One hundred years ago, when Charlottesville began an eight-year period of monument-building, the city wrote a series of historical narratives that have reverberated to the present.
Beginning in 1916 and ending in 1924, Charlottesville and the University of Virginia erected four statues across the city: two commemorated the Lost Cause and two glorified the frontier exploits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and of George Rogers Clark.
The monuments to Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are powerful symbols of white supremacy. They were built at a time of resurgent Ku Klux Klan terrorism, as well as increased valorization of the myth of the Lost Cause, a pro-Confederate interpretation of history that held that the Civil War was not actually lost, and could still be won by new forms of racial proscription and segregation.
In ways different than the Lee and Jackson statues, the George Rogers Clark and the Lewis and Clark statues are also monuments to white supremacy. They are instrumental in creating and perpetuating the myth of brave white men conquering a supposedly unknown and unclaimed land.
The Lee and Jackson statues have received considerable attention over the years. Most recently, the controversy over their proposed removal erupted in the hate-filled violence wrought by white supremacists on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017. The memorials to Lewis and Clark and George Rogers Clark have not yet generated profound and violent controversy, but momentum also has grown for their removal. In November 2019, the Charlottesville City Council voted in favor of removing the Lewis and Clark statue, and community members submitted a petition to UVA earlier that year, urging removal of the George Rogers Clark statue.
Edwin Alderman, who served as UVA’s first president from 1905 to 1931, spoke at the unveiling of both statues. In 1919, at the Lewis and Clark ceremony, Alderman characterized Lewis and Clark’s journey as one designed “to break paths through pathless woods, to voyage down vast unsailed rivers, to battle with the savage and the beast, to use science in dominion over nature.”
Two years later, it was front page news in The Daily Progress the day after Alderman accepted the George Rogers Clark statue on behalf of the University. In a speech celebrating the gift from Paul Goodloe McIntire – the benefactor responsible for all four of the Charlottesville statues – Alderman praised it as an “epic in metal and stone, of conquest and empire.”
The statues articulate a particular version of history. Unlike the monuments to Lee and Jackson – monuments, at the time, to events from the relatively recent past – the monuments to Lewis and Clark and George Rogers Clark had less to do with memory than they did with an imagined past. And that past was built upon two myths: the myth of the lone frontier hero settling the West and the myth of the vanishing Indian. In 1916, when announcing the city’s intention to build a monument to Lewis and Clark, an anonymous columnist for The Daily Progress quoted the “poet laureate of the Confederacy,” Father Abram Joseph Ryan: “A land without monuments is a land without memories; a land without memories is a land without history.” And the history being written included Indian people solely as obstacles to progress.