Lee statue in U.S. Capitol
Two Virginia members of Congress have proposed replacing the statue of Robert E. Lee representing Virginia in the U.S. Capitol. I applaud this move. Being a lifetime Virginian who grew up immersed in the legacy of the Confederacy and the glory of Lee and Virginia, I think it is time for Virginia to move beyond its misguided glorification of the Civil War. I would like visitors to the U.S. Capitol to identify the Commonwealth with something other than slavery and the Civil War.
I am a little ambivalent regarding the replacement for the Lee statue. The Congressional proponents favor Oliver Hill. I have recently finished two books about Hill: Margaret Edd’s wonderful We Face the Dawn and Hill’s entertaining and enlightening autobiography, The Big Bang. My admiration and appreciation of Hill are greater than ever. He deserves to be honored. My only reservation is that he does not come across as a “son of Virginia.” He was not proud to be a Virginian. Indeed, he had no reason to be; the state did everything it could to lessen his humanity. He spent his life fighting the state-supported system that tried to keep him and people like him from realizing their potential, all because of the color of their skin.
From that perspective, I would lean to selecting John Marshall to replace Lee as Virginia’s representative in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Not only was he prominent in Virginia government and politics, but, as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, he probably did more than anyone else to establish the strong central government that has characterized the United States.
However, Virginia already has one representative from the early national period in the Capitol: George Washington. Perhaps it is time to move away from our obsession with our history and present to the nation and the world someone who is representative of the modern Virginia. In the end, it was Oliver Hill, who (along with his law partner Spotswood Robinson) was the person from Virginia who was most instrumental in dragging Virginia and the rest of the nation closer to the goal enunciated by that other Virginian, “all men are created equal.”
