West Point, New York - Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly working on having a painting of a Confederate general and his slave reinstalled at West Point Military Academy.

According to The New York Times, Hegseth is seeking to bring back the giant painting featuring Robert E. Lee on a horse donning his confederate uniform while being guided by a slave he owned.

The painting was taken down in 2022 after Congress passed a law in 2020 to remove names and symbols representing the Confederacy from federal and military institutions across the country.

Lee served as superintendent at the school from 1852 to 1855, but in 1861, after 30 years of military service, he resigned from the US Army to fight alongside the Confederacy during the Civil War.

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After the Confederacy was defeated by the army, the painting of Lee was hung in the academy's library in 1952 – at the height of segregation and Jim Crow laws – to celebrate the anniversary of his stint as superintendent and revamp his public image.

While the US largely has sought to eliminate positive portrayals of the Confederacy – as the rebel army was inherently a treasonous attempt to overthrow the government – some on the far-right are seeking to revive its legacy.

Hegseth's attempt to bring the painting back comes amid President Donald Trump and his administration's efforts to sanitize US history and revive honor to the Confederacy.

Since Trump's re-election, Hegseth signed a memorandum to rename Fort Liberty in North Carolina back to its former name, Fort Bragg, which had initially been named in honor of Confederate general Braxton Bragg.

Earlier this month, Hegseth ordered a Confederate memorial at Arlington Cemetery to be resurrected, which featured a "nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy" and included "highly sanitized depictions of slavery," and an inscription in Latin that "construes the South's secession as a noble 'Lost Cause.'"

In a statement regarding Hegseth's West Point effort, Army communications director Rebecca Hodson insisted that the Trump administration seeks to "honor our history and learn from it – we don't erase it."