West Point restores Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s portrait

A painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee dressed in his Confederate uniform is back on display in the West Point’s library, several years after the storied academy removed honors to the Civil War military leader.

There also are plans to restore a bust of Lee that had been removed from a plaza at the U.S. Military Academy, and a quote from Lee about honor that was removed from a separate plaza is now on display beneath the portrait, an Army spokesperson said Tuesday.

The items were removed to comply with a Department of Defense directive in 2022 that ordered the academy to address racial injustice and do away with installations that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.

The Pentagon’s decision to re-hang the portrait, which shows a Black man leading Lee’s horse in the background, was first reported by The New York Times. It had been hanging in the library since the 1950s before it was placed it in storage.

The actions at West Point come as the Trump administration restores Confederate names and monuments that had been removed in recent years.

“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, said in a prepared statement. “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that decried efforts to reinterpret American history. The Army then restored the names of bases that originally honored Confederate leaders, finding service members with the same surnames to honor.

A commission created by Congress recommended in 2022 that the name and images of Confederate officers be removed from military academies. Lee graduated second in his West Point class in 1829 and later served as superintendent, and his name and image had prominent places at the academy on the Hudson River.

Congress took this action after repeated complaints by current and former enlistees and officers in nearly every branch of the armed services, who described a deep-rooted culture of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eradicate it.

Ty Seidule, a retired brigadier general who served as vice chair of the commission, said Lee’s image should not be on display because he “chose treason” and does not represent the values taught to cadets at West Point.

“It is against the motto of ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’” Seidule said. “Robert E. Lee is the antithesis of that, because his duty and honor was for a rebellious slave republic.”

Seidule, now a history professor at Hamilton College, also questioned whether the restoration of these symbols at West Point are legal under the federal law that led to their removal.

An Army statement asserts that the law does not bar the restoration of Confederacy-related names, symbols, displays, monuments or paraphernalia on military property.