Arlington National Cemetery will begin removing the Confederate Memorial
Workers were expected this week to remove Arlington National Cemetery’s towering Confederate Memorial, moving one of the nation’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy onto public land.
The removal of the monument, criticized for its sanitized portrayal of slavery, from the nation’s most famous cemetery is part of a military effort to remove Confederate symbols from its bases, ships and other facilities. Dozens of Republican lawmakers opposed removing the monument.
Security fencing was installed around the monument this weekend and the towering bronze statue will be removed by the end of the week, a cemetery spokeswoman said. murder of George Floyd.
That move prompted Congress to create the Naming Commission in 2021. This was created to devise a plan to rid the military of its statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy.
The Department of Defense has ordered the removal of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery by January 1, 2024.
It will be stored until its fate is determined, the cemetery spokeswoman said.
More than 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter last week asking Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, to halt the removal. They argued that the monument, funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and erected in 1914, did not commemorate the Confederate States, but rather the “reconciliation and national unity” between North and South.
The monument, they wrote, was commissioned by the government to honor “the country’s shared reconciliation with its troubled divisions,” and complemented an earlier gesture that moved the remains to the national cemetery.
But for others, including the members of the Naming CommitteeThe intricate images and inscriptions etched into the bronze honor the story of the Lost Cause, a myth that portrays the Confederacy’s rebellion as a noble defense of Southern values and depicts slavery as benign.
The monument features a woman representing the American South atop a 35-foot pedestal. according to the cemetery. Near the base, dozens of life-size Confederate soldiers sit next to mythical gods and two enslaved African Americans.
One is a “mammy” holding a Confederate officer’s child, and the other is a man “following his owner to war,” according to the cemetery’s description.
“It is the clearest example of a Lost Cause statement in a public space in the form of a monument,” said Kevin M. Levin, a Civil War historian who often gives tours of the cemetery. “Most Confederate monuments are large equestrian monuments that honor a specific person.”
“I think what the United Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to see in Arlington was an unapologetic vindication of the Confederacy,” he added, referring to the organization of Confederate women who raised money for the memorial.
Since 2020, hundreds of Confederate memorials have been renamed or removed from state and municipal lands. One such monument, a statue of Robert E. Lee astride a horse, was taken down two years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This year it was melted down to be repurposed as public art.
To Jalane Schmidt, a professor at the University of Virginia who helped lead the campaign to have that statue melted, said the argument for removing the Confederate Memorial in Arlington is the same as for any other.
Monuments on public lands, she said, “must tell a story that includes everyone and aligns with our democratic values.”
The cemetery will still contain monuments to the Confederates, in the form of hundreds of graves of fallen soldiers and the Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns, which is believed to contain the remains of warriors from both the North and South.