The Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery is scheduled to be reinstalled in 2027. The monument, a tribute to Confederates who fought against the United States, included a controversial depiction of slavery and it was taken down in 2023. To prepare for the restoration, the Pentagon has removed an existing interpretive panel which criticized slavery and The Lost Cause and replaced it with panel that is more sympathetic to the Confederate soldiers.
The removed panel said:
“The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery. Standing on a 32-foot-tall pedestal, a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South. She holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet: ‘They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.’ The statue stands on a pedestal with four cinerary urns, one for each year of the war, and is supported by a frieze with 14 shields, one for each of the 11 Confederate states and the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. Thirty-two life-sized figures depict mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians.
“Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase ‘Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton’ (‘The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato’) construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause.’ This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans. The image of the faithful slave, embodied in the two figures on the memorial, appeared widely in American popular culture during the 1910s through 1930s, perhaps most famously in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind.”
Those two paragraphs have been replaced on the new panels with this:
“Unveiled in 1914, the Confederate Memorial was designed by noted American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute.
“Sculptor Moses Ezekiel was buried at the base of his creation in 1921, after being honored at the first funeral ceremony in the newly built Memorial Amphitheater. Three other Confederate soldiers lie next to him: Lt. Harry C. Marmaduke of the Confederate Navy, Capt. John M. Hickey of the Second Missouri Infantry and Brig. Gen. Marcus J. Wright, who commanded brigades at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.”
The Washington Post reports that:
Stephen West, a Catholic University historian, said he first noticed that the sign had been changed when he visited Arlington National Cemetery on Sunday.
“The language that used to be on the sign and website described the Memorial correctly. Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy,” West wrote in a text message to The Washington Post. “And so as a historian, I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue — especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites.”
“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism,” Trump said in a 2020 interview with Fox News. “They love their flag, it represents the South; they like the South.”
In a description of the monument, Smithsonian Magazine says:
On June 4, 1914, the UDC dedicated what is perhaps the most egregious loyal slave monument, as it sits on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the former home of Robert E. Lee. A 32-feet-tall monument stood in a new section of Arlington, ringed by the graves of 267 Confederate soldiers, who had been reinterred from nearby locations. The dedication followed years of resistance to the idea of honoring Confederate dead on the same ground containing Union troops, black and white soldiers who had given their lives to save the United States.
Atop sits a statue of a human representation of the South, but beneath that, like tiers of cake, lies a ring of 14 shields emblazoned with the 13 seals of the Confederate states plus Maryland, then a series of life-sized friezes of the people of the Confederacy. Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and sculptor from Richmond, designed the monument and said he hoped to “show without any description how intensely and how seriously the men and women of every station in life had responded to the call to arms.”
All together, they represent the pillars of Lost Cause ideology: Confederate military service, white southern family life and crucially, the faithful slave. One of the reliefs depicts, in the words of former Confederate Colonel Hilary Herbert, who chaired the executive committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association, “an officer, kissing his child in the arms of an old negro ‘mammy.'”
To the left of this scene, Ezekiel placed a black man in Confederate uniform marching alongside white soldiers and officers. The meaning of this was clear for those who attended the dedication ceremony at Arlington. Herbert described Ezekiel’s scene in the official history of the monument this way:
Then the sons and daughters of the South are seen coming from every direction. The manner in which they crowd enthusiastically upon each other is one of the most impressive features of this colossal work. There they come, representing every branch of the service, and in proper garb; soldiers, sailors, sappers and miners, all typified. On the right is a faithful negro body-servant following his young master, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page’s realistic “Marse Chan” over again.
Ezekiel’s monument fit neatly into the racial and segregated landscape of its immediate surroundings at the time. Just a few years earlier, Virginia re-wrote its constitution to disenfranchise a large segment of its African-American citizens. Shortly after his inauguration in Washington, President Woodrow Wilson, who spoke at the dedication, ordered the segregation of all government offices.
This monument to the Confederate dead and its depiction of enslaved people as loyal, content with their subservient place, and disinterested in their own freedom, was a historical explanation that justified and helped maintain this new racial order that was now well in place throughout the former Confederacy.
Today, these monuments continue to distort the history of the Civil War and the Confederacy. Numerous SCV sites refers to the Ezekiel monument as evidence that black Confederates served in combat. In the hands of one unidentified author, Ezekiel’s body servant is now a “Black Confederate soldier…marching in rank with white Confederate soldiers,” and the monument itself is identified as “one of the first monument[s], if not the first, honoring a black American soldier.” .
In recent years the SCV and UDC have advanced this myth not only to stem the tide of calls to lower Confederate flags and monuments, but to suggest, as their forebears did, that the cause of the Confederacy had nothing at all to do with the defense of slavery. Since black men fought willingly for the Confederacy, the argument runs, the preservation of slavery and white supremacy could not have been its goal. The Confederate flag and the many monuments that dot the southern landscape—properly understood—ought to unite black and white Americans.
The sons and daughters of the Confederacy understood that the key to re-imposing and justifying white supremacy following Reconstruction involved controlling history. Arguments against removing Confederate monuments often raise the dangers of erasing history.
What is often missed, however, is that the depiction of African-Americans as loyal and submissive itself constituted an erasure of history in favor of a fictional narrative that ultimately justified segregation and disfranchisement.
Andy Hall, a Civil War historian, reprints a description of the monument from the Daughters of Confederate Veterans:
“But our sculptor, who is writing history in bronze, also pictures the South in another attitude, the South as she was in 1861-1865. For decades she had been contending for her constitutional rights, before popular assemblies, in Congress, and in the courts. Here in the forefront of the memorial she is depicted as a beautiful woman, sinking down almost helpless, still holding her shield with “The Constitution” written upon it, the full-panoplied Minerva, the Goddess of War and of Wisdom, compassionately upholding her. In the rear, and beyond the mountains, the Spirits of Avar are blowing their trumpets, turning them in every direction to call the sons and daughters of the South to the aid of their struggling mother. The Furies of War also appear in the background, one with the terrific hair of a Gordon, another in funereal drapery upholding a cinerary urn.
Then the sons and daughters of the South are seen coming from every direction. The manner in which they crowd enthusiastically upon each other is one of the most impressive features of this colossal work. There they come, representing every branch of the service, and in proper garb; soldiers, sailors, sappers and miners, all typified. On the right is a faithful negro body-servant following his young master, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page’s realistic “Marse Chan” over again.
The artist had grown up, like Page, in that embattled old Virginia where “Marse Chan” was so often enacted.
And there is another story told here, illustrating the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and the slave — a story that can not be too often repeated to generations in which “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” survives and is still manufacturing false ideas as to the South and slavery in the “fifties.” The astonishing fidelity of the slaves everywhere during the war to the wives and children of those who were absent in the army was convincing proof of the kindly relations between master and slave in the old South. One leading purpose of the U. D. C. is to correct history. Ezekiel is here writing it for them, in characters that will tell their story to generation after generation. Still to the right of the young soldier and his body-servant is an officer, kissing his child in the arms of an old negro “mammy.” Another child holds on to the skirts of “mammy” and is crying, perhaps without knowing why.”
