MARCH 30, 1921 - Moses Ezekiel's Funeral at Arlington

Coming Home: Part 4 - From VMI to Rome

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He set Thomas down and stood up.

The field behind him held everything he had brought to New Market and could not carry away. The boys he had drilled with. The boys he had sketched in the margins of his notebooks. The boys whose names he would one day carve into bronze so that no one could ever say they had not existed.

He was wounded. And the war was not over.

Moses Ezekiel recovered from his wounds and was reassigned with other surviving cadets to serve as drill instructors for new Confederate recruits. He was nineteen years old and he was teaching men how to fight a war he had already survived once. The veterans who had mocked the cadets on the march to New Market did not mock them anymore. They had fairly won their spurs on that field. Everyone knew it.

The war ground on through the summer and into the fall. In the autumn of 1864 the Corps was dispatched to Richmond for duty in the trenches around the city. Moses was there. Digging. Waiting. Watching the Confederacy contract around him one mile at a time.

Then came the order to defend Lexington.

Union General David Hunter was moving on the town. VMI itself was in his path. The cadets took up a battle position outside Lynchburg but Hunter never came that direction. He came to Lexington anyway, and on June 12, 1864, while Moses and the Corps were still in Richmond, Hunter's soldiers put VMI to the torch.

The place where Moses had refused to be hazed. Where he had kept the Sabbath as best he could. Where he had sketched the light on the Maury River in the early morning. Where he had stood as Corporal of the Guard over Stonewall Jackson's body. Where Thomas Jefferson had been his friend and brother.

Burned to the ground.

He would not see it again for more than a year.

The Corps continued its service through the winter, academic work resuming at the Richmond Almshouse in December 1864, the cadets studying in a building that was not their home in a city that was slowly dying around them. On April 2, 1865, the day before the evacuation of Richmond, the Corps disbanded. Each cadet found his way home as best he could.

Moses Ezekiel was twenty years old. He had fought for Virginia and survived. He had watched his home burn. He had held his friend while he died. And now the cause for which all of it had been done was finished.

He went back to VMI anyway.

The Institute reopened in Lexington in October 1865, rebuilt from its ashes. Moses returned with it. He finished his education in the ruins of the world he had grown up in, in a Virginia that had been broken open and was trying to figure out what came next. He studied. He painted. He made his first serious attempt at sculpture, a clay bust of his father Jacob. The hands that had carried a musket across the Field of Lost Shoes were learning a different kind of precision.

And in that final year something happened that would change the direction of everything.

Robert E. Lee arrived in Lexington.

The General had accepted the presidency of nearby Washington College in the fall of 1865. He was fifty eight years old, defeated, and quietly magnificent. He became aware of the young VMI cadet with the extraordinary artistic eye, the boy from Richmond who had fought at New Market and come back to finish what he had started. Lee called Moses in and spoke to him directly in the way that Lee spoke to young men he believed in.

I hope you will be an artist, Lee told him. It seems to me you are cut out for one. But whatever you do, try to prove to the world that if we did not succeed in our struggle, we are worthy of success.

Moses Ezekiel graduated from VMI in 1866.

He carried Robert E. Lee's words with him for the rest of his life.

Back in Richmond he returned to his father's store and tried to figure out what came next. He enrolled at the Medical College of Virginia, thinking perhaps he would become a physician. He studied anatomy with the focused intensity of a man who had seen what a body looks like when it is broken. The knowledge would serve him later in ways he could not yet imagine, in the precise musculature of bronze figures, in the way a hand holds a shield or a woman extends a laurel wreath toward the south.

He also served as superintendent of the Richmond Hebrew Sunday School in 1867 and 1868. The boy who had kept the Sabbath at VMI as best he could was now keeping the faith alive for the next generation in a city that had been burned and was being rebuilt under the grinding machinery of Reconstruction.

Then the family lost everything.

Jacob Ezekiel's business in Richmond was destroyed by fire. The household that had survived the War Between the States, the occupation, and Reconstruction could not survive the flames. Jacob moved what remained of the family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where their oldest daughter Hannah lived. Moses went with them.

He had not intended to stay long. He called Cincinnati his home in his memoirs but he was already looking toward something larger. In Cincinnati he began the serious study of sculpture, working at the Art School of J. Insco Williams and in the studio of Thomas Dow Jones. His small clay figure Industry, a girl knitting socks while studying her lessons, won notice in the Cincinnati press when it was displayed in the window of an art store. People stopped to look. The city noticed.

He was twenty four years old. He had been a soldier, a drill instructor, a defender of a burning city, a medical student, a Sunday school superintendent, a dry goods clerk, and now he was becoming something else entirely.

In 1869 Moses Ezekiel sailed for Berlin.

He entered the Royal Academy of Art, the prestigious Prussian Kunstakademie, studying life modeling under Professor Albert Wolff. He was the only American in the program. He needed money and found it by teaching English and selling whatever work he could. In 1873, during the Franco-Prussian War, he worked briefly as a correspondent for the New York Herald and was arrested and imprisoned for a time as a suspected spy for France. He was released. He went back to his studio. Nothing was going to stop him.

In 1873 he entered his bas relief Israel in the prestigious Michel Beer Prix de Rome competition. He was twenty nine years old. He was the first foreigner ever to win it.

The prize money took him to Rome.

He arrived in the Eternal City and never really left. In 1879 he established his studio in the ancient Baths of Diocletian, the vast ruins of a third century Roman complex that had been partially converted into living and working spaces. His studio was built into the bones of an empire that had fallen fifteen hundred years before. He understood something about fallen things. About what survives them.

He hung a Confederate battle flag on the wall.

It stayed there for forty years.

Rome came to him. Artists and diplomats and royalty and musicians made their way to the Baths of Diocletian to see what this American sculptor was doing in the ruins. Franz Liszt sat for a portrait bust and called him a genius. President Ulysses S. Grant visited and they talked about the war from opposite sides with the particular frankness of men who had both been in it. The Italian government noticed. Emperor Wilhelm of Germany noticed. King Humbert of Italy noticed. King Victor Emmanuel noticed. The knighthoods came one after another until Moses Ezekiel, the boy from Old Market Street in Richmond who had run barefoot across the Field of Lost Shoes, was Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel, knight of three European nations.

He never stopped being a Virginian.

He never stopped thinking about the boys who had not come home from New Market.

In the autumn of 1910 he traveled to Washington. Hilary Herbert, former Secretary of the Navy and chairman of the UDC memorial committee, had recommended him for a commission. Herbert and writer Thomas Nelson Page met with Ezekiel on November 5. They visited Section 16 at Arlington together. They talked about size and placement. Moses sketched his idea on the spot. The design committee met the following day. Moses presented his vision. A large female figure representing the South, holding a laurel wreath, standing on a circular base surrounded by figures showing the sacrifices of the Southern people.

The committee was impressed. On November 7, 1910, Moses Ezekiel signed the contract.

He had spent his entire life preparing for this moment without knowing it. The boys at New Market. The flag on the wall. Robert E. Lee's charge to prove to the world that if they did not succeed they were worthy of success. All of it had been leading here.

He refused all other work so he could devote himself entirely to it.

He would later say it was the most important commission he ever received.

He was not wrong.

To be continued.

Part Five publishes tomorrow.

Today marks 827 days since the Confederate Memorial was removed from Arlington National Cemetery.

Coming Home is a Six-Part Series on the Life, Death, and Funeral of Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel.

-By Mindy Esposito / March 28, 2026 / Nashville, Tennessee

Mindy Esposito is an independent historian, writer, and Confederate heritage advocate based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has spent more than two decades in primary source research on nineteenth and twentieth century American history.

☆☆☆☆☆

COMING HOME: A Six-Part Series

Bibliography Part Four

Primary Sources

- Ezekiel, Moses Jacob. Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian. Edited by Joseph Gutmann and Stanley F. Chyet. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

- Moses J. Ezekiel Papers, Manuscript 0010. Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington, Virginia.

- Lee, Robert E. Quoted in Jewish Virtual Library. "Moses Ezekiel." jewishvirtuallibrary.org.

Secondary Sources

- Gibson, Keith. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917)." Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7, 2020.

- Jewish Virtual Library. "Moses Ezekiel."

- Nash, Peter Adam. Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor of the Gilded Age. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.

- Confederate Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery. Wikipedia. November 2010 commission details and contract date November 7, 1910.

- VMI Archives. "Battle of New Market." vmi.edu. Post-battle reassignment and defense of Lexington.

- VMI Archives. "Civil War." vmi.edu. Corps timeline 1864-1865.

- Grokipedia. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel." Cincinnati and Berlin details.

- Sephardic Horizons. "Discovering Moses Ezekiel." Vol. 7, Issue 1-2. Rome studio and career details."

COMING HOME: MOSES EZEKIEL'S FUNERAL AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY | The Road from VMI to Rome