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

Coming Home: Part 5 - New South

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COMING HOME Part Five: New South

The studio in the Baths of Diocletian was quiet in the early mornings.

Rome woke slowly. The light came in through the high windows at an angle that Moses had learned to read like a clock. The smell of the city drifted up from the streets below, woodsmoke and stone and the particular dampness of a place that had been inhabited for three thousand years. His Confederate battle flag hung on the wall where it had always hung. His tools were where he had left them the night before.

He was sixty six years old. He had a commission.

He cleared everything else from his worktable.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy had given him something no one else could have given him. Not a job. Not a commission in the ordinary sense. A summons. They were asking him to speak for the dead. For the boys who had gone down on the Field of Lost Shoes. For the men buried in the concentric circles of Section 16 at Arlington National Cemetery. For Virginia. For the South. For everything he had carried since he was nineteen years old and running barefoot through the mud toward a Union line that could not quite believe what it was seeing.

He knew exactly what he wanted to say.

He had been saying it his whole life without being able to say it out loud. In the VMI New Market monument Virginia Mourning Her Dead he had said it once. Now he would say it again, larger and more completely, in bronze, at the center of the most important military cemetery in the United States.

He began with the clay.

The design came quickly because it had been forming for decades. A woman representing the South would stand at the top, thirty two feet above the ground, facing southward toward the land she represented. In her left hand a laurel wreath extended toward the South in acknowledgment of sacrifice. In her right hand a pruning hook resting on a plow blade, a reference to the biblical passage about beating swords into plowshares. At her feet the inscription. Not for fame or reward. Not for place or for rank. Not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity. But in simple obedience to duty as they understood it.

Below her, thirty two life sized figures wrapped around the base. Minerva, goddess of war and wisdom, holding back the shields of the states. Soldiers of every branch. A Southern woman bidding farewell. A minister blessing a soldier. A blacksmith leaving his forge. And among them, woven into the continuous human story circling the memorial, figures that no one who commissioned the monument had asked for and no one who saw it could ignore.

A Black soldier in uniform. A woman holding an infant. A child pressed against her side.

Moses knew those faces.

He had known them since he was a small boy in his grandparents' household in Richmond. Four enslaved women had moved through the world of his childhood. They had woken the house before dawn and quieted it after dark. Two of them he had called Mammy. He had carried their faces with him across an ocean and through forty years in Rome and they had never left him.

Sometime around 1910, in this same studio, he had sat down with pen and ink and drawn their faces from memory. Four portraits. Every line careful. Every expression held. He titled each one himself in his own hand.

Mammy Mary. Mammy Keziah. White Lucy. Our Betty.

He owed them that much. He had always known he did.

Now he owed them something more.

When Moses Ezekiel placed that family at the center of the Confederate Memorial he was not making a political calculation. He was not following a script. He was bearing witness to something he had carried his entire life. He was saying in bronze what no one else had said. These people were here. They were real. They loved each other. They mattered. You will not look at this memorial without seeing them.

The critics would later say the figures sanitized slavery. They would say the memorial presented an impossibly gentle picture of a brutal institution.

Moses Ezekiel had known Mary and Keziah and Lucy and Betty by name. He had drawn their faces from memory sixty years after he last saw them. He had never forgotten them and he had made certain that no one who stood before this memorial could forget them either.

That is not sanitizing. That is refusing to let them be erased.

He worked for four years. He refused all other commissions. He built a new studio to accommodate the scale of the work. He spent five thousand dollars of his own money when the UDC funds ran short. The casting was completed in November 1913. The memorial was shipped from Rome to the United States aboard a Hamburg America ocean liner, sent by barge up the Potomac River, and arrived at the Washington Navy Yard on January 10, 1914.

Moses Ezekiel came home with it.

It was his last visit to the United States. He was sixty nine years old. He had not been back since 1910. He stood at Section 16 at Arlington National Cemetery and watched them erect the work that had consumed the last four years of his life, this thing he had been building toward since he was a boy running barefoot across the Field of Lost Shoes.

The dedication was set for June 4, 1914. In honor of the 106th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis, which was June 3rd.

It was a warm June day when the crowd of four thousand gathered at Section 16. Military personnel from across the country. Washington residents. UDC members who had raised every dollar to make this possible. And standing among the pointed Confederate headstones that lined the grass of Jackson Circle, something that had not happened on this ground before.

Union veterans placing flowers on Confederate graves.

Confederate veterans paying the same honors to the Union dead.

Almost fifty years after the war ended, the men who had fought it were standing together on the ground of Arlington National Cemetery. The Washington Post would call it a memorial of heroic size, commemorating war, but dedicated to peace.

President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern Democrat elected to the presidency since before the war, unveiled the memorial. He spoke briefly. The dark clouds were already gathering at the edges of the sky, a thunderstorm building over Virginia, and he knew he did not have much time.

I assure you that I am profoundly aware of the solemn significance of this thing that has taken place, Wilson said. The Daughters of the Confederacy have presented a memorial of their dead to the government of the United States.

And then: My task is this, ladies and gentlemen. This chapter in the history of the United States is now closed. I bid you to turn with me with your faces to the future, quickened by the memories of the past, but with nothing to do with the contests of the past. Knowing, as we have shed our blood on opposite sides, we now face and admire one another.

The storm hit before the ceremony ended. The crowd scattered for automobiles and trolley cars. The floral tributes were quickly deposited at the foot of the memorial. Wilson made a hasty exit for the White House.

Moses Ezekiel stood in the rain and looked at what he had made.

He called it New South.

He went back to Rome.

The flag went back on the wall.

He was seventy years old and the most important work of his life was done. He continued to sculpt. He continued to receive visitors in the studio at the Baths of Diocletian. He continued to be Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel, celebrated and honored and not quite finished yet. His last work was a bronze statue of Francis Henney Smith, VMI's first superintendent, a commission from his alma mater. It would remain incomplete.

The war that had burned VMI and ended the world he grew up in was fifty years in the past. Now another war was consuming Europe.

World War One reached Rome in stages. The Americans in the city organized to help. Moses threw himself into the work with the intensity of a man who had seen what war does to boys. He helped form the American Italian Red Cross Relief Committee, distributing funds to Italians in need, coordinating shipments of supplies to soldiers at the front. He was seventy two years old. He worked through the cold damp winter of 1916 into 1917.

The winter wore on him.

The pneumonia came on quietly the way pneumonia does, settling into the lungs of an old man who had worked too hard in too much cold. By early March of 1917 it was clear he was not recovering. He was in his studio at the Baths of Diocletian, surrounded by the work of a lifetime, the Confederate flag on the wall, the incomplete statue of Francis Smith in the corner.

On March 27, 1917, Moses Jacob Ezekiel died in his studio in Rome.

He was seventy two years old.

Among his effects they found a letter.

He had written it some time before, against this moment, against the certainty that he would not live forever and the equal certainty that he could not leave this to chance.

He wanted to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. At the foot of the Confederate Memorial.

Among his Confederate brothers.

It would take four years to bring him home.

To be continued.

March 30, 2026. The 105th anniversary of the day they finally brought him home.

Today marks 828 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 29, 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 Five

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.

- Wilson, Woodrow. Dedication address, Confederate Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, June 4, 1914. As quoted in Washington Post and Arlington Cemetery records.

- United Daughters of the Confederacy. Official history of the Confederate Memorial, 1914. As cited in UDC press release and federal court filings, 2023.

Secondary Sources

- Confederate Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery. Wikipedia. Dedication details, casting history, shipping records, and UDC fundraising figures.

- Boundary Stones, WETA. "Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery." boundarystones.weta.org. Dedication crowd, Wilson remarks, thunderstorm account.

- Arlington Cemetery. "Confederate Dead Are Still Remembered at Arlington." arlingtoncemetery.net. Wilson address text, Union and Confederate veterans at dedication.

- Encyclopedia Virginia. "Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery." encyclopediavirginia.org.

- United Daughters of the Confederacy. Press release on removal of the Reconciliation Memorial. hqudc.org. 2023.

- Artes Magazine. "Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel: The Jew Who Sculpted Confederate Monuments." artesmagazine.com. Rome studio, knighthoods, Red Cross work, death details.

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

- Gibson, Keith. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel." Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7, 2020.

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

- Washington Post. "Gray and Blue Join." June 5, 1914. Dedication account. Retrieved via ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

COMING HOME: MOSES EZEKIEL'S FUNERAL AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY | New South