Where does removing Gen. Lee’s statue get us?
The monuments went up for multiple reasons, sentimentality playing a prominent role — the expressions of the defeated
So what will become of Robert E. Lee and all the “fixed” tributes to his memory and the “Lost Cause” he represented?
We’ll see. The removal of Lee from Richmond’s Monument Avenue will likely not quench the prevailing thirst.
I admit to some ambivalence about Lee’s banishment — is this really the best, most thoughtful answer? — and may be channeling my grandmother here. Years ago, having driven down to Mississippi and toured the Vicksburg battlefields, I showed her my souvenirs, which included a postcard portrait of Ulysses S. Grant.
“Why did you buy that?” she asked and she wasn’t kidding. She had two uncles who had fought in the Civil War and knew them as a child. One of them rode a horse named “Meat Ox.” We heard of Meat Ox often growing up, because horses were not incidental to rural Virginia memories.
Such details draw history closer. Proximity shapes mentality. The monuments went up for multiple reasons, sentimentality being prominent in the mix. These were public expressions of a defeated, if not an especially contrite people.
And nowhere was the defeat more harshly felt than in Virginia.
Richmond retains its status as the “former capital of the Confederacy,” but Virginia’s participation in the Southern rebellion remained an open question for a time in 1861 and only a divided vote sanctioned it.
You could, after all, just look at a map and see where this dispute would be contested.
Late in 1861, after Bull Run, the first big battle of the war, according to a newspaper account uncovered late one night, a Virginia state senator archly observed the diminished enthusiasm for visiting Northern Virginia from that point on.
But Virginia warmed to the work of war and after four years — after Lee had parted company with Grant at Appomattox — graves dotted the land and Virginia was a blasted, burnt, economic wreck. Our “wealth,” in land and purchased people, had been “annihilated,” as one late 19th century account expressed it.
Did it occur to Virginians that entering into the war, in the long history of our commonwealth, had not been our most useful idea?
Probably, but you struggle to find anyone saying as much. The occupying federal troops eventually left and other thinking gradually took hold. On May 6, 1890, according to the Norfolk Virginian, Richmond “merchants closed their business houses at 4 o’clock.”
It was time to get Lee’s new statue from the railway station to its completed pedestal in Richmond. “The streets along the route were a mass of people. Men and boys were upon the house top, in trees, on telegraph poles, and everywhere else that afforded them a view of the sight.”
The account carried a telling demographic detail: “One of the features of the event was the absence of the colored people. Very few of them were in the procession.”
No doubt others took note and, on the day of the great unveiling, with parades and bands festooned in stars and bars, a former Confederate spoke to the national press.
“Of course all sensible men understand that the war is over,” said Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew and the parade’s chief marshal, “and that we are perfectly loyal to the United
States government, and that the Confederate colors now mean only a sentiment. The Confederate decorations mean that we honor those who lead us and therefore shed their blood for us — nothing more.”
But it was never quite “nothing more.” No statue ever is. Generations follow and new, younger eyes measure for themselves their inherited shrines. Changed circumstances make for reappraisals — in all cultures.
Some 200,000 people gathered in 1970 in East Berlin to see a 62 feet high statue of Lenin unveiled on his 100th birthday. Twenty years later, after the wall came