{"id":4934,"date":"2020-07-28T22:59:40","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T02:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/?p=4934"},"modified":"2024-12-21T12:07:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T17:07:50","slug":"the-origin-story-of-monument-avenue-americas-most-controversial-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/the-origin-story-of-monument-avenue-americas-most-controversial-street\/","title":{"rendered":"The origin story of Monument Avenue, America\u2019s most controversial street"},"content":{"rendered":"

The boulevard that long defined Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, began as a ploy by a savvy real estate developer.<\/h2>\n
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A monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee was erected in 1890 next to a tobacco field planted as an exhibition garden of Virginia’s leading cash crop. The statue gradually became the center of a fashionable all-white neighborhood along Richmond’s tree-lined Monument Avenue. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY COOK COLLECTION, THE VALENTINE<\/p><\/div>\n

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Empty plinths colorfully spray-painted with social justice slogans now punctuate the South\u2019s grandest boulevard. In the aftermath of the May 25\u00a0killing of George Floyd<\/a>\u00a0at the hands of Minneapolis police, protestors and city contractors\u00a0brought down the immense memorials<\/a>\u00a0to Confederate leaders along Richmond\u2019s tree-lined Monument Avenue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cTimes have changed, and removing these statues will allow the healing process to begin,\u201d said Levar Stoney, the city\u2019s 39-year-old African-American mayor. \u201cRichmond is no longer the capital of the Confederacy. It is filled with diversity and love for all.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet the 12-ton equestrian figure of General Robert E. Lee continues to tower over one of the Virginia capital\u2019s most elegant neighborhoods, its fate tied up in litigation. The statue celebrates the leader of Confederate forces, but its origin reveals a bitter struggle between his nephew and a biracial coalition to define the New South in the aftermath of the Civil War.<\/p>\n

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As Union troops approached the beleaguered city in April 1865, Confederate soldiers set fire to its warehouses, and the conflagration eventually destroyed a quarter of Richmond. The city was slow to recover, but by the early 1880s its factories boomed, drawing Black, white, and immigrant workers. An impressed\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/b><\/i>lauded Richmond\u2019s \u201csnap and go\u201d that heralded \u201ca new epoch\u201d of commercial ambition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That new epoch brought political change as well. An alliance of white, working-class Democrats and Black Republicans formed a powerful movement called the Readjusters, a term referring to those who wanted to renegotiate Virginia\u2019s pre-war debt in order to invest in the future. Its leader was William Mahone, an industrialist who had served with General Lee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Readjusters quickly won control of the state\u2019s general assembly, the governorship, and municipalities like Richmond, and launched an ambitious effort to boost funding for schools for both Blacks and whites and abolish laws designed to discourage Black voting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Conservative Democrats resolved to break this formidable alliance by reviving the fading passions for the Lost Cause. Fitzhugh Lee, who had fought under his uncle in the Civil War, led the charge. By 1885, Lee was in the governor\u2019s mansion, and the Democratic Party regained the legislative majority, though a few cities, like Richmond, remained Readjuster strongholds.<\/p>\n

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Governor Lee made erecting a monument to his uncle a priority, in order to keep the fires of Confederate memory kindled. In 1886 the general assembly put him in charge of a memorial association, and his agents fanned out across the South to solicit donations. The ideal emissary, one of the governor\u2019s secretaries confided, was a handsome but \u201ccrippled, maimed Confederate\u201d who could \u201cinterest the women.\u201d Contributions poured in. (Here’s why the Confederate battle flag made a 20th century comeback.<\/i><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The city\u2019s leading white women advocated a prominent downtown hill as the best site for the equestrian statue, which was cast in Paris at a cost of $77,500. The governor had other ideas. One of his close friends, a real-estate developer named Otway Allen, proposed donating a lot in a field a quarter mile west of the city limits. Allen envisioned the statue as the magnet to create a fashionable\u2014and lucrative\u2014subdivision.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The proposal drew outrage across the state for seeming to trade on the dead general\u2019s prestige for financial gain. A Lynchburg newspaper accused the association \u201cof betraying its high public mission in favor of crass private interests\u201d by relegating the statue to \u201ca remote and inaccessible suburb.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whether Lee\u2019s nephew stood to benefit directly from the deal is not clear, said University of Pittsburgh historian Kirk Savage. But the governor brushed aside the clamor, arguing that the plan would increase tax revenues for the fast-expanding city. Yet when he sought $15,000 from the Richmond city council in the fall of 1887 to cover the cost of a celebration at the laying of the cornerstone, he met spirited resistance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One city council member dismissed the project as \u201cmerely an effort to boom an old field,\u201d while two African-American council members openly ridiculed the request. \u201cIf I had a different complexion, I would vote for the appropriation,\u201d joked Anderson Hayes, drawing laughs from the audience. \u201cGeneral Lee was a good man, and I hope he is at rest,\u201d added Edinboro Archer. \u201cHe had his opinions and I have mine.\u201d In the end, the request was soundly rejected 17 to 8.<\/p>\n

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The cornerstone nevertheless was laid, and the May 1890 dedication was timed to coincide with a massive Confederate veterans\u2019 reunion that drew 50 former generals, 15,000 uniformed veterans, and more than 100,000 onlookers. By then, an ominous new era of white supremacy had dawned that would last seven decades. (Related:Today’s toppling of Richmond’s statues is the first step toward ending Confederate myths.<\/i><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When the governor sought $7,500 from the city to help cover the cost of the ceremony, the three remaining African Americans on the council found it prudent to abstain rather than vote for the measure, which easily passed. Soon after, the Democrats gerrymandered the largely African-American ward that they represented out of existence, effectively removing Blacks\u2014and therefore nearly half of Richmond\u2019s population\u2014from city leadership. That was just the start. African Americans across the state subsequently were largely disenfranchised and subject to a battery of new laws enforcing strict segregation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFew doubt that in the course of \ufb01ve years the Lee circle will be in the very heart of the fashionable neighborhood of Richmond,\u201d a newspaper reported around the time of the dedication. When novelist Henry James visited in 1905, however, he compared the general\u2019s figure to \u201csome precious pearl of ocean washed up on a rude bare strand.\u201d Over time, however, the subdivision became an exclusive and wealthy enclave where African-American residents were prohibited.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After the Lee dedication, new Confederate monuments sprang up in the city \u201cwith something akin to a vengeance,\u201d wrote historian Kathy Edwards. Along what was dubbed Monument Avenue, statues of General \u201cJeb\u201d Stuart and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were unveiled in 1907. General Stonewall Jackson took his place in 1919, followed a decade later by Confederate Navy chief Matthew Fontaine Maury. By then the boulevard had emerged as what historian Charles Reagan Wilson called \u201cthe sacred road\u201d of \u201cSouthern civil religion.\u201d Its only addition came in 1996, when a statue of African-American tennis pro and Richmond native Arthur Ashe was erected.<\/p>\n

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Floyd\u2019s death abruptly changed all that. By July 2, four of the five Confederate memorials were in storage behind the fence at Richmond\u2019s wastewater treatment plant. \u201cFor too long, we have overlooked the inherent racism of these monuments, and for too long we have allowed the grandeur of the architecture to blind us to the insult of glorifying men for their roles in fighting to perpetuate the inhumanity of slavery,\u201d the Monument Avenue Preservation Society said in a statement supporting the eviction. (As monuments fall, the world reckons with which relics to preserve\u2014and which to remove.<\/a>)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet Lee remains. His memorial rests on land given by private owners to the state on the condition that \u201cshe will faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.\u201d In June, a great-grandson of one of those owners sued to force Virginia to keep that promise, though the state\u2019s attorney general called it \u201ca grandiose monument to a racist insurrection\u201d that was \u201cdesigned to demean Black Virginians\u201d and should be taken down. For the moment, a court injunction prevents that. On July 23, a Richmond judge said he would soon issue a written opinion on the fate of Fitzhugh Lee\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Lawler is author of three books, Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World\u2019s Most Contested City, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, a national bestseller, and Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization. As a journalist, he has written more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles from more than two dozen countries. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and many others. He is contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology. Andrew\u2019s work has appeared several times in The Best of Science and Nature Writing.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/AndrewLawlerAuthor","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/andrew-lawler-9b5a064a\/","https:\/\/x.com\/LawlerAndrew","https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCsliIwdDC_wPYE01Se2zzAw"]}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18551,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4934\/revisions\/18551"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}