Confederate memorial will be returned to Arlington Cemetery, Hegseth says
The decision is the latest in a series of moves by President Trump's administration to restore Confederate names and symbols that had been discarded as part of the nation's racial reconciliation efforts following George Floyd's murder in 2020.
'I'm proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel's beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as 'The Reconciliation Monument' — will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,' Hegseth posted on X, referring to the memorial's creator. 'It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don't believe in erasing American history — we honor it.'
The 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy was unveiled at a ceremony presided over by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended. Its supporters said it was dedicated in part to promote reconciliation between the North and the South. But critics said the memorial glorified the Southern cause and glossed over slavery, with elements such as a frieze showing an enslaved Black man following his owner and an enslaved woman — described on the cemetery's website as a 'mammy' — holding the baby of a Confederate officer.
The sculpture was removed from Arlington in December 2023 after Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin arranged for the Virginia Military Institute, the nation's oldest state-supported military college, to take custody of it. In a statement Wednesday, Youngkin said the statue will return to Arlington in 2027 after a full refurbishment.
'We are grateful for the care being taken to preserve and display this statue, which allows us to better understand the complex history of the United States,' he said.
Hegseth's announcement that the Confederate memorial would return to Arlington came a day after the National Park Service said a statue of Confederate brigadier general Albert Pike, torn down and set on fire by protesters in 2020, would return to its original site in Washington D.C. a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
In March, Trump issued an executive order 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History' that included a section saying the administration would 'determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.' It said it would take action to reinstate those monuments, memorials and statues.
The Confederate Memorial's removal from Arlington was ordered by the bipartisan Naming Commission, which was established by Congress in 2021 and prompted in part by the calls for racial justice following George Floyd's murder. The commission was tasked with removing vestiges of the Confederacy from the military and recommending names that reflect the nation's diversity.
'The idea of putting that monument back up is just wrong,' Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as vice chair on the commission, said on Wednesday. 'This is not some woke thing, it's the will of the American people that Secretary Hegseth is going against.'
The monument, Seidule said, 'is the cruelest I've ever seen because it's a pro-slavery, pro-segregation, anti-United States monument. It's not a reconciliation monument. It's a Confederate monument and it's meant to say that the white South was right and the United States of America was wrong.'
In its decision recommending the Confederate Memorial at Arlington for removal, the commission cited imagery on the memorial and an accompanying Latin phrase celebrating the Lost Cause retelling of the Confederacy.
'This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled White backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans,' the commission wrote.
'This was a memorial to men who committed treason in defense of the supposed right of some humans to 'own' other humans as property,' James Grossman, former executive director of the American Historical Association, told The Washington Post on the day the sculpture was removed from Arlington National Cemetery. 'The very idea that this monument was still here until today reminds us not just how far we've come but how much further we have to go.'
In addition to recommending the removal of the Confederate memorial, the naming commission also identified nine army bases for name changes, including Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Pickett in Virginia, Fort Benning in Georgia and Fort Hood in Texas. The names of the bases, which all honored Confederate leaders including some who owned slaves, were changed in 2023. But earlier this year Hegseth announced they would revert to their previous names, though they would not honor their previous namesakes. The Defense Department renamed the bases for individuals who had served in the military and had the same last name as the Confederates for whom the bases were originally named.
'This is something we've been proud to do,' Hegseth told senators at a hearing in June, 'something that's important for the morale of the Army.'
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