Confederates cleared from Virginia capitol
Included is a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, positioned in the spot where he took command of the state’s army in the Civil War.
Virginia has removed from its iconic state capitol the busts and a statue honoring Confederate generals and officials. That includes a bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee positioned in the same spot where he stood to assume com m and of t he state’s armed forces in the Civil War nearly 160 years ago.
They are the latest Confederate symbols to be removed or retired in the weeks since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked a nationwide protest movement.
Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat, quietly ordered the Lee statue and busts of generals J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jack- son, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and others removed from the historic Old House Chamber. A moving crew worked through the night Thursday — carefully removing the monuments and their plaques and loading them into a truck and taking them to an undisclosed location.
T he stealth approach avoids the possibility of protests or a lawsuit to keep the monuments in place, but may prompt criticism that the monuments were moved without public discussion.
“Virginia has a story to tell that extends far beyond glo- rifying the Confederacy and its participants,” Filler-Corn said in a statement. “Now is the time to provide context.”
Designed by Thomas Jeffer- son, the Virginia State Capitol is the first state capitol to open after the American Revolution and was used as the Confederacy’s Capitol during much of the Civil War.
Filler-Corn’s move to remove the Confederate generals comes a few weeks after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam ordered the removal of a different Lee monument — a 21-foot (6-meter) bronze equestrian sculpture on Rich- mond’s historic Monument Avenue.
A lawsuit has delayed that statue’s removal, but other Confederate monuments on the street — once one of the most prominent collection of tributes to the Confed- eracy in the nation — have already come down. And earlier this week,the U.S. House approved a bill to remove statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders from the U.S. Capitol. The bill’s prospects in the Senate are uncertain.
In Virginia, the Old House Chamber was where lawmakers first met when the Capi- tol opened in 1788 and was used as the House’s meeting place for more than 100 years before the Capitol building was expanded. It is not currently used for official pur- poses when the legislature meets.
The chamber’s history is long and varied — then-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall presided over a trial there that saw former Vice President Aaron Burr acquitted of treason — but much of the iconography in the room is devoted to Confederates.
Virginia delegates voted in the chamber to secede from the Union in April 1861. A few days later, Lee entered the room to take formal command of the state’s military.
“Trusting in almighty God, an approving conscience, and the aid of my fellow citizens, I devote myself to the service of my native state, in whose behalf alone will I ever again draw my sword,” Lee said, according to an inscription on the statue.
Seven years later, after the South lost, it was the same room where a new constitutional convention met that included Black delegates for the first time.
Like many Confederate monuments, most of those recently removed from Virginia’s Capitol were erected decades after the Civil War.