Friends, this is our last blog and it comes from Arlington, Virginia as the Great American Road Trip comes to a close at Arlington National Cemetery. Here the Civil War story comes full circle. The most esteemed Confederate General, Robert E. Lee owned this land when it was his Virginia farm across the Potomac River from Washington DC. Lee's farm now is the home to the grave sites of many Union civil war soldiers along with many newer additions including the Kennedy brothers Edward, Robert and John. The Union took this Virginia farm where Lee lived as the spoils of war but many years the US government lost a court case when descendants of Robert E Lee succeeded in claiming the farm was wrongly confiscated by the US government and the Court ordered the land be returned to the Lee family. Given that the site was now a military graveyard the Lees negotiated a cash payout from the government rather than taking the farm back. Today there is a Museum honouring Robert E Lee in his old plantation home. Ironically there is a wonderful view from the Lee plantation home looking out on the Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac River. The American Civil War took the lives of an estimated 620,000 souls, roughly 2% of the entire population of the country. These deaths also destroyed the lives of many of those who lost their loved ones. Few Americans were unaffected by the war. However, given the numbers of dead, all of the casualties of the war could not even be identified. The Tomb of The Unknowns honours those war dead with a tomb and a 24 hour guard. Inscribed on the side of the tomb are the words: Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but only to God" Last thought is from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that 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."

The guard at The Tomb of the Unknowns

Changing of the guard of The Tomb of the Unknowns

Edward Kennedy

Robert Kennedy

President John F Kennedy's Eternal flame

John F Kennedy

The Lincoln Memorial view from Robert E Lee's Plantation Home in Arlington Cemetery