The Confederate Memorial Is Returning to Arlington. Honor the Dead, but Tell the Truth.

Three years after cranes lifted it out of Arlington National Cemetery, the Confederate Memorial is coming back. On Thursday, the Army presented its final plans to put it back where it stood for more than a century.

Conservatives are right that a nation should not erase its history. They should also insist that it tell the truth about it. This statue is a test of whether we can do both.

What the Army plans

The Office of Army Cemeteries submitted final plans to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts on Thursday to return the memorial to a small section of the cemetery where more than 400 Confederate soldiers were reinterred in the early 1900s, The Washington Post reported. The memorial will go in Section 16, which holds the remains of 442 Confederate soldiers, and members of the commission were appointed by President Donald Trump, WTOP reported.

The bronze memorial was designed by sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. It was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914 at a ceremony presided over by President Woodrow Wilson, according to the Post. The project has now been renamed the Moses Ezekiel Sculpture, after the artist, who is buried in Section 16, WTOP reported.

It is undergoing renovations and is expected back at Arlington next year, NBC4 Washington reported. The Army previously said restoring it would cost $10 million. The plans include several interpretive signs to give context, but the designs unveiled Thursday did not say what the signs will say, according to WTOP.

How it was removed, and why it is returning

In 2022, an independent commission recommended to Congress that the memorial be taken down as part of a push to remove names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from military property. It was removed in December 2023.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last year that it would return. "It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings," he posted in August 2025. "Unlike the Left, we don't believe in erasing American history — we honor it."

What the statue actually shows

Here is the part every honest conservative should look at squarely. The memorial does more than mourn the dead. Its bronze reliefs include a Black woman depicted as a "Mammy" holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war, NBC4 and WTOP reported. Critics have long said elements of the memorial glossed over the horrors of slavery and romanticized the pre-Civil War South, according to the Post.

That criticism is fair. Slavery was not a sentimental arrangement between loyal servants and kindly masters. It was the buying and selling of human beings made in the image of God. Scripture lists "menstealers" among the lawless and ungodly (1 Timothy 1:9-10), and the law of Moses said, "he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). Any image that softens that sin tells a lie.

Honor the dead. Tell the truth.

None of that means the statue must be destroyed. It stands among graves. The men buried in Section 16 were soldiers, and a cemetery is a fitting place to remember the dead, even those who fought for a wrong cause. Americans, North and South, have long been willing to mourn together. That is a mark of a Christian people, not a shameful one.

And it is true that the left has often gone too far in its war on monuments, treating the whole American story as if it were one long crime. Conservatives are right to resist that.

But "we honor history" cannot mean we honor every message a monument sends. The best way to keep this statue from teaching a lie is to tell the truth right beside it. The Army has promised interpretive signs. Those signs should say plainly what the reliefs depict, that slavery was a grave evil and that the Confederacy fought to preserve it. A sign that dodges that would make the return of this memorial exactly what its critics fear.

History is not a museum of heroes. It is a record of men, some noble and many sinful, under the judgment of God. Remembering it well, as Dock Line noted on the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, means learning from it. "Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people" (Proverbs 14:34). A country confident in its story can leave a statue standing and still name the sin it depicts. That is not erasing history. That is telling it.

Hero photo: Arlington National Cemetery / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.