The monuments left Richmond intact. In Charlottesville, a statue left in a furnace.

The monuments left Richmond intact. In Charlottesville, a statue left in a furnace.

Crews working for the Commonwealth took down the last of the Capitol Square Confederate statues in Richmond last week, closing a six-year effort that began with the protests of 2020.

Three statues came down on Friday, August 28. They depicted Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, placed in 1875; William “Extra Billy” Smith, a Confederate general who twice served as governor of Virginia, placed in 1906; and Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Confederate army surgeon, placed in 1904. A fourth monument, also of Jackson, came down Saturday morning. Capitol Square, the civic green beside the state Capitol, now holds nothing that honors Confederate service.

The Capitol Square Confederate statues are not being destroyed

This is the fact most early coverage buried, and it changes the story. The Department of General Services says the Commonwealth gifted the monuments to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation. That New Market nonprofit manages the eight-county Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District and has helped preserve thousands of acres of Civil War ground.

The foundation intends to move the statues to battlefield sites in the Valley and put them back on public display. Its chief executive, Keven M. Walker, called the transfer an act of preservation, saying preservation “is more about the future than the past.” The destination is not arbitrary. Jackson fought his 1862 campaign across that ground.

A bill that failed, then passed anyway

No standalone law authorized the removals. A bill to take the statues down stalled during the 2026 General Assembly session. Lawmakers then reached the same result through Budget Item 71 #1C in the fiscal 2027-28 state budget, which passed in June. That item directed the Department of General Services to clear every Confederate monument and memorial from the square, and it carried funding with it. Multiple outlets put the appropriation at $1.8 million.

Charlottesville chose a furnace

Ninety minutes west, the same argument ended very differently. Charlottesville pulled its statue of Robert E. Lee from Market Street Park in July 2021. That December the city council gave the bronze to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which had proposed melting it down and recasting the metal as new public art under a project called Swords Into Plowshares.

Two groups had bid to keep the statue whole instead: the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation and the Ratcliffe Foundation. Both sued. A Charlottesville judge dismissed the central claims in July 2023, and that October, at a foundry the center declined to name, workers melted the statue.

The contrast is not one of degree. In Charlottesville, a century-old work of sculpture ceased to exist, and the organizations offering to preserve it lost in court. Five years later, the Commonwealth handed the Capitol Square Confederate statues to a preservation foundation by choice. Virginians who watched the Lee bronze go into a crucible have reason to mark that difference, whatever they think of clearing the Capitol lawn.

The case for taking them down

Supporters reject the charge that anyone erased history. Former state Sen. Adam Ebbin, the Alexandria Democrat who sponsored the original measure, said the action “changes who we choose to venerate on the Capitol lawn” and leaves the history of the war untouched. State Sen. Mike Jones of Chesterfield, who sat on the Richmond City Council during that city’s removals, described the monuments as symbols and asked where the Commonwealth wants to point its visitors. In Charlottesville, the heritage center’s director argued that recasting the bronze would turn something her community experienced as harmful into something that reflects its values now.

Those arguments deserve a hearing, and Virginia Christians will not all land in the same place on them. Two questions survive the monument debate, however, and they belong to citizens on every side of it.

What a people owes its own memory

The first question is procedural. A measure that could not pass on its own merits became law inside a budget item. Budget language draws no separate floor debate and no separate recorded vote, so no member had to stand behind this decision by name. Whatever anyone thinks of the statues, that mechanism now sits on the shelf for any contested policy that fails in open session, including policy touching schools, conscience, and the family. Readers who care about constitutional government should watch the tool, not just this use of it.

The second question concerns memory. Scripture treats honest recollection as a duty rather than a preference, and it never permits the flattering version. A monument is not history, and lowering one repeals nothing that happened. Melting one erases nothing either. A nation that cannot bear to look at its own record, in either direction, has not healed. It has only stopped looking.

Capitol Square is not bare. A memorial to Virginia’s civil rights movement still stands there, along with an earthwork honoring the Commonwealth’s Indian tribes and a monument to Virginia women. The four Confederate statues will stand again as well, on fields where the men they depict actually fought. Charlottesville chose a different ending.