A year at a Norwegian folk high school, living and studying in Norwegian.
Perhaps the last violent encounter between soldiers of the Confederate and United States Armies occurred in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 18th, 1946, when a car driven by a U.S. Army sergeant collided with a statue of a Confederate soldier.1 The driver was unhurt in the accident. However, the Confederate soldier now faced east instead of south toward the Confederacy. The city soon rotated the monument to again face south. Erected in 1889 by the Robert E. Lee Camp of the United Confederate Veterans, the statue’s inscription states its purpose of preserving the memory of Alexandria’s Confederate dead. By commemorating the soldiers’ sacrifice to the Confederacy and ignoring the system of chattel slavery for which the Confederacy fought, the statue perpetuated the Lost Cause myth. The statue stood in the middle of the road at the intersection of Washington and Prince streets from 1889 to 2020, spanning Alexandria’s transformation from an old Southern city filled with Confederate sympathy into a suburb of Washington, DC that has little appetite for commemorating a treasonous cause that fought for slavery.
Edgar Warfield was a Confederate veteran from Alexandria who first proposed the erection of a monument honoring Alexandria’s Confederate dead. He served as adjutant of Alexandria’s Lee Camp of the United Confederate Veterans and participated in the Lee Camp’s committee that carried out the project. Born in 1842, Edgar Warfield fought for the Confederacy as a private in the Seventeenth Virginia Infantry and played a prominent role in Alexandria's public life after the war. He continued to participate in events until his death in 1934, at which point he was Alexandria’s last Confederate veteran. In the final years of his life, he wrote down his experience as a Confederate soldier in order to record the bravery and sacrifice of the Confederate soldiers, whose numbers were dwindling by the 1930s.2 Soon after his death in 1934, Warfield’s children published his memoirs of ‘The War Between the States.’3
Warfield grew up in an Alexandria grounded in its roots and history as a magnificent Southern city. However, during the first seven years of his life, Alexandria was part of Washington, DC. In the compromise of 1790, the Southern states agreed to indirectly pay off the Northern states’ war debts, in exchange for moving the capital from Philadelphia to a location further South.4 Later that year, Congress passed the Residence Act, which established a permanent capital along the Potomac River and allowed President Washington to select the capital’s exact site.5 The proposed location initially did not include Alexandria, however Washington demanded its inclusion, to which Congress acquiesced.6
After the Revolutionary War, the slave trade became a major element of Alexandria’s economy as a result of over-farming of tobacco and wheat in Northern Virginia, which led to an over-supply of slave labor when agriculture moved elsewhere.7 Sustained effort for retrocession, the transfer of land back to Virginia, began in the 1830s, most likely a result of Alexandrians’ fear of a possible ban on the slave trade and slavery itself. While a part of Washington, Congress held full control over Alexandria. In September 1846, Alexandrians voted on retrocession, however only free white males who had resided in Alexandria for at least six months could vote.8 Retrocession won with a vote of 763 to 222, and white Alexandria celebrated the city’s return to the Old Dominion after 56 years.9
Although not a soldier in the U.S. Army prior to the Civil War, Warfield still participated in militaristic endeavors. Dissatisfied with Alexandria’s response to John Brown’s 1859 rebellion at Harper’s Ferry, which temporarily diverted Alexandria’s three companies of soldiers, Warfield cofounded a new rifle company for defense of the city. At the company’s first meeting, it selected the name “The Old Dominion Rifles.”10 In February 1861, the Old Dominion Rifles and three other Alexandria companies were combined to form the Alexandria Battalion. Warfield does not provide a reason for the creation of the battalion, but the impending war clouds most likely spurred this action.
On May 24th, 1861, one day after Virginia’s official secession from the United States, Warfield and all of the newly-Confederate troops left Alexandria. The monument’s inscription celebrates this day, stating that “this monument marks the spot from which the Alexandria troops left to join the Confederate forces, May 24, 1861.”11 While not incorrect, rather than the inscription’s suggestion of an honorable march, Warfield in his memoir instead described May 24th, 1861, as an ignominious evacuation of the city.12 Warfield included a telegraph from Confederate general W.G. Duncan to the Confederate secretary of war that demonstrates the Confederacy’s ignoble withdrawal from Alexandria: “General Lee is much mortified, admits he was unprepared, having only 600 troops in Alexandria.”13 In one day, the United States captured Alexandria, facing no resistance except the death of Captain Ellsworth, a close friend of President Lincoln, at the hands of James Jackson, an innkeeper defending the Confederate flag on the inn’s roof.14
Few sources describe May 24th, 1861, as an evacuation of Alexandria. However, the Confederate veterans who dedicated the monument certainly remembered their evacuation. The veterans’ choice to inscribe ‘left’ instead of ‘evacuated’ on the monument contributed to this historical inaccuracy in Alexandria’s memory of the Civil War by focusing on the soldiers’ military service while simultaneously ignoring the surrender of Alexandria.
After his evacuation from Alexandria, Warfield details in 204 pages his service throughout the entire war in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He participated in every major engagement except Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness, and he was present at Appomattox in April 1865 for Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant.15 Warfield writes that he received parole after Lee’s surrender and also safe passage to Richmond. He was never detained or incarcerated as a prisoner of war.16 Warfield’s lack of punishment demonstrates the United States’ emphasis on reconciliation over retribution. On April 25, just sixteen days after Lee’s surrender, Warfield arrived in Alexandria, home for the first time in four years.17 Although spared the destruction witnessed by many Southern towns, Warfield returned to an Alexandria altered by four years of occupation, the longest of any Southern town.
Just 23 when the war ended, Warfield lived seventy more years and is believed to be the last living person of the six hundred soldiers who evacuated from Alexandria on May 24th, 1861.18 Two years after the war’s end, he cofounded a drug store in Alexandria, building a successful business and attaining the position of President of the Virginia Pharmaceutical Society.19 However, in his memoir, Warfield focused only on his service during the war. His children wrote just three pages in the postscript describing his public service in Alexandria after the war. Warfield’s decision to record just his four years of wartime service instead of including the seventy years he lived after the war reflects the importance to him of preserving the Confederate perspective.
Just as Warfield and his children published his memoir to preserve his narrative of his service to the Confederacy, Warfield dedicated much of his life after the war to preserving the memory of his fellow veterans of the Confederate Army. An active member of the Robert E. Lee Camp of the United Confederate Veterans, in 1885, Warfield proposed to the Camp that a monument be erected honoring Alexandria’s Confederate dead.
Founded on July 7th, 1884, the by-laws of the Robert E. Lee Camp of the United Confederate Veterans exemplify reconciliationist sentiment, often at the expense of black political rights and well-being. The by-laws state the camp’s mission to “perpetuate the memory of our fallen comrades,” and “to extend to our late adversaries, on every fitting occasion, courtesies which are always proper between soldiers, and which in our case a common citizenship demands at our hands.”20 Warfield proposed the construction of a monument in order to perpetuate the memory of his fallen Confederate comrades, and he served on the committee tasked with its creation.21 John Adams Elder submitted a proposal based on the central figure of his famous painting Appomattox, which depicts a pensive Confederate veteran framed by a devastated landscape in the wake of Lee’s surrender to Grant. The committee adopted Elder’s proposal without hesitation.22 More of a painter than a sculptor, Elder enlisted his friend Casper Buberl to sculpt the statue.23
The monument demonstrates the Lost Cause myth by ignoring the irrefutable truth that Confederate soldiers seceded from and fought the United States in order to perpetuate slavery. According to an Alexandria Gazette article on the unveiling of the monument, the statue “stands not only [as] a beautiful work of art, but an educator of future generations in the history of the struggle made by the South for her rights and independence.”24 Only twenty-four years after the South’s surrender, the narrative already ignored the true reason for the formation of the Confederacy, revealed plainly in the secession documents of each state: slavery. The same Alexandria Gazette article described the monument:
The statue represents a Confederate soldier as if viewing the field of strife after the surrender. He stands, dressed in the old familiar uniform of the Confederate private, with folded arms, and head bowed forward as if in deep contemplation over the scenes, privation and hard fought battles through which he had passed, all for a principle which he deemed sacred and righteous, and yet all apparently for naught. The idea is a striking one and at once, impresses every beholder as most fitly and feelingly telling at a glance the whole story of the gallantry, glory, and heroism of the South.25
Despite the claim of the statue as a “complete history,” the statue fails to portray the Confederacy’s reliance on and prioritization of maintaining chattel slavery. This dedication to slavery is a part of the principle that the Confederates “deemed sacred and righteous,” and for which its soldiers fought to separate from the United States. Even in surrender, Alexandria’s Confederate veterans sought to portray themselves as heroes. Despite the supposed “gallantry, glory, and heroism of the South,” the South lost. The statue ignores the Confederacy’s rebellion and treason. The orientation of the soldier’s back towards the North is the only reference to rebellion against the Northern states and the Confederacy’s defeat. The statue commemorated the Confederate soldiers and their defeat while concealing the principles for which they fought.
By ignoring the Confederacy’s slavery and treason, the statue created a new narrative that embodied the Lost Cause myth. The Confederate veterans focused on portraying the deaths of their ninety-seven Alexandrian Confederate comrades not as sacrifices to a treasonous confederation, but as just and heroic sacrifices to their homeland. The monument’s inscription on the south side reads “Erected to the memory of Confederate dead of Alexandria, VA. By their Surviving Comrades, May 24th 1889,” and the north side reads “they died in the consciousness of duty faithfully performed.” By 1889, the Lost Cause myth already pervaded the United States. The statue, the Alexandria Gazette wrote, “is, in a word, the complete history of the Lost Cause graphically presented to posterity by a single figure.”26 First coined in 1866 by Edward Pollard, the Lost Cause myth holds, among other notions, that the Southern states did not secede to preserve slavery, that the Confederacy inevitably succumbed to the overwhelming resources of the United States, and that Confederate soldiers fought for a just and constitutional cause.27
Like later monuments erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Warfield and the R. E. Lee Camp erected Alexandria’s Confederate memorial monument to perpetuate the Lost Cause myth. The Camp’s by-laws and the pedestal’s inscriptions state the objective of preserving the memory of Confederate veterans. However, by creating a physical space honoring Alexandria’s fallen Confederate soldiers, the statue cemented the Confederacy into Alexandria’s memory for generations far removed from the war. The Alexandria Gazette article on the unveiling of the monument demonstrates that the monument transcends generations:
war to a large percentage of the present generation is only known through history; they were either unborn or too young to have witnessed the terrible fruits of carnage or to have realized the self abnegation of men who voluntarily shouldered their muskets in defense of what is sincerely believed to be sacred, and many there were who, while they stood around that monument today lapsed into a thoughtful mood, when the panorama of the scene of the four years’ conflict passed through their mind.28
To those who experienced the occupation of Alexandria for four long years, this monument represented the reclamation of Alexandria by white Southerners and the failure of Reconstruction.
Although Alexandria avoided frontline combat, the city suffered during its four years of occupation by the United States. Due to Alexandria’s close proximity to Washington and location on the Potomac River, the Union during the war built supply bases, hospitals, and camps for Union soldiers.29 In August 1862, the new military governor of Alexandria, General John P. Slough, described the situation as a “reign of terror.” He attributed this situation to the widespread sale of alcohol, which he quickly banned.30 Two-thirds of local Alexandrians fled, in part due to restrictive measures such as the imposition of martial law, the requirement that citizens remain inside after 9pm, the ban on alcohol, and restrictions on mail.31 The occupying government later sold the homes of many residents who had fled due to lack of tax payment.32 Many Alexandrians as a result did not return after the war.
The departure of many Alexandrians during the occupation and the influx of freed slaves and others who sensed economic opportunity altered Alexandria’s demographics. These new residents more than made up for the lost local residents. With limited housing, newcomers built cramped shanties, and the government erected multiple barracks.33 Numerous newly-freed African American slaves, called ‘contrabands,’ streamed into Alexandria. An 1863 report by the Freedmen’s Relief Society stated the number of ‘contrabands’ in Alexandria to be 3,000.34 Their population grew to 7,000 by September, 1864. After the Confederacy’s surrender, Warfield and other Confederate soldiers returned to Alexandria. One wrote poetically that “Yes, now the charms of the city have gone, its vices and follies I loathe and spurn…”35 Alexandria’s population of 17,000 numbered 4,000 more than in 1861, and African-Americans almost equaled the number of whites. By April 1865, Alexandria’s occupation had dramatically changed its composition and instilled lingering animosity among its residents toward the Northern states.
During the war and the beginning of Reconstruction, Alexandrians possessed little political agency. When Virginia seceded in 1861, politicians largely from northwestern Virginia, now West Virginia, created the Restored Government of Virginia, governed by Francis Pierpont, which the United States recognized as the official government. During the occupation, Pierpont’s administration survived only through federal force and was unpopular among Alexandrians. In Alexandria, “the Pierpont administration… existed only in the shadow of the Federal armies and would have been summarily expelled by the people but for them.”36 Although not supported by most Alexandrians, whites composed the Pierpont administration.
Intolerable to Alexandrians was African American participation in Alexandria’s political scene. With President Johnson’s goal of reconciliation, Southerners hoped for speedy restoration to the United States.37 However, the United States Congress thwarted Johnson’s aspirations by granting citizenship to all people born in the United States, thereby elevating the status of slaves. Congress also passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which provided assistance to newly-freed slaves. During a parade in Norfolk by freedmen celebrating these bills, a riot occurred and two white and two black people died.38 A 1904 history of Reconstruction in Virginia by H. J. Eckenrode, although discounted by its racist aspects, captured the growing sentiment among white Alexandrians: “Racial antagonism began to be felt, for the negroes inclined to assert themselves in their joy over the Congressional measures.” Black suffrage allowed African Americans for the first time to hold political office in Alexandria. In October 1867, black people voted in Alexandria for the first time. With newly-attained voting power for black Alexandrians, George Seaton, an African-American, won election to represent Alexandria in the Virginia House of Delegates. However, the success of George Seaton and other African-American politicians in Virginia was short-lived. Despite black enfranchisement in the new constitution, the same elections on July 6th, 1869 paved the way for Virginia’s return to white control. Out of 180 seats in the Virginia legislature, conservatives held a 70-seat majority.39
By focusing on integration and allowing white Southerners to regain control, black political rights gained during Reconstruction began to disappear. On January 26th, 1870, President Grant approved a bill passed by Congress allowing for the admission to Congress of representatives from Virginia. Eckenrode claimed that this approval meant that “the reconstruction of Virginia had come to an end after well-nigh five years of weary waiting… After this long period of war and of political subjection the white people of Virginia now regained control of affairs.”40 Indeed in 1873, the Democrats won the governorship and both houses of Virginia’s legislature.41
However, Eckenrode’s history of Reconstruction in Virginia ignored the Readjuster Party, the most successful interracial political movement in the post-Reconstruction South. The Readjuster Party advocated for black education and eliminated the poll tax, a method used to disenfranchise black people.42 In 1881, its candidates won every major political office in Virginia.43 Even though black people outnumbered whites in many areas of Virginia, “the white men have used all the devices of politics to prevent the local supremacy of blacks…”44 Although black people technically remained enfranchised, Virginia by the end of the 1880s had firmly returned to white control.
Only after the end of Reconstruction and the disenfranchisement of African Americans despite the 15th amendment could Alexandria’s Confederate veterans erect the monument. By 1889, white Alexandrians again controlled the city. Alexandria’s mayor was E.E. Downham, a Democrat. Virginia’s governor was none other than Fitzhugh Lee, the nephew of Robert E. Lee. Fitzhugh Lee’s governorship symbolized the return of white Confederate sympathizers to political power in Virginia. The Confederate memorial monument represents the return of Alexandria to its pre-Civil War status as a white-dominated society.
The dedication ceremony contained all the pomp and fanfare of a victory parade and evidenced the reconciliationist sentiment on both sides. Former residents and visitors poured into Alexandria, and “the occasion far exceeded anything in the way of parade or open air meeting ever seen in Alexandria, the city from daybreak having put on its holiday attire.”45 Commemoration of those who fought for the Confederate cause had become a holiday. The parade included mounted police, various bands including a Marine band, and a drum corps. A single one-armed Union soldier, dressed in uniform, stood on a street corner during the parade, taking off his cap when the marching Confederate veterans approached. The marching soldiers performed the rebel yell while walking by, and some broke ranks to grip the one remaining hand of the Union veteran.46 Although the presence of the Union veteran could be interpreted as defiance, his removal of his cap and handshakes with Confederate veterans suggest a sentiment of reconciliation. The parade ended at the intersection of Washington and Prince streets, the site of the monument, which remained veiled during the initial speeches.
The subsequent speeches demonstrate the Lost Cause myth’s strong presence in Alexandria. Reverend Norton, a chaplain from the R. E. Lee camp, offered the ceremony’s first words. Unable to thank God for victory in the Civil War, he instead gave Him thanks “for the goodly heritage which thou has given us, for the civil and religious privileges which we enjoy, and for the multiplex manifestations of this favor towards us.”47 Norton’s use of ‘us’ and ‘we’ referred to white Southerners. By evoking divine intervention, Norton cast the Confederate defeat and the deaths of ninety-seven Alexandrian Confederate soldiers as part of God’s plan, under which white Southerners eventually regained civil and religious privileges, implicitly at the expense of African Americans.
Captain R. Travers Daniel then spoke on behalf of the artist, John Adams Elder, who could not attend due to illness. Daniel repeated elements of the Lost Cause narrative and portrayed the deaths of Alexandria’s Confederate soldiers as part of a glorious cause. Daniel stated that Alexandria’s soldiers “died in defense of ‘their altars and their fires,’ and the right of their people to self-appointed constitutional government,” and he then portrayed the Confederate cause as a glorious second American Revolution, claiming that the Civil War “has been stigmatized as ‘rebellion.’”48 To Daniel and those present at the monument’s dedication, the ninety-seven dead Alexandrians died not in a treasonous rebellion, but in defense of their heritage and the civil and political rights of Virginia. Daniel compared the dead Confederates and their leaders to legendary figures from history. Daniel implied that just as history lionizes Leonidas’ last stand and Napoleon’s conquests, so too will history remember Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals. He equated the deaths of the Alexandrian soldiers, whose names will not be prominent in history, to the deaths of the unknown common soldiers of Leonidas and Napoleon. The Confederate soldiers “have been content to discharge their duty to their country and their God, to die and be forgotten men,” just as the soldiers of Napoleon “fell with the wild acclaim upon their dying lips… and sank into nameless graves.”49 By recasting the Confederate defeat and the deaths of Alexandria’s soldiers as a noble sacrifice on par with legendary historical figures, Daniel entrenched the Lost Cause myth in Alexandria’s memory of the Civil War. After Daniel’s speech, Miss Virginia Corse, the daughter of a Confederate general, pulled the cords and unveiled the monument.
Governor Fitzhugh Lee spoke next, expanding on comparisons between the American cause during the Revolution and the Confederates during the Civil War, particularly between Robert E. Lee and George Washington. Lee eloquently spouted of the accomplishments of the Confederacy during the war and of specific Alexandrian soldiers, mentioning Edgar Warfield by name. Despite defeat, Lee stated that “they have written honor, courage, and heroism upon each feather of the Southern plume that floated above the storm of war.”50 Like Daniel, Lee compared this ‘honorable’ Confederate defeat to that of Leonidas’ defeat at Thermopylae. After expending hundreds of words on Thermopylae, Waterloo, and Balaklava, the sight of the famous charge of the Light Brigade, Lee then compared these battles to the Battle of Gettysburg, repeating the misconception that the Confederacy could not win after defeat at Gettysburg and that the Confederacy would have been victorious had Stonewall Jackson been alive.51 The festivities continued into the night with a banquet hosted by the R. E. Lee Camp and a pyrotechnics display around the monument.
Already during the nineteenth century, the monument faced criticism. Fitzhugh Lee in his speech spoke of the importance of honoring the bravery and sacrifice from soldiers of both sides. However, DeWitt Ward, a Union veteran of the 71st New York Regiment, disagreed. Confederate soldiers, he argued in an 1892 letter to the editor published in the New-York Tribune, should not be honored.52 DeWitt lamented the fact that statues existed for Confederate soldiers as well as Christopher Columbus and other explorers, but that New York City had no monument for the Boys in Blue.53 He wrote that he viewed Alexandria’s Confederate Memorial statue during a visit to the city, stating that it was “erected to commemorate the ‘Lost Cause.’”54 He questioned the statue’s existence, writing “How strange that those who would have divided our country are reverently remembered and honored by those who served, while those who died to maintain it undivided are (as far as this city is concerned) neglected…”55 No action appears to have been taken for the construction of a monument in New York City: the only monument constructed for the 71st’s Civil War service is at Gettysburg.56
Although the number of Confederate veterans dwindled in the decades after the war, the desire of Alexandria’s white residents to remember and commemorate the Confederacy remained strong. Celebrations of the monument continued annually on Confederate Memorial Day, celebrated in Virginia on May 24th. The R. E. Lee Camp also continued to celebrate its namesake’s birthday every January 19th, a legal holiday in Virginia, with banks, schools, and public offices closed.57 A 1912 article in The Washington Times detailed the Robert E. Lee Camp’s celebrations at the monument, replete with music and a parade.58 The ceremonies that day ended with a volley over the graves of unknown Confederate dead at Christ’s Church, often frequented by Robert E. Lee before the war, and a committee was assigned to ensure the decoration of each Confederate grave.59 Warfield’s dedication to the Confederate cause and General Lee had not diminished. On Lee’s birthday in 1912, Warfield began the evening’s banquet by reading Lee’s Farewell Address, which Warfield had memorized.60 Up until his deathbed, Warfield continued to lead commemoration events. On May 24th, 1933, at age 92 and just six months before his death, he led the procession from the Camp hall to the Confederate memorial statue.61 By this point, Warfield was the only soul remaining of the 600 who evacuated from Alexandria on May 24, 1861, seventy-two years earlier.62
Even after the defeat of the Confederacy, violence against and repression of African Americans in Alexandria continued. Two recorded lynchings occurred in Alexandria. In 1897, a white mob broke into Alexandria’s police station and forcibly removed teenager Joseph McCoy. The mob then proceeded to beat and hang him. In 1899, a white mob again broke into the station and lynched 16-year-old Benjamin Thomas in the same horrific manner. Black Alexandrians also experienced segregation and displacement during the Jim Crow era.
By 1950, participation in celebrations of Confederate Memorial Day had begun to dwindle. The 34 Confederate graves in Christ Church’s cemetery outnumbered the number of attendees that year at the graveside ceremony honoring the dead.63 On May 24th, 1961, the hundredth anniversary of the evacuation of Alexandria by Confederate troops, a rededication ceremony was held for the statue.64 The parades ended by the end of the 60s due to danger from racial unrest in Alexandria.65
Simultaneous with the decrease in participation in Confederate celebrations, debate over the monument increased in Alexandria. At the time of the monument’s dedication in 1889, horses and buggies dominated the streets. Over time, cars replaced horses as the primary mode of transportation. The monument remained in the middle of the road at the busy intersection of Washington and Prince streets. This location inevitably resulted in various traffic incidents. In 1946, an army sergeant from the WAC collided with the statue.66 Although the sergeant was unhurt in the incident, the statue now faced east instead of south. City officials promptly turned the statue back south.
By the 1960s, Alexandria had begun to slowly lose its status as an old Southern city. In 1968, Alexandria still flew the Confederate battle flag on Confederate Memorial Day, along with the flags of Virginia, the United States, and Alexandria.67 However, The Washington Post noted debate between citizens as to whether the Confederate flag should continue to fly. Alexandria, the columnist wrote, was “an old Southern-leaning city that unhappily has found itself a Washington suburb and wishes that it were not.”68 Alexandria legislation slowly narrowed celebrations of the Confederacy. In July 1970, Alexandria enacted a law restricting the flying of the Confederate flag at the intersection to only Lee’s birthday on January 19th and Confederate Memorial Day on May 24th.69 Two of Alexandria’s six City Council members were African American, reflecting changing political norms. Both passively accepted the Confederate flag, stating that “Alexandria has room for everybody,” and “we live in a Southern city.”70
During the 1970s, Northern Virginia’s population of minority groups exploded, likely a result of an increasing number of well-paying jobs and the 1968 Fair Housing Act by Congress, which prohibited race-based discrimination in the housing market. Nonwhite groups moved into areas that had previously been all-white suburbs. Integration united black and white children in schools. The Washington Post wrote that “the proportion of whites in Northern Virginia’s population dropped substantially for the first time since the Civil War.”71 The number of African Americans in Northern Virginia increased by 74% during the 1970s, however African Americans still comprised only 8.2% of the total residents. During the same decade, Washington’s population of African Americans fell by 17%.72 Alexandria had become a suburb of the nation’s capital.
Alexandria’s changing demographics likely contributed to increased debate over the Confederate Memorial statue during the 70s and 80s. Traffic incidents illuminate the changing sentiments about the statue. When the WAC sergeant in 1946 collided with and spun around the statue, the city only debated which direction to orient the statue. Despite increased public opposition and press coverage, the Alexandria City Council, still including two black members, voted unanimously to return the statue to its pedestal.73
The history of the statue’s ownership is unclear. The United Confederate Veterans erected and initially owned the statue. However, in 1952, UCV dissolved. The last Confederate veteran had died the previous year. At some point, the United Daughters of the Confederacy gained ownership of the statue.
By 2016, the final grips of the South’s hold on Alexandria had almost disappeared. In the wake of the June 2015 Charleston massacre at a historically black church and the shooter’s idolization of the Confederacy and the rebel flag, Confederate iconography gained new attention.74 In September of that year, the Alexandria City Council, again with two African American members, voted unanimously to ban the flying of the Confederate flag on city property, which ended the flying of the flag on Lee’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day.75 The Alexandria City Council voted unanimously in 2016 to change the name of Jefferson Davis Highway and to seek permission from the Virginia General Assembly to move the statue.76
At the time, the City Council could not remove the statue on its own due to Virginia legislation prohibiting the Confederate Memorial Statue’s removal. In 1890, perhaps conceiving the possibility of anti-statue sentiment in the future, the state legislature passed an act stating that the statue
shall perpetually remain as at present erected and located, at the intersection of Prince and Washington streets, in the said city of Alexandria, and that the permission so given by the said city council of Alexandria, for its erection, shall not be repealed, revoked, altered, modified, or changed by any future council or other municipal power or authority.77
An earlier state law from 1812 in part prohibited the removal of war memorials.78 Preserving Confederate memorials meant much to diehard Southerners, even in the 21st century. In 2016, the Virginia General Assembly passed a bill that would have prohibited the removal of war memorials, however Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed the bill.79
The following year’s white supremacist rally at Charlottesville shifted the legislature’s sentiment away from the monuments. Justin Wilson, Alexandria’s mayor at the time, said one of Alexandria's motivations for removing its Confederate monument was because “we did not want to see a repeat of Charlottesville or anything else.”80 White supremacists had held a weeklong rally in opposition to Charlottesville’s attempts to remove its Lee Monument. The rally led to multiple deaths, numerous injuries, and forced the monument debate into public view. Despite the rally’s goal of preserving the Lee monument, the widespread news coverage and public outcry in fact accelerated the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the country. Cities feared that their own Confederate monuments would become another rallying point.
Legislation to permit the removal of Confederate monuments only came about in April, 2020, when Republicans lost control of the General Assembly, which allowed the Democrats to amend state law the same year and permit the removal of Confederate monuments and eliminate the clause that Alexandria’s Confederate statue could not be moved. The new Virginia legislation would come into effect July 1st.81
On May 5th, 2020, Alexandria's city manager sent a letter to UDC that informed the organization of the recent legislation and communicated Alexandria’s official request for the removal of the statue.82 The city sent the letter in advance of July 1st so that UDC could plan ahead for the monument’s removal. Alexandria’s UDC chapter president responded a week later informing the city of the monument’s anticipated removal date on July 11th or 18th. With Charlottesville likely in mind, the UDC requested that there be no press release or publicity.83
Although the George Floyd protests occurred after the passage of this legislation, the protests accelerated the monument’s removal. In May 2020, Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, and cell phone footage of the event sparked massive outcry and public riots and vandalism. In Richmond, demonstrators spray-painted the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, an act of vandalism but also a powerful demonstration against Virginia’s history of racial injustice. Fearing a similar fate for Alexandria’s Confederate statue, on June 1st, the UDC filed a request to the city of Alexandria to remove the statue the next day.84 During the morning of June 2nd, a crane crew removed the statue in an event described by spectators as anticlimactic, with no crowds or conflict.85 The UDC removed the statue a month early for protection but with the knowledge that the statue would soon come down regardless. According to Alexandria’s legislative director at the time, Sarah Taylor, the removal of the statue before July 1st was “technically against the law” because the new legislation permitting the statue’s removal had been signed into law but had not yet taken effect.86 The pedestal was removed a month later. During the summer of 2022, the UDC moved the statue’s pedestal to Bethel Cemetery in Alexandria and plans to reunite the statue with its pedestal.87
Although erected by Confederate veterans in memory of Alexandria’s Confederate dead, the statue also commemorated the Confederacy’s dedication to slavery and repression against African Americans. Alexandria’s political landscape changed in the second half of the 20th century, a result of demographic shifts driven by the Civil Rights movement and Alexandria’s status as a suburb of Washington, DC. Public backlash to riots and domestic terrorism by white supremacists contributed to legislation permitting the monument’s removal, and the vandalism of other Confederate monuments during the George Floyd protests accelerated the monument’s removal. The statue’s history intertwines with Alexandria’s transformation over the last 150 years, and the statue’s removal is a final step in Alexandria’s acknowledgement of the city’s history of repression against African Americans and also represents the completion of Alexandria’s transformation from an old Southern city into a progressive modern suburb.