[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 10]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 13859-13860]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 DISCUSSION ABOUT REMOVING A PLAQUE ON THE JEFFERSON COUNTY COURTHOUSE

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. ALEXANDER X. MOONEY

                            of west virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                      Tuesday, September 12, 2017

  Mr. MOONEY of West Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the 
following remarks by Peter Onoszko, President of the Jefferson County 
Commission:

       ``With malice toward none and charity for all'' thus said 
     President Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address in 
     1865. Even though the Civil War would continue for several 
     more months before the final victory over the Confederate 
     States, President Lincoln was already setting the country on 
     the path of reconciliation. Regardless of the military 
     victory, the President knew that unless there was a 
     reconciliation the military victory would be meaningless.
       The path of reconciliation has been slow and tortuous. 
     However, in the decades following the Civil War all but the 
     most senior of the former Confederate military and civilian 
     leadership had their United States citizenship restored by 
     Congress. The post-War

[[Page 13860]]

     careers of Confederate general officers is illustrative of 
     the reconciliation. Depending on how one counts, there were 
     between 425 and 562 Confederate general officers. Of these 
     numbers, 3 were recalled to active duty during the Spanish-
     American War and served in the United States Army. 51 were 
     appointed to various federal civilian positions ranging from 
     US ambassadors to foreign governments to US marshals to 
     membership on various federal commissions to postmasters and 
     so forth. 45 were elected to the US Congress as senators and 
     representatives and at least one was appointed to a federal 
     judgeship.
       What of the ordinary soldiers and how they felt? In 1905 on 
     the 40th anniversary of the Civil War, Congress authorized 
     the first campaign medal ever awarded to members of the Armed 
     Forces and this was the Civil War Campaign Medal awarded to 
     all who had served honorably in BOTH the Union and 
     Confederate armies. Perhaps the most poignant demonstration 
     of reconciliation was the Battle of Gettysburg Reunion of 
     1913 marking the fiftieth anniversary of that great battle. 
     Thousands of surviving veterans from both the North and the 
     South gathered at the site of the battle. During several days 
     of the reunion, Confederate and Union veterans toured the 
     battlefield walking arm in arm as they revisited the site and 
     reminisced with each other, recognizing that there was an 
     unbreakable bond that had risen among all who had 
     participated.
       By 1978 the United States Congress had restored US 
     citizenship to all of the senior leadership of the 
     Confederacy, in some cases posthumously. The last was 
     Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, who 
     posthumously had his US citizenship restored by an act of 
     Congress in 1978. In signing this act President Jimmy Carter 
     observed that this was the final act of reconciliation.
       Paralleling the reconciliation of ``the Boys in Blue and 
     the Boys in Gray'' was the reconciliation between white and 
     black Americans. This also followed a tortuous path. Starting 
     with the Emancipation Proclamation promulgated in 1863 and 
     continuing with the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th 
     Amendments to the Constitution between 1864 and 1870, slavery 
     was abolished and black Americans were recognized as full 
     citizens of the United States with all the rights and 
     privileges pertaining thereto.
       Unfortunately the full acceptance of black Americans was 
     legally obstructed in many sections of the country for the 
     next century with the enactment of ``Jim Crow'' laws which 
     made racial segregation and discrimination legal (``Separate 
     but equal'' as the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. 
     Ferguson [1896]). However, the path toward racial 
     reconciliation continued. The Armed Forces were racially 
     integrated by President Harry Truman during the Korean War 
     and Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned by the US Supreme Court 
     in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education decision which 
     ruled that ``Separate but equal is not equal at all'' to cite 
     several examples of the country moving toward complete 
     reconciliation. The struggle to legally abolish racial 
     discrimination and insure civil rights for all Americans of 
     whatever racial background, in which struggle both black and 
     white Americans participated, came to a head in the civil 
     rights protests and demonstrations of the 1960s. This 
     resulted in the landmark Civil Rights Legislation of the era 
     which ended racial segregation and outlawed discrimination on 
     the basis of race.
       In our lifetime we have had an African American president, 
     African American cabinet officers, including two secretaries 
     of state, two African American Justices on the Supreme Court, 
     several African American four-star generals including one 
     Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, many Members of 
     Congress in both the Senate and House, along with African 
     American leaders in business, industry, science, medicine, 
     academia, and the arts.
       Tragically today there exist small radical minorities among 
     both white and black Americans who seek to undermine over a 
     century and a half of progress toward the reconciliation 
     between regions of America and the races of Americans, 
     creating harmful division and discord between our people and 
     threatening to destroy our country. This has got to stop. We 
     are ALL Americans and as Abraham Lincoln said in 1858 ``A 
     house divided against itself cannot stand.''

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