Workers remove the Confederate Memorial in Section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery in December 2023. (Elizabeth Fraser/U.S. Army)
WASHINGTON — A memorial commemorating Confederate soldiers will be reinstated to Arlington National Cemetery after it was removed as part of an effort to eliminate references to the Confederacy from military bases and assets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that the statue, which he referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument,” will “rightfully” return to its former location near the burial site of its sculptor, the Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel.
The monument, commonly called the “Confederate Memorial,” was taken down in December 2023 on the recommendation of an independent commission convened by Congress.
The statue will return to Arlington in 2027 after refurbishment at a cost of about $10 million, according to the Army.
“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X announcing the memorial’s reinstatement. “Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
The commission said the statue offered a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery” and misleadingly featured the coats of arms of several non-Confederate states to inflate the Confederacy’s size, support and significance.
Unveiled in 1914, the memorial depicts a bronze woman and mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians, including an enslaved man following his owner to war and an enslaved woman depicted as a “mammy” holding the child of a white officer.
A Latin inscription on the monument construes the South’s secession as a “Lost Cause” — an interpretation of the Civil War that romanticizes the Confederacy and its motivations while downplaying slavery as a root cause of the war.
The granite base and foundation of the memorial have remained at Arlington to avoid disturbing surrounding graves. The rest of the monument is being stored at a secure Defense Department facility in Virginia.
Its removal was part of a response to the racial justice protests that consumed American cities in 2020. That year, lawmakers voted over the objection of President Donald Trump during his first term to create a renaming commission specifically to review military assets honoring the Confederacy.
Since returning to the presidency, Trump has taken steps to undo efforts to reexamine American history and the way it is presented. Hegseth in recent months has reverted the names of seven Army bases to match the historical Confederate figures after which they were named.
“This is something that we’ve been proud to do, something that’s important for the morale of the Army,” Hegseth told senators in June. “And those communities appreciate that we’ve returned it back to what it was instead of trying to play this game of erasing names.”
Confederate soldiers were barred from interment at Arlington Cemetery for decades until Congress passed a bill in 1900 designating a special area for their remains. In 1906, the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the effort to erect a memorial in the Confederate section.
Stars and Stripes reporter Matthew Adams contributed to this story.
