Confederate Monument Is Going Back Into Arlington

Restoring a memorial to the Confederacy that was removed from Arlington National Cemetery at the recommendation of Congress will cost roughly $10 million, an Army official said Wednesday—the latest development in a Trump administration effort to combat what it calls "erasing American history." Once back in the cemetery, the monument—described a few years ago by a member of a commission as "problematic from top to bottom"—will also feature panels nearby that will offer context about its history, said the official. The Pentagon expects it to take about two years to refurbish the monument and restore it to its original site, the official told the AP.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would reinstall the memorial at Arlington less than two years after it was removed on the recommendation of the independent, congressionally mandated commission. On social media Tuesday, Hegseth said the Arlington statue "never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don't believe in erasing American history—we honor it." Erected in 1914, the monument was the creation of sculptor and Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel. It features a classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, representing the American South, alongside sanitized depictions of slavery. Retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, vice chair of the commission, said in 2022 that the group found that Ezekiel's memorial was "problematic from top to bottom."

Arlington National Cemetery's page on the memorial noted that aside from the sanitized depictions of enslaved people, the statue featured a Latin phrase that equated the South's secession to a noble "lost cause." That's a false interpretation of the Civil War that glorifies the conflict as a struggle over the power of the federal government and not the institution of slavery. On Monday, the National Park Service announced that the statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate brigadier general and a revered figure among Freemasons, would be returned to its previous position in Washington's Judiciary Square, a few blocks from the US Capitol.