The Trump administration has removed language from Arlington National Cemetery that described the dismantled Confederate Memorial as presenting a "nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy" and offering "highly sanitized depictions of slavery." The edits, made to both a cemetery marker, as reported by The Washington Post, and a Department of Defense webpage, strip references to the "Lost Cause" narrative that historians say romanticized the antebellum South while downplaying the role of slavery in the Civil War. According to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which emerged after the end of the American Civil War, Confederate soldiers were fighting primarily for states' rights rather than the right to own enslaved people. Slavery, meanwhile, is depicted as a system that treated people relatively well.
The changes come as the Trump administration moves forward with plans to return the Confederate Memorial to Arlington in 2027, after the sculpture was removed in 2023 under a congressional mandate targeting Confederate symbols on military property. "It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the left, we don't believe in erasing American history—we honor it," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on social media last year.
Newsweek contacted the White House and Arlington National Cemetery for comment by email on Tuesday morning. Standing 32 feet tall, the Confederate Memorial is an imposing monument that loomed over Arlington National Cemetery for over a century until its removal in 2023. Unveiled in 1914, the Confederate Memorial comprises a bronze statue and plinth on top of a granite base, commemorating members of the Confederate army who fought and died during the American Civil War.
Along with the soldiers, the monument includes figures of Black servants apparently supporting the Confederate cause. The monument, which is unmistakably celebratory of the fallen soldiers, was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to former Confederate soldier and sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel. Ezekiel believed his monument corrected some of the "lies" the North had perpetrated against the South.
In 2020, amid a renewed focus on civil rights and racial justice in the nation, Arlington National Cemetery installed a plaque near the monument, informing visitors that it featured "highly sanitized depictions of slavery." In 2021, Congress established a bipartisan commission in response to the nationwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd that set out to scrutinize the ways in which the military continued to honor the Confederacy and recommending name changes and removals. The Department of Defense accepted recommendations to remove the Confederate Memorial during the Biden administration, and it was taken away from the cemetery and relocated in December 2023. The Sons of Confederate Veterans opposed the move, filing several lawsuits against the monument's removal.
The Confederate Memorial is stored in a secure Department of Defense facility in Virginia. In August 2025, the Trump administration announced plans to reinstate the monument in Arlington National Cemetery by 2027. The Trump administration has removed two paragraphs explaining why the monument was so controversial.
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