So far, Robert E. Lee is winning the battle. But U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) is insistent he won’t win the war.
Legislation from Beyer to remove the Confederate general’s name from the National Park Service’s Arlington House national monument now has 138 cosponsors. And at a recent event, Beyer said an eventual renaming “will happen.”
But probably not this year. Those 138 cosponsors (up from 120 in early May) are all Democrats, and Beyer’s bill – along with a companion piece sponsored by U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine – most likely will languish in committee until the end of the 2023-24 session in December.
After that? Who knows?
“I’ve been going around to every member of Congress,” Beyer said at a June 23 ceremony honoring the life and legacy of Arlington’s Evelyn Reid Syphax.
Similar efforts by Beyer and Kaine to remove Lee’s name from the memorial occurred in the 2021-22 session of Congress, when Democrats held control of both houses, but gained no traction. A last-ditch effort by supporters to slip the measure in an omnibus spending bill at the end of 2022 was rebuffed, so the process had to begin all over again in 2023.
The bills seek to remove “Robert E. Lee” from “Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial.” The property has been known that way since 1972, and since 1955 has been designated the nation’s official memorial to Lee.
Congress in 1955 marked the 90th anniversary of the end of the Civil War by designating what was then known as the Lee Mansion in Arlington as a permanent memorial to Lee. In the measure – still the law of the land – Lee was honored as someone “whose name will ever be bright in our history as a great military leader, a great educator, a great American and a truly great man through the simple heritage of his personal traits of high honor, his grandeur of soul [and] his unfailing strength of heart.”
In 1972, the Democratic-controlled Congress amended the legislation to formally add Lee’s name to the site. As such, it would take an act of Congress to remove it, Beyer acknowledged at the June 23 event.
It was at Arlington House in 1861 that Lee made the fateful decision to decline President Lincoln’s offer to command U.S. troops and instead side with his home state of Virginia. At the outbreak of hostilities, federal troops marched from the District of Columbia to seize the property after the Lees had departed.
During the war, the first burials took place in what would become Arlington National Cemetery, effectively precluding the family’s eventual return.
Lee’s heirs in the late 1800s received the then-astounding sum of $175,000 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the property had been illegally seized by the government.
For most of the nearly 160 years following the end of the Civil War, Lee (who died in 1870) was seen as a symbol of post-war reconciliation. While most Americans probably still hold that view, others believe he should not be honored, owing to his role in the war and as a slave owner.
