The Confederate monument that was removed from Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) will be reinstalled — and it will cost about $10 million to do so, The Associated Press reported.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to restore the statue. It was removed in 2023 as part of the Congressional Naming Commission’s directives to rename or remove any Department of Defense items that commemorate the Confederacy.
The ANC website says the Army expects to display the statue in 2027, “after it has undergone complete refurbishment.”
An anonymous U.S. Army official told AP that restoring the statue will cost roughly $10 million. The base it sits on needs to be replaced and the monument needs to be refurbished. That official also said that the restored monument would feature panels offering context about its history.
The Statue
The monument was created in 1914 by sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran who was buried at its base.
It depicts a woman crowned in olive leaves who represents the American South. Below her on the statue are 32 life-size depictions of Confederate soldiers and Southern citizens, including two depictions of slavery. One features an enslaved woman called “Mammy” holding the infant child of a white officer. Another shows an enslaved man following his owner to war.
The statue shows a “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” ANC’s website says. In addition, it includes a quote that construes the South’s secession as “a noble Lost Cause.” This narrative “romanticized the pre–Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.”
According to AP, Retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule called the memorial “problematic from top to bottom.”
A Broader Effort
Similarly, The National Park Service announced plans to reinstall the statue of Confederate general and Freemason leader Albert Pike. The statue of Pike was toppled during protests in 2020.
These measures are part of a broader Trump administration effort. In March, Trump issued an executive order that objected to what he called “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” over the past decade.
It included a directive for the Department of Interior to determine if public memorials and monuments had been removed “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology,” and to reinstate those pre-existing monuments.
Feature image courtesy Arlington National Cemetery
