War Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Army to restore a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, with cemetery officials estimating the project will cost taxpayers approximately $9 million. The Army expects to reinstall the sculpture in 2027 and plans to provide historical context for visitors.

“The current estimated cost of comprehensive conservation, replacement of the internal support structure and installing the Moses Ezekiel sculpture in Arlington National Cemetery is approximately $9 million in Operation and Maintenance Army (OMA) funds,” an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson said.

Arlington officials confirmed the sculpture was given to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a private nonprofit, in January 2026. The Army’s existing loan agreement remained in effect, while federal funds will cover conservation, repairs, and reinstallation despite the sculpture’s private ownership.

Kyle Bibby of the Black Veterans Project criticized the use of taxpayer money for the project. “Public land and public money should not memorialize men who took up arms against the United States,” Bibby, a former Marine Corps infantry officer, told Task & Purpose.

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The memorial was removed in December 2023 following recommendations from the Naming Commission, which Congress established under the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. That legislation required the Pentagon to remove Confederate monuments and symbols from military property by Jan. 1, 2024.

More than 40 Republican members of Congress opposed removing the monument. In a letter to then War Secretary Lloyd Austin, they argued it was intended to commemorate “reconciliation and national unity,” rather than the Confederacy.

Hegseth later directed the Army to return the monument to Arlington. “The Secretary of War under title 10, United States Code, section 113, directed the U.S. Army to coordinate with the Commonwealth of Virginia to display Moses J. Ezekiel’s sculpture at his burial site in Arlington National Cemetery,” the cemetery spokesperson said.

Originally unveiled in 1914, the memorial portrays Confederate soldiers and enslaved people, along with a “mammy” figure described in the source as a longstanding racist caricature. A woman holding a laurel crown in one hand stands atop the monument.

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Bibby rejected the sculpture’s portrayal of enslaved Black Americans and said its imagery distorts their relationship with the Confederacy. “This is not about preserving history because this sanitized version of slavery is ahistorical,” he said.

“Black people were not marching willingly in arms alongside the men who enslaved them, erased their lineage, sold their children away, and answered the Civil War with a century of Jim Crow and racial terror,” Bibby added.

Ezekiel was a former Virginia Military Institute cadet who fought for the Confederacy as a teenager. He later spent much of his adult life in Rome, where he continued celebrating the Confederate cause decades after the Civil War ended.

Research by art historian Samantha Baskind found that Ezekiel displayed a Confederate flag in his Rome studio for roughly 40 years. He also signed letters affirming loyalty to the Confederate cause and produced monuments honoring Confederate military leaders.

In his memoir, Ezekiel claimed that he fought not for slavery but for “states’ rights and for free trade.” The source noted slavery’s central role in the Confederacy’s formation.

The restoration follows Hegseth’s broader reversal of efforts to remove Confederate associated names and symbols from the military. In 2025, he reversed name changes involving Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The Pentagon rededicated Fort Benning to a World War I soldier and Fort Bragg to a World War II soldier who shared surnames with the Confederate generals previously honored. That approach restored the installations’ former names without formally honoring those generals.

Many asked whether the Pentagon consulted service members or studied the restoration’s potential effect on morale and unit cohesion. The Pentagon referred those questions to the Army and Arlington, while the Army confirmed it had not sought feedback from service members.

Bibby said the restoration was probably not a priority for most troops, given unexpected combat deployments to the Middle East and other pressing concerns. He nevertheless accused Pentagon leadership of failing to consider whom the military should honor.

“Unfortunately, this decision is consistent with Pentagon leadership that has made clear it prefers racist mythology to the harder work of building a genuinely unified military,” Bibby said.

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