A portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is back hanging on the walls of the U.S. Military Academy library this week at the direction of the Defense Department, nearly three years after then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved its removal.

The 20-foot portrait depicts the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and an enslaved individual guiding his horse through a field behind him. In 2022, West Point officials announced they would remove the portrait of Lee, an 1829 graduate and the school’s superintendent in the early 1850s. The announcement followed former Austin’s approval of a 2022 congressional naming commission recommendation to remove 13 Confederate memorabilia from the campus.

Recommended Stories

• Hegseth warns additional strikes on drug cartels could come after 11 killed
• Brushing aside a judge’s ruling and state’s opposition, Trump targets Chicago and Baltimore for military intervention to stem violent crime
• Trump says 11 Tren de Aragua 'terrorists' killed in US strike on drug vessel that left Venezuela

Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the portrait has been rehung and that a previously displayed quote of Lee’s has been put back up on West Point’s campus as well. Smith said the academy will soon restore a bust of Lee that was also removed following the 2022 directive.

“At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place,” Army communications director Rebecca Hodson said in a statement. “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”

The Lee quote now displayed again on campus is: “There is true glory and a true honor: the glory of the duty done, the honor of the integrity of principle,” which he said while he was superintendent of West Point, according to Smith.

The rehanging of the Lee portrait comes as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moves to restore the names of military bases that were previously tied to the Confederacy but renamed during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

Hegseth’s push follows President Donald Trump’s broader March executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In the order, he calls for the restoration of “solemn and uplifting” public statues and monuments that were removed after Jan. 1, 2020. The year was a significant year of reckoning, during which many Confederate statues were removed as the Black Lives Matter movement called attention to the monuments after the murder of George Floyd.

ARMY ESTIMATES $10 MILLION PRICE TAG FOR RESTORING REMOVED CONFEDERATE STATUE

In the executive order, Trump called on the Interior Department to determine whether statues were “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology” and “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments.”

Trump dined with the director of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch, last week as his administration reviews the federal museums for cultural bias, a move that also stems from the March order.