Trump Administration Reinstalls Caesar Rodney Monument on Freedom Plaza
A new cluster of statues has appeared in downtown Washington, D.C. and one of them has reopened a long-running argument over who gets memorialized in public space. Last Friday, the Trump administration installed 13 statues on Freedom Plaza, including an equestrian monument to Caesar Rodney, the Revolutionary War figure and slave owner whose statue was removed from view in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 2020.
The monument depicts Rodney’s 1776 ride from Dover, Delaware, to Philadelphia, where he cast the decisive vote for independence. Rodney died in 1784 at his home on Byfield plantation, where he owned 200 slaves. The 12 soldiers surrounding the horse, according to a Department of the Interior spokesperson, are intended to represent the collective sacrifice of Revolutionary War service members and the broader range of people who contributed to the nation’s founding.
The installation is part of a wider campaign to restore decommissioned monuments as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. In 2020, shortly after Rodney’s statue was removed in Wilmington, Trump issued a proclamation marking the founding father’s 292nd birthday and denounced the removal as “an extreme anti-American historical revisionism” driven by “critical race theorists on college campuses, cancel culture adherents in corporate boardrooms, and flag-burning mobs on city streets.”
Earlier this year, the administration also announced a statue of Christopher Columbus, made from fragments of a monument that protesters in Baltimore tore down after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Fragments of the original were later recovered and refashioned into the sculpture now standing on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The monument program is unfolding alongside Trump’s effort to exert greater control over the Smithsonian Institute. In an order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” he accused the institution of promoting a version of history that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” As the administration pushes these restorations forward, the debate over public memory is becoming inseparable from the politics of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
