There’s news with the memorial dedicated to the Southerners who took up arms against the United States to preserve their right to own Black people that the Trump administration is planning to reinstall at Arlington National Cemetery next year.
The administration has edited the marker at the site of the Confederate Memorial and also edited the Arlington National Cemetery website to strip language criticizing the depictions of slavery in the 32-foot bronze statue, which was removed in 2023, was slated to be relocated to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, and is currently out of the spotlight, in storage in a federal facility in Northern Virginia.
The memorial, designed by VMI alum Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate Army veteran, featured, per the now-scrubbed website description, “an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war” – part of Ezekiel’s effort to sanitize the “Lost Cause,” “which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.”
The monument was unveiled in 1914 by President Woodrow Wilson, the Staunton native and noted White supremacist – the ceremony was held on June 6, 1914, the 106th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis, the president of the short-lived Confederacy.
Seriously, folks, you can’t make this stuff up.
A federal commission moved in 2023 to order the removal of the monument from Arlington National Cemetery, for obvious and long-overdue reasons.
The VMI Board of Visitors, at the behest of Glenn Youngkin, the MAGA serving as governor of Virginia at the time, voted unanimously to accept the monument, for placement at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War, which VMI operates at the New Market Battlefield State Park – the site of the 1864 Battle of New Market, where a battalion of VMI cadets played a key role in a Confederate victory.
The monument never made its way to the New Market museum, though; it’s still sitting in storage.
Its imminent return to Arlington was set forth last year by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who reversed the decision to have it removed by “woke lemmings” who believe in “erasing American history.”
That’s one perspective. Another was shared with The Washington Post, which broke the news on the edits to the marker at Arlington National Cemetery, and the Arlington website, by retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, who served as vice chair of the commission that recommended the memorial’s removal.
“It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument,” Seidule told the Post.
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Chris Graham
