Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is the podcast. This is episode 395.

395. Thanks for joining us. So I saw in my news feed today that the president and the Secretary of Defense have ordered the restoration of a portrait of Robert E. Lee that was hanging at West Point.

West Point, of course, is the United States Military Academy.

Robert E. Lee was a graduate of West Point. He was a great military figure, both in the United States

Armed Forces and in the war between the States, he was the leader of the

Confederate armies. Now, this is worthy of comment, but I don't want to comment on the causes of

the war or the rights and wrongs of the war or anything of that like that right now. I simply want to talk

about a peculiar feature of how America handled the aftermath of the war. And by the aftermath of the

war, I'm not talking about reconstruction. Reconstruction was basically a continuation of the war. So the radical Republicans,

well, I'll get into a little bit. The radical Republicans, I think were upset at Lincoln's

charity toward all approach to the South afterwards. And I think there's a good reason to believe that the radical

Republicans had something to do with Lincoln's assassination. After Lincoln was assassinated,

the radical Republicans were sort of steering the ship and were savage in their treatment of the southern states. And I'll just say

that that reconstruction era was simply a continuation of the conflict by other means. But after

the period of the reconstruction, when the war was still a matter of living memory, the nation healed

in a peculiar way. And the sort of the agreement that was reached by North and South together

was that both sides were allowed to be proud of how both sides fought.

It was sort of the two regions of the country achieved a peaceful, agreeable sentiment.

I think it was the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

There was actually a reunion of soldiers who had Battle of Gettysburg, there was actually a reunion of soldiers

who had fought at Gettysburg, who came north and south and gathered together to commemorate the

battle. There were Confederate memorials all over the south. There were ways where the national government

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