Monument Avenue: A Road Less Traveler

By Charles McGuigan 07.2020

A couple years back, shortly after gun-toting, torch-bearing, flag-waving, Nazis, white supremacists and neo-Confederates descended on Charlottesville like a plague, murdering one woman and injuring many others, my brother Chris and I were texting one another about the fate of Confederate monuments in Richmond. At that time, Chris and his wife lived in a tiny Maryland village called Keedysville, less than five miles away from Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg. Chris and his wife, Margaret, had raised their two children there in an 18th century log and stone house they had meticulously restored over the course of some twenty years. Chris, who is among other things, a sculptor, an architect, and a blacksmith, spent most of his career with the National Park Service. His specialty was historic preservation.   

“What will they call Monument Avenue when the monuments come down?” he typed.

“A road less traveler,” I responded.

“Well-played,” Chris replied, which meant a lot to me. Chris possesses a rapier wit.

When the monuments began to come down last month, they were like bowling pins, falling in slow motion. A massive ball of outrage, molded from centuries of racism and inequity, struck the pocket perfectly—no spare; just a resounding, if protracted, strike. One by one they fell, torn from their pedestals by protesters, or removed by professionals with the aid of portable circular saws that cut through bronze bolts that had secured them to their lofty heights for more than a century.  The monuments ended up, some have said, in an old tobacco warehouse down on Southside.  Just a temporary holding place before their final fate is decided.

On July 1, the very day a state law went into effect giving municipalities the power to remove Confederate monuments, Mayor Levar Stoney began tackling the statues along Monument Avenue with all deliberate speed.

Jefferson Davis had already been toppled by protesters back in mid-June. The statue lay face up on the asphalt, its torso coated with pink paint that called to mind a negligee, perhaps a reference to the legend that Davis, a month after the Surrender at Appomattox, had dressed in women’s garments to avoid capture by Union troops, who ultimately arrested him just outside Irwinville, Georgia. The former president of the former Confederacy was unceremoniously loaded on to the flat bed of a tow truck and hauled away into the night. A group of protesters cheered and chanted.

Two weeks later, I stood among more than a thousand people, the vast majority wearing masks, who formed a large circle thirty feet from the central island of the rotary at the juncture of Arthur Ashe Boulevard and Monument Avenue. Rising from that island, atop a stone pedestal, was a massive equestrian statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who, in the eyes of many Confederate devotees, is just one rung below General Robert E. Lee in that strange pantheon at which they seem to worship.

Work crews rose on the fenced platform of an articulating boom lift, a sort of cherry picker that can move in any direction. Once at the hooves of Little Sorrel, Jackson’s horse, the team of hardhat-clad men began carefully securing harnesses sheathed in anti-chafing gear at key points around the forelegs and hind legs of the bronze horse. The operation would last for a few hours, and there was reason for this.

Acting as a sort of consultant, Jillian Holland of Round Hill, Virginia, sporting a harness and a hard hat, accompanied the crew on several of their expeditions up to the bronze statue, and made recommendations. She knows a fair amount about large bronze sculptures.  Jillian herself is a metal worker, whose media include steel, aluminum, iron and cast bronze. What’s more, she’s often assisted Richmond-based sculptor Paul DiPasquale in the assembly, installation, and delivery of his work.

“Once lowered,” Jillian told me. “It has to be laid on its side for transport. We have to make sure that we will not bend, in any way, the extreme parts. His legs are sticking out, and his boots, and his saddle bags. We just need to make sure every piece of stays intact as he comes down.”

Throughout the afternoon, the crowd swelled along Arthur Ashe Boulevard and Monument Avenue, and each time a harness was secured, there rose a chorus of chants. “No justice, no peace.” “Black lives matter.” “F*** that statue.” And so on.

A massive crane, towering about the monument, would groan and screech when the tension on the harnesses tautened, and it seemed at any moment the machineries would lift the statue from its perch. But time dragged on.

By late afternoon, clouds had begun moving in, white at first and then gray, and to the South a steep bank of clouds turned dark as ancient pewter. You could see bolts of lightning in the darkest of those clouds, and I overheard the man operating the crane yell up to his compatriots at the top of the monument to hurry up. “You can see it coming,” he screamed, and the two men near the legs of Little Sorrel, looked to the South, and then got back to their work of cutting through the bronze bolts. Just then, the skies opened. Globs of water, each a puddle unto itself, fell hard, and were quickly followed by sheets of rain. Once that final bolt was severed, and after the two men descended, the crane peeled the statue away from its stone base. As the statue rose, there was a long peal of thunder that rolled along like the report of distant artillery, ending in a final clap loud as the voice of God.  At the same instant, a man and a woman crossed over to the large bell of a nearby church and began ringing it.

The graffiti on the stone base, the crowds, and their chants and their applause and their cheers, and the tolling of the bell, reminded me of footage I had seen on TV thirty years ago when the Berlin Wall came down. The throng on Monument Avenue was jubilant and thoroughly soaked by a pummeling rain, a showering baptism.  And they were people of all colors, ages and genders. “Who’s street?” they asked in unison. “Our street,” they answered as one voice.

The following day, without much fanfare, the statue of Matthew Fontaine Maury came down (the globe would be removed a little over a week later). On July 7, J.E.B Stuart, the last of the city-owned Confederate statues on Monument Avenue was removed. All that now remains is the largest monument, which resides on state land.  A court injunction has temporarily barred its removal.

Lee stands alone now, the only member of the pantheon still towering above Monument Avenue. He is crippled in his power much as he was during the Civil War: his right arm (Stonewall Jackson) is gone, and his eyes and ears (J.E.B. Stuart) have been plucked away and punctured. The white marble pedestal on which the gelded Traveler stands has been converted into a rainbow canvas, and the median strips adjacent it have been turned into a sort of camp for protesters, an army of them, who seem intent on holding their ground until this three-dimensional memorial to white supremacy is removed, until they achieve victory. The circle itself has been rechristened Marcus-David Peters Circle in honor of a 24-year-old Black man shot and killed by Richmond police two years ago.

Those who want the monuments to stay often cry a chorus of “History and heritage”.

Every one of the Confederate figures represented by the statues that once stood on Monument Avenue defended human bondage, and the rape, torture and murder of enslaved Africans, and their descendants. Just read the articles of secession from each of the rebel states that would form the Confederacy. Slavery, and its preservation, is mentioned over and over again, as is the notion of white supremacy and the inherent inferiority of people of African descent.

Consider this excerpt from what is often called the “cornerstone speech” delivered on the eve of the Civil War by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea,” he said. “Its foundations are laid, 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.”

Here’s another fact: Each one of those Confederate leaders once memorialized on Monument Avenue attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and broke his solemn oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . .”

In terms of their history, Confederate monuments like those erected in Richmond served two other purposes, one being a revisionist, and often romanticized, history of the Confederacy and the myth of the “Lost Cause”. The other reason for their placement in Richmond and elsewhere in the country is even more disturbing. They were symbols of white supremacy to let Blacks know that despite the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union victory, the adoption of the Civil War Amendments, and a hundred years later, the Civil Rights Movement, they, as a people, would never be equal to whites.

The vast majority of the Confederate monuments erected in public places began in the mid-1890s just as Southern states began enacting the egregious Jim Crow laws which were created to disenfranchise Blacks and and re-segregate society after three decades of integration. These laws and this rapid construction of Confederate monuments lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw the lynching of Black men in unprecedented numbers, and a massive revival of the domestic terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan. Many of these monuments were sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

It’s worth noting here, too, that the white supremacist who massacred the Charleston Nine, had visited Confederate monuments throughout South Carolina shortly before he went on his rampage. So, it would seem, these symbols do incite the most hideous kind of racial violence.

Returning to Monument Avenue and its inception. Real estate developers selling lots there claimed in advertisements at the time that “no lots can ever be sold or rented in MONUMENT AVENUE PARK to any person of African descent.”  That’s historic fact.

Only real history can save us from ourselves.

Not a sanitized version of it either, one that glorifies just those moments in our past when we did act in exemplary ways. It must be a history that exposes all of our failures and shortcomings, an acknowledgement and an acceptance of our imperfections, those critical moments when we succumbed to our baser instincts, and forsook our loftier ideals.

All great fiction must confront painful pasts. Literary works that do otherwise, fall short, and end up in bargain bins or kindling boxes because they are two-dimensional tales at best, lacking any real depth.

Even when examining the novels of our own lives, the histories of our past deeds, we can never inch forward to a greater truth unless we are able to admit our own mistakes, and confront them, and learn through their correction. There is something gratifying in coming clean with it all, even those things that in the past might have plagued us. Without lies to obfuscate, all things become clear.