When Lincoln Returned to Richmond, Part III

The unveiling was set for April 5, a Saturday. I drove back down to Richmond the day before to meet up with David Leak, a Son who had attended the Lincoln conference at the Marshall. He had agreed to show me around town–“to see some of the important sights,” he said–and help me kill time before the ceremonies began Saturday morning.

Leak is in his late fifties, stout and balding, a banjo-picker by trade. This sunny afternoon he was dressed casually, as he usually is, in baggy khakis, a purple polo shirt, and, both as a sporty touch and a shield from the sun, a wide-brimmed Panama hat. I met him outside the house he shares with his mother. He lives in what Richmonders call the Fan, a picturesque district of Victorian row houses, all red brick with white trim, set along wide boulevards that angle out from downtown and run westward for 30 blocks or more. Each house has a columned front porch and a small square of lawn edged in boxwood. The dogwood and azaleas were in full bloom.

I complimented him on the neighborhood.

“Charmin’, isn’t it?” he said. Leak is native to the capital, and his accent is deep and rich. “It’s a wonder”–a wondah–“it’s been preserved as well as it has. But Richmond is that way. A lot of the big things change, a lot of the little ones never do. At least to the naked eye.”

The first stop on our tour was the Capitol grounds–notable for its statuary, just as the guidebooks say. The magnificent equestrian statue of Washington, where Lincoln may or may not have made his lost address to the freedmen, still towers over the lawn where it drops away toward the river. Leak nodded at it, then pointed me farther along the Capitol driveway, to a statue of Stonewall Jackson, which sits in a prominent position–right next to a statue of his doctor.

I was saying, “They built a statue of Stonewall Jackson’s doctor?” when Leak had me stop the car.

“You see old Stonewall standing there,” he said. “Very impressive, isn’t he? Well, here’s the plan. They’re gonna start on a renovation of this place real soon. Redo everything, make it good as new. However, there will be a shortage of toilet facilities for those visiting the Capitol. So honest to God, they’ve announced they’re going to line the portapotties up right along here in front of this statue so no young innocent will have to be exposed to the horrible sight of Stonewall Jackson. Now whole busloads of schoolchildren will be able to tour their state Capitol and take a piss on the hero of Chancellorsville, all in the same day.”

We drove back through old downtown, past doorways heaped in trash. “When I was a boy people would come from all over to shop here,” Leak said. “Department stores, theaters, candy shops, haberdashers. Look at it now. Anyone who tries to stand up for tradition, for the past, when we do that, they call us ‘alienated.’ Well, yes, I guess I am alienated from this.”

As we drove along, Leak quoted Tocqueville on “democratic consensus,” Allen Tate on the character of the southern imagination, and the art critic Robert Hughes on the value of representational, as opposed to abstract, art. Everything he said was interesting, but his observations were interspersed in a long patter of complaint. I saw before too long he was taking me on a grievance tour–perhaps the only way he could see his hometown, now that it had suffered so many indignities.

He told me he had never been politically inclined until 10 years ago or so. In 1993, the City Council unilaterally decided to place a statue of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, a Richmond native, on Monument Avenue, the miles-long boulevard dotted with memorial statues of Confederate heroes. Monument Avenue is Via Dolorosa for southern nostalgics.

“It was the gratuitousness of it that bothered me,” he said. “There was just no call for it. And then they tried to stop a mural of Robert E. Lee from going up down by the river. They were getting up some kind of tourist destination down there, a river walk, and Lee’s was just one portrait in a gallery–a perfectly politically correct gallery of women, blacks, liberals, everyone else. You could have Frederick Douglass. Fine. They had Lincoln, of course. Got to have Lincoln. But not Lee. Oh no. Couldn’t have Lee.”

Inspired and repulsed, Leak began writing letters to the editor, attended rallies, and eventually joined the Sons in their long-running guerrilla war with the city establishment. “The powers that control the city, they cannot stand diversity,” he said. “They say they love it, but really they cannot tolerate it. They want everyone to live like them, think like them, talk like them, honor their heroes, honor their values. Meanwhile they do everything they can to eliminate ours.”

He said the city of his childhood had ceased to exist a generation ago. “The newspaper is run by Yankees. The businessmen are spineless. Cultural Marxists control all the major institutions. They’re very cosmopolitan, these people. They have no sense of being rooted in a single place–to them Richmond is just this town they’ve moved to. They’ve been everywhere, and they’re from nowhere.”

He told me he’d seen a sign from the city’s Valentine Richmond History Center, sponsoring a “Lincoln Walk.”

“Here you’ve got the oldest, most revered museum in this city. They’re just falling all over themselves to commemorate the great man’s visit. They want the citizens of Richmond to follow in the footsteps of the American Caesar, to ooh and aah: Oh, he walked here! Oh, he stopped there! How can they honor a man who did everything in his power to destroy them? I’ll tell you how. They’ve taught southerners to hate their history. And after the history is gone, after their respect for their ancestors is gone, there’s nothing to replace it with.”

He pointed me down North Boulevard, another grand thoroughfare, past Battle Abbey, the bunker-like headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. “You’d think they’d have some kind of Confederate flag flying, wouldn’t you? You see a Confederate flag?”

I scanned the marble face of the building and its complicated foliage. I didn’t see a flag.

“Look close. It’s there.”

I gave up.

“Drive around here,” he said, and I pulled the car up at an odd angle where we could peer into a copse of trees–and sure enough, tucked behind a towering pine that almost precisely blocked it from the street was a Confederate battle flag, hanging limp from a gold-trim pole. “They moved the flagpole a while back,” Leak said. “Had to get it out of public view! Can’t expose the children! Even at the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.”

We drove further down, past the Virginia Historical Society, where the building’s original inscription, “Confederate Memorial Institute,” has been covered over by a huge banner, and then through Hollywood Cemetery, where more than 10,000 Confederate soldiers are buried, and where, at Jefferson Davis’s grave, the Sons were planning to hold a counter-demonstration against the Lincoln statue the next day. Leak said he wouldn’t be at the counter-demonstration, but planned to be at Tredegar to protest the unveiling as it happened. “Got a bunch of signs being printed up at Kinko’s even as we’re standing here talking,” he said.

On our way back to the Fan, we drove the length of Monument Avenue again, past Stuart, Lee, Jackson, and the other heroes, so Leak could show me the statue of Arthur Ashe. When the city council first approved the statue, a year after Ashe’s death in 1989, civic groups from all over the city vied to have it placed in their neighborhoods. The council voted to place it on the avenue instead, notwithstanding, or rather because of, the odd juxtaposition–just a few hundred yards down the street from Jefferson Davis, who never in his life would have given a thought to Arthur Ashe or his ancestors, unless he’d been putting in a bid.

The City Council’s highhanded decision, and the energetic objections to it, made news around the world, drawing attention to Richmond as a place “where the Civil War was still being fought.” With their marches and paid advertisements, the Sons campaigned loudly against the city fathers, in a prototype of the campaign they now waged against the Lincoln statue.

“Of course, we lost in the end,” Leak said. “They won. They always do.”

We looked up at the statue as cars circled by. Amid a clutch of crouching children, Ashe stands knobby-kneed, in short pants and ankle socks. He holds both hands aloft, raising his racquet high in the air as though he’s trying to keep it away from the brats at his feet.

The statue looked puny and absurd.

“It’s a joke,” Leak said.

“It makes the whole avenue seem like a postmodern installation,” I agreed. “‘Five Generals and a Tennis Player.'”

In the car I said: “You have to admit Ashe is a great local hero. He deserves a statue, right?”

“That is an issue on which I have no strong views one way or the other,” Leak said. “There are dozens of places where a thing like that would have been suitable. The important thing is, by putting the statue here, on the avenue, they realized they could trivialize the things we cherish and get away with it. They could rub our noses in it and nobody could be powerful enough to stop them. So of course it was just the beginning.”

For our final stop, Leak had me pull over to the far lane of another traffic circle, in the center of which General Lee sat impossibly high and erect on his mount, Traveler. We got out and Leak removed his hat. “Robert E. Lee is of course the beau ideal of Southern manhood,” he said, “a gentleman whose character was as close to perfection as Southerners have dared imagine.”

I said, lamely, that Lee did indeed seem like a great man.

“You need to understand one thing about Robert E. Lee,” Leak said. “And this one thing may help you understand other things. Lee inherited slaves from his wife’s father. He freed them at once. Slavery was a sin against God, he said.

“And then–then–when his country, Virginia, was invaded by Yankees, he did not hesitate to take up arms to defend her. They can say what they want. But when this man took the field he was not fighting for slavery.

“When they brought the statue to Richmond, there were ceremonies to mark its progress as they pulled it through the streets. Grown men wept as it passed. They wept. It’s not so hard to understand, is it? The people who paid for these beautiful statues, who built them and honored them and maintained them, they believed in something. You may like it, you may not like it–but they believed in it.

“What do people believe in now? Nothing. Commerce. Power. Money. Winning at whatever cost.

“When they put that statue in tomorrow, down at Tredegar, with the mayor and the businessmen there, and the governor probably, when they put in that glorious, expensive statue to Father Abraham, they will have won again, right? They always win. Fine. Winning is what they care about.

“But you think anyone’s going to weep?”

We’re a forward-looking country. What could be less American than dwelling on the past? So it is fitting that when modern Americans dwell on Lincoln–who is, after all, the inventor of modern America–we botch the job. Those who hate him turn him into a monster out of all proportion. Those who love him turn him into a sentimental old poop.

The Richmond City Council had declared April 5, 2003, “Lincoln in Richmond Day,” and an hour after dawn the day was still dark, with slate-gray thunderheads rolling up from Petersburg in a line along the river. But the downpour never came. By late afternoon, when the shroud was tugged off the statue at the visitor center, the sun had splintered through and Tredegar was bathed in golden light. Hundreds of onlookers cheered, the bronze of the statue glowed, and the mayor and Mr. Kline and the park service people beamed.

Many of them had spent their morning at a “Lincoln in Richmond” symposium, held a couple miles away at the headquarters of the Virginia Historical Society–the same building where, Leak had told me, the word “Confederate” had been covered up from embarrassment. In keeping with the interlocking fiduciary opportunities that so appalled the Sons, the society was hawking miniatures of the Lincoln statue to its members, splitting the money with Mr. Kline and his nonprofit U.S. Historical Society. The symposium was thrown together in haste, as the city establishment’s rebuttal to the “Lincoln Reconsidered” conference, and like the Sons, the society had had to reach far beyond Richmond for its panel of Lincoln experts.

They shared a pedigree common to the breed nowadays; indeed, it would have been difficult to bring together a panel of Lincoln obsessives more perfectly opposite to the group assembled by Brag Bowling at the John Marshall Hotel. Harold Holzer, a specialist in Lincolniana from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, used to write speeches for Mario Cuomo. William Lee Miller, an ethics professor from the University of Virginia, was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and later worked for Lyndon Johnson. The third panelist, Ronald C. White, is dean of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, which is a self-explanatory job title.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Lincoln who emerged from their discussion was a cross between Adlai Stevenson and Mario Cuomo, if both had gone to San Francisco Theological Seminary. Professor Miller noted how “unmoralistic” Lincoln was, a specialist in self-criticism who never felt the need, despite constant provocation, to be “judgmental.” White, for his part, said the Richmond statue improved on Daniel Chester French’s heroic, awe-inspiring statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. “We’re in a new era,” White said. “The new statue gives us a mild, contemplative Lincoln, in marked contrast to French. Today there’s a different spirit, ready to identify with a gentler Lincoln–a Lincoln who could deal comfortably with ambiguity.” The little plaza outside the visitor center, said White, will create “a safe space for us to talk about those rifts that divide us.”

Forget Stevenson and Cuomo. If Lincoln had been born 125 years later, he could have been Bill Moyers.

AFTER THE SYMPOSIUM I went down to the safe space at Tredegar. A long row of protesters had formed along the driveway leading to the iron gates of the parking lot. Cops were everywhere. Several of them, mounted on horseback, had ranged themselves around the hill above the visitor center. Half a dozen others manned a checkpoint at the gate. Everyone entering the park was required to empty bags and purses–pockets, too, in some cases. A printed sign read: “No Coolers, Glass, Signs, Flags or Banners.”

I found Leak in the line of protesters along the driveway, dressed festively in a top hat and a cutaway morning coat over his polo shirt and khakis. His signs showed the professional Kinko’s touch: “No Honor for War Criminals,” and “Jefferson Davis was Our President.” A friend next to him held another sign: “Your Hero Killed Five of My Ancestors.” Behind us, a few of the Sons began singing “Dixie.”

“And how was the love-in at the Historical Society?” Leak asked. “Did you learn about the greatness of the great man?”

“They think he was a wimp,” I said.

Leak looked away, then back at me. “Jesus,” he said. “Even I don’t think he was a wimp.”

A scuffle broke out at the gate. One of the Sons had tried to enter wearing a T-shirt bearing the Stars and Bars. “No flags,” a cop said loudly.

“Just one more example of ethnic cleansing,” the man said when he rejoined the other protesters. “They just want to remove the undesirable elements from the population.” He saw my notepad and said: “Getting kicked around don’t piss me off. We’re used to it by now. What pisses me off is when they tell us we’re supposed to like it.”

I went up to the visitor center. A temporary platform had been set up for a surprisingly large group of speakers: the park supervisor Cynthia MacLeod and Bob Kline, several congressmen, the lieutenant governor, a small army of state legislators. The mayor was at the microphone, commending his city on hosting the “the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.” In mid-speech he was drowned out by the sudden appearance of a small propeller plane, circling low overhead. It trailed a big banner: “Sic Semper Tyrannis”–“Thus always to tyrants”–the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the words John Wilkes Booth sang out as he fell to the stage of Ford’s Theater, having put a bullet in Lincoln’s brain.

I stood off to the side with a group of reporters from local television stations. Their cameramen milled about, looking bored.

“This is it?” one of them said. “Where’s the action?”

I looked around for Brag Bowling, but he was nowhere to be seen. It appeared that no one from the higher ranks of the Sons had bothered to show up. “For two months I’m getting emails–‘We’re going to stop this thing by any means necessary’; ‘Prepare for the fireworks on April 5,'” one of the reporters said. “I guess they lost their nerve.” He turned to his cameraman. “At least you got a shot of the prop plane, right?”

When the speeches were over, on toward dusk, the audience gathered around the plaza. The statue sat hunkered under a tarp. With a flourish, Mr. Kline and Cynthia MacLeod yanked the cover off.

“It’s so small!” said a lady next to me. And it was–though life-sized, it looked smaller than life, diminutive almost. Lincoln sits tilted forward on a bench with a faraway look in his eyes. Tad is next to him, looking up expectantly, presumably waiting for his father to say something. The effect is supposed to be contemplative, but really it looks as if son has caught dad puzzling through a senior moment. (“Four score and . . . and what? . . . damn! . . . four score and . . .”) The bronze bench on which they sit extends on either side, leaving space for tourists to pose for pictures, and soon the statue was engulfed by the crowd, as everyone jostled to get close.

I joined Mr. Kline off to one side, where he stood with his partner, Martin Moran, the president of the U.S. Historical Society.

Mr. Kline was much moved. “Right at this moment the meaning of the statue is quite clear, don’t you think? It says, very simply, that we should love each other.”

He fell silent, and Moran, who is much the more voluble of the two, began extolling the statue’s significance.

“I’ve had historians tell me that this is the most important statue of Lincoln anywhere in the world,” he said. “This is a day that will go down in history. People will come from all over to admire this piece.”

Tom DiLorenzo, the author of “The Real Lincoln,” had said something oddly similar a few weeks before. Putting the statue in Richmond, he said, reminded him of stories he’d heard about Russia in the 1980s, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“People would walk by all the huge statues of Lenin every day,” he said, “and the statues just reminded them of what a lie it all was. Those statues, erected by the Communists, worked against the Communists, because it illustrated the lies the whole system was based on. The same thing’ll happen with the statues of Lincoln. In a few years, Americans are going to look at that statue down there, and they’re going to wonder, ‘What did this man really stand for?'”

DILORENZO IS ALMOST CERTAINLY WRONG, of course, but I’m pretty sure Moran is wrong, too–and they’re wrong precisely at the point where they agree: Both have high hopes for the statue, both believe their countrymen will see it as a thing of great consequence, full of meaning, because Lincoln is a figure of such consequence. We watched the visitors elbowing one another, patting Lincoln’s shoulders and hair, mugging for snapshots. The sinking sun gilded the statue in outline. I said something about how small the bronze figures looked.

“That was intentional,” Moran said. “Could we have got something larger, some huge icon sort of thing? You bet we could have. We could have done one-and-a-half, double, triple life-size. We could have put it on a pedestal.

“And what would we have had then? A giant among the little people. Well, that wouldn’t have been appropriate. We wanted Lincoln down here among the people, something more human, more approachable, something everyone could relate to.”

As he spoke a mother tried to settle her three kids for a photograph. A little girl hopped into Lincoln’s lap and pounded the crown of his head, while her brother knotted his little fingers around the statue’s throat, and her sister, letting out a girlish “Eeeewwww,” slipped her pinky into the great man’s nose.

“And this,” Moran said, “this is the Lincoln we’ve brought back to Richmond.”

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.