Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia
The “Faithful Slaves” monument in Mebane (see first installment
of this essay) is just one example of the regional, even national,
enthusiasm for commemorating “mammies” and “faithful slaves.” Perhaps
the most striking manifestation of this impulse was a decades-long
campaign to erect a monument to black “mammies” in Washington D. C. As
early as 1904, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)
began campaigning for a memorial to “faithful slaves,” and Southern
congressmen took up the cause, unsuccessfully seeking federal funding
for a monument in 1907 and 1912.2
A milestone in the UDC’s campaign to commemorate both the Confederacy and “faithful slaves” was the erection of the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery
in 1914. Sculpted by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and
prominent sculptor, the imposing monument includes thirty-two life-sized
reliefs, including a frieze depicting a loyal black slave accompanying
his Confederate master into battle and another that portrays a departing
Confederate soldier bidding farewell to his children, who cluster
around an “old Negro mammy.” According to Hilary A. Herbert, who wrote a
history of the monument in 1914, the monument depicted “the kindly
relations that existed all over the South between the master and the
slave – a story that can not be too often repeated to generations in
which “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” survives and is still manufacturing false
ideas as to the South and slavery in the ‘fifties.’ The astonishing
fidelity of the slaves everywhere during the war to the wives and
children of those who were absent in the army was convincing proof of
the kindly relations between master and slave in the old South.”3
