Under orders from the Republican administration of Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the US Army has presented final design plans to the US Commission of Fine Arts to restore and reinstall the Confederate Memorial (now being formally referred to as “the Moses Ezekiel Sculpture”) at Arlington National Cemetery.
Restoration and reinstallation of the roughly 30-foot-tall bronze monument featuring sanitized depictions of slavery is estimated to cost about $10 million.
The monument was originally removed in December 2023 under a Congressional mandate from the Naming Commission to rename and/or remove Department of Defense assets that commemorate the Confederate States of America (CSA) or any person who voluntarily served with the CSA against the United States.
The Confederate States attempted to leave the United States following the election of Abraham Lincoln and launched the Civil War in order to preserve their claimed right to keep people enslaved.
The memorial is scheduled for reinstallation in 2027 in Section 16, near the burial site of the statue’s sculptor, Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel, and among the graves of more than 400 Confederate soldiers who for obvious reasons were never meant to be buried there when the cemetery was established.
In 2017, after the Unite the Right rally violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, twenty of Ezekiel’s extended family published a letter in The Washington Post calling for the monument to be removed.
Neo-Confederate History
When Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 traitors to the United States were not intended to be buried there, but some dead prisoners of war, executed spies and unidentified Confederate bodies were included. Several hundred other Confederate battlefield dead also found their way to Arlington by the end of the war.
After the war, the federal government did not permit the decoration of Confederate graves at the cemetery.
In 1869, former United States soldiers who were members of the Grand Army of the Republic stood watch over Confederate graves at Arlington to be sure they weren’t honored on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day). At the same time no new Confederate burials were allowed and no monuments to Confederate dead were allowed.
Following the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, as white supremacists returned to control in most of the South, a movement rose to re-frame the history of the Civil War and have history textbooks present a version of the War.
That version falsely claimed secession was not rebellion and the Confederacy did not fight to retain slavery.
Pseudohistorical lost cause ideology and the reestablishment of the white supremacy in the South led to the establishment of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers.
The UDC venerated the Ku Klux Klan and funded a monument to the terrorist group in 1926. The Klan was revived in the 1910s, adopting cross burnings and hooded robes; by the 1920s it had millions of members.
At the urging of the UDC, the Confederate Memorial at Arlington was authorized in March 1906 and commissioned by the UDC in 1910. It was widely criticized at the time and since, for its racist overtones.
The monument features a woman representing the South protecting Black figures below. One was described by the UDC in 1914 as “a faithful Negro body-servant following his young master.” Ezekiel also included the weeping figure of the “loyal black mammy” as a correction to what he and the UDC saw as lies about the history of slavery perpetrated by abolitionists and their ideological descendants.
About 360-365,000 United States soldiers died during the Civil War, about 110,000 killed or mortally wounded; another 275,000 to 282,000 US soldiers were wounded in action.
Estimates of total United States casualties (including dead, wounded, captured, and missing) range from roughly 640,000 to 646,000.
New York State contributed the highest number of troops to the war effort (around 400,000 to 465,000 men) and subsequently suffered the highest total death toll of any state – about 50,000.
About 16,000 United States Civil War dead are buried in Arlington Cemetery, including about 4,000 unknown US soldiers and about 3,800 escaped formerly enslaved people and US Colored Troops.
You can read more about the statue’s history and the controversy surrounding it here.
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Illustrations, from above: United States Army soldiers lie dead near Dunker Church after the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, 1862 (detail, colorized); and “loyal slaves” shown on the Confederate Memorial.
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