The monument to Jefferson Davis on Monument Avenue would come down but statues to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and J.E.B. Stuart, and naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury would remain standing under recommendations submitted by the Monument Avenue Commission.
Under the Commission’s proposals, interpretative signage would be added to the four statues to explain the historical context of why the statues were erected. Additionally, the Commission recommended installing additional monuments on the boulevard, including one to the United States Colored Troops, a regiment of former slaves.
To take effect, pending legal challenges must be resolved and a state law on war memorials must be amended.
The Monument Avenue Commission report is a thoughtful document that examines multiple facets of the controversy and acknowledges all sides of the debate. Its recommendations, I submit, reflect the best-possible balance achievable in these divisive times.
Jefferson Davis’s 1907 memorial is the most odious to modern-day sensitivities. Stated the report: “Of all the statues [the Davis statue] is the most unabashedly Lost Cause in its design and sentiment.”
Not only was Davis not a native-born Virginian, not only was he not a military hero, but the monument glorifies his role in the secession. As the report explains, “Davis’s pose depicted him giving the speech in which he resigned from the United States Senate. In that speech, which is quoted on the entablature behind him, he referred to the state’s rights guaranteed by the Constitution as the justification for secession.” The allegorical figure atop the column behind him, Vindicatrix, was based on the word vindicate. The statue clearly reinforced the goals of the Lost Cause movement.
By contrast, the monument to Lee was unveiled in 1890, twenty years after his death but twelve years before Virginia’s 1902 state constitution restored white supremacy. The statue depoliticized the Civil War by emphasizing Lee’s personal virtues and sacrifice. The erection of the statue was part of a larger movement that downplayed slavery, but the main impetus of which, states the report, was “to help the South walk away from defeat and humiliation and reenter American life with dignity.”
The statues to Stuart and Jackson were erected in 1907 during the white-supremacy era. Still, the statuary emphasized personal virtues. The Stuart statue showed him leading a charge. The Jackson monument emphasized the serenity and spirituality of its subject.
There are many stories here to be told. There are the stories about the historical figures themselves. There are stories about thinking that went into erecting the statues. There are stories about the South’s defeat and humiliation, Reconstruction, the reconciliation of North and South, the nostalgia for the passing of the Civil War generation, the ideology of the Lost Cause, the rise of white racial supremacy, and the institutionalization of Jim Crow oppression of blacks. There are stories, too, about the overthrow of Jim Crow and the struggle for individual rights. A common theme across the arc of Virginia history is the articulation of and struggle for individual rights. It is a complex story, and it doesn’t fit the easy narratives of Left or Right.
Richmond stood at the center of these great debates, and it stands at the center of the national dialogue on race and reconciliation today. We Richmonders can erase the history, or we can reinterpret it anew. If done properly, Richmond can serve as a model for the rest of the nation. With its museums, statues and historic buildings supplemented by signage, websites, historical databases, mobile apps and videos, the city can become a living museum for understanding, reinterpreting — and moving beyond — the most painful chapter in America’s history.
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