London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Richmond: The Cosmopolitan Sensibility of the 1890 Lee Monument

Confederate monuments are often defended on the grounds that they provide an educational function. Both enthusiasts and critics of the Confederacy who take this position see Confederate monuments as a necessary tool to provide historical information about the past. But this was never the priority of the Confederate memorialists who put them up. Organizations responsible for erecting Confederate monuments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries typically thought about their actions in terms of grieving—especially in the early years after the Civil War—or glorification.

White Southern fury over their humiliating defeat in the Civil War and political subordination to Black voting blocs during Reconstruction can’t be overstated. One of the ways of understanding Confederate commemoration, then, is as a way of reasserting the dignity and glory of the Confederacy. In addition to all the post-Reconstruction horrors that were used to extinguish Black political power in the South—terrorism, theft, legislation, and, eventually, constitutional manipulation and mass disfranchisement—white Southerners were also extremely eager to reclaim what they saw as their rightful place on a global stage as a political, economic, and cultural force. As Jubal Early declared in 1870, at the meeting where the Lee Monument Association was born: Confederate veterans must “vindicate our manhood and purge ourselves of the foul stain [of defeat] by erecting an enduring monument to [Lee] that will be a standing protest, for all time to come.”

During my time as a Virginia Humanities fellow over the past year, I have been researching the emotional dimensions of Confederate commemoration. I’ve studied this topic from multiple angles. As part of the False Image of History project, my team and I have built out a database of responses to Confederate commemoration on the part of Black journalists going back to Reconstruction. Although some contemporary commentators think that criticism of Confederate commemoration is a recent phenomenon, our findings prove that Black authors were sounding the alarm about the rising tide of Confederate commemoration already in the late 1860s.

Another facet of my research has been exploring the archives of organizations responsible for commemorating the Confederacy in the first place. During my residency at the Library of Virginia earlier this year as part of my Virginia Humanities Fellowship, I spent a significant amount of time looking at the Library’s holdings of the records of the Lee Monument Association—a complex organization that, over the course of 20 years after Lee’s death in 1870, organized the creation of the Lee monument on what became Monument Avenue.

In this blog post, I want to tell a story about the way the Lee Monument Association made a choice about the Lee monument that reflected the emotional priority of white Southerners at the time: the need to reestablish their dignity on the global stage. But how do I do this? I want to highlight a particular strategy used with the Lee monument that was not standard for later Confederate monuments. The power players in the Lee Monument Association used their influence to push for a cosmopolitan monument. They wanted a monument that would spotlight Richmond as a sophisticated, cultured haven for an international elite. Rather than a defeated capital city, they wanted to advance a portrait of Richmond as glamourous and genteel—on a par with other cosmopolitan capitals like Paris, Rome, Berlin, London, and New York. This culminated in the highly controversial selection of a French sculptor for the Lee monument: Antonin Mercié.

To understand the controversy underlying this decision, we need a picture of the Lee Monument Association. The strange 20-year history of this group has been ably researched by a number of historians. All have pointed out that the group was riven by internal factionalism from the beginning. Within five days of the death of Robert E. Lee on October 12, 1870, a group of women from the powerful Hollywood Memorial Association gathered to form a new group that would help raise a monument to Lee in Richmond. A week after their meeting, on October 25, a group of Confederate veterans, led by Jubal Early, also gathered in Richmond, where impassioned speeches were given and the Lee Monument Association (LMA) was formed. They pledged at the time to cooperate with the women, who came to be referred to as the Ladies Lee Monument Association (LLMA). In January of 1871, the LMA was formally constituted by an act of the Virginia legislature.

Confusion marred the group’s efforts from the beginning. The name of the group shifted in its early years, and its circumstances were complicated by the fact that several other groups—with similar names—had also sprung up around the country at exactly the same time. Meanwhile, there was consistent tension between the women’s group and the veteran-led group. As Caroline Janney writes, “a bitter and often cantankerous rivalry arose” between the two groups, and “for nearly fifteen years, the fires of hostility between Early and the women burned intensely as the agents for competing associations flooded towns and cities throughout the South trying to raise money for the Lee monument.” Challenges with fundraising were especially acute as competing memorial groups around the South sought to fund their own monuments.

The confusion around similarly named organizations—with the same acronym! —added to the group’s woes. In 1875, one of the group’s own agents wrote to Early and misidentified him for the president of the Lexington association: he had been fundraising for the wrong group all along. Several professionally printed embossed donation books with LMA stationery in the Library of Virginia archives record a few pages of eager donations, then go blank.

A major reorganization of the group in 1875 did little to rectify the situation. In 1878, the Secretary of the LMA sent a miserable letter to a colleague reporting on his frustrations: “I confess that I feel very much discouraged at the seeming apathy of our people, whose hearts are not engaged in any work of love.” In the 1880s, the situation sputtered along. At one point, Jubal Early accused the women’s group of entangling the funds in their hands with the personal funds of the blue-blooded Randolph family.

The impasse was finally resolved in 1886. With the election of Lee’s nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, to the governorship, a new interest from the state government helped to jumpstart the LMA. The LLMA came back to the table with a generous offer: they would turn over their accumulated funds and fully merge with the LMA, which would be run by a six-person board. The LLMA and LMA would each nominate three members. Graciously, the LLMA agreed that their nominees would not necessarily be women, and they ended up putting forward Sarah N. Randolph, Elizabeth Byrd Nicholas, and Archer Anderson, a widely admired Confederate veteran. This new power-sharing agreement worked. The group quickly settled on a sculptor and held a cornerstone-laying ceremony on a rainy day in 1887. In 1890, after a 20-year span, the Lee Monument went up at the intersection of the newly platted Allen Ave. and Monument Ave. The unveiling was one of the most spectacular events in Richmond’s history, with an estimated 100,000–150,000 attendees, at a time when the population of Richmond was only about 80,000.

Although the configuration of the new six-person board would seem to have disadvantaged the women, in actuality it ended up turning into a vehicle for the dominating influence of Sarah Randolph. Randolph, a member of the aristocratic Randolph-Jefferson dynasty and great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, appears to have played a decisive role in the final selection of the sculptor and design. She was the driving factor in creating a cosmopolitan masterpiece—one that would place Richmond on the global map of cultural capitals.

The problems with fundraising and organization notwithstanding, the LMA did manage to hold three separate design competitions to find an appropriate artist and model for the eventual sculpture—in 1877, 1878, and 1886. These competitions already reflected a cosmopolitan sensibility. In March 1877, it was noted in the LMA minute book that the secretary “prepared and forwarded to Europe to be published one week in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, also the New York Herald.” Many commentators were adamant that the best sculptural talent in the world was in Europe, or at least European-trained, and that the monument would be inadequate if European artists were not allowed to compete. Several judges appointed to decide on the 1877 competition complained that the competition had not received enough European talent.

One judge wrote to the LMA “It should not be forgotten that this to be a work for all time; and that the statue of Lee will be in the future a Mecca for the good, and enlightened of all lands.” As Randolph herself advised in an 1886 letter to Fitzhugh Lee, “The finest portrait statue in America and if not the finest in the world at least there is no finer is the Washington statue in the Virginia Capitol made by a Frenchman.” “Genius,” she added for good measure, “is cosmopolitan.”

These concerns led to the scuttling of each of the three competitions. Models were displayed in prominent locations, judges were called in and canvassed, and some prizes were even awarded. But none of these results ended up having any bearing on the final decision of a sculptor. This led to significant confusion in the press and even within the LMA. After a winner was declared in the 1886 competition, Jubal Early wrote a scathing letter to Fitzhugh Lee, excoriating the winning design as “an abomination” that left Lee looking like “an English jockey.”

But Early had misunderstood the situation, based in part on confusion in the press. The model that had “won” the competition—by American sculptor Charles Henry Niehaus—was not selected as the design for the monument. Instead, Randolph and her allies elevated another entrant whose contribution was widely considered to be inferior, but whom they viewed as having the most potential to produce a glorious monument that would establish Richmond’s cosmopolitan bona fides. “Of all the sculptors who sent models to the exhibition,” Randolph wrote to Fitzhugh Lee, “the most distinguished is Mercié, who ranks very high in his art in Europe.”

The two “winners” of the competition were sidelined. Instead, Randolph solicited “references” from leading figures in the international art world. She transmitted their favorable opinions of Mercié to Fitzhugh Lee and engineered the ultimate selection of the Frenchman as the sculptor. Although the decision was controversial at the time, the spectacular success of the eventual sculpture seems to have rallied even Jubal Early’s faction around what was widely hailed as a masterpiece.

Early and Randolph had the same priority. They both wanted to glorify Lee and vindicate the fallen empire of the Confederacy itself. But they worked through different means. Randolph’s goal was to connect Richmond to the prestigious international art circuit—especially to the art world powerhouses of Europe. Early’s faction preferred Edward Valentine—a native Virginian—for the commission. A pamphlet published shortly after Mercié’s selection was announced in 1887 saw the cosmopolitan bias clearly, declaring “The ladies would appear to have been always impressed with a narrow idea of the indispensability of prestige”.

But Early’s approach prevailed over time. Gradually, the focus shifted to cultivating the South’s own talents, especially if they had links to the Confederacy itself. Just a few years after the Lee monument went up, for instance, the minutes of the Jefferson Davis Monument Association state their vision that “The men and women who fought for the Confederacy and their descendants must quarry this monument out of their hearts’ blood, if need be.” Over time, Southern sculptors like Valentine, Moses Ezekiel, and Frederick William Sievers came into high demand for Confederate monuments. This focus on autochthonous Southern artists suggested a strategy we might call nationalist, rather than cosmopolitan, for Confederate commemoration.

Both strategies pursued the same goal through different means: to glorify the Confederacy, to resolutely defy the proposition that the Confederate cause was evil or unjust, to erase the insult of defeat. This trajectory of Confederate commemoration closely paralleled the aggressive reassertion of violent white supremacism in Southern society. Black journalists saw clearly what was happening, not least among them the Richmond Planet, whose critical commentary on the erection of the Lee monument has been extensively documented. The Planet observed the Lee monument unveiling—and the culture of white Southern defiance it exemplified—with despair:

The South may revere the memory of its chieftains. It takes the wrong steps in so doing and proceeds to go too far in every similar celebration. It serves to retard its progress in the country and forges heavier chains with which to be bound. All is over.