Washington (National) Cathedral, one of the many churches meant to transfer the idea and ideals of medieval European Christian faith and architecture into North America, continues the tradition of its medieval models. While it blends the medieval and the modern by virtue of being built much more recently, it also shows numerous elements added and changed since 1907. Such changes include renovations of the original organ and repairs after an earthquake in 2011.
One even more recent adaptation is not very well known: In 1947, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began plans to memorialize Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the cathedral, leading to the installation of a pair of stained-glass windows depicting the two Southern heroes in various scenes from their lives. The memorial bay with the window was supposed to make sure not only Northern leaders (George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison) were to be honored in the cathedral. As the UDC leaders proudly stated:
No boy from either side of the line must ever stand in this great gathering of soldiers and wonder at the absence of a Southern hero. One must be there lest the question be: were the men who wore the Gray really patriots; did they fight for their country to keep it the way their forebears founded it? They were and they did; and, for their sake, their beloved leader must have place where the great spirits of our nation’s history are to be enshrined.
The necessary private funds were raised, stained-glass artist Wilbur H. Burnham produced the two windows, and none other than President Eisenhower praised the project when he addressed 1700 members at the UDC’s annual convention on November 10, 1953. He stated that “these two men are more influential today than when they led the Confederate armies” (Washington Post, 11 November, 1953).
While the depiction of the generals had its critics throughout the decades since 1953, it was only after the massacre at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, that the voices for the removal of the windows could no longer be ignored. The Dean of the Washington Cathedral, Gary Hall, strongly favored the removal of the windows, and Brent Staples, in a 2017 article for the New York Times, summed up the often irate concerns of visitors to the cathedral: “Southerners who rose to federal office after the Civil War achieved something the Confederate Army had not: They seized control of Washington and bent it to their will.”