President Donald Trump’s administration has installed a new informational plaque that sanitizes a former memorial to the Confederacy as Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department prepares to return the “racist” sculpture to Arlington National Cemetery.
The Confederate Memorial was removed from the cemetery in 2023 after Congress passed a law requiring the U.S. military to change property names and remove symbols honoring the Confederacy.
It was replaced with a marker explaining that the monument had portrayed a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery” in the form of a “Mammy” figure and a “faithful slave” following his owner to war.
Despite the congressional mandate, Hegseth announced last year that the “beautiful and historic sculpture” will “rightfully be returned” to Arlington National Cemetery.
The administration is now preparing for its reinstatement next year with a new sign providing “historical background” on the monument that conveniently omits any mention of its controversial past, The Washington Post reported.
“Driven by a renewed sense of national unity following the Spanish-American War, in 1900 Congress authorized the reburial of Confederate remains in ‘some suitable spot’ at Arlington National Cemetery,” the plaque says.
Erected in 1914, the project was led by the Daughters of the Confederacy and designed by “sculptor and Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel,” it adds.
The new description leaves out some key details, like the fact that Ezekiel—who relocated to Rome after the Civil War—spent much of his artistic career promoting the myth that the Civil War was just and heroic, and not a treasonous war fought to uphold slavery.
His 32-foot bronze memorial includes an inscription in Latin that frames the Civil War as a “Lost Cause” that was nevertheless admirable for its noble principles and resistance to tyranny, according to an archived version of the Arlington Cemetery website.
The sculpture also sanitizes the violent reality of slavery, with an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy” figure holding a white officer’s child and an enslaved man following his owner to war, according to the website.
Ezekiel purposefully included the “faithful Black servants” to combat what he believed were “lies” about slavery in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, according to Hilary A. Herbert, an Alabama lawmaker who pushed for the creation of the Confederates’ section at Arlington Cemetery.
The artist believed his statue “correctly” showed Black slaves’ support for the Confederate cause, according to Herbert, meaning the Trump administration is reinstating the myth that Black people supported their own enslavement.
The memorial has also been called “The Reconciliation Monument” because it was created during a period when the federal government abandoned its policy of Reconstruction, which aimed to reunify the nation after the Civil War and transform the South’s slave-based society into something more equitable.
During Reconciliation, the government “downplayed the Confederacy’s treason,” “papered over the issue of slavery,” and “ignored the underrepresented black officers of the U.S. Army,” according to West Point Military Academy’s Modern War Institute.
Troops were withdrawn from the South, allowing the former Confederate states to impose racial segregation, deny Black people the right to vote, and terrorize Black communities.
Reconciliation was the “renewed sense of national unity” that Arlington National Cemetery’s new informational plaque euphemistically describes as leading to the creation of the section for Confederate soldiers.
The plaque also says, “The Army expects to display the [Confederate Memorial] sculpture at this site in 2027 after it has undergone comprehensive conservation and refurbishment.”
It’s not clear how the Defense Department can legally reinstall the statue after the congressionally created, bipartisan Naming Commission decided to remove it.
Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as the commission’s vice chair, told the Post that he and his colleagues considered the monument “the most egregious example of racism that they had seen on any public land in America.”
“It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument,” he said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Defense Department for comment.
The move to restore the monument comes despite the cemetery itself being founded in 1864 on land seized from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plantation estate, according to the National Park Service.
The decision to bury Union soldiers on the property was widely viewed as a way to restore honor to the property, which had been disgraced by Lee’s decision to lead the Confederate forces, according to the NPS.
Since Trump’s return to office, his administration has made a point of reintroducing Confederate symbols to public spaces, restoring a portrait of Lee in his Confederate uniform to West Point, removing references to slavery from national museums and parks, and honoring soldiers who massacred Native Americans.
