The Trump administration erased language criticizing slavery and the Confederacy from a memorial sign and website at Arlington National Cemetery.
According to a Monday article by the Washington Post, the changes are part of a broader effort to reshape how the Civil War is portrayed. The Confederate Memorial was a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914.
The statue was pulled from the military cemetery in 2023 after Congress ordered the removal of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from U.S. military property. The bipartisan Naming Commission recommended taking the statue down amid backlash over its imagery, which included an enslaved woman carrying the infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war, according to The Post.
A Defense Department website and a marker at the site once described the sculpture as a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The site also called out how the “faithful slave” trope shaped American pop culture, The Post reported.
That language has since been stripped from the website, and the marker has been replaced with a new sign that drops the criticism, according to photographs and archived versions of the page cited by The Post.
The Defense Department referred The Post’s questions to Arlington National Cemetery, which did not respond.
The statue was relocated to the Virginia Military Institute in 2023, according to The Post. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year it would come back to Arlington, The Post noted. A new marker at the former site now reads, “The Army expects to display the sculpture at this site in 2027 after it has undergone comprehensive conservation and refurbishment,” according to The Post.
Stephen West, a Catholic University historian, told The Post he was disturbed by the change.
“Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy,” he said. “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.”
Trump has framed Confederate symbols as protected speech, The Post noted. “When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism,” he said during a 2020 Fox News interview.
Ty Seidule, a retired Army brigadier general who served as the Naming Commission’s vice chair, said the memorial’s pending return troubled him. He called it “the cruelest monument that I have ever seen.”
Seidule told The Post that restoring the statue would run against the will of voters and the law Congress passed.
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