Defense chief Pete Hegseth is restoring to West Point Military Academy a giant painting of rebel Gen. Robert E. Lee that shows him wearing his gray Confederate uniform and accompanied by a slave guiding his horse.
The painting was originally hung in the storied academy’s library in 1952—at the height of racial segregation, voter suppression, and Jim Crow laws in the South—as part of an effort to rehabilitate the disgraced general’s image, The New York Times reported.
Its return is part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to reintroduce Confederate symbols, restore monuments that whitewash the evils of slavery, and remove references to slavery from national museums and parks.
Lee had a long history with West Point, attending from 1825 to 1829 and graduating at the top of his class. He later returned as the academy’s superintendent from 1852 to 1855.
His family was shocked when, after more than 30 years of service, he resigned from the U.S. Army in 1861 to fight on the side of the Confederacy.
When Congress passed a law in 2020 creating a commission to remove Confederate names and symbols from military institutions—including bases and academies—his likeness was all over West Point, and at least five roads and buildings were named in his honor.
The commission decided that portraits of Lee in his blue Army uniform could stay up, but ordered the removal of the portrait that shows him in Confederate gray and accompanied by his slave. The commission also recommended renaming the areas bearing his name.
It’s not clear how Hegseth could bring the Confederate portrait back out of storage without breaking the law, the Times reported.
“At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place,” Army communications director Rebecca Hodson told the paper. “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Department of Defense for comment.
Already before its removal in 2022, the academy’s diverse, 21st-century officer corps and alumni had begun pushing back against Lee’s sanitized image, which emerged as a result of a process called “Reconciliation,” West Point’s Modern War Institute wrote in 2020.
After the Confederates surrendered in November 1865, the federal government spent more than a decade pursuing a policy of Reconstruction to reunify the nation and transform the South’s slave-based society into something more equitable.
The Reconstruction effort, however, ended in 1877 and was replaced by a policy called “Reconciliation” that, in the words of the Modern War Institute, “downplayed the Confederacy’s treason,” “papered over the issue of slavery,” and “ignored the underrepresented black officers of the U.S. army.”
The federal government also withdrew troops from the South, allowing the former Confederate states to impose racial segregation, deny Black people the right to vote, and terrorize Black communities.
Lee’s Confederate portrait was donated to the West Point Library in honor of the 100th anniversary of his taking the helm of the academy.
During the unveiling, Gen. Maxwell Taylor declared that, “Few fair-minded men can feel today that the issues which divided the North and South in 1861 have any real meaning to our present generation,” The Modern War Institute reported.
The Army had only decided to pursue full desegregation a month earlier. Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks’ arrest, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Freedom Summer, the Selma to Montgomery March, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. were all still years away.
Lee personally owned several families of slaves at various points in his life. After his father-in-law died, he managed hundreds of enslaved people belonging to his wife’s family and personally ordered their whippings on occasion, according to the National Parks Service.
In 1856, he wrote to his wife that slavery was a “moral and political evil,” but that it was a “greater evil to the white man than to the black race,” because “the painful discipline” of slaves fell to white people. This discipline was “necessary for their instruction as a race,” he wrote.
When his home state of Virginia seceded from the Union, he decided to resign from the U.S. Army after 30 years of service and joined the insurrection—despite having received a request to command Union troops, the National Parks Service reported.
He agonized over the decision, according to the NPS, but ultimately chose to fight for the Confederacy despite claiming to oppose both slavery and secession.
During the war, his Virginia estate was seized and later turned into Arlington National Cemetery to honor fallen Union soldiers. Lee nevertheless said that his “duty demanded” that he fight for the Confederacy, and that he would do it all over again.
The resurrection of his Confederate portrait comes after the Trump administration has brought back Army bases named after Confederate soldiers, restored a statue of a Confederate general, re-erected a monument devoted to the idea that the Civil War was a noble “lost cause” that enslaved Black people supported.
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