Why I’m glad to see Lee go, and why I hope you will be too

Unveiling of the Lee Monument in Richmond, Harper’s Weekly June 14, 1890.

A person would be hard pressed not to recognize how historic the last week and a half have been in the United States. This is a moment historians will look back on for many important reasons. Here in Virginia, news broke last Wednesday in the midst of massive Black Lives Matter protests that the Confederate statues on Monument Ave in Richmond would come down. While these announcements came from the mouths of the governor of Virginia and mayor of Richmond (Lee is owned by the state and the other monuments by the city), there is no mistaking that citizens’ collective action made this happen.

There may be some who cringe at this. Very few of us who study the Civil War (probably more accurately, none of us) have not had a conversation with someone concerned that taking monuments down was “rewriting history” or “white-washing history.” Of course, history reminds us that these monuments themselves white-washed history and told a story that was often far more glorious than reality.  For evidence of this, consider the Jefferson Davis monument down the road from Lee, which reads, “DEFENDER OF THE RIGHTS OF STATES” and fails to specify that the right to enslave other human beings was the principle right Davis defended by leading the Confederacy in secession.  See the list at the bottom for some great works by scholars who have fleshed other examples out in painstaking detail.

Whatever you might think about whether these monuments are “history,” we must also consider that the United States has long enacted democracy on the ground.  As the U.S. built the infrastructure of a nation – cities, highways, National Parks – its designers did so with a belief that we could inscribe the heart of the American nation onto its physical landscape. In the words of planners who designed the National Mall, who picked out the first National Parks, and who created national monuments, we find this sentiment repeated over and over again. These physical objects and spaces could, and should, represent us. Yes, that included representing historical figures and “telling” history. But there has always been more to it. We chose those figures, and we tell those stories, because we believe they can do important work in the present.

Those who designed and dedicated the Lee monument in Richmond knew this and acknowledged it.  Speaking at the dedication of the Lee monument in 1890, Archer Anderson, a former Confederate staff officer, proclaimed, “Fellow citizens, a people carves its own image in the monuments of its great men. Not Virginians only, not only those who dwell in the fair land stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, but all who bear the American name may proudly consent that posterity shall judge them by the structure, which we are here to dedicate and crown with a heroic figure…Let this monument, then, teach to generations yet unborn these lessons of his life!”  The monument’s creators believed that this image was not just of Lee, but of the people now dedicating it.  It was an image, said Anderson, not just of Lee, not just of Virginians, but of all Americans “from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.”

Moreover, the monument would teach “generations yet unborn,” not about who Lee was, but “lessons of his life.”  John Mitchell, Jr. editor of the Richmond Planet and a Black Richmond city council member, explained there was no mistaking what those “lessons” of Lee’s life were at the monument’s dedication.  Describing the scene, Mitchell wrote, “Rebel flags were everywhere displayed and the long lines of Confederate veterans who embraced the opportunity and attended the reunion to join again in the ‘rebel yell’ told in no uncertain tones that they still clung to theories which were presumably buried for all eternity.”  They may have lost the war, but these former Confederates were not giving up the vision of the nation their war was meant to create.  Instead of leaving the United States, they would etch that vision into its landscape.  Speaking in 1890, Anderson was in many ways foreshadowing what was coming as white Virginians beat back the successes of Reconstruction and Black political enfranchisement and solidified elite white men’s control over the government.

We believe public spaces and public objects, like monuments, can move the nation. Said differently: they are political. They do political work. Think for a minute about your school field trips to places like the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. or the local National Park. What was it they wanted you to learn? What did you feel as you took it in? How did your teachers frame your visits? They wanted to teach you something, not just about the past, but about the present and the future. Look no further than the “history” page of the National Mall’s website, which reads, “The sites of National Mall and Memorial Parks are a testament to America's past and present where the values of our nation are presented.” These spaces, and the monuments that inhabit them, present the nation.

With this in mind, I hope we can all agree that if these public spaces are meant to inscribe the American nation onto its physical landscape, if they are about articulating to viewers who we are and what we are about, then change can be good. Change is good. Change is a reflection of our desire to create a democracy where everyone’s voice is heard, acknowledged, and valued. And change is needed, because who we were as a nation when these particular monuments went up at the turn of the twentieth century is not who we want to be anymore. If we start looking around, we’ll probably notice other public spaces that need revision too. Not because we want to “rewrite” the past or overwrite history, but because these spaces are about us here and now and what we want our future to look like. That is what they have always been about, and again, I hope we can agree that the nation we looked to become during the glory days of monument construction (read: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) is not who we hope to be now.

It is up to us to decide what it is the United States will become in the twenty-first century, and I hope that as Monument Avenue redevelops it will involve a lot more inclusive public input than it did the first time around. I hope too, that we the people will hold those in office accountable for that and create public spaces that reflect a desire to hear, acknowledge, and respect all the voices in our nation rather than the most powerful.

Rebecca Capobianco Toy is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow at William & Mary, in Virginia. She holds a MA from Villanova University with an emphasis on US and public history. Prior to returning to graduate school she worked in education and interpretation for the National Park Service. 

Sources and Further Reading:

For footage of the press conferences announcing the monuments’ removal: https://www.wavy.com/news/virginia/northam-holding-press-conference-at-11-a-m-set-to-announce-plans-to-move-richmonds-robert-e-lee-statue/

For primary sources directly related to the development and evolution of Monument Avenue: https://onmonumentave.com/; for a variety of relevant reading lists, see specifically: https://onmonumentave.com/resources

John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Blair, William A. Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Bruggeman, Seth C. Here, George Washington was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Dailey, Jane. Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Domby, Adam. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Glassberg, David. Sense of History: the Place of the Past in American Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Mills, Cynthia J., and Pamela H. Simpson. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005.

Savage, Kirk. Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Oakland: University of California Press, 2011.

Shackel, Paul A.  Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post Bellum Landscape. New York: AltaMira Press, 2003.

Shaffer, Marguerite. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

Upton, Dell. “Confederate Monuments and Civic Values in the Wake of Charlottesville,” https://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sah-blog/sah-blog/2017/09/13/confederate-monuments-and-civic-values-in-the-wake-of-charlottesville

Upton, Dell. Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Upton, Dell. What Can and Can’t be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Wright, Amos W. “The Lee Monument at Richmond.” Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1890.