History in Our Everyday Lives

The Other Confederate Monuments

In 1907, the city erected two additional monuments to commemorate Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and Jeb Stuart, a Virginian-born Confederate general. In the earliest twentieth century, Southern cities began moving away from commemorative funerary Confederate monuments in cemeteries to monuments placed in more prominent locations. Author of Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865 to 1913, Gaines Foster, states that by 1913 “almost 80 percent [of Southern Confederate monuments] featured the lone Confederate soldier, and more than 85 percent were placed on courthouse lawns, downtown intersections, or other public places.”²¹

After almost a decade of fundraising by various Confederate groups, historiographer Gaines Foster writes that the city of Richmond erected “perhaps the clearest sign of the southerners’ sense of vindication…in the form of honor paid to the region’s ‘representative man.’”  A crowd of at least 80,000 gathered for the unveiling on Davis’s birthday. Davis stands in front of a Doric column with his hand outstretched to the city’s capitol towering a total of 67 feet high.²² Engraved inside of the semicircle colonnade, the stone reads, “If to die nobly be ever the proudest glory of virtue, this of all men has fortune greatly granted to them; for, with deep desire to clothe their country with freedom, now at the last they rest full of an ageless fame.” In 1919, Richmond added a monument commemorating the fallen General T. J. “Stonewall” Jackson.²³ The Virginia-born graduate of West Point and former Virginia Military Institute professor fought in many of Confederacy’s key battles during the Civil War, including commanding militia at Harper’s Ferry and leading troops in the epic battle of First Manassas where he earned the name “Stonewall.”

In a letter to the editor written in memoriam of Jackson twelve years after his death The Weston Democrat writer William Arnold opined that after the death of Stonewall, “The great heart of Virginia was pierced, and tears of joy and sorrow for Stonewall Jackson, were seen to run down the cheeks of her children like water which roll down the James.”²⁴ The song “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” accompanying Arnold’s article captures the deep admiration Southerners felt towards their fallen hero. The first stanza begins, “Come, stack arms, men! Pile on the rails,/Stir up the camp-fire bright!/No Matter if our canteen fails--/We’ll make a roaring night./ Here Shenandoah brawls along, There burly Blue Ridge echoes strong,/ To swell the brigade’s rousing song/ Of Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

In 1912, the Matthew Fontaine Maury Association (MFMA) formed to fundraise erecting a monument in honor of Maury. For almost two decades, the group campaigned to bring Maury to the forefront of Virginia’s heroic narratives. Along with receiving donations from various notable Confederate groups such as the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, MFMA also advocated for a state holiday in honor of Matthew Maury. Even though the group was unable to secure the state-wide holiday, the state designated December 11, 1925 as “Maury Monument Day,” a day where schools featured lessons on Maury’s contributions and schools encouraged students to donate funds to the MFMA foundation.²⁵

Despite the accolades bestowed upon the South’s martyr, the statue unveiled by Robert E. Lee’s son on October 11, 1919, represented a shift away from the lore of the Lost Cause. In his analysis of the avenue, Barbee writes that not only was the Jackson monument much smaller in scale when compared to the previous monuments, the Jackson monument also “seems to reflect a more somber, less defiant manifestation of Confederate heritage.”²⁶ In fact, unlike the other monuments, Jackson faces north which could also be a symbolic gesture toward national military unity.

Professor and author of the first title in the series named “New Studies in Southern History,” Matthew Barbee, argues that the addition of Matthew Fountain Maury to Monument Avenue, like Stonewall’s monument, also downplayed Richmond’s regionalism and connection to the Lost Cause. He writes that instead the Maury monument linked “the Confederacy to American nationalism through the global ideals of science and man’s dominance of the globe.” Born in Fredericksburg, Maury was an officer in the U.S. Navy and was considered the father of modern oceanography. Despite not holding a prominent position in the Confederacy, Barbee iterates that Maury did contribute significantly to practices of meteorology and oceanography that “greatly improved and sped up the work of naval ships and U.S. mercantile fleets.”²⁷ Barbee also writes that after the Civil War, Maury traveled to Mexico City where he “began working on plans for agricultural an commercial developments in northern Mexico which would be linked to the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico by a system of railroads and canals and hoped to entice Virginia planters to migrate with their slaves to the region.” Maury’s plan of course did not come into fruition, and soon thereafter he returned home and started an agriculture and technical college which ultimately became Virginia Polytechnic Institute, better known today as Virginia Tech. ²⁸

Even more so than Jackson, the Maury monument moved away from the trend of classical aesthetics of earlier Southern designs. His statue went beyond battlefield prowess and instead recognized him for his accomplishments in science. ²⁹ Richmond’s choice not to unveil the monument on a day associated with the Lost Cause, but instead on November 11^th, Armistice Day, furthers the narrative away from the myth of the Lost Cause and “placed the Civil War within the longer, heroic traditions of international militarism” and underscored the theme of monuments as reconciliation.

After the addition of Maury, the development of the avenue would slow down and sixty years would pass before the city would add another monument to the historic avenue. Sporadically throughout this swathe of time, however, conversations around a new monument would spark. In the sixties, for example, the city hired Salvador Dali to design a statue honoring Sally Thompkins, a Confederate nurse whom Jefferson Davis named a captain, but the city was not in favor of a monument anodized pink that depicted Thompkins fighting a dragon; unsurprisingly, the council abandoned the project altogether.³⁰ Later in the 1991 the idea of adding to the avenue arouse once again when Chuck Richardson, a black city council member, “hatched an idea that resonated with many metropolitan residents, white and black alike. Richardson believed that a statue of the then governor of Virginia, Douglas Wilder, be placed of Monument Avenue.”³¹ This proposal proved unfruitful as well, but the idea of adding someone who represented another heroic narrative persisted, and by 1996 after great debate, the city would unveil its chosen hero.