Excerpted from the tablet marker- The history of Section 16 and the Confederate Memorial dates to the turn of the 20th Century. Driven by a renewed sense of national unity following the Spanish-American War in 1900, Congress authorized the reburial of Confederate remains in “some suitable spot” at Arlington National Cemetery. Notably, this “national unity” did not include African Americans. In 1871 a group of black soldiers had petitioned the War Department to relocate the graves of hundreds of United States Colored Troops (USCT) from the “Lower Cemetery,” where they were buried alongside former slaves and poor whites, to the main cemetery near Arlington House, where white Civil War veterans lay at rest. The War Department denied the petition. Section 16 became known at the time as the “Confederate Section”. Then Secretary of War, William H. Taft, approved the creation of a memorial there, and the project was eventually led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization of white southern women. Arlington National Cemetery would remain segregated until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order. The Confederate Memorial was erected in 1914, almost 50 years after the end of the Civil War. Designed by the sculptor and Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel, it presents a nostalgic, mythological version of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.

Two of the figures on the memorial are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war (see images below). An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.

Sculptor Moses Ezekiel was buried at the base of his creation in 1921, after being honored at the first funeral ceremony in the newly built Memorial Ampitheater. The memorial remains controversial and is slated for removal, except for the base the memorial sits on, from the cemetery pending litigation (see link). According to the link “The Army and the ANC said the process of taking down the monument will start Dec. 18 (this year) and is expected to take four days, during which all but the concrete base of the statue will be removed to prevent disturbing the graves of Confederate fighters encircling the monument.”