Language that had criticized a Confederate memorial once standing at Arlington National Cemetery has been taken down under the Trump administration, The Washington Post reported. The 32-foot bronze Confederate Memorial, commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was removed from the military cemetery in 2023. That step followed a congressional mandate to clear U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders.
A Defense Department website and a marker at the old site once described the sculpture as portraying a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The report said that wording is no longer on the website. A new sign at the cemetery also leaves out earlier text that criticized slavery and the Confederacy.
The bipartisan Naming Commission backed removal after criticism of scenes on the statue, including an enslaved woman carrying an infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war, according to the report. The website had identified the two Black figures as enslaved people, called the woman a “Mammy,” and noted that the “faithful slave” image helped shape American pop culture.
New cemetery marker says the Army expects to display the sculpture in 2027
Sculptor and Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel created the statue. It was taken apart in 2023 and put in storage after some congressional GOP opposition, the report said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year that the statue would be put back at Arlington National Cemetery. Then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said last year that it would return the next year.
The new marker at the former site states, “The Army expects to display the sculpture at this site in 2027 after it has undergone comprehensive conservation and refurbishment.” Earlier website text also explained symbolism on the work, including a Latin phrase. “An inscription … construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause,’” the site previously read.
The older page added, “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.” Photographs of the sign and archived copies of the webpage show that language and other text were removed in recent weeks, according to the report.
The Defense Department sent questions about the sign and website changes to Arlington National Cemetery, which did not respond on Monday, the report said. Catholic University historian Stephen West said he first saw the new sign during a visit to the cemetery on Sunday.
“The language that used to be on the sign and website described the Memorial correctly. Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy,” West wrote in a text message to The Washington Post.
“And so as a historian, I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue – especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites.” The Trump administration’s push to reshape federal cultural narratives extends beyond Arlington, as it has threatened to cut funding for the Smithsonian over alleged activism.
Trump has said he supports recognizing the Confederacy and treats the issue as one of free speech. This pattern of federal actions on Confederate symbols and slavery history continues, such as when the Trump Admin removed a slavery exhibit at Washington’s home in Philadelphia.
“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism,” Trump said in a 2020 Fox News interview. “They love their flag, it represents the South; they like the South.” A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that protesters tore down and set on fire in 2020 was put back in downtown Washington in October, the report said.
The Pentagon last year also ordered a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform returned to the West Point library. The Naming Commission had required the removal of that painting. It showed an enslaved man in the background tending to Lee’s horse.
Retired U.S. Army brigadier general Ty Seidule, who served as vice chair of the commission, said the planned return of the Confederate Memorial especially troubled him. The Confederate Memorial “is the cruelest monument that I have ever seen,” Seidule said.
He said he and several colleagues called the statue “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.” Seidule said changing the marker and website is the first step before the memorial comes back. Putting the monument back, he said, would be “against the will of the American people through their elected representatives in the law that they created.”
Published: Sep 8, 2026 11:00 am