Trump Admin Scrubs Language Criticizing Slavery Depictions From Confederate Memorial

(Photo by Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto via AP)

The Trump administration has stripped language criticizing a Confederate memorial’s depictions of slavery from an Arlington National Cemetery website and marker as the controversial monument is set to return to the site.

The 32-foot bronze Confederate Memorial was removed from Arlington in 2023 under a congressional mandate targeting Confederate names and symbols on military property. The monument, commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was subsequently relocated to the Virginia Military Institute.

But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last year that the memorial would be returned to Arlington, and a newly installed marker at its former location says the Army plans to put the sculpture back on display in 2027 following “comprehensive conservation and refurbishment,” according to Monday reporting from The Washington Post.

As those plans move forward, critical historical context about the monument has disappeared from both the cemetery marker and a Defense Department website, per the Post.

The previous language described the statue as presenting a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” It identified two Black figures featured on the monument as enslaved people and discussed the racist “Mammy” and “faithful slave” imagery depicted in the sculpture.

Another passage previously explained that an inscription on the monument promoted the Confederate “Lost Cause,” a narrative that “romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.”

Those descriptions are no longer included on the website or the replacement marker, according to the outlet. The Defense Department directed the newspaper’s questions about the changes to Arlington National Cemetery, which did not respond Monday.

Catholic University historian Stephen West, who discovered the changed marker during a Sunday visit, told the Post he was “deeply disturbed” by both the edits and plans to restore the monument.

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, who served as vice chair of the commission that recommended the memorial’s removal in the first place, offered an even harsher assessment.

“It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument,” Seidule told the paper.

President Donald Trump has long criticized the removal of Confederate monuments. His administration has also restored Confederate Gen. Albert Pike’s statue in Washington and ordered a portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee returned to the West Point library.

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