ARLINGTON'S FORGOTTEN MONUMENT

BY CLINT JOHNSON

Who would believe it? A Confederate memorial that practically shouts "The South was right," standing in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery? Impossible!

The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery has to be the most remarkable statue in the country commemorating the dead of any war. While the average Civil War statue rarely rates a visit of more than a few minutes to read the inscription and note the mistakes, this memorial requires 20 minutes just for you to soak in its imagery.

That is because the Confederate Memorial features one larger-than-life and 32 life-size figures. Among the figures are women representing Bible verses, Roman war goddesses, brave and frightened soldiers, a black soldier, parents sending a son off to war, separating sweethearts sharing one last touch, and a trusting father giving his baby one last kiss as he hands the infant over to a black servant.

The scene that will most surprise visitors to this monument in Arlington National Cemetery, about 400 yards west of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, is right in its front. A goddess girded for war is supporting a wounded woman clinging to a shield. Looking at those two women, you immediately understand what you're seeing: a Southern justification of the war. It is not even necessary to read the inscriptions on the monument to understand what the artist is saying: he believed the South was right to fight the North.

This unabashedly pro-Confederate statue--located ironically next to the Virginia cemetery's segregated section, where the federal government once placed U.S. Colored Troops and black sailors--was the crowning achievement of sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and his sponsor, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

The story of how the memorial came to be starts more than 40 years before its dedication. At least as early as Decoration Day 1868, the U.S. government, as caretaker of the nation's premier military cemetery, began turning away families and UDC members who tried to bring flowers to the graves of 377 Confederates who had died in Washington hospitals and were buried here. Major General John A. Logan, whose corps had burned Columbia, South Carolina, in 1865 and who was now commander of the leading Union veterans organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, specifically ordered that the ladies be turned away and the Confederate graves left bare. Angered Southern families began to remove their relatives from Arlington.

Then, in 1898, the Spanish American War broke out. Sharing Spain as a common enemy, Northerners and Southerners served side by side in the U.S. Army. Even former Confederates, including notables such as Major Generals Joe Wheeler and Matthew Butler, donned the uniform of their erstwhile enemy. No matter that the war was relatively short; it brought the North and South together again. Anti-Southern sentiment began to wane.

In 1900 Congress authorized an official Confederate section inside the cemetery. By then there were few Rebel graves left; between 1868 and the close of 1899, 241 Southern soldiers had been moved out of Arlington in response to the restrictive policies. Now, scattered Confederates were disinterred and reburied in the new section, bringing the total back to more than 400. The Washington chapter of the UDC, recognizing an opportunity, began lobbying their own national organization and members of Congress for a Confederate memorial. In 1906 approval was granted, and the UDC was authorized to raise money for the monument's construction. Six years later, the UDC chose as the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a Virginian who was living in Rome, Italy.

Ezekiel, the most respected American-born sculptor of his day, knew the Confederate experience firsthand. His knowledge came from his brief military career: he was the first Jewish boy to attend Virginia Military Institute, graduating in the class of 1866, and he fought in the 1864 Battle of New Market, Virginia, in which he and other cadets lost their footgear at a landmark later know as the Field of Lost Shoes. He never joined the army, remaining at VMI through graduation. He then spent a year at the Medical College of Virginia, where he studied anatomy before attending an art school in Ohio.

After learning his craft, Ezekiel moved to Europe, first to Berlin and later to Rome, making occasional trips back to the United States. Ezekiel created more than 200 bronze statues and bas-reliefs in his career, but only four statues specifically related to the Civil War. In 1910 he designed a statue looking out over Lake Erie for the Confederate cemetery in the prison camp at Johnson's Island, Ohio. In 1912 he created the unusual statue of Stonewall Jackson wearing a slouch hat for the state capitol at Charleston, West Virginia, and then copied it for VMI. Standing near that Jackson statue at VMI is Ezekiel's most famous statue, Virginia Mourning Her Dead, his homage to friends who were killed at New Market. The statue stands in front of six of their graves. His last war statue, the Confederate Memorial, was also his largest at 32.5 feet tall.

According to surviving notes, Ezekiel met with a UDC committee several times, but the ladies apparently did not expressly tell him what they wanted the monument to convey. The imagery on the statue seems to be his own statement about the war. Ezekiel did not ask for a design fee and was paid only his expenses.

The memorial was dedicated by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, the 106th anniversary of the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Wilson, a native of Virginia who as a child visiting Augusta, Georgia, had scrambled to the front of the line to catch a glimpse of Robert E. Lee during the general's 1870 tour of the South, spoke only a few minutes in a disjointed speech perhaps made so by approaching bad weather. Wilson said the UDC "had presented a memorial to their dead to the government of the United States" and went on to challenge the crowd to "turn your faces to the future, quickened by memories of the past, but with nothing to do with the contests of the past, knowing as we have shed our blood upon opposite sides, we now face and admire one another."

Also at the podium was Washington Gardner, the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. He told the crowd, "The heroic devotion and lofty self-sacrifice of these honored dead is held in grateful and affectionate memory." He said the war was inevitable and ended his comments with, "Neither side will ever have to apologize for the sincerity or the devotion of its adherents."

Bennett Young, commander of the United Confederate Veterans and an organizer of the Confederate raid on St. Albans, Vermont, in 1864, was uncompromising in his view of the war. "We still glory in the records of our beloved and immortal dead," he said. "Their surviving comrades and their children still believe that for which they suffered and laid down their lives was just; that their premises in the civil war were according to our Constitution. The men of the Confederacy submit, but they have no words to recall, nor history to change. The South gave 200,000 lives, the best and the most precious offering it had, as an assurance of honesty of conviction, unfaltering faith and integrity of purpose. The sword said the South was wrong, but the sword is not necessarily guided by conscience and reason. The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth. Right lives forever."

When Daisy McLaurin Stevens, president-general of the UDC, spoke, she said boys and girls would look at the new monument with reverence and "would thank God that they are Americans." Tossed in among her comments was a prediction that for 1914--before the United States had entered World War I--was very perceptive. She said Americans shall "resolve that whether our flag shall float from pole to pole, whether our drum beat circles the sea, at least American ideals shall shape our future and the empire of the civic world be ours."

The celebration was cut short by a tremendous, windy thunderstorm that sent Wilson rushing back to the White House. On the way, his car narrowly avoided colliding with a three-horse wagon.

Stories about the dedication peppered the local press, but conspicuously absent was a description of the monument itself, the object that had attracted all those people to Arlington that day. Starting at the top of the monument, facing south, there is a larger-than-life-size woman holding out a laurel wreath, a symbol of victory. She is leaning against a plow and holding a pruning hook. She stands atop a pedestal, below which is the familiar verse from Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks." Below the verse and around the statue are the seals of the Confederate states, plus the seal of Maryland.

Directly below the woman, on the level with the rest of the figures, is Minerva, the Roman goddess of war. She holds a spear in her right hand, and in her left arm is an obviously wounded woman. In the wounded woman's left hand is a shield prominently labeled "U.S. Constitution," an impossible-to-ignore statement that the Confederate cause had its origin and justification in the Union's founding document. By implication, the enemy that slew the Confederacy was warring against the Constitution itself.

Setting out counterclockwise from the woman's shield, you see soldiers marching off to war. One looks frightened, but the man behind him has a firm grip on his arm to lend him strength. In the background, a black man wearing a military forage cap but not carrying a weapon marches in formation with white men. Further along, an officer is kissing his baby, held up to him by a stereotypical black mammy, as a toddler buries his or her face in the mammy's apron. The image appears to say that both the white adult and white child trust the black woman to take care of the family while the officer is off to war; black and white are partners in the same cause.

Continuing on, a blacksmith is leaving his forge while his wife looks into his eyes. That scene is followed by what must be an Episcopal priest (wearing robes) and his wife sending their teenage son off to war. Following that is another officer turning to leave as his sweetheart clings to him for one last touch. In front of him are several other sailors and soldiers representing all the branches of the Confederate army and navy.

Below the figures on the front of the monument is a Latin inscription that translates to:

"The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause pleased Cato." This refers to the Roman Civil War, in which Julius Caesar defeated Pompey. Pompey was an admirer of Cato, a Roman leader known for his honesty. Ezekiel seems to be comparing Roman and Southern history, recognizing that the South lost, but that it fought for what it believed was right.

On the rear of the monument is an inscription by Dr. Randolph McKim, who served in the Confederate army before becoming a clergyman. It reads:

Not for fame or reward
Not for place or rank
Not lured by ambition
Or goaded by necessity
But in simple obedience to duty
as they understood it
These men suffered all,
sacrificed all, dared all and died.

To one side of the monument lies the grave of Moses Ezekiel, who died in 1917, three years after the dedication of his greatest work. His contribution as sculptor of the monument is not mentioned. The inscription reads: "Sergeant of Company C, Battalion of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute."

All this beauty and poignancy is lost to the average visitor to Arlington National Cemetery. Though the Confederate Memorial is on the map at Arlington, it attracts few visitors. It is the largest, most elaborate monument in the cemetery, yet the Arlington trolley tour makes a hard right near the monument without even slowing down to give tourists a glance.

The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery is destined to remain an underappreciated piece of a past some people would rather forget. But it is there to speak to anyone who will listen, and it has plenty to say. All you have to do is find it.

Clint Johnson of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is the author of Touring Virginia's and West Virginia's Civil War Sites, Touring the Carolinas' Civil War Sites, and Civil War Blunders. Donations for the memorial's upkeep and cleaning can be sent to: Arlington Endowment Fund, 11843 Summer Oak Drive, Germanton, MD 20874.

GETTING THERE --Most people include Arlington National Cemetery in a tour of Washington, D.C. To get to the cemetery from the capitol, take the Lincoln Memorial Bridge across the Potomac. The Confederate Memorial is about 400 yards west of the often-visited Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is shown on the official cemetery map.

FOOD & LODGING --Major restaurant and hotel/motel chains are well-represented in the Washington/ Alexandria area.

ANNUAL EVENT --The Confederate Memorial Committee of the District of Columbia hosts a service at the Confederate Memorial every year on the first Sunday in June at 3:00 p.m.

OTHER ATTRACTIONS --At the outset of the Civil War, Arlington National Cemetery was the estate of Robert E. Lee. When Lee accepted a commission in the Confederate service, however, Union authorities appropriated his property for a Federal military cemetery. Lee's house--actually the ancestral home of his wife's family, the Custises--still stands as Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial (703-557-0613). The Arlington Historical Museum (703-812-9479), run by the local historical society, offers exhibits on the history of the Arlington area.

HOURS --The cemetery is open 365 days a year. Hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. October 1 through March 31 and 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. April 1 through September 30.

INFORMATION --The cemetery's website, www.arlingtoncemetery.org, includes site history and an events listing.