For the past six years, a towering bronze statue of Caesar Rodney — signer of the Declaration of Independence and enslaver — has been gathering dust in storage, most recently in the darkness of a Delaware warehouse.
But that’s about to change. Soon, the statue of Rodney astride his horse, removed from public view during the 2020 racial justice protests, will be brought to Washington and displayed in a much more august setting, on an outdoor concourse on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
The National Park Service plans to install the Rodney statue temporarily in Freedom Plaza, a federal park in downtown Washington that was renamed to honor the civil rights leader in 1988. The statue would be displayed for up to six months as part of the nation’s celebration of its 250th birthday, according to Interior Department documents obtained by The Washington Post.
“As we approach America’s 250th anniversary, the Trump administration has been committed to celebrating and acknowledging the full breadth of our nation’s history, including the story of Caesar Rodney and his pivotal ride in July 1776,” an Interior Department spokesperson said in a statement when asked to confirm the Park Service’s plan. “Despite being gravely ill with a cancerous condition that caused him constant pain, he rode through a violent storm to cast Delaware’s deciding vote for American Independence. The hard work and sacrifices of the men and women who built this nation deserve to be remembered and honored.”
Rodney, who suffered from a disfiguring facial cancer, died in 1784.
The spokesperson’s statement does not mention Rodney owned a plantation and enslaved more than 200 people or that the statue had been taken down by the city of Wilmington in 2020 as racial justice protests flared across the country following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. That year saw the removal of a record number of statues and memorials honoring Confederate soldiers and leaders, enslavers and other historical figures including Christopher Columbus.
The Interior Department did not respond to questions about whether the placement of Rodney’s statue in Washington would acknowledge his role as an enslaver.
With its planned reinstallment, first reported by Spotlight Delaware, the Rodney statue is the latest example of memorials toppled or removed in 2020’s racial reckoning that the Trump administration has since pushed to honor in the nation’s capital.
In October, the Park Service restored a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike to its original downtown location five years after it was graffitied, set alight and pulled from its plinth by protesters. Pike was an unapologetic white supremacist believed to have ties to the Ku Klux Klan. His likeness is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate in the District.
Last August, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that a Confederate memorial removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023 would be reinstalled. The sculpture had been taken down as part of a congressionally mandated effort to rid military bases and sites of Confederate names and images. In a post on X announcing the decision, Hegseth wrote: “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
Officials are also planning to installa Christopher Columbus statue on White House grounds, a reconstruction of a statue protesters had dumped in Baltimore’s harbor.
The administration has been active elsewhere, stripping references to slavery from federal property. In January, the Park Service removed displays that discussed slavery at a site in Philadelphia where George Washington lived as president. A federal judge ordered the displays restored to the site in February. Displays and exhibits in national parks and in Smithsonian museums that examine or refer to the history of slavery are under review as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” in March 2025.
A spokesperson for D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) did not respond to a request for comment on the plans to place the Rodney statue in Freedom Plaza, directly across the street from the John O. Wilson building, home to the mayor’s office and the D.C. Council. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) declined to comment, as did D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), who had previously criticized the administration for returning the Pike statue to D.C.
Eric Buckson, a Republican state senator in Delaware, has long clamored for the statue to be resurrected from storage and displayed for public viewing once more. He contacted the National Park Service about a year ago, he said, inquiring about the possibility of placing the statue in Delaware on the Dover Green, a federal park and former Revolutionary War gathering place where delegates ratified the Constitution, making Delaware the first state to do so.
Rodney, one of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, rode to Philadelphia on July 2 to ensure Delaware would vote in favor of the document and join 11 other colonies in passing it. (New York initially abstained from voting on the document, but a week later members of the New York delegation voted to approve it and make its passage unanimous.)
Soon after contacting the Park Service, conversations began about the possibility of bringing Rodney to Washington as part of the Semiquincentennial celebrations, Buckson said. “The purpose of locating him in D.C. for the country is to tell the story of the ride and the significance of that midnight ride,” he said. “He’s the reason there is a Fourth of July.”
For the time being, though, the statue remains mothballed in a warehouse in New Castle. Interior Department staff have visited to take 3-D dimensions to determine how to transport and place it, he said.
Ultimately, Buckson hopes the statue will find a home in Delaware. There, he said, the founding father’s life and legacy should be told more holistically, noting both his accomplishments and his role as an enslaver.
“You’ve got to be able to tell that side of the story, fairly,” he said.“ I really hope that people are willing to celebrate his ride and agree that at a later date we can tell the story of the man and his legacy to Delaware,” he said. “Right now, it’s the legacy to the country.”
The city of Wilmington says that no decision has been made about whether the statue will be reinstalled there. “Larger conversations are happening throughout the state, particularly in Dover, regarding where the statue should be located once it returns from D.C.,” Caroline Klinger, spokesperson for Wilmington Mayor John Carney (D), said in an email. “Ongoing conversations are also happening here at the community level as residents contend with the best way to memorialize historical figures within the full context of their story.”
An Interior Department spokesperson did not say when the statue would be installed.
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