He cut a handsome figure in his dapper gray, but alas, Bobby Lee is no more. The general who surrendered on behalf of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, effectively ending this country’s first Civil War, no longer stands any chance of remounting his faithful steed, Traveller, atop the pedestal where Lee once grimly surveyed the town of Charlottesville, Virginia. The statue was removed in 2021, four years after the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that had sought to preserve it. It was finally reduced to molten bronze last Saturday.
Immortalized as much for his formal dress and bearing at the Appomattox court house as for his indisputable skill on the battlefield, Lee remained a revered, almost legendary figure throughout most of this nation long after after the war’s conclusion. His was the noble and confident visage of what became euphemistically referred to as the “Lost Cause,” a gauzy, sentimental concoction to salve the wounded pride of Southern whites that served to obscure the brutal institution of slavery they’d fought so hard to preserve. More than 150 years after his death, Lee’s memory still commanded awe and respect in most segments of this still white-dominated country. It was truly a remarkable and unique legacy for a traitor who arguably should have been executed as an example to his Southern brethren.
But those were different times, we are assured. Well … perhaps not so much.
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As The Washington Post’s Teo Armus and Hadley Green reported from an undisclosed location (identified only as a foundry “somewhere in the U.S. South”), the very idea of removing the 6,000-pound statue of Lee had sparked the ire of white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville in 2017, inspiring them to march in the streets in support of racism and Donald Trump. Even two years after its removal in 2021, the same monument to slavery that had prompted shouts of “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us!” from a well-coiffed, business-casual mob of torch-bearing heirs to the Ku Klux Klan had to be melted down in an atmosphere of total secrecy, with only a few allowed to witness its final demise.
[T]he statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.
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Because this country has made such remarkable strides in resolving its racial divide since 1865, Armus and Green were only permitted to watch the dismemberment and melting process upon the condition that they did not reveal the (Black-owned) foundry where it occurred, or even the town or state. Those who'd gathered to observe were understandably concerned about violence perpetrated by modern-day racists who tend to congregate online to plan their terrorism rather than gathering in plowed cornfields at midnight to burn crosses.
The melting of the statue into its base bronze was overseen by Swords Into Plowshares, a project initiated by Charlottesville’s Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a Black-led museum tasked by the city to come up with an appropriate plan for its disposal. It follows a long campaign and two lawsuits by various pro-Confederate history organizations that sought to preserve or refashion it. As Armus and Green report:
The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the century-old monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons.
But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry outside Virginia, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.
The last lawsuit was finally dismissed last month, and the statue was cut apart and melted only hours following the expiration of the plaintiffs’ right to appeal.
The Post article describes and depicts (in video) the dismemberment of the statue in exquisite detail. Lee was first chopped into nine pieces. His severed, hollow head was then gashed open so it could more easily fit into the furnace.
The decision to dispose of Lee in such a seemingly unflattering, even violent fashion was considered. As pointed out by Dr. Erin Thompson (another witness to the statue’s demolition) in a guest essay for The New York Times, the tradition of melting statues to express contempt not only for the person so memorialized but for the political and cultural impetus that inspired the statue in the first place goes back to the days of the American Revolution. As Thompson writes:
That’s why the idea to melt Lee down, as violent as it might initially seem, struck me as so apt. Confederate monuments went up with rich, emotional ceremonies that created historical memory and solidified group identity. The way we remove them should be just as emotional, striking and memorable. Instead of quietly tucking statues away, we can use monuments one final time to bind ourselves together into new communities.
It happened with one of the first metal monuments to arrive in the American colonies. A gilded lead statue of George III, it was melted down in 1776 to make ammunition for the fight for democracy. Melting Lee down and turning him into something new is a violent act and also a hopeful one.
Thompson points out another salient fact about this particular statue: It was erected in 1924, not anywhere near the end of the Civil War but in the midst of the Jim Crow era. Thus its purpose can fairly be characterized, as Thompson observes, “to entrench a system of racial hierarchy.”
The social environment in Charlottesville before and during the time the statue was erected, as Thompson notes, confirms that interpretation:
The monument was commissioned in 1917, amid racial tensions that two years later would boil over into the Red Summer, when white mobs killed or injured hundreds of Black people during race riots across the nation. Days before the monument was unveiled, the Klan marched through the city.
As explained on Swords Into Plowshares website, the bronze ingots obtained from Lee’s statue will be transformed into a public art work to be displayed in Charlottesville. The group is currently compiling suggestions for its goal: to refashion this former monument to our country’s most shameful legacy into “an artistic expression of democratic values and inclusive aspirations.”
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