A portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform with a slave guiding his horse in the background will be rehung in West Point’s library, the Army confirmed to Military.com on Friday.
The reinstallation, which was first reported by The New York Times, marks the latest effort by the Trump administration to reverse the work of a congressionally mandated commission charged with scrubbing tributes to the Confederacy from the military.
In a brief email Friday, an Army spokesperson confirmed to Military.com that the Times report was accurate. West Point did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while the Pentagon deferred to the Army.
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The portrait that was removed and now being reinstalled was first hung in 1952 during a high point for the Lost Cause movement that seeks to recast the Confederacy’s fight as a heroic struggle unrelated to slavery.
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously announced they were restoring the names of nine Army bases that were named after Confederate military leaders and reinstalling a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
The pair have argued they are simply respecting history that was being erased by “woke lemmings” – as Hegseth phrased it in a social media post about the decision to restore the Arlington monument.
In reality, the bases were renamed, the memorial was removed and the Lee portrait was put into storage at the direction of what was known as the Naming Commission.
Congress created the commission in 2020, overriding a veto Trump issued during his first term, to examine how to remove Confederate names, statues and other tributes from military property. The law also mandated that the Pentagon implement the commission’s recommendations.
Lawmakers in both parties advocated for creating the commission amid a national reckoning over the legacy of slavery after widespread racial justice protests in summer 2020 in response to the police killing of George Floyd. The U.S. military, lawmakers argued, should not be honoring traitors who fought against the United States in order to preserve slavery, and it was long past time to correct that mistake.
When the Trump administration restored the Confederate names to the Army bases earlier this year, it skirted the law by choosing different namesakes who have the same last names as the Confederate military leaders.
Lawmakers in both parties were irked by the use of a legal loophole and added an amendment to this year’s defense policy bill seeking to force the administration to follow the law.
Officials have not articulated any similar workaround for reinstalling the Lee portrait without running afoul of the law.
Lee has a deep history with West Point that complicated the commission’s work there. He was a cadet at the academy, graduating second in his class in 1829, and returned to serve as its superintendent from 1852 to 1855, prior to the Civil War.
But, as the commission noted in its final report, Lee actively turned down a command post in the Army at the start of the Civil War and chose to fight instead for the Confederacy.
“The consequences of his decisions were wide-ranging and destructive. Lee’s armies were responsible for the deaths of more United States soldiers than practically any other enemy in our nation’s history,” the commission wrote in its report.
Ultimately, the commission decided to take a nuanced approach to Lee’s presence on campus. Portraits of Lee in his Army uniform and references solely to his time as superintendent were allowed to stay, but the commission unanimously recommended removing the portrait of him in the Confederate uniform. It also recommended changing the names of several buildings and streets named after Lee.
“The commissioners do not make these recommendations with any intention of ‘erasing history,’” the commission’s report said. “The facts of the past remain, and the commissioners are confident the history of the Civil War will continue to be taught at all service academies with all the quality and complex detail our national past deserves. Rather, they make these recommendations to affirm West Point’s long tradition of educating future generations of America’s military leaders to represent the best of our national ideals.”
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