The Trump administration is returning a 20-foot-tall painting of General Robert E. Lee to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed. In a statement, Army spokeswoman Rebecca Hodson said, “At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place. Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”

General Lee, who epitomized the perfect cadet, excelling in military skills and academics, was relegated to the closet in 2022 at the direction of a bizarre little commission, called “The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.” It was part of the national madness when that was unleashed after a Black career criminal and doper, George Floyd, died while being arrested. Some good cops were railroaded, what, in retrospect, appear to be USAID-funded riots sprang up across the country, and much of what passes for our elites tripped over themselves trying to outdo each other in their groveling.

The commission was charged with erasing American history and turning some significant figures into Soviet-style “non-persons.” Robert E. Lee was one of those. This bill was passed over President Trump’s veto; 109 Republican Congressmen and 36 Republican Senators joined the left, turning this historical atrocity into law.

The naming commission’s initial order to remove General Lee’s portrait was complicated by the general’s long history with the Army and the academy. General Lee graduated near the top of his West Point class and served as the academy’s superintendent from 1852 to 1855. His name and likeness were all over the campus.

The commission decided that portraits of General Lee in his blue Army uniform should remain. But the divisive painting of General Lee in his Confederate gray uniform was hauled away. The commission also recommended that West Point’s Lee Barracks, Lee Road, Lee Gate, Lee Housing Area and Lee Area Child Development Center all be renamed.

“We will conduct these actions with dignity and respect,” Lt. Gen. Steven W. Gilland, the academy’s superintendent, promised in 2022.

Originally hung in 1952, the portrait was part of a broader effort to rehabilitate General Lee’s image as a revered figure in the history of the academy. General Maxwell Taylor, a famous World War II general who went on to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at West Point on the day the portrait was unveiled.

“Few fair-minded men can feel today that the issues which divided North and South in 1861 have any real meaning to our present generation,” he said. At the time the Army had just begun to desegregate, but Black people in the South still lived under the cruel strictures of Jim Crow laws.

I think General Taylor hit it exactly right, especially since Lee took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. in October 1865 and worked toward reconciliation for the rest of his life.

What’s actually traitorous is your refusal to acknowledge the authority of the United States Congress pic.twitter.com/p1LyAF2hPH

— VJ Maxwell 📡 (@vortmax79) August 30, 2025

In fact, I would argue that Lee started working toward reconciliation before he ever met General Grant at the McLean House at Appomattox, when he rejected the recommendation that the Army of Northern Virginia adopt guerrilla warfare; see April 9, 1865. The Surrender at Appomattox – RedState.

Early on the morning of April 9, Lee called a conference with his generals so they could give their opinions on surrender. All of them concurred that under the circumstances surrender was the only option, except the young Brigadier General Edward Alexander, who, writes Foote, “proposed that the troops take to the woods, individually and in small groups, under orders to report to the governors of their respective states. That way, he believed, two thirds of the army would avoid capture by the Yankees.”

Lee gently rebuked Alexander, reminding him, “We must consider its effect on the country as a whole.” The men, he said, “would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy’s cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections that may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.” Alexander would later write: “I had not a single word to say in reply. He had answered my suggestion from a plane so far above it that I was ashamed of having made it.”

As I say in that story:

In one day, Lee decided that no matter what terms Grant demanded that he would not be a party of any prolonged guerrilla war. Grant, with all the cards in his hand, decided to do the hard thing and avoid an Obama-like victory strut and gave Lee terms that would largely ensure the Confederate army accepted the surrender and then treated the defeated army with dignity. Absent those two decisions we could have seen a prolonged and bloody insurgency in the South that would have caused a permanent rift in the nation.

The “Naming Commission” was that Obama-esque victory strut that had a goal of creating a permanent class of winners and losers in American society.

I also feel compelled to point out that “Jim Crow” laws had nothing to do with the Civil War or Robert E. Lee, as they were upheld by a decidedly non-Confederate Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. The states adopting Jim Crow laws were, by no means, limited to the former Confederacy.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has undone much of the anti-American labor of the “Naming Commission.” The bases renamed in the post-George Floyd panic have been reverted, though I think in a weasely way. The law establishing the commission also set a sunset date for it. I don’t find any evidence that the commission’s recommendations were codified into federal law, so my preference would’ve been for the administration to hit this nonsense head-on and force Congress to act.