Removal of Confederate Monuments

[David Lockmiller]

The last paragraph from President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address reads as follows:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

New York Times, September 3, 2017

When the towers of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Milwaukee began rising after the Civil War, they were seen as soaring monuments to the nation’s benevolence. . . . Old Main was a model of modernity when it was authorized in 1865 by one of the last official acts of President Abraham Lincoln. It became home to about 1,000 former soldiers who rose at reveille each morning and dressed in blue uniforms, then filed into companies organized by disability. One visitor at the time praised the wards as “large and cheerful: well ventilated and well lighted.”

As the building aged into obsolescent, it stubbornly resisted solutions. In 2011, local preservationists got Old Main protected as a national historic landmark. But in recent years, preservationists working with local veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs, worked out a 75-year lease that will allow a developer who specializes in historic preservation, the Alexander Company, to renovate Old Main and five other historic buildings on the campus as apartments for homeless veterans. “The bones of this building are great. You could never afford to build something like this today,” said Joe Alexander, the company’s chief executive.