Robert E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson
Baltimore, Maryland

Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Baltimore, Maryland, 1948 with paint from 2017
Lara Gardin Fraser
158 x 66 x 75 in. (401.3 x 167.6 x 190.5 cm)
City of Baltimore, Maryland
Filed Under:
Robert E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson
Sponsor: J. Henry Ferguson (1849-1928)
Dedicated: 1948
Removed: 2017
Upon his death in 1928, banker J. Henry Ferguson, a proud Confederate sympathizer from a slave-owning family, left $100,000 in his will to commission a monument within ten miles of Baltimore City Hall. The monument was to depict Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) and Stonewall Jackson (1924-1863), his “boyish heroes,” parting before the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863), which is considered Lee’s greatest victory and central to the Lost Cause inflation of his legacy. The funds became available in 1934 following the death of Ferguson’s sister as stipulated in his will. At that time, a nine-person committee, also specified by Ferguson, convened and selected a location in Wyman Park, across the street from the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1935, six sculptors were invited to compete for the commission. The next year, a panel of six judges, including the directors of the BMA and the Chicago Art Institute and the president of the National Sculpture Society, chose Laura Gardin Fraser’s design. Best known for her bas-relief sculptures, Fraser was the first woman to design a coin for the U.S. Treasury. The Confederate generals upon whom the myth of the Lost Cause pivots are depicted on horseback, side by side; Lee gazes solemnly into the distance as Jackson brings his horse to a halt. The composition is meant to convey pathos, as the viewer would know that Jackson will soon die in the impending battle.
Shortages of bronze during World War II caused significant delays in the statue’s completion. The opulent granite pedestal designed by John Russell Pope, architect of the BMA, was installed in 1939 and stood empty until the bronze statue’s installation in 1947. Members of the public accused Fraser of purposely stalling production of the statue because she was a “Yankee.” Fraser responded to the criticism by sharing that her father was from Charleston, South Carolina, and that she herself had been born there.
The monument was dedicated on May 1, 1948, the eighty-fifth anniversary of Lee and Jackson’s final meeting. Speeches given by Maryland governor William Preston Lane Jr., Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, and Baltimore mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. (Nancy Pelosi’s father) emphasized sectional reconciliation and held up Lee and Jackson as paragons of American strength and conviction that should serve as inspiration in the face of the looming Cold War. In his speech, D’Alesandro specifically called upon Americans to “look for inspirations to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions.”
On May 15, 1948, an editorial in The Afro-American, the local Black paper, compared Lee and Jackson to Benedict Arnold and challenged the governor’s claim in his unveiling speech that the “scars of the Civil War had long since healed.” As evidence, the author pointed to the seventeen governors who were fighting President Truman’s Executive Orders 9980 and 9981, which mandated the desegregation of the federal government and army, respectively. The author also noted that the “sacred institution” Lee and Jackson sought to preserve was slavery.





































































































































































































































































































































































