The statue of one of the nation's greatest traitors is finally cut apart and thrown into a furnace

He cut a handsome figure in his dapper gray, but alas, Bobby Lee is no more. The general who surrendered on behalf of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, effectively ending this country’s first Civil War, no longer stands any chance of remounting his faithful steed, Traveller, atop the pedestal where Lee once grimly surveyed the town of Charlottesville, Virginia. The statue was removed in 2021, four years after the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that had sought to preserve it. It was finally reduced to molten bronze last Saturday.  

Immortalized as much for his formal dress and bearing at the Appomattox court house as for his indisputable skill on the battlefield, Lee remained a revered, almost legendary figure throughout most of this nation long after after the war’s conclusion. His was the noble and confident visage of what became euphemistically referred to as the “Lost Cause,” a gauzy, sentimental concoction to salve the wounded pride of Southern whites that served to obscure the brutal institution of slavery they’d fought so hard to preserve. More than 150 years after his death, Lee’s memory still commanded awe and respect in most segments of this still white-dominated country. It was truly a remarkable and unique legacy for a traitor who arguably should have been executed as an example to his Southern brethren.

But those were different times, we are assured. Well … perhaps not so much. 

RELATED STORY: Henrietta Lacks to be immortalized again—this time as a monument replacing Robert E. Lee statue