Back in the 1970s I was traveling in Richmond, Virginia, and encountered Monument Avenue for the first time. I remember saying to a friend I was traveling with, “What’s up with all of these statutes to Confederate traitors?” (This was a bold move at that time. I could have been lynched by any Klan members passing by).
Honestly, I never imagined that I would ever see those Confederate statues come down in my lifetime. I am glad I lived long enough to see this day.
Four of the bronze statues representing J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Matthew Fontaine Maury were removed from their memorial pedestals after Black Lives Matter protests in July 2020.
On Wednesday, the massive Robert E. Lee monument, dedicated in 1890, was finally removed. Buh-bye Bobby Lee.
The onlooking crowd cheered wildly, and then joined in singing “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.”
Your moment of zen.
CNN reports, Robert E. Lee statue on historic Virginia street removed:
Virginia on Wednesday took down a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the last Confederate statue remaining along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue.
A pair of rulings from the state Supreme Court last week cleared the way for its removal after intense national debate over the 12-ton statue’s purpose and place along the nearly one-mile stretch of monuments on a, tree-lined street in the city that was once the capital of the Confederacy. The statue, like other symbols of the Confederacy in the commonwealth and and across the country including the busts of Confederate figures in the Virginia statehouse, was removed after the killing of George Floyd prompted a nationwide reckoning with police brutality and racism.
The statue came down just before 9 a.m. ET as the crowd chanted, “na, na, na, na. Hey, hey, hey, goodbye” and “Black Lives Matter.”
Court battle over statue’s removal
Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had announced plans to remove the Lee statue in June 2020, but met legal challenges.
A group of Richmond residents sued, arguing that an 1890 deed and an 1889 General Assembly joint resolution prohibited the governor from directing the removal of a state monument from state property. The plaintiffs also claimed property rights to enforce the deeds, saying they required Virginia to perpetually keep the Lee statue in place.
In its opinion, the Virginia Supreme Court disagreed, saying that all the plaintiffs’ claims were without merit and dissolved injunctions the lower court imposed.
Northam praised the rulings as a “tremendous win” in a statement last week and said pulling down the statue would help move the state and Richmond “into a more inclusive, just future.”
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, on Tuesday said that the state’s high court “stated plainly that the prior injunction pending appeal was dissolved ‘immediately.'”
[R]ichmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a Democrat, last summer invoked his emergency powers to remove several Confederate monuments honoring Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and others. And protesters had toppled a monument of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate states during the Civil War.
The statue will be placed in secure storage at a state-owned facility until a decision is made on its further disposition, officials said in a news release Monday. The 40-foot granite pedestal the Lee statue sits on will remain in place during a community-driven effort to “reimagine” Monument Avenue, according to officials.
A time capsule at the monument is also set to be replaced with a new capsule made by Richmond sculptor Paul DiPasquale that will include 39 artifacts. A photo taken of a Black ballerina at the monument last summer, a Covid-19 vaccination card and Kente cloth are some of the items to be included.
“The past 18 months have seen historic change, from the pandemic to protests for racial justice that led to the removal of these monuments to a lost cause,” Northam said in a statementTuesday. “It is fitting that we replace the old time capsule with a new one that tells that story.”
UPDATE: The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, ‘It’s not the void they hoped it would be’: An 1890 time capsule under Lee statue to be removed – once crew members find it:
[W]orkers are continuing to examine the the Robert E. Lee statue’s pedestal contents and are preparing to place a new time capsule in the north east corner of the 40-foot pedestal. The statue of Lee, which was unveiled in 1890 and sat on top of the pedestal, was removed Wednesday morning.
There is scant evidence suggesting workers placed a time capsule under the pedestal in 1887, but there’s no guarantee it’s there. The only evidence of its existence is a newspaper article and an X-ray revealing a void in the stone. But the statue’s blueprints don’t show it.
The 1887 article, published in The Richmond Dispatch – a predecessor of this publication – stated that the old time capsule contained 60 objects largely related to the Confederacy. The list of contents includes a picture of Abraham Lincoln lying in his coffin, a collection of Confederate buttons, a guide to Richmond with a map of the city, three bullets, a piece of shell and a Minie ball lodged in a piece of wood from a Fredericksburg battle field.
Workers reached the void Thursday morning, but apparently the capsule is not in that particular void, said Clark Mercer, Gov. Ralph Northam’s chief of staff.
“It’s not the void they hoped it would be,” Mercer said.
The void apparently was used to help place the stone in 1887, which was the first piece of the stone work on the monument. The rest of the pedestal was constructed around it.
There’s still a chance the capsule is lower in the stone or underground, said Dale Brumfield, an author and historian who has studied the capsule’s history.
[If] the time capsule is discovered, it will be taken to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for opening. But Brumfield estimates there’s a 90% chance its contents have been ruined by water seeping into the box.
One worker used a saw to cut a hole into one of the blocks for the placement of the new time capsule, whose contents were recently announced by Northam’s office.
Richmond sculptor Paul DiPasquale designed a 12 by 6 by 6 stainless steel box to house the artifacts. The box was sealed with silicone and pumped with argon to prevent water and air damage. The new time capsule will go where the old one is believed to exist, and there are no plans to identify it with a sign.
If the pedestal is eventually removed and a new statue or work of art is placed in the circle, the capsule will be buried underground at that location, said Tori Noles Feyrer, a member of the governor’s staff.
Eugene Robinson writes, “Robert E. Lee’s statue is gone. Now can we dismantle the myth, too?”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/09/robert-e-lees-statue-is-gone-now-can-we-dismantle-myth-too/
Now that the statue of Robert E. Lee that towered over the onetime capital of the Confederacy has been cut into pieces and hauled away to some obscure warehouse, maybe the weaponized myth of Lee as a great man — or even a good one — can finally be mothballed as well.
Southern propagandists concocted and embellished the Lee myth toward the end of the 19th century, as part of a larger justification for erasing the gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction and reimposing a system of state-approved white supremacy. The statue, erected in 1890, was part of that project. One of the true good things it’s possible to say about Lee, who had died 20 years earlier, is that he would have been among the first to object.
“I think it wiser … not to keep open the sores of war,” he wrote in 1869, declining to help choose the locations for memorials at Gettysburg, “but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Letting go and moving on were not on the agenda of the architects of Jim Crow repression, however. They chose Lee as the dignified, slightly tragic hero of their fanciful retelling of what they called “The War Between the States.” They painted Lee as an honorable man, personally opposed to slavery, who reluctantly chose loyalty to his state of Virginia over allegiance to the Union — and who, albeit in a losing cause, was the most brilliant general in U.S. history.
Lie after lie after lie.
Lee was, first and foremost, a traitor. A graduate of West Point, he decided to take up arms against the nation he had sworn an oath to serve. The choice he made cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives. Treason was, and remains, a capital crime. Abraham Lincoln was determined to seek reconciliation at any cost, “with malice toward none with charity for all.” But following the surrender at Appomattox Court House, the president would have had every legal and moral right to have Lee promptly court-martialed and hanged.
[L]ee did refer to slavery in a prewar 1856 letter as “a moral & political evil,” but argued that the institution was “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race” and asserted that the “painful discipline” enslaved Black people were suffering was “necessary for their instruction as a race.”
When an enslaved man and woman escaped the plantation and were recaptured, Lee had them whipped, summoning a county constable to “lay it on well.” According to one of the escapees, Wesley Norris, Lee then ordered that their lacerated backs be doused with brine. And Lee was particularly ruthless in separating families, hiring out husbands, wives and children to different distant plantations.
When Lee’s renowned Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania, its soldiers abducted free African Americans and sent them south into slavery. At the Battle of the Crater in 1864, as in many Civil War encounters, Black Union soldiers who tried to surrender were not taken as prisoner. Instead, they were massacred on the spot — by troops under Lee’s command.
And as for Lee’s alleged military genius? One stubborn fact interferes with the myth: He lost the war.
Lee is indeed credited as a gifted hit-and-run tactician. But his strategic decision to engage the Union in a conventional battle of massed armies at Gettysburg was a monumental blunder. Throughout the war, Lee had the advantage of fighting on friendly terrain with overwhelming civilian support.
Still, he got pummeled into unconditional surrender.
Not done harshing on that treasonous traitor, Bobby Lee. Dana Milbank writes, “Robert E. Lee was a stone-cold loser”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/10/robert-e-lee-statue-richmond-trump-history/
No general in U.S. history was defeated as unequivocally and as totally as Lee. For all his supposed strategic skill, his army was entirely destroyed. One-quarter of those who served under him were killed, and an additional half were wounded or captured. He was a traitor to the United States who killed more U.S. soldiers than any other enemy in the nation’s history, for the supremely evil cause of slavery. To boot, he was a cruel enslaver and a promoter of white supremacy until his death.
It is ridiculous that, in the year 2021, these simple truths are in dispute.
[F]ormer president Donald Trump, the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party, penned an impassioned defense of the Confederate commander. It was ugly in its embrace of the themes that have powered white supremacists for generations. It was also fake history.
[F]or a point-by-point grading of Trump’s history paper, I checked in with Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general and military historian who is the former head of the U.S. Military Academy history department. Now at Hamilton College, he’s the author of “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause.”
Greatest strategist of all? “Well, he’s a loser,” Seidule responded. “He wasn’t just defeated; his army was destroyed. The idea that he’s the greatest strategist of all is just ludicrous.”
War would have been over in a day? If it had, Seidule argued, then slavery may have survived. Emancipation wasn’t U.S. policy until 1863. “So the fact that Lee was able to keep the war going as long as it did helped add to the eventual destruction of that which he fought for.”
Lee chose the Confederacy because of his great love of Virginia? Seidule said Lee was one of eight U.S. Army colonels from Virginia at the time of secession in 1861. The other seven remained loyal to the United States — as did Virginian Winfield Scott, the U.S. Army’s commander, and 80 percent of all colonels from the South. “Lee’s the outlier,” Seidule said. That may be because at that level of Army officers “no one benefited from slavery more than he did.” Lee ran an enslaved-labor farm — a plantation — from 1857 to 1860. He wasn’t even a resident of Virginia for most of his prewar life; Alexandria, his hometown, was part of the District of Columbia until 1847.
Would have won but for Gettysburg? The day after Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant triumphed at Vicksburg, giving the U.S. Army control of the Mississippi River and splitting the Confederacy. Lee’s army couldn’t function without thousands of enslaved people working as servants or in factories and on farms, and after Vicksburg, Seidule said, “they lose all that enslaved labor” as the U.S. Army pushed into the South.
Greatest unifying force after the war? Grant called Lee’s actions “forced acquiescence” that was “grudging and pernicious.” Though more conciliatory than others, Lee testified to Congress in 1866 that Black residents “cannot vote intelligently” and that “it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them.” In 1868, Lee joined in issuing the White Sulphur Springs manifesto, which argued that Black people had “neither the intelligence nor the qualifications … for political power.” Argued Seidule: “His idea of reconciliation is only if the White South is given complete political control over Black people.”
Afghanistan would have been a total victory under the “genius” Lee? If the U.S. military had suffered the same casualty rate in Afghanistan that Lee’s army did, 200,000 American troops would have been killed, not the actual 2,400. Some 400,000 would have been injured or captured instead of 20,000 injured.
“No one has lost more completely in American history than Robert E. Lee,” Seidule said. “There is no general that has been more crushed, more defeated, at the strategic, tactical, operational level. … How much genius does it take to lose absolutely and completely?”
Neither Lee nor his statue deserves a pedestal.
—
Nor does that moronic loser Donald Trump.
UPDATE: “Search For Confederate Time Capsule Ends: ‘Done With Lost Causes’”, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/confederate-time-capsule-lost-causes-moldy-box_n_613cbb2ae4b090b79e84662e
Workers who dismantled the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, this week called off the search for a 134-year old time capsule supposedly buried at the statue’s base.
“After a couple of long hard days, it’s clear the time capsule won’t be found ― and Virginia is done with lost causes,” Grant Neely, chief communications officer for Gov. Ralph Northam (D), said in a statement referencing a revisionist term for the Civil War that romanticizes the South.
“The search for this moldy Confederate box is over. We’re moving on,” Neely said.
Since his death Lee’s personal papers have been locked away & his descendants have refused to release them. Definitely makes one wonder what’s being covered up:
Via Balloon Juice:
“….it’s fascinating. But Professor LaFantasie’s thesis should inform all attempts to understand Robert E Lee: we simply know too little about him from his own accounts and the accounts of his immediate family to really have a good understanding of him as a person and as a senior military leader.
The second point is that Lee’s reputation as a brilliant general who was both a strategic and tactical genius as well as a great leader of men, as LaFantasie recounts in his essay, is largely ahistorical and was largely made up as part of the creation of the Lost Cause mythology that ultimately becomes the Dunning School of American history. From LaFantasie’s essay:
But something strange later happened concerning the photostats at the Library of Congress (LC). In 1977, Thomas L. Connelly, who had already established himself as a historian with little good to say about Robert E. Lee, published his book, “The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society.” Connelly argued that Lee’s public image had been largely shaped after the Civil War by a “Lee cult” that worshipped the general like a god and rewrote history according to a Southern interpretation of the Lost Cause. In making his case, Connelly quoted the Civil War reminiscences of Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee that revealed her sharp bitterness toward Lincoln and the Northerners who had defeated her husband. Through some administrative error at LC, Connelly had been allowed to see the reminiscences despite the restriction on the document’s use. According to LC records, after the publication of Connelly’s book, Mary Custis Lee deButts wrote again to LC and reiterated her intention and that of her sister that Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee’s reminiscences should be off-limits to researchers. In 1981, LC placed the document in a separate, restricted container, where it has remained ever since.”
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2021/09/09/robert-e-lee-is-trending-thats-never-a-good-sign/