Why Are They There?: The Confederate Statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection

December finally brought the tumultuous year of 1857 to a close. The ongoing crisis in "bleeding" Kansas and the pro-southern Dred Scott decision handed down by the Supreme Court earlier in the year had further fractured political parties and exacerbated the dangerous drift toward disunion and war. But on one cold day that month congressmen from all states and all parties celebrated together as they traded their old chamber, where flawed acoustics had bedeviled their meetings for over forty years, for spacious and acoustically sound quarters in the southern wing of the newly expanded US Capitol. At least one wag found the highly decorated chamber "tawdry and out of place," but most agreed that a room where, historian Guy Gugliotta explains, "members would never again have to scream to be heard" was infinitely preferable to the old echo chamber.[1]

In the midst of its intractable sectional challenges, the move left Congress with one agreeable problem: what to do with the vacated space. By the time a decision was reached, the Southern congressmen were gone, having joined their states in the struggle to form a separate country that would protect the peculiar institution of slavery. In 1864, the war’s most costly year of sacrifice, Congress passed Vermont representative Justin Morrill’s bill authorizing each state to send two statues to the Capitol as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection, which would be located in the Old House Chamber. A Congress preoccupied with the gargantuan struggle between Blue and Grey did not long ponder a bill concerned with decorating empty space. Not much thought was given to how many statues the old chamber could hold and apparently no more was given to what the Southern states might do after what many in the North considered their inevitable return to the Union. Once statehood was restored, the former Confederate states would be as free as the loyal northern ones to choose the two people they most wanted to honor.

Rhode Island led the way with a statue of Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene in 1870 followed by colonial political and religious leader Roger Williams two years later. Massachusetts surveyed its wealth of possibilities and made a similar choice, pairing John Winthrop and Samuel Adams. New York chose Revolutionary-era Robert Livingston, but veered from the colonial-revolutionary pattern with nineteenth-century governor and United States vice president George Clinton. These six statues and those that followed were greeted with a small and routine ceremony.

The harmony was broken in 1896 when Wisconsin sent a replica of Father Jacques Marquette to join the lineup of Protestant white men. Sending a Catholic priest to the nation’s Valhalla so enraged some still clinging to Know Nothing–style anti-Catholicism that the base of the statue was damaged and for months it required a guard.[2]

Marquette’s fate might have served as a warning to the South that not all of their choices would be welcome. Choosing statues was not a vital interest for many northern states; Delaware, for example, offered no one until 1934. Midwestern states also moved slowly and were more likely to choose more recent figures.

Since Abraham Lincoln, its favorite son, was already represented with a congressionally commissioned statue, Illinois chose a former senator along with prohibition leader Frances Willard, the first woman to be honored.

When Willard’s statue was placed in the Capitol in 1905, not one of the eleven former Confederate states was represented. What was of only passing interest to many in the North was of much greater concern to southerners. Virginians, determined to win the history of the war it had lost, led the way in making sure that the Confederacy would be well represented. Pre-war candor that secession was necessary to preserve slavery was replaced with the myth of the noble lost cause, which claimed the South fought to defend its homeland and the rights of states. The sanctification of Robert E. Lee was critical to the effort to win control of the war’s history. Thomas L. Connelly explains, "the ultimate rationale of this pure nation was the character of Lee."[3]

As Virginia’s congressmen watched the parade of northern statues, some resolved early on that Lee had to join them, but they knew it was prudent to wait for the right time. In the years when the bloody shirt still fueled politics, a former Confederate would not be accepted. But year by year veterans aged and memories dimmed.

In 1903, Virginians gambled that the time was right, and state senator Don Halsey spearheaded a plan to send a bronze statue of Lee to Washington, DC. He assured would-be critics that Virginia had "no desire to offend northern sentiment or to re-open old wounds" by placing their hero in the "National Valhalla," nor did he wish to "force the North to honor Lee." But he predicted that in time northerners would also "take pride in the General for the purity of his life and his military genius." In case the carrot of persuasion failed, Halsey also employed a stick by binding Lee to George Washington; Congress must accept both or it would get neither and no one else in the future.[4]

Some in the North applauded Virginia’s choice as in the spirit of unity, but far more condemned it as divisive. One congressman predicted that representing the commander of the rebel army in the Union capital would reverse the good will North and South had increasingly enjoyed and "result in much ill-feeling."[5] The most vehement and protracted opposition came from Union veterans. One veterans’ organization predicted that "the happy feeling of brotherhood which has slowly but surely been taking the place of bitterness and distrust" would be upended by Lee’s inclusion.[6] West Virginia’s chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic demanded that Statuary Hall "not only be kept free from Robert E. Lee’s statue but kept forever free from anything that will encourage disloyalty or would emulate treason or rebellion."[7] African Americans, with no representative in the collection, matched veterans in expressing outrage. The Indianapolis Freeman claimed it would leave General Grant turning over in his grave and Union veterans regretting their service.[8]

The controversy faded, only to be re-ignited six years later when Edward Valentine’s statue of the Confederate general wearing his dress uniform was displayed. Chicago veterans articulated anger heard all over the North when they protested that placing a statue of Lee, especially one dressed in the uniform of rebellion, in the Capitol was "against the fundamental principles of our Republic and against the honor and integrity of the veterans who nobly gave up life and home to preserve the country Robert E. Lee attempted to destroy."[9] A northern senator declared that putting Lee in the hall of statues was equivalent to putting Benedict Arnold there.[10]

Groups of northern veterans united to petition President Taft’s attorney general, George Wickersham, a small boy living in Pennsylvania when Lee invaded his state, to stop the Confederate general’s inclusion. Wickersham denied the petition on the grounds that it was Virginia’s right to select whomever it wished, and, exceeding his official responsibility, also praised Lee for representing "all that was best in the lost cause."[11] The determined Virginians and their northern opponents did at least agree that the statue should be placed in National Statuary Hall without fanfare.

Emboldened by Virginia’s example, other southern states followed suit until ten political and military Confederate leaders were represented in the Union’s Capitol. By 1931 Mississippi was emboldened to send Confederate president Jefferson Davis, considered by many in the North as the most villainous rebel of all. But Union soldiers who had once marched to war singing about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree were now few in number, and the survivors were too old to mount the protest that greeted the choice of Lee. The Detroit Daily Mirror, an exception to the generally tempered response, did urge its readers to recall that Davis fought for a cause "based on the most barbarous, cruel and vicious institution ever invented – human slavery."[12]

Such thinking was absent from the unveiling ceremony that welcomed Jefferson Davis to the Capitol he had fought against. After a great-granddaughter pulled a cord to unfurl the American flag covering the statue, the Marine band played "Old Folks at Home (Way Down Upon the Swanee River)," "Old Black Joe," and "Dixie."[13]

Virginians were pleased enough to see the Confederacy’s president and general together but were also miffed that Davis received the ceremony denied their Lee. They successfully demanded an official unveiling to welcome both Lee and Washington twenty-four years after they had arrived. There has been confusion about when General Lee’s bronze likeness was added to the collection ever since. Kathryn Jacob, for example, incorrectly concludes in her study of the capital’s civil monuments that after Lee was proposed in 1903 there was such "a tidal wave of angry letters" that Virginia waited nearly three decades before offering the statue again.[14] Even the Capitol’s own signs and publications often have Lee joining the collection in 1910.

The National Statuary Hall Collection remains the one created by the 1864 bill, which was amended in 2000, but it bears little resemblance to what Morrill and other supporters envisioned. When the Architect of the Capitol determined Statuary Hall could not bear the weight of so many statues, they were scattered throughout the building. Statues and busts that are not part of the collection share their space. Congress has tried to rectify the failure of any state to choose an African American by commissioning busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth and a statue of Rosa Parks. The District of Columbia was authorized to send one statue and chose Frederick Douglass, but since only states can contribute to the National Statuary Hall Collection, Douglass is not included.

In 2000 an amendment to the 1864 bill allowed states to trade out original statues for new ones. Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan have replaced more obscure choices from Kansas, Michigan, and California. Only one Confederate, Alabama’s Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, who was traded for Helen Keller, has been removed. Lee, Davis, and nine more remain, silent reminders of a lost cause.

Bess Beatty is Professor Emerita of History at Oregon State University. She is the author of Alamance: The Holt Family and Industrialization in a North Carolina County, 1837–1900 (Louisiana State University Press, 1999) and A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876–1896 (Praeger, 1987).