Recent years have handed defenders of the Confederacy their greatest defeats since 1865. As flags come down and statues are melted down, millions of Americans are finally waking up to the fact that honoring treason against the United States — undertaken for the purpose of allowing certain people to own other human beings — was never a righteous cause. But the Confederacy’s advocates are not ready to accept their defeat. Which is why there’s a fight over the Pentagon’s plans to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.
The planned removal met with objections from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, cries of anguish from Confederate sympathizers and a lawsuit that has temporarily left the statue in place. Conservative media is full of condemnations of the memorial’s removal. A group of 44 far-right Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanding that he leave the statue in place.
It is not possible for an honest person to claim that symbols of the Confederacy only stand for honor and tradition.
The memorial at Arlington, as described on the cemetery’s official website, depicts a number of figures: not only noble and brave Confederate soldiers, but also “an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.” It was erected in 1914, at a time when pro-Confederate politicians and groups were erecting statues and memorials around the country. Their campaign was part of a broader effort to both rewrite the history of the Civil War and reassert white supremacy in the South. (They also argued against textbooks that portrayed slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Sound familiar?)
The statue’s removal was scheduled in compliance with a law intended to remove commemorations of the Confederacy from U.S. military facilities. In late 2020, Congress passed a Defense Department spending bill that required…
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