Arlington National Cemetery, where the murdered President Kennedy is buried, along with thousands of American military careerists and a comparatively few war heroes who get most of the place’s publicity, has a little-known Confederate side.

“For many years following the war, the bitter feelings between North and South remained, and although hundreds of Confederate soldiers were buried at Arlington, it was considered a Union cemetery. Family members of Confederate soldiers were denied permission to decorate their loved ones’ graves and in extreme cases were even denied entrance to the cemetery.”

At least one of the 482 Rebel graves there today is that of a 13th Regiment private, Michael Quinn of the Lauderdale Zouaves. He was a Union POW who had died in captivity when he was buried at Arlington in about May, 1864, according to research by independent historian Jess McLean.

Quinn’s grave and the others only became accessible to relatives and friends after the turn of the twentieth century. In 1914, a 32-foot monument was erected with a “frieze of life-sized figures depicting mythical gods and Southern soldiers,” the whole of it designed by Moses Ezikiel, a Confederate veteran and sculptor from a colonial-era Jewish family of Richmond.