Before You Build the Arch, Know What the Ground Already Says.

GINSBURG 2028  —  CAMPAIGN POST

Before You Build the Arch, Know What the Ground Already Says.

On thirteen years, two wars, one constitution, a view across a river, and a better idea.

Let us begin with a question. Not a hostile one — a genuine one. What, precisely, are we celebrating?

The proposed Independence Arch is to stand 250 feet tall — one foot, its designers say, for every year of American independence. That is a striking image. It is also an answer to a question that nobody in this administration appears to have asked seriously, because the honest answer is not 250. It depends entirely on which independence you are measuring, and which United States you believe you are honoring.

The history here is not obscure. It is taught in every American classroom. But it is worth stating plainly, because what it reveals about this particular monument, on this particular ground, is something that no rendering from an architecture firm can show you.

We are not 250 years old as a nation. We are 250 years from the moment we decided to try to become one. Those are not the same thing.

1776. The declaration. Courage without independence.

On July 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed their names to a document that was, in the most precise legal sense, a declaration of treason against the Crown. Not a treaty. Not a founding document. Not an act of independence. A declaration of rebellion — backed by moral conviction, Enlightenment philosophy, and the full understanding of what failure would cost every man in that room.

Benjamin Franklin said it plainly as the signatures were being gathered: 'We must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately.' That is not the language of men celebrating freedom. That is the language of men who have made a bet they are not certain they can win, and who understand that the penalty for losing is death.

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most consequential moral and political documents in the history of human self-governance. Read it carefully and you will find that it is precisely that — a moral and political document. It does not create courts, or a legislature, or a treasury, or an army. It asserts that certain truths are self-evident and draws the conclusion that these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states. It is an argument. A magnificent, dangerous, world-altering argument. But an argument is not a fact until it is proven, and this one required seven years of war to prove.

Here is the truth that the proposed arch and its designers appear not to have reckoned with: independence cannot be declared into existence. It must be won, or it is not independence at all. Until September 3, 1783 — the day Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris and formally acknowledged that the war was over and the rebellion had prevailed — every man who had put his name to that document remained, under the law of the sovereign power that still claimed jurisdiction over them, a traitor subject to execution. The Declaration did not make them free. Seven years of war made them free.

We celebrate July 4th because of what those men were willing to risk. That courage was real and it was staggering, and it deserves every honor we give it. But let us be honest about what July 4, 1776 actually was: the day the attempt began. Not the day it succeeded.

1781. The Articles of Confederation. Thirteen neighbors. No nation.

Five years into the revolution, the thirteen states ratified the Articles of Confederation — their first attempt at a shared governing structure. It is worth understanding precisely what they built, because its failure explains everything that came after, including the war that Arlington National Cemetery exists to honor.

The Articles created a Congress. One chamber. One vote per state, regardless of population or size. That Congress could pass resolutions. It could not enforce them. It could request money from the states. States could refuse — and regularly did. It could call for troops. States could ignore the call. It had no president, no executive branch, no administrative capacity of any kind. It had no federal judiciary. It could not regulate commerce between the states. And any amendment to the Articles required the unanimous consent of all thirteen states — meaning a single state could hold the entire structure hostage indefinitely, and several did.

Think of the closest modern equivalent. It was not quite the United Nations, where member nations gather to deliberate without binding legal obligation to comply. It was something closer to the European Union in ambition — a genuine governing compact among sovereigns with defined shared responsibilities — but far weaker in practice than even that, because the Articles' Congress had no enforcement mechanism whatsoever. The most accurate single description is this: it was a neighborhood homeowners association covering thirteen very different neighborhoods, each of which retained the absolute right to ignore any rule it found inconvenient, and any one of which could block a change to the bylaws forever.

The United States under the Articles of Confederation was thirteen sovereign states operating in uneasy proximity. It was a league. It was not a nation.

A nation that cannot collect its debts, pay its soldiers, or compel its members to honor their commitments is not a nation. It is a hope.

1783. The Treaty of Paris. This is the date. This is independence.

On September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed. Seven years of war — at a cost in lives, treasure, and suffering that we have largely forgotten in the comfortable distance of history — had produced its result. Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the American states. The rebellion had become a revolution. The argument had been proven by force of arms.

This is the date. If you want to build a monument standing one foot for every year of American independence, September 3, 1783 is the date from which you measure. Not July 4, 1776 — the day the attempt began. The day independence was actually secured is the day the nation that had been fighting for it was recognized, by the power it had been fighting against, as having won. Every year between 1776 and 1783 was a year of active war in which the outcome remained in doubt and the signers of the Declaration remained, in law, traitors. Independence is not a declaration. It is a result.

Read the treaty carefully. Britain did not recognize the United States of America as a single sovereign nation. It recognized the independence of thirteen named states, listed individually: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Thirteen recognitions. Thirteen sovereigns. The first state to ratify the Constitution that would follow — Delaware — appears in that list as one independent entity among thirteen.

Independence had been won. The nation had not yet been built. Those are two different things, and the seven years between the Treaty of Paris and the inauguration of George Washington are the proof.

1787. Philadelphia. Replacement, not repair.

In the summer of 1787, delegates gathered in Philadelphia. Their mandate from the existing Congress was specific and limited: propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. What they did instead was set the Articles aside entirely, close the windows against the summer heat of Pennsylvania, and spend four months writing a new governing document from the ground up.

Then they changed the rules for ratification. The Articles required unanimous consent of all thirteen states for any change. The new Constitution specified that it would take effect upon ratification by nine of thirteen. They replaced the old framework with a new one, and used the new framework's own ratification standard — not the old one — to bring it into existence. Whether that was strictly legal under the existing governing compact is a question constitutional scholars still debate. What is not debatable is that the men in Philadelphia understood the stakes well enough to act outside the boundaries of the system they were replacing, because that system had demonstrated it could not save itself.

Thomas Jefferson was not in Philadelphia that summer. He was serving as Minister to France, watching the Constitutional Convention unfold through letters — primarily from James Madison, its principal architect. Jefferson's relationship with the Constitution was complicated: he praised its structure, worried about its silences, and insisted on a Bill of Rights as the price of his full endorsement. But his fingerprints are all over its philosophical foundation, because the Declaration he wrote in 1776 established the moral premises that the Constitution of 1787 was designed to make operational. He gave the cause its argument. Madison gave the argument its architecture.

Jefferson lived through the entire arc. Born in 1743. Wrote the Declaration at thirty-three. Watched the Articles fail. Corresponded through the Constitutional Convention from Paris. Served as the first Secretary of State under the Constitution he had not quite written. Became the third President. Died on July 4, 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, the same day as John Adams — as if the republic had held its breath until both men were clear of it.

Jefferson gave the cause its argument. Madison gave the argument its architecture. The Constitution of 1789 was the moment both became operational — and the United States, as one nation, began.

1788 to 1789. The nation, at last.

New Hampshire ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788 — the ninth state, the threshold required by Article VII. The Constitution was now law. The first Congress convened on March 4, 1789. George Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789.

On that date — and not before — the United States existed as what it has always been and what it remains today: a single sovereign constitutional republic — a democratic republic, with one government, one supreme law, and the structural capacity to act as a unified whole in the world. Not thirteen neighbors sharing an awkward fence. One nation.

So when someone proposes to build a monument standing one foot for every year of American independence, the honest question is: independence measured from when? From 1776 — the declaration of rebellion — we are 250 years out. But 1776 is not independence. It is the opening move. From 1783 — the Treaty of Paris, the military and diplomatic achievement of actual recognized sovereignty — we are 243 years out. That is independence. From 1789 — the moment the United States became a single sovereign constitutional democratic republic rather than thirteen states operating in uneasy confederation — we are 237 years out. That is nationhood. Three different numbers. Three different things being measured. And a structure that conflates all three without distinguishing any of them is not a monument to American history. It is a monument to American imprecision.

The 1860s. What Lincoln was actually preserving.

This history matters because it tells us precisely what Abraham Lincoln was fighting to hold together — and why the ground at Arlington National Cemetery says what it says.

Lincoln was not fighting to preserve a convenience. He was not fighting to preserve a trade arrangement or a regional alliance. He was fighting to preserve the thing that had taken from 1776 to 1789 — thirteen years of war, diplomacy, failure, argument, and constitutional invention — to actually build. The United States as one sovereign nation under one constitutional government was a hard-won, fragile, still-young achievement when the Southern states began to secede. The oldest veterans of the Revolution were still alive. The Constitution was not yet eighty years old.

The Confederate argument, stated plainly, was the Articles of Confederation argument restated: that the states were sovereign first, that their compact with the federal government was voluntary, and that they retained the right to withdraw from it when the terms no longer suited them. That argument was not without legal minds behind it. What Lincoln understood — and what the war settled at a cost of more than 600,000 American lives — is that a nation which can be dissolved by the preferences of its constituent parts is not a nation. It is, again, a league. A neighborhood association. And Lincoln had read enough history to know what leagues of sovereign states become when the interests of the members diverge: nothing.

He held it together. Four years of war. A cost in blood and treasure that we have not finished paying in the moral ledger. But the constitutional question was settled. The United States is one nation. The sovereignty is national, not divisible. What the Founders built between 1787 and 1789 — what Jefferson argued for philosophically and Madison architected legally — was worth defending. And Lincoln believed that with everything he had, until the night at Ford's Theatre.

Lincoln did not fight to win a war. He fought to preserve the answer to a question the Founders had left dangerously open — are we one people, or are we thirteen? — and to ensure that answer would not have to be fought for again.

The ground. What it cost. What it means.

Maryland and Virginia both ceded land to create the District of Columbia. Maryland's cession came in 1788, under the authority of the new Constitution whose ratification it had supported. Virginia ceded its portion in 1789. Congress accepted both and established the federal district in 1790 under the Residence Act. Two states gave ground — literally — so that the capital of the new constitutional republic would belong to no single state and stand as common property of all.

Virginia's portion was retroceded — returned to Virginia — in 1846. Arlington is Virginia soil today because of that retrocession. Arlington National Cemetery stands on Virginia ground that was once part of the federal district, returned to the state before the war that would make it famous.

Arlington House was the home of the Custis family — step-grandchildren of George Washington — and passed by marriage to Robert E. Lee. When war came and Lee made the most consequential choice of his career, the federal government moved to seize the estate. The tax was assessed. The rules required in-person payment. Mary Anna Custis Lee was too ill to travel. The property was declared forfeit in 1862.

After the war, Lee's son George Washington Custis Lee sued the United States and won. The Supreme Court ruled in 1882 that the land was his by lawful inheritance. He sold it to the federal government for $150,000. He did not fight to reclaim it as private property. He chose to release it. Arlington National Cemetery — where more than 400,000 of America's sons and daughters now rest — exists because George Washington Custis Lee chose to sell back to the United States the ground his grandfather had built as a monument to George Washington, and on which his father had commanded the army that fought against it.

That act of release is one of the quieter acts of reconciliation in the American record, and we do not speak of it nearly enough.

The view. Drawn on purpose. Preserved for a reason.

Arlington House sits on a bluff 171 feet above the Potomac, looking east-northeast across the river. On the far bank, anchoring the western end of the National Mall, sits the Lincoln Memorial. Those two structures face each other across the water. They were designed to.

Arlington Memorial Bridge — completed in 1932 after decades of deliberation, full congressional authorization, and unanimous approval by the Commission of Fine Arts — was sited on the precise visual axis connecting Arlington House to the Lincoln Memorial. That decision was made in 1922, in a joint meeting of the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission, the Vice President of the United States, and the Commission of Fine Arts. It was unanimous. It was intentional. It was documented. The bridge exists to complete a symbolic statement: the home of the Confederacy's most consequential general faces, across the river and across the graves, the memorial to the Union's most consequential president.

Lee and Lincoln never met as equals in life. In the geography of Washington, they face each other for eternity — and between them, on the ground where the men who died to answer the question of union lie at rest, the nation stands.

From the portico of Arlington House, a visitor looks east across that axis and sees the Lincoln Memorial. Behind it, the Washington Monument rises 555 feet. Beyond that, the Capitol dome — the seat of the Congress Lincoln fought to preserve and Lee's surrender made possible. That sequence is not an accident of geography. It is a designed argument, constructed over more than a century of public deliberation, making one claim: we came through it, and we are still one people.

The view from Arlington House to the Lincoln Memorial is not scenery. It is a sentence. It has been standing, unobstructed and deliberate, for more than a hundred years. It does not require anything built in front of it to make it larger.

The Americans beneath the hill.

From the Civil War through today, more than 400,000 service members, veterans, and their families lie on that hill — the fallen and the ones who came home — each of them having earned this ground. Arlington House looks out over them. The Lincoln Memorial looks back.

There is no more fitting arrangement in American public life than this: the house of the man who led half the nation against itself stands permanent watch over the veterans who died to hold it together. That reciprocal gaze — Lee's house and Lincoln's memorial, watching each other across the river and across the graves — is not sentiment. It is architecture. It is deliberate national policy, established through the proper legal and democratic processes that the Lincoln Memorial itself followed: congressional authorization, public deliberation, independent commission review. Every step, properly taken, because the people responsible for building this capital understood that some decisions belong to the nation, not to whomever happens to hold office at the moment.

What the proposed arch would actually do.

The proposed Independence Arch would stand 250 feet tall at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island — directly on the visual axis between Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial. Not near it. Not adjacent to it. On it.

The arch base sits at approximately river grade — around ten feet above sea level. Its tip would reach roughly 260 feet above sea level. From the portico of Arlington House at 171 feet elevation, the arch would rise as a dominant foreground obstruction, nearly ninety feet above the observer's eye line at less than a quarter mile away. The Lincoln Memorial's roofline sits at roughly 150 feet above sea level. The arch would block it — partially or fully, depending on where you stand on the portico — and with it, the sentence that view has been speaking for over a century.

The Lincoln Memorial is 99 feet tall. The proposed arch is 250 feet — more than two and a half times its height. Paris's Arc de Triomphe stands 164 feet. The proposed structure would exceed even that by nearly ninety feet. It would be, by standard building measurements, the equivalent of a sixteen- to twenty-story structure planted between two of the most deliberately placed landmarks in the American landscape, without the congressional authorization that every comparable structure on the National Mall required and received.

And it sits directly beneath one of Reagan National Airport's primary approach corridors, raising aviation safety concerns that the Federal Aviation Administration has not yet fully resolved.

The veterans who have filed suit to stop it are not obstructionists. Three of them fought in Vietnam. They are doing what the law invites citizens to do when the law is being bypassed. A federal judge has already required fourteen days' notice before any ground is broken and ordered the National Park Service to publish its authorization publicly before construction can begin. The Commission of Fine Arts is required to review the designs. These are not bureaucratic obstacles. They are the democratic safeguards that ensure national symbols remain national — the product of deliberation, consent, and accountability — rather than the product of a single administration's preferences.

There is a particular irony in this that every veteran will recognize immediately. The men and women buried at Arlington gave everything they had to preserve the nation Lincoln held together at the cost of 600,000 lives. The view from that ground to his memorial is not incidental to their rest. It is the acknowledgment that what they defended was worth defending — that the nation is real, that it endures, that it looks back at them across the river. To place a structure between those veterans and that memorial — in the name of honoring them — is not honor. It is the substitution of a personal monument for a national one. And every veteran who has ever stood on that ground will know the difference.

Every monument on the National Mall went through Congress. The Lincoln Memorial. The Washington Monument. The Korean War Veterans Memorial. The World War II Memorial. Every one. Because the ground belongs to all of us — not to whomever holds office when the idea occurs to them.

A better idea. Four points. One quadrangle. The complete history.

This campaign does not simply oppose. Opposition without alternative is complaint. What follows is not merely a different location for one arch. It is a framework — a coherent vision for how the monumental landscape of the American capital should speak to the four foundational moments of American existence, each in its right place, each measuring the right thing.

Those four moments are not interchangeable. The Declaration of 1776 is not independence. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 is independence. The Constitution of 1789 is nationhood. And the preservation of that nation through the Civil War is the proof that what was built was worth keeping. Each of these deserves its own memorial language. None of them should be collapsed into a single structure standing at the wrong place measuring the wrong date.

Declaration. Independence. Nation. Union. Four moments. Four points. An irregular quadrangle across the landscape of the capital, each corner marking the moment that made the next one possible.

Point one. The Declaration. Jefferson's arch. Maryland's threshold.

If this administration is committed to a triumphal arch, and committed to the number 250, then let it stand where 250 counts from the right event. July 4, 1776 belongs to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence — his words, above the signatures of fifty-five other men who affixed their names by consent, knowing those words constituted treason under the law of the power they were defying. If you want a monument to that act of defiance, that moral argument, that magnificent and dangerous declaration of intent — then honor it with Jefferson's name, on Maryland ground, at the northeastern threshold of the District nearest his own memorial on the Tidal Basin.

Maryland ceded the land that became the permanent District of Columbia in 1788. Virginia's portion was returned in 1846. Maryland's gift was permanent and unconditional, and it has never been acknowledged with anything commensurate to its scale. An arch on the Maryland approach — a small additional parcel, a completion of what Maryland began — is not an imposition. It is an invitation to Maryland to finish what it started. And it places the Declaration's monument in sight of Jefferson's memorial, the two reinforcing each other across the Tidal Basin rather than competing with anything already standing.

Build it 250 feet if you must. Dedicate it to Jefferson and the fifty-five who signed with him. Call it honestly what it commemorates: the day the attempt began. That is not a diminishment. That is the truth about what those men did, and the truth is more impressive than the myth — because they knew they were committing treason and they signed anyway.

Point two. The Treaty of Paris. Independence actually won.

September 3, 1783 is the date that has no monument. It is the most consequential unacknowledged date in American history — the day Great Britain formally recognized that the rebellion had become a revolution, that the argument had been proven by force of arms, and that thirteen named states were sovereign nations recognized by the power that had tried to suppress them. This is the date from which independence is honestly measured. It deserves to be marked.

A monument to the Treaty of Paris belongs on the Mall, or on the White House grounds — which carries particular resonance, because the White House itself was burned by British forces in the War of 1812, the last military challenge to the sovereignty the Treaty had established. A monument there would commemorate not only the treaty but the proof, thirty years later, that the independence it recognized would be defended at any cost. Aspiration is the right register here: not a competing arch, not a rival structure, but a permanent acknowledgment — in stone or bronze, at appropriate scale, through the proper process — that September 3, 1783 is the date the United States became free in fact rather than in declaration.

Point three. The Constitution. The Capitol already stands.

The building already exists. The United States Capitol is Article One of the Constitution made physical — the first institution named, the first branch established, the seat of the legislature that the Founders considered the primary expression of popular sovereignty in a constitutional democratic republic. It was not built in 1789, but it was built to house what 1789 created, and it has done so without interruption for more than two centuries. Rather than a new structure, the appropriate memorial to the constitutional founding is within the Capitol itself — plaques, permanent inscription, formal acknowledgment within the building that is already the monument. The structure is the memorial. It requires only to be recognized as such, explicitly and permanently, so that every visitor who walks those halls understands that they are standing inside the physical answer to the question the Declaration raised and the Revolution answered.

Point four. The Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House. Leave it alone.

The fourth point of the quadrangle already exists and requires nothing built, nothing added, nothing changed. The Virginia approach. Arlington Memorial Bridge on the precise axis connecting Arlington House to the Lincoln Memorial, placed there in 1922 by unanimous decision after decades of democratic deliberation. The home of the man who led the rebellion watching the memorial of the man who held the line. The graves of those who died to settle the question lying on the slope between them.

This is the monument to union sustained in the face of internal conflict. To the nation that nearly destroyed itself and chose, at enormous cost, to survive. It does not need a triumphal arch planted in front of it. It does not need anything. It needs only to be seen, understood, and left precisely as it is.

The men of 1787 were sent to Philadelphia to amend what existed. They looked at what they had, concluded it could not bear the weight required of it, and built something new — outside the rules of the system they were replacing. That is the model. Not unilateral decree. Deliberate construction, with the consent of the governed, in service of a purpose larger than the men doing the building.

The quadrangle is already there. We only need to see it.

Declaration. Independence. Nation. Union. Four moments. Four points across an irregular landscape, each one the necessary precondition for the next. The Declaration gave the cause its argument. The Revolution gave the argument its victory. The Constitution gave the victory its form. And Lincoln gave the form its proof — that it would hold, even under the pressure of the most destructive internal conflict in American history.

Each of these moments already has, or can have, its right memorial in its right place. The Jefferson arch on Maryland ground at the northeastern threshold, honoring the Declaration and its author, nearest his own memorial, built through the proper process with Maryland's consent. The Treaty of Paris acknowledged on the Mall or on the White House grounds where British forces once burned the seat of the government the treaty had made possible. The Capitol standing as it has always stood — Article One made stone, the constitutional monument that requires only to be recognized as such. And the Virginia approach, the bridge on the axis, Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial watching each other across the river and the graves, left exactly as they are.

That is the complete history. All four corners of it, in their right places, each measuring the right thing. No moment collapsed into another. No date falsified. No sightline destroyed. No monument to one person's preferences standing between 400,000 veterans and the memorial to the man who preserved the nation they served.

More than 400,000 Americans: service members, veterans, and their families lie on that hill — the fallen and the ones who came home — each of them having earned this ground. From that hallowed ground they look out at Lincoln and back at Lee, and speak — quietly, permanently, without any gilded statue required — of a nation that nearly destroyed itself and chose, at great cost, to survive anyway.

Build what you want to build. Build it honestly, in the right place, measuring the right date, through the right process, with the consent of the people whose ground it is. The history is not hiding. It is sitting right there, in four moments, waiting to be honored correctly.

And leave that view alone. It has been saying everything that needs saying for over a hundred years. It does not need anything standing in front of it. It needs only to be seen.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

United States Air Force Veteran  |  Registered Nurse

Candidate for President of the United States — 2028

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