THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996                TAG: 9608020599
SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

RICHMOND STATUE OF GEN. LEE HAD ITS OWN SHARE OF CONTROVERSY

Now that the controversial dust has settled and Arthur Ashe's statue has finally been placed on Monument Avenue in Richmond, it might be amusing to recall a similar brouhaha that preceded the earlier erection of the imposing bronze replica of Gen. Robert E. Lee on the same thoroughfare in 1890.

Soon after Lee died in 1870, the Hollywood Memorial Association of Richmond launched a move to erect a suitably imposing monument of him. This idea was immediately snapped up by a group of the Holy City's most prominent matrons, who organized under the name of the Ladies Lee Monument Association and began collecting funds to make the project possible.

Resenting being upstaged by a feminine contingent, a group of ex-Confederate officers, led by belligerent Gen. Jubal A. Early, put down their mint juleps long enough to form a Lee monument association of their own. From then on, the fat was in the fire and an uneasy truce was not accomplished until the State of Virginia overrode the combatants by forming a Lee Monument Association of its own.

From then on things progressed fairly smoothly until a site had to be chosen for the monument. Then the finger pointing began anew. Finally after considerable wrangling, Otway S. Allen, a prominent Richmond Confederate veteran, stepped forward and donated a cow pasture at the present site of Monument and Allen Avenues for the purpose. Allen's gift was reluctantly accepted since it was outside the city limits.

Then another problem reared its ugly head. When it was proposed that a ``Yankee'' sculptor from Ohio be entrusted with fashioning the statue, Gen. Early fired off a letter to Gov. Fitzhugh Lee, a nephew of Gen. Lee, in which he threatened that ``if the statue of General Lee be erected after the model,'' he would ``get together all the surviving members of the Second Corps and blow it up with dynamite.''

Following this epistolary blast, a new competition was held, and internationally known French sculptor Jean Antoine Mercie was chosen to execute the statue of Lee on Traveller. Even then, controversy continued to threaten the project. When Gov. Lee learned that ``the model called for the statue and pedestal measuring some ten feet less overall from bottom to top than Washington's statue in Capitol Square,'' he ``insisted that Mercie alter his design and place Robert E. Lee not one inch lower than George Washington.''

Meanwhile, according to Virginius Dabney's ``Richmond: The Story of a City'' (1976), The Planet, the city's African-American newspaper, owned by John Mitchell Jr., who was also a member of the city council, got on the editorial soapbox and denounced the monument project and its male members, declaring that ``Most of them were at a table, either on top or under it, when the war was going on.'' Later, Mitchell declared that the project was honoring a ``legacy of treason and blood.''

But work on the monument went forward, and when the crated sections of the statue arrived in Richmond by rail, practically everyone turned out to greet the train. Once the crates had been unloaded on flat top wagons, an estimated 10,000 men, women and children manned the ropes to help transport the boxes to the monument site. In reporting the event, Earl Lutz in ``A Richmond Album'' (1937) says: ``The ropes were then cut into small bits, and in many a Richmond home a piece is still treasured.''

Finally, on May 29, 1890, former Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston unveiled the statue while an estimated 100,000 spectators gave vent to their feelings with Rebel Yells, punctuated at intervals with the booming of cannon.

Now, 106 years later, Arthur Ashe's statue has joined the stately figure of ``Marse Robert'' on horseback at the other end of the avenue. Both laudable endeavors were initially beset with small-mindedness and bickering, but in the end good judgment prevailed.

In closing let us all hope that both projects have furthered these challenging words of the Declaration of Independence: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Bickering marked the creation, design and placement of Gen. Robert

E. Lee's monument in Richmond. by CNB