LAST WEEK I was in New Orleans when city council voted to remove the Confederate monuments to President Jefferson Davis, General P.G.T. Beauregard, and General Robert E. Lee. It is hard for me to imagine the removal of the stoic sculptures, but regardless of the outcome I wanted to visit this “Rebel art” before it possibly perished from the locations that it had been in for over 100 years.

This is the view looking from the privately funded Confederate Memorial Hall toward the Robert E. Lee monument at Lee Circle. The Lee monument was dedicated in 1884, and put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. A New Orleans magazine listed the sculpture as “one of the 11 most important monuments” in the city. Robert Lee Hodge.
New Orleans has been under the media microscope since Mayor Mitch Landrieu initiated the monument removal effort in the wake of last summer’s Charleston, S.C., shootings. New Orleans has now set a major precedent by trying to eradicate all Confederate physical memory from city property. If Mayor Landrieu and city council are able to follow through with their efforts (lawsuits are pending) one has to wonder where does this take us as a society, and to what end?

Another view of Beauregard’s statue, backed by an early evening sky. The equestrian monument stands at the entrance to New Orleans City Park. Robert Lee Hodge.

This early-war flag is on display in New Orleans’ Confederate Memorial Hall. The “Orleans Rifles,” a company of the 6th Louisiana Infantry, carried the banner. Today’s pleas from defenders of Confederate memory are oddly similar to the words on the flag. Robert Lee Hodge.
Robert Lee Hodge is a passionate Civil War filmmaker, speaker and preservationist. He is famous for his profile in the New York Times bestseller, Confederates in the Attic.