway if not fonder, at least more bearable.

   

I too made summer plans: I’d garden and lose myself in “War and Peace,” finally. I researched translations in May but haven’t actually gotten the book. To whet my whistle, I ordered the 1956 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Get this: It’s 3 ½ hours long. People’s attention spans must have been longer back then. I’ll just return it and reorder when the nights are long.

Gardening has been more pain than pleasure because a low pressure system has held the East Coast in its grasp for weeks, breeding heat, humidity, monsoon rains, ginormous mushrooms and a bumper crop of weeds. The weather is demoralizing, and don’t get me started on Congress, the president and the Supreme Court.

To escape the full monty of Washington malaise, a friend and I dodged raindrops Sunday and got in the car with a map of Virginia’s scenic byways. We drove into the summer afternoon, destination unknown.

Less than 40 minutes from the nation’s dysfunctional capital, the skies lightened and we found winding roads, green rolling hills, stone walls, rail fences, canopies of trees, horses, black angus cattle and more historic markers than you could want.

    

While others fought the crowds at the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, we drove the nearly deserted Snickersville Turnpike, State Route 734, a road that hasn’t changed much since George Washington traveled it as a lad. We stopped atop a quiet hill at a monument to the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry that suffered grievous losses on June 17, 1863, in the Battle of Aldie, a fight on the armies’ march to Gettysburg.

Visitors today see a drowsy field and barn and a stone wall. But behind that wall, Confederate sharpshooters knelt and fired on an approaching Union cavalry column. Massachusetts lost 198 of 294 men, and the names of the fallen are inscribed on the granite marker, erected in 1891 by the First Massachusetts Cavalry Association.

It’s easy to overlook the history in your own backyard, but close to home you can change your perspective without worrying about the exchange rate. A road taken can lead to learning new things.

I looked up the Battle of Aldie later and found this sad description of the battle’s toll. Confederate Col. Thomas Munford wrote, “I do not hesitate to say that I have never seen as many Yankees killed at the same space of ground in any fight I have ever seen, or on any battlefield in Virginia that I have been over.”

Back on the road, we stopped in the city of Winchester, with its magnificent library. We wandered the newly renovated Old Town pedestrian mall, where kids cooled off in a splash pad, a young man played guitar and sang Beatles tunes, his guitar case open for contributions, and in true American fashion diners enjoyed sushi, Thai and Mexican food.  

We followed our noses to a barbecue joint – the aroma from the two BBQ smokers out front was irresistible -- and washed down smoked pork with sweet tea at a communal table.   

At the city’s visitor center, I mentioned our delicious lunch to one of the friendly women behind the counter.

“Did you have dessert?” she asked.  We had not. She shook her head.

“The chocolate cake,” she said with a sigh, “is the best I’ve ever had out.”  

Summer may be running away, but it’s not gone yet. We can go back. That’s the virtue of staying close to home.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

At 150, taps links us to past -- May 23, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I grew up hearing taps. My dad was in the Air Force, and on many of the air bases we temporarily called home, the mournful notes of taps were a steady punctuation, signaling the end of another day.

We were living in Japan when the bugler cracked a note of taps the day President Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Now as then, taps calls us to reflect on those who have given their lives for our country. Taps stirs patriotic feelings in the jaded; it wrings out every drop of cynicism I think I have.

Until a few days ago, though, I had no idea where taps began. On this, the 150th anniversary of taps, here’s its story.

One July day in 1862, Union Brigadier Gen. Daniel Adams Butterfield, commander of a brigade camped at Harrison’s Landing in southeastern Virginia, sent for his bugler.

It was just after the bloody Seven Days battles, where Butterfield was wounded and 600 of his troops were killed. In his tent, Butterfield showed bugler Oliver W. Norton some musical notes written in pencil on the back of an envelope and asked him to play them.

“I did this several times, playing the music as written,” Norton wrote long after the Civil War. “He changed it somewhat, lengthening some notes and shortening others, but retaining the melody as he first gave it to me. After getting it to his satisfaction, he directed me to sound that call for taps thereafter, in place of the regular call.”

The regulation call for “lights out” was a tune borrowed from the French that Butterfield found too formal. That night, bugler Norton played taps.

“The music was beautiful on that still summer night and was heard far beyond the limits of our brigade,” Norton wrote in a magazine in 1898. “The next day I was visited by several buglers from neighboring brigades, asking for copies of the music which I gladly furnished.”

And so taps spread, not by directive from Washington but by commanders along the James River and farther afield who heard the haunting melody. It was soon played at the burial of a cannoneer killed in action in Virginia.

Jari A. Villanueva, a retired Air Force bugler and the nation’s leading taps historian, tells the history of taps in his booklet, “Twenty-Four Notes that Tap Deep Emotions,” and his website.

Villanueva, who has devoted many years to taps history research, concluded that Butterfield did not compose taps but revised an earlier bugle call.

No matter, the melancholy music also caught the ear of Confederates. Ten months after it was composed, taps was played at the funeral of Confederate Lieutenant Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Taps was made an official Army bugle call after the Civil War. Today taps is played at the end of the day on most military bases and at funerals of military personnel and veterans.

On its 150th anniversary, taps is getting fresh attention. About 200 buglers from around the country gathered at Arlington National Cemetery Saturday to play taps. Taps is being remembered this week at the Trumpet Guild Conference in Columbus, Ga.

A commemoration of the first taps is scheduled for June 22 through 24 at Berkeley Plantation in Charles City, Va., where Civil War re-enactors will portray the Union Army camped at Harrison’s Landing. A rededication of the taps monument there is planned for June 23.

In case you’re curious, the Army says that taps – and reveille – are not capitalized or put in quotation marks because they are bugle calls, not songs or official titles.

The name taps is thought to be shorthand for a “tattoo” or signal that soldiers should quit carousing and return to quarters, according to the Veterans Administration. The Dutch word “taptoe” is a command that means shut the tap of a keg,

Villanueva scotches as myth the oft-repeated tale that Robert Ellicombe, a captain in the Union army, found the music for taps in the pocket of his dead Confederate soldier son on the battlefield and then had the notes played at the boy’s funeral.

“There is no evidence to back up the story or the existence of a Captain Ellicombe,” Villanueva says.
The spirit that prompted Civil War commanders to embrace taps also animates buglers in the 21st century. Buglers Across America was founded in 2000 to ensure that veterans’ funerals have taps performed live.

Congress decided in 1999 that most veterans should get a two-person military color guard at their funerals to fold the American flag and to play taps. There are too few military buglers to go around, so Congress also said playing a recording of taps was acceptable. An enterprising company came up with an electronic gizmo that fits into bugles and plays taps digitally.

No, the nation’s buglers said, that’s not good enough. More than 7,500 buglers around the country now volunteer to play at veterans’ funerals. Bravo.

Thank you, buglers, for finding the time to honor our veterans with taps.

And, thank you, General Butterfield and bugler Norton, for giving us a melody that connects America’s past and present.

(Marsha Mercer writes from Washington. You may contact her at marsha.mercer@yahoo.com)

(c) 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Family's gift of Civil War portraits shows America's best side -- Column of July 21, 2011

By MARSHA MERCER

Here, finally, is a story to make you feel good about Washington. And, no, that’s not impossible even in this summer of dysfunctional government.

It does mean that for today this space will be debt-free, politician-free, tax-and-spend-free and, I hope, migraine-free.

With Washington sweltering and cranky, I headed to the cool marble of the Library of Congress. If there’s a more beautiful public building in America, I’ve not seen it.

“The Last Full Measure” is billed as an exhibit of Civil War portraits – but that doesn’t do it justice. Unlike other collections of Civil War photos, the nearly 400 images are not of famous generals and politicians, and there are no camp scenes or soldiers dead in a field.

These are portraits that ordinary Union and Confederate soldiers paid to have taken of themselves with what then was the latest technology. Two-thirds of the exhibit pictures are ambrotypes, underexposed images on glass placed against a dark background, and the rest are tintypes, images on thin sheets of coated iron.

Each picture was framed with an ornate brass mat and cushioned with a facing pillow of brocaded velvet. The treasure was then encased in a leather or plastic box.

It’s shocking how young these soldiers were. Many of the solemn faces into whose eyes we look 150 years later can’t be more than 14 or 15 years old. With a change of clothes, they could be boys we see on the street. Their names mostly are lost, their identities only hinted by a button, hat or belt buckle. Many died much too young. Three million from North and South marched off to war, and 620,000 didn’t come back.

Choosing how they wanted their “shade” or “shadow” captured, some soldiers sat with friends or family members, others atop trusty steeds. Some held a gun or sword -- or a sword and a gun.

One heart-breaking portrait is of a sad-eyed girl of about six, in whose hands are a picture of her deceased father. Another portrait comes with a scrap of lace and a note saying it was taken from the hand of a dead Rebel after battle.

Photographers were much more plentiful in the North, so there are many more pictures of Union soldiers. The exhibit has five cases of Union pictures and one with Confederates.

Intriguing is an unidentified Confederate soldier from Co. E “Lynchburg Rifles,” 11th Virginia Infantry Volunteers, who looks like he has stepped from the pages of a catalogue. He holds an 1841 “Mississippi” rifle, Sheffield-type Bowie knife, canteen, box knapsack, blanket roll and cartridge box, according to the description. The pictures is only 2 ¾ inches by 3 ¼ inches. Who is he?

The exhibit inspires gratitude for a family’s philanthropic vision and to technology, modern and 19th Century. The Liljenquist family of Virginia donated 700 portraits to the library with a request that the photos be digitized and high-resolution scans made available online. The small pictures are so sharp because photographers used more silver in those days, creating a sharper image, experts say.

Tom Liljenquist – pronounced LILLY-en-kwist – and his sons began collecting Civil War relics in 1996 after finding a Civil War bullet in a park near their house in Arlington. They discovered a Civil War portrait in an antique store and began combing shops, shows, estate sales and eBay to add to their collection.

In 2003, the hobby took a more serious turn when The Washington Post began publishing the faces of fallen soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Liljenquists hoped their collection could honor Civil War dead in a similar way.

Last year, with hundreds of portraits at home and in Tom Liljenquist’s jewelry stores in the Washington area, sons Jason, 19, Brandon, 17, and Christian, 13, offered the collection to the Library of Congress.

If you can’t make it to Washington by Aug. 13 when the exhibit closes, don’t fret. You can experience it online through www.loc.gov. The online exhibit is rich in detail, and it was easier to call up individual pictures from home than to use a kiosk in the gallery.

Here’s more good news. The Liljenquists are still collecting Civil War portraits. They plan to keep giving them to the Library of Congress -- and to all of us.

©2011 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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