A controversial portrait of General Robert E Lee, which shows an enslaved man holding the Confederate leader’s horse, is being returned to the library at West Point, according to Pentagon officials who spoke with the New York Times.
The nearly 20ft canvas, which had hung in the US military academy since 1952, was removed following a 2020 law that ordered Confederate names and tributes to be stripped from military installations.
That same law established a commission to rename bases and review monuments. By 2022, the commission directed West Point to clear away all items that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy”. Shortly after, the Lee portrait was taken down and placed in storage.
Exactly how the painting is being reinstalled without countering the legislation remains uncertain. The measure was passed in the wake of nationwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place,” Rebecca Hodson, the army’s communications director, told the Times.
“Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it – we don’t erase it.”
Donald Trump has long framed the renaming of bases as an attack on American traditions. “Robert E Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all,” the president has said, adding that “except for Gettysburg” he thinks Lee would have won the civil war.
Both Trump and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have pushed for the restoration of Confederate symbols that were removed in recent years. Hegseth, in particular, has pressed for reinstating a Confederate memorial at Arlington national cemetery that Congress recommended removing. In an August social media post, he wrote that the statue “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings”.
Hegseth moved to reinstate Confederate general names at army bases such as Fort Bragg and Fort Lee earlier this summer, but did so in a way that attempted to stay within the boundaries of the 2020 law. The new names honored different soldiers, none of whom had fought for the Confederacy, yet the names were the same as those of the original Confederate honorees.
The Lee portrait had originally been installed at West Point during the early 1950s, part of a broader, mid-20th-century push to recast Lee as a celebrated figure in military history.
West Point library did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
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