The statue of Robert E. Lee, celebrated general for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, was melted down in October 2023 and the bronze ingots, weighing more than one thousand pounds and labeled “Swords into Plowshares,” will be used to create a new work of art for the city. The sculpture, with pedestal, 26 feet high, 12 feet long and 8 feet wide, showed Lee astride his horse Traveller, and had stood in a Charlottsville downtown park for almost one hundred years before its removal in 2017 amidst violent resistance and legal battles from the white supremacists. After the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in 1865, General Lee did not endorse the creation of Confederate war monuments, believing that it would only hinder the South’s recovery and “…keep open the sores of war.” But after his death in 1870, various memorial organizations advocated monuments to be built in Lee’s memory and a large statue over sixty feet tall of Lee and Traveller was erected in downtown Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital in 1890. The statue was removed in September 2021 and sent to storage. Between 1890 and the 1920s dozens of Confederate monuments were built across the South. The Charlottsville statue was erected in 1924.