The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in 2017. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
The federal government is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit over the fate of an Arlington National Cemetery memorial celebrating Confederate "dead heroes" after the case was moved from Virginia to the District last month.
The memorial, depicting a Black woman holding the baby of a white Confederate officer and an enslaved man accompanying his enslaver into battle, was commissioned in 1914 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "To our dead heroes," the monument reads above a Latin saying that praises lost causes.
Cemetery caretakers have said on signage and a web page that the memorial was part of a larger attempt to gloss over slavery's evils.
"The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery," the cemetery's website said.
Last year, the Pentagon directed that monument be dismantled and its bronze figures removed following the recommendation of a Naming Commission established in 2021 to review military facilities celebrating the Confederacy. But in an attempt to keep the memorial intact, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and descendants of Confederate soldiers sued the Defense Department and the Army in March.
Among other claims, the suit said the decision to dismantle the memorial was done without sufficient public input and is illegal because it serves as a grave marker for Confederates buried at the site.
Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery in 1922. (Library of Congress)
"The Memorial represents the reunification of the North and South after the Civil War, as well as the commemoration of all fallen members of the military," said the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. "Removal … will broadcast a message of dishonor which amounts to an act of disgrace."
Last month, a judge granted the government's request to move the case to federal court in the District, where similar litigation is pending. On July 28, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss the case because, among other reasons, the memorial's removal was still being discussed — and, even if these discussions were completed, the monument would have to be removed by law.
"Defendants are obligated by statute to implement the recommendation of the Naming Commission to remove the Confederate Memorial," the motion to dismiss said.
The Justice Department, Defense Department and Arlington Cemetery declined to comment.
H. Edward Phillips, an attorney representing the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said there is no need to bury Confederate history at Arlington, especially when Union and Confederate soldiers are both interred at the cemetery — including unknown soldiers from both sides buried in the same vault.
The Confederacy does not threaten to rise again, he said: "They are no longer an enemy — they are an entity that no longer exists."
Ty Seidule — the vice-chair of the Naming Commission and a retired Army brigadier general who teaches history at Hamilton College — has singled out Arlington's Confederate memorial for criticism.
In his 2021 book "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause," Seidule wrote that the memorial's figures "provide one racist trope after another," including Black enslaved people happily serving the bigoted regime that oppressed them.
"I think it's the cruelest monument in the country," Seidule wrote. "The statue represents all the terrible lies of the Lost Cause."
In a telephone interview, Seidule said that Arlington's memorial is not about reconciliation. This was accomplished when Confederates were granted amnesty on Christmas Day in 1868, he said.
Instead, the memorial was erected in the 20th century by segregationists committed to Jim Crow and to "showing the white South is in charge again," according to Seidule.
"The bottom line is that this commission has recommended that it be removed," Seidule said of the memorial. "I expect, like everything out of the commission, it will happen."
