Virginians woke up Monday morning, December 21, 2020, to the news that the statue of Robert E. Lee was removed overnight from statuary hall of the U.S. Capitol. The Lee statue had stood in the hall as one of Virginia’s two designated representative statues for 111 years. Each state is allowed two statues, some of which are in statuary hall while others are located in other areas of the Capitol building. The second Virginia representative is George Washington.
So why was Robert E. Lee removed?
I’ve been addressing the issue of Confederate statues and other monuments to the Confederacy in a series of posts beginning with “The Rational Case for Removing Confederate Monuments.” Two subsequent posts (to date) looked at whether such removal “erases history” and whether “added context” was possible. Those posts provide some needed background for evaluating the current action.
In short, many jurisdictions – states, localities, federal – have been reassessing the message put forward by honoring Confederate leadership such as Lee and Jefferson Davis. Several statues have been removed, most notably statues in New Orleans (Lee, Beauregard) and Charleston, South Carolina (John C. Calhoun). A handful of statues were pulled down by mobs during this past summer’s protests following the death of George Floyd and others. Similarly, a few schools have been renamed (Robert E. Lee High School in Virginia is now Barack Obama High School). The Defense Department has indicated it will rename army bases currently named after Confederate generals. Overall, however, the vast majority of statues and names remain in place, some perhaps forever while others while public discussion continues.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2020 ordered the movement of several portraits of prior Speakers who had, after serving as leader of the House of Representatives, then rejected their U.S. citizenship to become leaders in the Confederacy. These portraits remain in the Capitol but now are found in less prominent locations, in essence reflecting their downfall from grace. The current decision by the state of Virginia to remove Robert E. Lee follows in this general reassessment of Confederate iconography. The moves are not restricted to Democratic leaders; Republican Governor Ron DeSantis spearheaded the effort to replace Florida’s statue of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith with black civil rights activist and educator, Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune also has a large statue in Lincoln Park, where the summer of 2020 saw efforts to save a statue of Lincoln and freedman Archer Alexander from destruction.
Other statues in statuary hall have been replaced for a variety of reasons by their sponsoring states. Ohio recently replaced a statue of former Governor William Allen with famed inventor Thomas Edison. In 2019, Nebraska replaced its statue of William Jennings Bryan with Ponca Chief Standing Bear. Ohio replaced James Harlan with agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug. In 2009, California replaced Thomas Starr King with former Governor and President Ronald Reagan. At least eight states have made recent replacements, seven have replacements pending, and three have replacements under consideration. Some of these are to replace Confederate statues, but most are for other reasons. Reevaluation of which icons of history each state wants to represent them are not unusual.
Which gets us back to Robert E. Lee. As a former Confederate state and location of the capital of the Confederacy, Virginia has had to assess and reevaluate its place in modern America. A statue of Jefferson Davis on Monument Avenue in Richmond was torn down by vandals during the George Floyd protests. A large equestrian statue of “Stonewall” Jackson was removed by the state. The removal of the Lee statue from statuary hall is a continuation of this reassessment.
The likely replacement of Lee is civil rights activist Barbara Johns, who in 1951, at the age of 16, led a walkout at her segregated high school to protest substandard conditions. Her lawsuit against the county was folded into the landmark Brown v Board of Education case resulting in the Supreme Court decision declaring “separate but equal” unconstitutional. Johns would be the only teenager represented in statuary hall. The Commission for Historical Statues approved the Johns statue and the Virginia legislature is expected to agree, after which a sculptor will be commissioned.
As states, local communities, and in some cases, federal actors continue to reassess the historical record, we are likely to see an increased effort for more inclusive representation in public spaces. Each of us can play a role by communicating our views to lawmakers at all levels of government. Meanwhile, I will continue to examine the issues associated with Confederate monuments in future posts. I’ll also take a look at “overflow” of the Confederate monument debate into other potentially controversial figures such as Christopher Columbus, our slaveholding founding fathers, and remarkably, even Abraham Lincoln.
David J. Kent is an avid traveler, scientist, and Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World as well as two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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[Photo Credit: Glynn Wilson, Why is Robert E. Lee’s Statue in the U.S. Capitol Not Yet the Subject of Controversy? | New American Journal]
Over the last couple of years, two mountain peaks with which I’m familiar were renamed from “Jeff Davis”. One is nearby in the Sierras, and another across the state in the Great Basin National Park.
The local peak, apparently named by a group of Confederate sympathizers from a mining settlement in the area, was renamed “Da-ek Dow Go-et Mountain” from the local area’s indigenous “Washoe” people’s language for, “saddle between points”. An outcropping on the peak was also renamed “Sentinel Rock” per an 1883 survey map.
As for the peak in the in Great Basin National Park, it had originally acquired its name on maps during an 1855 survey by Lt. Col. Edward Steptoe of the U.S. Army Corps in honor of his then commander, the U.S. Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis.
Early proposals were to rename the mountain “Smalls Peak” after Robert Smalls, an escaped slave from South Carolina who fought with the Union Army and who was eventually elected to Congress in South Carolina. I can understand the appeal. However, I sincerely think that cooler heads prevailed in this case, and it was officially returned to its original, indigenous “Shoshone” name for the peak, “Doso Doyabi”, meaning “white mountain”.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think the American penchant for elevating personalities opens itself to a constant stream of contextual reinterpretations, historical revisionism, and a degree of propaganda. To some, Lee’s image may have signified a respectful remembrance, gazing up at the souls of those who gave their lives honoring a military command. To others, it was simply a way of casting one’s gaze toward a past that utterly disrespected their own humanity. Objectivity requires both interpretations. And that means someone will always be justifiably offended at some point, regardless of whose image graces a pedestal.
Maybe it’s time to reconsider altogether how we portray our history. Perhaps artifacts, source materials, historical documents, stories, places themselves? Real humans, even those we would follow, are flawed and fragile beings, navigating a complex landscape with only what we have at hand at a particular moment in time. Clearly understanding the context and the result of that movement through history seems far more important to me than standing in awe at the feet of the latest granite god.
Thanks for all the great information. The trend toward renaming with Native American names (including the renaming of Mt. McKinley to Denali) seems like a good idea.
I wonder if more people aren’t shifting to a perspective similar to yours, i.e., less emphasis on elevating personalities and more on broader, or perhaps grander, themes. The constraints on that are obvious in some cases, like for example the replacement of Lee with Barbara Johns; statuary hall statues aren’t so amendable to being conceptual. Mountains would be easier, and seemingly more appropriate given how they predate anyone who they might be named after.
Now that I’m fully immersed in my historian hat, artifacts, source materials, and documents are a way of life. While they are eminently useful in understanding history, outside the Archives and similar places they don’t have much artistic, which is at least part of the rational for having statuary. I do think monuments, which would include statues as well as naming, do have a place in presenting history. But maybe we can get away from putting individual icons up on pedestals and develop more conceptual monuments that would invoke a broader representation of history, not just the white male perspective. The Barbara Johns statue, while still an individual, does do this in some respects as it brings in a young, black, woman whose actions contributed to the end of segregation – some big themes represented by one individual.
As you say, context matters. And there is a lot of context that has been omitted. It’s well beyond time to rectify that problem. How to do it, well, is still a source of debate.
An upper division US History class affected my perceptions of how we present our own history. Approaching it as a study, each student posed a question and formed a hypothesis. Then, we both found and were assigned related primary source materials that we needed to cite in order to either confirm or refute what we thought we knew. For me this, involved a series of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as some related writings by various “Founding Fathers”, a United States treaty, and Joseph Story’s, “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States”.
I would compare the experience to opening the hood of a car. We easily notice a car’s paint and lines, find comfortable seats, observe so-so gas-mileage, and complain that the AC doesn’t work on a hot day. What we don’t see is the inner-workings of how it all comes together. So we don’t understand why or how things function, our responsibilities in their maintenance, what’s likely to fail over time, or what could be improved.
As I know you’re well aware, history is complicated and messy, kludged together while in motion and using whatever was available at the time, and by means of the knowledge, skills and tools available to the people who put it together. These people are certainly a part of that history, and I don’t at all advocate removing them from the record. My worry is that focusing only on a particular individual, especially as the symbol of a cause or worthwhile achievement, but without a clear understanding of her or his place in the larger context of interactions risks reducing our understanding to something like the binary interpretation of a “Check Engine” light.
Sounds like a great course. Digging into the primary material buried behind the final documents and decisions (under the hood of the car) really is necessary to understand the dynamics of compromise. And it’s all compromise since people have different views on how to achieve goals (not to mention that the goals themselves may differ). That’s something that only a small percentage of Americans ever get to see, and then only within a narrow area of study.
I agree we shouldn’t remove people from the historical record, and see no danger of that by removing the Lee statue from the Capitol. It is, after all, just a statue, and in a place that very few people actually see. Statue gone, but everyone knows who Robert E. Lee was and his place in history, even if some of us have a distorted view of that place. As you say, the key is understanding the larger context. That is where we have largely failed, and it’s one of the reasons Confederate statues went up and remain up. The replacement statue of Barbara Johns, though it too won’t be seen by very many people, will at least bring an entire historical debate about segregation that is largely missing from the statutory record (pun intended).
That broader public discussion of the complete history is clearly lacking. I’m hoping the new administration, with it’s “looks like America” focus, will help get us on a path where that broader discussion can occur.
Mr. David Kent, you write: “As states, local communities, and in some cases, federal actors continue to reassess the historical record, we are likely to see an increased effort for more inclusive representation in public spaces. Each of us can play a role by communicating our views to lawmakers at all levels of government. . . . I’ll also take a look at “overflow” of the Confederate monument debate into other potentially controversial figures such as Christopher Columbus, our slaveholding founding fathers, and remarkably, even Abraham Lincoln.”
You also note in the first paragraph: “The second Virginia representative [in the statuary hall of the U.S. Capitol] is George Washington.”
Mr. Kent, you suddenly appeared as a “Like” blogger of my Letter to the Editor in the Richmond Review titled “Do Not Rename Lincoln High School.” One of the schools that the elected members of the San Francisco School Board plan on renaming is Washington High School in the same district of San Francisco in which I live, the Richmond District.
You write in the first paragraph: “Each of us can play a role by communicating our views to lawmakers at all levels of government.”
You can add your prominent name to the causes in San Francisco for both President Abraham Lincoln and President George Washington by posting your thoughts in the Richmond Review or some other local media source that you consider appropriate.
A reminder: You note this injustice will touch “remarkably, even Abraham Lincoln.”
Please publicly express yourself in San Francisco on this issue. I do not want San Francisco, the city in which I live, to be the first city in the United States to dishonor and disgrace the character and reputation of President Abraham Lincoln by Renaming Abraham Lincoln High School for allegedly “good causes” which I have proven by the historical record to be false.
Thanks for your note. Yes, I saw your letter regarding the San Francisco school board plan and agree with your sentiments. Local voices carry more weight with local decisions, and I’ve found local papers less likely to print letters from outside entities. That said, I do intend to follow through on presenting a Lincoln perspective to the board. You might also want to reach out to the Huntington Library, which has a significant Lincoln collection. Also, the Lincoln Memorial Shrine may be willing to provide some support. While both are in the Los Angeles and not San Francisco area, they are at least in California and likely to have more impact. Their website links are below:
https://www.lincolnshrine.org/
https://www.huntington.org/collecting-lincoln
I have a descendent of slaves the last thing I would have wanted to see representing the state of Virginia in the US capital what’s the status of Robert E Lee Now I do understand that he fought for the confederacy Because Virginia was his home and I can understand it the reason I would not want him to represent Virginia is he owned people Forced him to work for him abused him sold them broke up families and the list goes on and on I know who I am I know who my family was that was slave we own two farms that was part of the plantations that my ancestors work as slaves the statues are beautiful but put them in a place where people that want to see them can see them not in the US Capital not on Monument Avenue about 10 blocks from my home well I have to see it every day how would you like it to have been your family color have nothing to do with it hatred have everything to do with it
Indeed, one of the major rationales for removal are the continued reinforcement of white supremacist views, both for the white and for black viewers of these monuments. The first post of the series looked at the three time periods reflected by every statue, the last of which is now: https://www.davidjkent-writer.com/2020/10/20/the-rational-case-for-removing-confederate-monuments/
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