RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia has removed busts and a statue honoring Confederate generals and officials from its iconic state capitol. That includes a bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee placed where he stood to assume command of the state’s armed forces in the Civil War nearly 160 years ago.
They are the latest Confederate symbols to be removed or removed in the weeks following George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police that sparked a nationwide protest movement.
Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat, quietly ordered the statue of Lee and the busts of Generals JEB Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and other retirees from the historic House Chamber Old woman. A moving team worked Thursday night, carefully removing the monuments and their plaques, loading them onto a truck, and taking them to an undisclosed location.
The stealth approach avoids the possibility of protests or a lawsuit to keep the monuments in place, but can provoke criticism that the monuments were moved without public discussion.
“Virginia has a story to tell that extends far beyond glorifying the Confederacy and its participants,” Filler-Corn said in a statement. “Now is the time to provide context for our Capitol to truly tell the whole story of the community.”
Designed by Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia State Capitol is the first state capitol to open after the American Revolution and was used as the Confederate Capitol for much of the Civil War.
Filler-Corn’s move to eliminate Confederate generals comes a few weeks after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ordered the removal of a different Lee monument – a 21-foot (6-meter) bronze equestrian sculpture in historic Richmond Monument Avenue.
A lawsuit has delayed the removal of that statue, but other Confederate monuments on the street, once one of the nation’s most prominent Confederation tribute collections, have already fallen. And earlier this week, the United States House passed a bill to remove the statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders from the United States Capitol. The prospects for the bill in the Senate are uncertain.
In Virginia, the Old House Chamber was where lawmakers first met when the Capitol opened in 1788 and was used as a House meeting place for more than 100 years before the Capitol building was expanded. It is not currently used for official purposes when the legislature meets.
The chamber’s history is long and varied: then-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, presided over a trial there that saw former Vice President Aaron Burr acquitted of treason, but much of the iconography in the room is dedicated to the Confederates.
Virginia delegates voted in the chamber to separate from the Union in April 1861. A few days later, Lee entered the room to take formal command of the state army.
“Trusting in almighty God, an approving conscience and the help of my fellow citizens, I dedicate myself to the service of my home state, in whose name I will only draw my sword again,” said Lee, according to an inscription on the statue.
Seven years later, after the South lost the war, it was the same room where a new constitutional convention was meeting that included black delegates for the first time.
Like many Confederate monuments, most of the recently removed from the Virginia Capitol were erected decades after the Civil War. They were commissioned and built during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed new segregation laws, and during the “Lost Cause” movement, when historians and others attempted to portray the Southern rebellion as a fight to defend the rights of the states, not slavery.
The Lee statue was approved in 1928 with the help of the then governor. Harry Byrd, who would later lead the state’s Mass Resistance to racially integrated schools. Its price of $ 25,000 (approximately $ 370,000 currently) was paid by the state, donations, and an in-kind donation from the sculptor.
Busts of Davis and Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, were donated to Virginia in the 1950s by Mississippi and Georgia.
Filler-Corn also announced that it has appointed Del. Delores McQuinn to lead a new advisory group to advise the speaker on “possible future actions” of other historical artifacts controlled by the House.
The House does not control Capitol Square, the outdoor area around the Capitol, which includes statues of Stonewall Jackson and William “Extra Billy” Smith, former Governor and Confederate Brigadier General. The authority to remove those statues is a matter of debate and may need the full approval of the legislature.
Confederate monuments are not the only tributes to lost causes in and around the Capitol, a building built with slave labor where almost all the portraits hanging on the walls are of a white man.
A large statue of Byrd, the segregationist of the arch, stands in Capitol Square and two portraits hang prominently on Capitol Hill.
In the Chamber of the Chamber, directly behind where the speakers of the Chamber preside, there is a plaque in honor of Nathaniel Bacon. He was a wealthy settler who led a failed rebellion in the 1670s whose goals included the unfettered murder of Indians and the seizure of their lands.
Follow NBCBLK on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
