There are several works of art in the United States Capitol honoring former leaders of the Confederate States of America and generals in the Confederate States Army, including seven statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection, busts and portraits.[1]
These include the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, the Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens, and former U.S. President John Tyler, who sided with the Confederate cause and negotiated the terms for Virginia's entry into the Confederate States of America.[1]
In the National Statuary Hall Collection, housed inside the United States Capitol, each state has provided statues of two citizens that the state wants to honor. Seven Confederate figures are among them, with one pending removal and replacement. The dates listed below reflect when each statue was given to the collection:[2][3]
The statue of Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (Alabama, 1908) was replaced by a statue of Helen Keller in 2009.[14]
On June 18, 2020, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ordered four paintings of former Confederates removed from the Speaker's Gallery in the Capitol in the wake of the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd while in police custody.[15] "We didn't know about this until we were taking inventory of the statues and the curator told us that there were four paintings of Speakers in the Capitol of the United States, four Speakers who had served in the Confederacy," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.[15]
The statue of Robert E. Lee (Virginia, 1909)[16] was removed on December 21, 2020.[17][18] In January 2023, the design of a replacement statue of Barbara Rose Johns was revealed. At the time, sculptor Steven Weitzman stated that the statue would be ready for installation sometime in 2024.[18]
The statue of Edmund Kirby Smith (Florida, 1922) was removed in 2021 and replaced by a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in 2022.[19]
On July 22, 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 305–113 to remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (as well as statues honoring figures who were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War) from the U.S. Capitol and replace it with a bust of Justice Thurgood Marshall. The bill called for removal of Taney's bust within 30 days after the law's passage. The bust had been mounted in the old robing room adjacent to the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol Building. The bill (H.R. 7573[20]) also created a "process to obtain a bust of Marshall ... and place it there within a minimum of two years."[21] After the bill reached the Republican-led Senate on 30 July 2020 (S.4382) it was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration, but no further action on it was taken.[22]