The verbal gymnastics by our Defense secretary whenever he orders a Confederate monument to go back up is truly Olympian.
To wit, Secretary Pete Hegseth just ordered the army to refurbish a 1914 Arlington Confederate Monument to the tune of $10 million and restore it by 2027. Hegseth called it a “reconciliation monument … taken down by woke lemmings.”
In his announcement, Hegseth avoids the actual name of the monument, “The Arlington Confederate Monument.” In fact, nothing in his statement mentions the Confederacy at all. There’s a reason for that: Congress passed a law in 2019 preventing the Department of Defense from naming or renaming anything after the Confederacy. Hence, “reconciliation monument.”
I study Confederate commemoration. This structure is one the cruelest, most racist monuments in the country, and its location at the sacred ground of Arlington National Cemetery makes it even more offensive. The monument clearly commemorates the Confederacy and its purpose — chattel slavery.
It depicts a tearful, overweight enslaved woman, a “mammy,” cradling the child of her Confederate enslaver, supporting him as he departs for war. The monument portrays faithful slaves and kind white masters, a historical lie. Slavery featured legal rape, torture and selling husband from wife, child from mother.
The monument came down because Congress, with a Republican-controlled Senate, passed a law directing the Pentagon “to remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America.” President Trump vetoed the $800 billion defense bill because it required the changing of nine base names like Fort Lee and Fort Benning that honored Confederates. Those bases were named during World War I and World War II, when the Army and the American South were segregated and few Black southerners could vote. Congress overturned Trump’s veto with a supermajority.
To execute that order, Congress created a Naming Commission on which I served as vice chair. We were no “woke lemmings.” The eight commissioners appointed by Congress and the secretary of Defense included three Republicans, one Democrat, and four retired flag officers.
When the commission members visited the Confederate monument in 2022, we were shocked by its overt racist imagery and anti U.S. sentiments. We voted unanimously to recommend removal.
Hegseth and neo-Confederate groups argue that the Commission sought to “erase history.” Not quite. Classes still study the Civil War, slavery, the Confederacy, and Jim Crow. Removing the names of bases named after confederate generals or racist monuments changed who and how we commemorate, our remit from Congress, not history.
Hegseth further declares that the monument was done in the spirit of reconciliation. He gets his history grossly wrong. Reunion had already occurred in 1868 when President Andrew Johnson magnanimously granted amnesty for treason to all Confederates. By 1877, all the former rebelling states had full political rights and representation.
In 1914, the Arlington Monument celebrated not reconciliation, but the victory of white supremacy. Before 1877, over 2,000 Black men held elective office, including a Black U.S. senator from Mississippi. By 1914, even though Mississippi and South Carolina were majority Black, almost no one of color could vote, much less hold office. Jim Crow triumphed.
Reconciliation did not include 9 million African Americans in the South who lived in a racial police state without voting rights enforced by a terror campaign of lynching. In 1914, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine counted 55 African Americans lynched. In Louisiana, three Black men were burned alive at the stake. Another mob doused a Texas man with gasoline and placed him in an “oil-soaked, dry-goods box” and set him on fire. None of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice.
Commemoration should inspire us. Who we commemorate should reflect our values. Instead of spending $10 million to restore that monument, we should commemorate the 1,800 United States Colored Troops and thousands of other U.S. Army Civil War soldiers buried in Arlington who helped destroy chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women and children from human bondage, protected democracy and the saved the United States of America.
By ordering the monument back, Hegseth is subverting Congress and the will of the American people. He is telling us that the values of 1914, white supremacy, and Jim Crow are this country’s — and the Army’s — values. This monument has everything to do with racism and nothing to do with reconciliation. Suggesting otherwise is a perversion of U.S. history and an insult to everyone buried in Arlington Cemetery.
Brigadier General Ty Seidule, U.S. Army (Retired) served as the Vice Chair of the Naming Commission. His is the Hinchcliff Professor of History at Hamilton College and his forthcoming book with Connor Williams is A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases.
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