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March 15, 2025

The Arlington Reconciliation Monument needs to be restored to Arlington National Cemetary immediately

by Dr. Ann McLean and Patricia N. Saffran

President Trump created Executive Order 13933 on June 26, 2020, "Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence", with its Purpose, "The first duty of government is to ensure domestic tranquility and defend the life, property, and rights of its citizens.” He then summarizes the dramatic traumatic events and violence over five weeks starting at the end of May 2020 that led to Confederate and other monuments and statues being vandalized and torn down, writing, "Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies—such as Marxism—that call for the destruction of the United States system of government.” Trump's order rewrites existing code which goes back much further such as to the Travel Act, section 1952 of title 18, United States Code, and subsequent acts, so protections have been on the books for quite some time. President Trump recently updated his protections for monuments with Executive Order 14189 of January 29, 2025, "Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday."  He's also ordering a new sculpture park, the National Garden of American Heroes. 

Oddly enough it was the US Congress who acted as fanatics, when they went against Trump’s original Executive Order, and later veto, by creating the Naming Commission on March 2, 2021 (dissolved October 1, 2022.) It was funded under the William M. Thornberry (Mac) National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (NDAA 2021.) The Commission basically called Confederates traitors and tried to erase any traces of Confederate memorials including the naming of public buildings. When Congress authorized the Naming Commission, the public was in favor of keeping Confederate statues in place. In 2020, according to the HuffPost poll, 66% of the US public didn’t agree with Confederate statue removals in particular.

Black veterans, whose ancestors fought for the South in the Civil War, and former Vice President of the N.C. NAACP, H.K. Edgerton, claims the Naming Commission was illegal. In a statement issued March 1, 2025, he explains, "You can’t call someone a traitor without a trial, and there was none." Besides, it was legal at the time to secede: the Constitution of 1787 was between sovereign states. The northern states threatened secession seven times before 1861. Many felt their home state was their “country” such as the Republic of Texas, and roiled at Abraham Lincoln’s calling up of 75,000 troops to prevent secession, an egregious violation of the Founders’ vision. 

H.K Edgerton, VP of N.C. NAACP

In our own time, similar appalling violations of the Constitution have come from Congress. Edgerton explains further, “When she [Elizabeth Warren] stood on the Senate Chamber floor and used as the justification for removing the Confederate Memorial, name changes to forts, bases and places, and removal of Memorials because they bore the names of Confederates-- because anyone who supported them were insurrectionist and traitors-- [this] was a corruption, a Bill of Attainder, and therefore a violation of the 9th and 10th Amendments, section 1 of each, of the US Constitution.” He goes on to clarify, “The United States Congress should have declared null and void any recommendations from this so called Commission as untenable and its body dismissed with recommendations of censure of Warren by the Senate, because as a law professor, she knew that she was breaking the law.”  

About the 2021 NDAA Omnibus’s 370th resolution Edgerton added: “To make matters worse, Elizabeth Warren [wasn’t accurate] about black veterans from the fields of battle having to return to bases named after Confederates.” He points out, “And even more so, to remove the Reconciliation Memorial Cenotaph Shrine that depicted those former black Confederates who in the hour of reconciliation, followed white Confederates (under General Joseph Wheeler) into the Spanish Civil War and remained on the Battlefield after a Smallpox and Yellow Fever epidemic struck and the President removed over 70,000 white soldiers declaring them unfit for battle. The Black soldiers from the South were said to have developed an immunity to the disease President McKinley was so impressed with them and their White counterparts, the courage and valor they displayed, he would ask for a place for the former Confederate soldiers to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He went even farther, to ask the Ladies of the South to build a memorial Cenotaph that would not be about the American War Between the States, but one that would depict the New South’s hour of Reconciliation.”Text Box: H.K. Edgerton

Edgerton continues, “Finally, after agreeing, the Ladies hired the renowned Jewish sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran himself, to complete the task that he described as his greatest work. It also marks his burial site. The Department of Defense under General Lloyd Austin and the US Congress have violated their Oath to protect the Constitution against foreign and domestic attack. I am proud to have co-founded Veterans Defending the Arlington National Cemetery Reconciliation Memorial Cenotaph Shrine, and having served at Ft. Bragg alongside the 82nd Airborne Division during Basic Training.”

Congress placed the Arlington Reconciliation Memorial at risk when they established the Naming Commission. Then by violating historical and environmental protection laws, the Army acted illegally to remove the important Moses Ezekiel monument on December 23, 2023 The magnificent memorial was unveiled on June 4, 1914, originally as a peace offering and celebrated as such by President Woodrow Wilson and three subsequent presidents. The Naming Commission erroneously had included the grave-marking Memorial on their list to remove, despite Congress specifically excluding grave markers.

During the removal they desecrated Ezekiel’s grave marker and others. Sculptor, Moses Ezekiel who was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, was the first Jewish graduate at VMI.  While there, he and other cadets were conscripted for the Battle of New Market. (See the movie, “Field of Lost Shoes”)  One of the ten boys who lost their life was our third presidents’ great nephew, Thomas Garland Jefferson. Fellow cadet, Moses Ezekiel nursed his friend, Jefferson, for two days as he was dying. He then spent his later life developing his sculpting talent and honoring the principles for which they fought.  Ezekiel created the poignant “Virginia Mourning Her Dead” at VMI, which sits atop the graves of some of the cadets who died. He sculpted the “Statue to Religious Freedom", and many other important, impressive works in his Rome studio, which over the years was visited by many notable guests, including Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia. 

Defend Arlington and other groups had tried unsuccessfully in court to prevent the Army from removing the monument, so far. Now Defend Arlington and plaintiffs are trying to appeal the Army’s rash and illegal taking. They and Ezekiel relatives have also been petitioning President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to restore the Arlington Reconciliation Memorial back to Arlington Cemetery. They also feel there’s a danger that the monument will be illegally transferred by the Army to the Commonwealth of Virginia to place in the remote New Market Battlefield where Ezekiel’s other masterpiece of Thomas “Stonewall" Jackson, formerly at VMI, was placed. Governor Youngkin and former Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, corresponded about such a location for the monument instead of restoring it to its rightful place, over the buried body of its creator and other veterans who President William McKinley intended to be cared for in Arlington.  

The Naming Commission's undemocratic recommendation for removal appears in the Naming Commission’s final report of September 2022. The Preface of the Final Report mischaracterizes a movement across the South to memorialize their fallen, a cultural phenomenon which produced many statues in the North to lost soldiers and generals. Shaped by academics such as Connor Williams and Ty Seidule, the Naming Commission’s Preface arrogantly states the movement to commemorate dead soldiers as a “mistaken understanding of the Civil War known as the 'Lost Cause’ These revisionist historians discount the funerary, commemorative aspect of the monuments.  They wrote: “In every instance and every aspect, these names and memorials have far more to do with the culture under which they were named than they have to do with any historical acts actually committed by their namesakes.”  This statement reveals bigotry, using a "partial truth" to negate sincere mourning experienced by loss of life in the South. 

It’s important to note that in the several forums conducted by Arlington Cemetery regarding Moses Ezekiel’s masterpiece, "Reconciliation", participants were 100+ to 1 in favor of keeping the magnificent monument in place. This means that the removal of the sculpture went totally against public opinion, and also against the military's own regulations concerning cemetery desecration of grave markers and funerary tributes. The possible removal now to a remote battlefield or similar location goes against the public as well who overwhelmingly want the sculpture returned to Arlington Cemetery. 

Since President Trump has rigorously campaigned to protect Confederate and other statues, monuments and grave markers, and Secretary Hegseth is on record for having the same position, how can they not act decisively to replace the Arlington Reconciliation Memorial to Arlington Cemetery as soon as possible?

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