The Confederate Memorial was a memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, United States. It commemorated members of the armed forces of the Confederate States of America who died during the American Civil War. Authorized in March 1906, former Confederate soldier and sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in November 1910 to design the memorial. It was unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, the 106th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America, and removed on December 20, 2023.
During the memorial's presence at Arlington, the grounds changed slightly due to burials and alterations. Some major changes to the memorial were proposed over the years, but none had been implemented until December 2023. Since the memorial's unveiling, most United States presidents have sent a funeral wreath to be laid at the memorial every Memorial Day. Some presidents have declined to do so.
In 2022, the Naming Commission recommended that the Confederate Memorial be removed. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin agreed to implement the suggestion, and Arlington National Cemetery made plans for removing and relocating the Confederate Memorial by the start of 2024 at the latest. When the monument was removed, its granite base remained to avoid disturbing nearby graves. In 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that the monument would be returned to Arlington National Cemetery and put on display in 2027.
First Confederate burials at Arlington
Arlington National Cemetery was established in June 1864 as a cemetery for Union Civil War dead. The first military burial at Arlington – William Henry Christman – was made on May 13, 1864,Cultural Landscape Program. Arlington House: The Robert E. Lee Memorial Cultural Landscape Report. National Capital Region. National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior. Washington, D.C.: 2001. Accessed April 29, 2012. close to what is now the northeast gate in Section 27. Formal authorization for burials was not given by Major General Montgomery C. Meigs (Quartermaster General of the United States Army) until June 15, 1864.
Confederate military personnel were among those initially buried at Arlington. Some were prisoners of war who died while in custody or who were executed as spies by the Union, but some were battlefield dead, and many were battlefield wounded who died at DC-area hospitals as prisoners of war. For example, in 1865, General Meigs decided to build a monument to Civil War dead in a grove of trees near the flower garden south of the Robert E. Lee mansion at Arlington. The bodies of 2,111 Union and Confederate dead within a radius of the city of Washington, D.C., were collected. Some of the dead had been interred on the battlefield, but most were full or partial remains discovered unburied where they died in combat. None were identifiable. Although Meigs had not intended to collect the remains of Confederate war dead, the inability to identify remains meant that both Union and Confederate dead were interred below the cenotaph he built. The vault was sealed in September 1866. Other Confederate battlefield dead were also buried at Arlington, and by the end of the war in April 1865 several hundred of the more than 16,000 graves at Arlington contained Confederate dead.Jacob, p. 157.
The federal government did not permit the decoration of Confederate graves at the cemetery. As Quartermaster General, Meigs had charge of the Arlington cemetery (he did not retire until February 6, 1882),Brown and Bushong, p. 580. and he refused to give families of Confederates buried there permission to lay flowers on their loved ones' graves. In 1868, when families asked to lay flowers on Confederate graves on Decoration Day (now known as Memorial Day), Meigs ordered that the families be barred from the cemetery. Union veterans' organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR; whose membership was open only to Union soldiers) also felt that rebel graves should not be decorated.Trout, p. 126. In 1869, GAR members stood watch over Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery to ensure they were not visibly honored on Decoration Day.Marling, p. 25. Cemetery officials also refused to allow the erection of any monument to Confederate dead and declined to permit new Confederate burials (either by reburial or following the death of veterans).Mayo, p. 176.Martinez and Harris, p. 177.
The 1898 McKinley speech The federal government's policy toward Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery changed at the end of the 19th century.
The 10-week Spanish–American War of 1898 marked the first time since prior to the Civil War that Americans from all states, North and South, were involved in a military conflict with a foreign power. After the Spanish–American War ended in August, a series of celebrations ("peace jubilees") were held in major cities in the United States from October through December. Many Southerners were lukewarm in their support for the war and for President William McKinley's territorial expansion in Cuba and the Philippines, and it was not clear that the Treaty of Paris (the agreement ending the Spanish–American War) would win the approval of the United States Senate.Rowe, p. 624; Nickeson, p. 491.
President McKinley made a trip across the Deep South by train in December 1898 to promote Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris and racial harmony. McKinley saw untended Confederate graves in Fredericksburg, Virginia, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, and the sight bothered him. In his speech at the Atlanta Peace Jubilee on December 14, 1898, McKinley not only celebrated the end of sectionalism but also announced that the federal government would now begin tending Confederate graves since these dead represented "a tribute to American valor". The speech impressed many Southerners, who saw it as a grand gesture of reconciliation and a symbol of national unification.
Creation of the Confederate section
The McKinley speech encouraged Dr. Samuel E. Lewis to seek additional improvements to the care and treatment of Confederate graves. Lewis, a former Confederate States Army (CSA) surgeon who then practiced medicine in Washington, D.C., was the leader ("commander") of the Charles Broadway Rouss Camp No. 1191 of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), a veterans organization for those who fought for the Confederacy. Lewis had inventoried all Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery in early fall 1898 as part of the local group's historic documentation efforts. He discovered 136 identifiable Confederate graves, far more than the six or seven cemetery officials assumed existed. The graves were scattered all over the existing burial grounds, and the headstones were similar to those of civilian employees and African American "contrabands" (runaway slaves). The similarity to the headstones of black people especially angered Lewis. In early 1899, his group discovered another 189 graves in the Soldiers' Home National Cemetery in the District of Columbia.Blair, p. 188.
On June 5, 1899, Lewis and other Confederate veterans sent a petition to President McKinley asking that the Confederate dead at Arlington be disinterred and reburied in a "Confederate section". McKinley approved of the idea. Former Confederate Brigadier General Marcus Joseph Wright (by 1898 an agent of the War Department collecting Confederate war records) drafted legislation to approve the reinterments, and Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley (a former brevet major general of volunteers for the Union) introduced it in Congress.Poole, p. 132. Congress approved the bill in 1900 and authorized $2,500 for the plan, which specified that the reburials occur near the field where Spanish–American War dead had recently been interred. McKinley signed the bill into law on June 6, 1900. A list of the dead at both Arlington and the Soldiers' Home was published so that families who wished to do so might remove their loved ones' remains from Arlington and reinter them closer to home.
Opposition to the section After June 1900, however, several women's groups—among them the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Ladies of the Hollywood Memorial Association—opposed allowing any Confederate dead to remain at Arlington. The reasons for this resistance were complex and varied. Most of the women's societies argued that Confederate dead should lie in Southern soil, Confederate families should not rely on Union "charity" (e.g., free grave space at Arlington), the GAR would desecrate the graves, and Confederate soldiers should rest among their comrades in Southern cemeteries.Blair, p. 188-189. Some of the women's societies also saw reburial of Confederate dead in the South as a way of maintaining their relevance and recruiting new members, while others wanted reburial in the South so they could erect pro-Confederate monuments over the graves. Some groups perceived the offer of a Confederate section at Arlington as a sign of Southern accommodationism with the United States.Blair, p. 189-190. Competition between different women's societies also played a role. For example, the Confederate Southern Memorial Association (CSMA) also opposed the creation of a Confederate section at Arlington. The CSMA was formed in 1900 as an umbrella group for the ladies' memorial associations, which were rapidly losing members. The CSMA feared being absorbed by the UDC, which had formed in 1894 both as a commemorative body and as a benevolent society for Confederate women and patriotic goals.Cox, "United Daughters of the Confederacy", p. 559; Gross, p. 190. The CSMA sought a way to differentiate itself from the larger body, and so advocated reburial, too—but not in Richmond (as the UDC did) but in local towns and cities throughout the South.Blair, p. 191.
To overcome this opposition, Lewis tried to identify support for a "Confederate section" as well as convince the administration to proceed. He secured the endorsement of a Confederate section by a number of former high-ranking Confederate officers. He also polled other chapters of the United Confederate Veterans and found they approved of the legislation as well. Lewis and his supporters argued that only the federal government had the financial resources to adequately maintain the large number of Confederate graves found at Arlington and the Soldiers' Home, and that failing to spend the $2,500 appropriation would discourage Congress from protecting Confederate graves in the future. Critically, Lewis won the support of Hilary A. Herbert, an Alabamian and former colonel in the 8th Regiment Alabama Infantry who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1877 to 1893 and as Secretary of the Navy under President Grover Cleveland. Herbert argued that leaving the Confederate graves at Arlington made a greater impression on the public than isolating them in the pro-Confederate South.Blair, p. 190.