Massive monument to falsified Confederate history soon to leave Arlington

A prominent example of public art as propaganda–a 32-foot-tall bronze Confederate Memorial, originally erected in 1914–will be removed from Arlington National Cemetery by January 1, 2024. The story of the monument highlights how interpreting past events is essential to understanding today’s struggles over racism, voting rights, insurrection, and democracy.

Arlington Cemetery is best known for the eternal flame at President Kennedy’s grave and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Some visitors may tour Arlington House, the former home of Robert E. Lee, and the associated museum. Few make the effort to hike out to Section 16, where graves of 482 Confederate soldiers and spouses encircle the monument, which bears the inscription “To Our Dead Heroes By The United Daughters of the Confederacy.”

The presence of a memorial at America’s national cemetery to troops who fought against the United States is a historical oddity. Its removal represents a long-overdue repudiation by the federal government of the legacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), one of the most effective and nefarious advocacy organizations in US history.

Removing the Arlington statue is required under the 2021 Defense Authorization Act, the first defense policy bill to pass Congress after the murder of George Floyd accelerated America’s reckoning with its history of racial injustice. The bill was vetoed by then-President Trump, who cited his opposition to renaming military bases in his veto message. Trump’s veto was overridden by bipartisan supermajorities in the House and Senate.

Only the bronze portion of the memorial will be relocated. The podium will remain in place after the statue is removed to avoid any disturbance to the graves, which will also remain in place. The monument’s sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, who fought in the Confederate Army, is among the people buried there.

I spoke with Henry Cross, an expert in museum exhibit relocation. He proposed a helicopter as the best way for the Army to remove and transport the structure from the sensitive burial site. “They have helicopters that can move Abrams tanks… and they can do it in the dead of night,” he said.

Why would Confederate troops be buried at Arlington Cemetery?

Arlington National Cemetery’s history is intimately connected with Civil War history. The property was inherited by Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Custis Washington, the United States’ first First Lady. Lee left the property in 1861 to rebel against the United States and lead the fight to preserve slavery. Soon after, the strategically important site directly overlooking Washington, DC was occupied by Union troops. President Lincoln designated the property a national cemetery for the growing number of Union dead. The decision was intentionally made as a gesture of defiance against Lee.

Confederate troops were barred from being buried at Arlington until Congress authorized it in 1900, when politicians seeking votes from white Southerners, including President William McKinley, declared a time of reconciliation and “fraternity” between the North and South. Congress appropriated $2,500 to have Confederate remains already buried in multiple states moved to Arlington. By 1902, 262 former Confederate soldiers were reburied there–the only soldiers who fought against the United States to rest at the national cemetery.

As the official Arlington National Cemetery website explains, “Notably, this ‘spirit of fraternity’ did not include African Americans.” In 1871, Black veterans petitioned the War Department to relocate hundreds of United States Colored Troops’ graves from the “Lower Cemetery,” where they were buried alongside former slaves and poor whites, to the main cemetery near Arlington House, where white Civil War veterans were buried. The War Department said no. The national cemetery remained segregated until 1948 when President Truman desegregated the armed forces.

The UDC led the effort to rebury the bodies and erect the monument. With unimaginable zeal, from the 1890s through the 1950s, the UDC and allied organizations marshaled political support and raised funds to erect memorials to mythical Southern valor in hundreds of state capitols, counties, cities, and towns, not only in the South. The exact number seems not to be agreed upon. I found estimates between 700 and 2,089. Frequently, these statues were inscribed with a description of Confederates as heroes, as in Arlington and in Rockville, Maryland.

Along with the erection of mass-produced statues, the UDC and its allies sought and won installation of museum exhibits, naming of streets, military bases, and schools, publication of textbooks, and other means of promoting the Lost Cause, falsified history that venerated the Confederacy as a noble effort and denied slavery as the basis for the Civil War.

The Lost Cause campaign was concurrent with Ku Klux Klan terrorism, lynchings, the imposition of poll taxes and other Jim Crow laws, anti-Black riots, and massive resistance to school desegregation. The statues were not merely a sentimental remembrance of a long-ago war. Their contemporary purpose was to intimidate Blacks and convey loyalty to white supremacy and opposition to Black civil rights.

What is to be done today with these Lost Cause relics?

The legacy and burden UDC leaves behind is that every one of these hundreds of communities must make a costly and controversial decision whether to leave the memorials in place, “contextualize” them, relocate them, or otherwise dispose of them. The cost to communities includes not only the public dollars spent but also the harm to civil society and community safety. In October, the Robert E. Lee statue that was the focus of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was melted at an undisclosed location to protect the foundry and its staff from hate crimes and terrorism. In Richmond, multiple Confederate statues were removed from Monument Avenue in 2021 after protestors covered them in graffiti and remain in storage until the Black History Museum and Cultural Center decides what to do with them.

The Defense Authorization Act created a Naming Commission to review all Defense Department assets with names commemorating the Confederacy. The commission issued three reports between May and October 2022. Among other recommendations, the commission called for nine Army bases to be renamed, including three in Virginia: the former Fort A.P. Hill (now Fort Walker), Fort Lee (now Fort Gregg-Adams), and Fort Pickett (now Fort Barfoot). Two buildings and a road at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis were also renamed.

Of the Arlington Confederate Memorial, the Naming Commission said, “The memorial offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The report identifies several lies and racist images in the sculpture, including that the coats of arms of Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri are included in the 14 shields on the monument’s pedestal, even though only 11 states joined the Confederacy. “The memorial’s inclusion of the heraldry from those states distorts history by inflating the Confederacy’s size, support and significance.”

The report also highlights racist and misleading depictions of two Black figures on the statue. It further explains that the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” inscribed on the statue means, “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato,” thereby construing the Confederacy as a noble “Lost Cause.”

Governor Glenn Youngkin, who opposed relocating the statue, arranged to move it to New Market Battlefield in the Shenandoah Valley, 112 miles west of Arlington. The Board of Virginia Military Institute (VMI), which operates the battlefield, unanimously agreed to accept the Arlington statue in September. Nevertheless, staff at Arlington National Cemetery and VMI were reticent to confirm that New Market would be the statue’s destination. Robert Quackenbush, Arlington National Cemetery’s Deputy Chief of Staff, confirmed that the statue would be removed by January 1, but told me the Army will not determine its final disposition until after consultation with Virginia historic preservation agencies and compliance with environmental requirements. Quackenbush said the Army awarded a $3 million contract to remove the statue from Arlington.

In my opinion, the UDC’s success in winning erection of so many monuments rebuts the suggestion that any one of them should be preserved as possessing unique value. The UDC flooded the market with mass-produced statues of little aesthetic merit, and therefore, little is lost by demolishing or dynamiting any single one of them. For those who want to know what they looked like, a vast amount of photographic evidence exists, many communities have left their statues standing, and historic sites like New Market Battlefield still display them. For those who want to see the monument in Arlington before it leaves, you have until the end of December.