From the center of the green, in the very middle of town, rose a jagged black trapezoid tied at the base like a giant chifforobe wrapped for protection until the movers arrive. It looked for all the world like a giant trash bag from which you could make out the crown of the general’s head and the nose and tail of the horse at opposite ends. The whole effect of the giant trapezoid in the middle of a stately park brought more attention to the general, and to the monuments to the Confederacy, not less, though the tarp had been a short-term compromise to keep it from public view. Tourists came in search of it.
“Guess that’s him right there,” a man said, crossing the street to take a closer look. The tourists waited their turn to take their picture in front of the cloaked general. Then they made the pilgrimage to the street across from the statue, the street where Heather Heyer had been killed. It had become a block-long memorial to her, piles of dying roses and sunflowers, heartbroken messages scrawled in the pavement and on the sides of brick walls, a plea for humanity.
We are witness
Never forget
The minute we look away,
the minute we stop fighting, bigotry wins
There is no more room for hate
That all men are created equal
Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. “Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”
The Confederacy would lose the war in April 1865, but in the succeeding decades would win the all-important peace. The Confederates would manage to take hold of the public imagination with gauzy portrayals of the Lost Cause. Two of the most influential and popular films of the early twentieth century—Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind—fed the country and the world the Confederate version of the war and portrayed the people of the degraded lowest caste as capable only of brute villainy or childlike buffoonery.
Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. After a decade of Reconstruction, just as African-Americans were seeking entry to mainstream society, the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them.
The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.
It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.
Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come.
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By the time of the rally in Charlottesville, there were some 230 memorials to Robert E. Lee in the United States, including the Robert E. Lee Hotel in Lexington, Virginia, Robert E. Lee Park in Miami, Florida, and Robert E. Lee Creek in Boise National Forest in Idaho, two thousand miles from the old Confederacy. There are scores of plaques, busts, schools, and roadways throughout the country—a Robert E. Lee Street in Mobile, Alabama, a Robert E. Lee Drive in Tupelo, Mississippi, a Robert E. Lee Boulevard in Charleston, South Carolina, a General Robert E. Lee Road in Brunswick, Georgia, and a Robert E. Lee Lane in Gila Bend, Arizona.
Students take classes at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Tyler, Texas, among others, and at Lee Junior High School in Monroe, Louisiana. Eight states in the Union have a county named after Robert E. Lee: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. The third Monday in January is Robert E. Lee Day in both Mississippi and Alabama.
Robert E. Lee was a well-born graduate of West Point Academy, a pragmatic and cunning military strategist, a political moderate, for his times and his region, and a Virginia slaveholder who saw slavery as a necessary evil that burdened the owners more than the people they enslaved. “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically,” he once wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise merciful Providence.”
Like other slaveholders, he made full use of the “painful discipline” of which he spoke. In 1859, three of the people he enslaved on his Virginia plantation—a man named Wesley Norris and his sister and cousin—fled north and were captured near the Pennsylvania border. They were forced back to Lee’s plantation. Upon their arrival, Lee told them that “he would teach us a lesson we would never forget,” Wesley Norris later recounted. Lee ordered his overseer to strip them to the waist, tie them to posts, and whip the men fifty lashes and the woman twenty, on their bare backs. When the overseer resisted, Lee got the county constable and told him to “lay it on well,” which the constable did. “Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh,” Norris recalled, “Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”
This was common practice and standard procedure during much of the 246 years of slavery. Had these and even more gruesome atrocities occurred in another country, at another time, to another set of people other than the lowest caste, they would have been considered crimes against humanity in violation of international conventions. But the slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society.
Lee was never called to account for what he did to the Norrises nor to the many families he broke apart as an enslaver, the children he separated from parents, the husbands from wives. Even after leading the war of southern secession that ended with more casualties than any other on this soil, Lee faced few penalties associated with treason. President Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat a
nd onetime slaveowner who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after Lincoln’s assassination, granted amnesty to most of the Confederates in a bid to move on from sectional tensions and to put the matter to rest. Lee did no jail time and suffered little censure, though he was no longer permitted to vote, and he was forced to relinquish his plantation, which the government coveted and converted into Arlington National Cemetery.
It turned out that, after the war, many white northerners felt a greater kinship with the former Confederates who had betrayed the Union than with the people whose free labor built the country’s wealth and over whose freedom the Civil War had been fought. The North’s conciliatory embrace of the former Confederates compelled Frederick Douglass to remind Americans that “there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget,” adding that “it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”
Robert E. Lee went on to become president of a college that would later add his name to its own, Washington and Lee University in Virginia. This granted him social standing and a worshipful legacy, and allowed him a platform to weigh in on issues of the day with authority if he chose.
His reputation only grew after his death in 1870. As the country embraced segregation, north and south, with redlining and restrictive covenants keeping black people out of white neighborhoods and the races separate, he became not just a southern hero, but a national one. He is interred at a chapel named after him on the campus of Washington and Lee, Confederate flags flanking, up until recently, a mold of the general in repose. Among the memorials in his honor well beyond the South, there came to be plaques and busts of him in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, elementary schools named after him in Long Beach and San Diego, and five different Robert E. Lee stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service. Usually, it is the victors of war who erect monuments and commemorations to themselves. Here, an outsider might not be able to tell which side had prevailed over the other.
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At two o’clock in the morning on April 24, 2017, a SWAT team positioned its sharpshooters at strategic locations at a dangerous intersection in downtown New Orleans. K-9 units patrolled the grounds and perimeter. At the center of the targeted area, men in face masks and bulletproof vests went about their perilous duty in the darkness. Others had refused to risk their lives for this, declined even to attempt the operation, after the death threats and firebombing that preceded this moment. These men in face masks were the only ones willing to take up the mission. They were removing the first of four Confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans.
Tensions had been building since 2015 when Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a fifth-generation Louisianan whose ancestors had been in the state since before the Civil War, decided it was time for the Confederate statues to go. That June, a gunman inspired by the Lost Cause of the Confederacy massacred nine black parishioners as they prayed at the end of Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Under international pressure, the South Carolina state legislature and Gov. Nikki Haley agreed to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol and put it in the Confederate Relic Room in the State Museum. South Carolina had been the first state to secede from the Union in the run-up to the Civil War, and this gesture opened the way for other states to follow if they could gather the will.
Landrieu was moved by this and was further awakened by his friend, the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, to the perspective of the descendants of enslaved people who had been terrorized under the Confederate banner.
The monuments in question included one for Confederate president Jefferson Davis and one for Gen. Robert E. Lee, the latter of whom had no direct connection to New Orleans but whose statue was erected by the city as the Jim Crow regime took hold after the end of Reconstruction.
Now, more than a century later, the city was within its right to remove its own property, and Mayor Landrieu thought it would be a fairly straightforward process of public hearings and a vote by a city council as progressive as the city it represented. With the country newly reminded of the enduring nature of white supremacy, supporters came forward, including an influential citizen who pledged to donate $170,000 toward the cost of removing the monument as long as he could be assured of anonymity.
The city tested the idea with the public. At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. “They are ashamed,” he said. “The question is, why aren’t we?”
As time wore on, though, things got ugly. The city had trouble finding a contractor to remove the statues. Every contractor who considered the city’s request got threatening attacks at home, at work, and on social media. It turned out that not one construction company in New Orleans wanted to touch it. Finally a contractor in Baton Rouge agreed to do it, but he pulled out, too, after his car was firebombed. The Confederate sympathizers made it clear that “any company that dared step forward,” Landrieu wrote, “would pay a price.”
The faithful of the old Confederacy held candlelight vigils at the monuments and clogged the city hall switchboard, cursing and threatening the receptionists. Soon the benefactor backed out of his promise of donating money for the removal effort. If it were ever discovered, he said, “I’ll get run out of town.”
The issue was now dividing all of New Orleans. “People who had served for years on civic boards quit,” Landrieu said. “There was a “deep, mean chill we felt when we entered a room for a public event.” Some of the mayor’s own neighbors and some of the people he thought of as friends averted their gaze when they saw him. He had not anticipated “the ferocity of the opposition.”
Finally, the city found a construction company willing to take on what had become hazard duty in a virtual war zone. It could be seen as karma that the only construction crew willing to risk their lives to remove the Confederate statues was African-American. Due to the dangers of the operation, the company charged four times what the city had anticipated to remove the three largest monuments, and said the company would only go in if there was police protection. By now, the city had few other options if it wanted the statues gone.
The mayor decided first to remove a monument to a supremacist organization called the White League because white citizens seemed to have the least attachment to that one. Still, the city took no chances.
That night, the men wore long sleeves and masks both to protect their identities and to conceal their skin color. Cardboard covered the company name on its trucks and cranes and hid the vehicle license plates. Still, the pro-Confederate forces poured sand in the gas tank of one of the cranes. As the workers proceeded to remove the obelisk in pieces, drones lurked above them taking unauthorized photographs of the operation. People in the crowd trained high-definition cameras on the workers to try to identify them. Finally, the pieces of the obelisk were down and driven to a storage shed.
The next month, the Robert E. Lee monument, a larger-than-life bronze likeness, arms crossed, standing on a sixty-foot marble column in a manicured circle in the center of town, was the last of the four to be removed. His figure dangled from a crane in full daylight and, this time, to cheering crowds.
Mayor Landrieu gave a speech that day to remind citizens of why this needed to happen. “These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” he said, “ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.”
They were more than mere statuary. “They were created as political weapons,” he would later write, “part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.”
The day
that New Orleans wrested Robert E. Lee from his column, the Alabama state legislature sent a bill to the Alabama governor, Kay Ivey. As in most of the former Confederacy after the post-civil-rights realignment, Republicans now dominated Alabama. They were now fighting to keep monuments to the very cause that the one-time party of Lincoln had fought in the Civil War. The new Alabama bill sent to the governor that day made it illegal to remove any monument that had been in place for twenty years or more, which in effect meant that nobody could lay a hand on a single Confederate statue in Alabama.
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An ocean away, in the former capital of the Third Reich, Nigel Dunkley, a former British officer and now a historian of Nazi Germany, drove along a curve of what is left of the Berlin Wall. He pointed to the neoclassical buildings of the old Weimar Republic that were for a time run by the Nazis and have been reclaimed since the reunification of Germany. We drew near the Brandenburg Gate, which survived the Allied bombing in the Second World War, and then reached a wide-open space in the very center of downtown.
The office towers and government buildings came to a halt and gave way to a modernist Stonehenge on 4.7 acres, the size of three football fields, where once there had been the death strip to catch defectors in the Cold War. Two thousand seven hundred eleven concrete rectangles, as if a field of chiseled coffins of varying heights, stand in formation, separated by just enough space for people to walk between them and to contemplate their meaning. The stones undulate and dip toward the center, where the ground hollows out, so that when a visitor reaches the interior, the traffic noise dies away, the air grows still, and you are trapped in shadow, isolated with the magnitude of what the stones represent. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe who perished during the Holocaust. There is no sign, no gate, no fence, no list of the 6 million. The stones are as regimented as the Nazis and as anonymous as the captives shorn of identity in the concentration camps. Since 2005, the memorial has borne mute witness to anyone who wishes to come, day or night.
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