Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that a Confederate statue which whitewashes slavery would be returned to Arlington National Cemetery in Northern Virginia.
“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’ — will be rightfully … returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth wrote on X Tuesday evening. “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it.”
The monument had been removed in 2023 as part of the Biden administration’s push for the take-down of Confederate symbols.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said Confederate symbols belonged in museums, not public squares. “I can understand the anger and anguish that people feel” because of “systemic racism,” he said.
The Trump administration is doing a U-turn on this strategy. During a visit to Fort Bragg, North Carolina in June, Trump said he was reversing a number of name changes to military bases that previously honored Confederate leaders.
Ezekiel was a Confederate soldier who pushed the “Lost Cause” myth — that the Civil War was valid and heroic, and not a war to keep slavery. Following the defeat of the Confederacy, Ezekiel left the U.S. for Europe and settled in Rome, where he hung the Confederate battle flag in his studio for four decades, according to Civil War Times Magazine.
His bronze memorial, measuring 32 feet, has a Latin inscription that claims that the Civil War was a “lost cause” that remained admirable because of its noble principles and effort to resist tyranny, an archived version of the Arlington Cemetery website states.
The monument also attempts to hide the violence that slaves were subjected to with figures including an enslaved woman holding a white officer’s child and a man accompanying his owner to war, the website notes.
Ezekiel intentionally included “faithful Black servants” in his sculpture against what he deemed misrepresentations of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, according to Hilary Herbert. The Alabama lawmaker and secretary of the Navy had argued for the inclusion of the Confederate section at the military cemetery in the late 19th century.
Ezekiel thought that his statue represented the support of Black slaves for the Confederate cause, Herbert believed, The Daily Beast noted. As such, the statue appears to suggest that Black people backed their own enslavement.
The monument, first unveiled in 1914, also appears to memorialize the federal government’s decision to leave Reconstruction behind and allow for racial segregation and violence across the South following the Civil War.
After the end of the Civil War, the federal government worked for more than 10 years to reunify the country and make the South fairer. That effort, called Reconstruction, ended in 1877 and was replaced by Reconciliation, with the federal government pulling back troops from the South and allowing former Confederate states to enact racial segregation, stop Black people from voting, and oppress Black communities.
Ezekiel’s memorial is also called “The Reconciliation Monument.” It was created as part of that movement, the archived Arlington Cemetery website states.
On Monday, the National Park Service announced it is bringing back a statue of Confederate Army General Albert Pike. He once wrote that the “white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country. It is the only one that is fit to govern, and it is the only one that shall.”
It stood outside the Metropolitan Police Department Headquarters in Washington, D.C. between 1898 and 2020, when it was toppled by protesters during Black Lives Matter protests.
“The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and re-instate pre-existing statues,” the National Park Service said in a statement.
