Statue of Robert E. Lee (Valentine)
sculpture by Edward Virginius Valentine
Robert E. Lee is a bronze sculpture commemorating the general of the same name by Edward Virginius Valentine, formerly installed in the crypt of the United States Capitol as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection. The statue was given by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1909. On December 21, 2020, the sculpture was removed from the grounds of the United States Capitol and relocated to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Replacement
On January 2, 2020, Virginia governor Ralph Northam requested a bill to remove the statue from the U.S. Capitol building. The idea came from United States representatives Jennifer Wexton and Donald McEachin. "These statutes aimed to rewrite Lee’s reputation from that of a cruel slave owner and Confederate General to portraying him as a kind man and reluctant war hero who selflessly served his home state of Virginia," Wexton and McEachin wrote in a letter to Northam. The pair suggested several potential candidates, including educator and orator Booker T. Washington and civil rights attorney Oliver Hill.
On December 16, 2020, the Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol unanimously recommended that the Lee statue be replaced with a statue of civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns as the Virginian representative within the collection. The statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from the National Statuary Hall five days later, on 21 December with Wexton, McEachin, and Virginia United States Senator Tim Kaine in attendance. It was then transferred to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
“Statue of Robert E. Lee (Valentine)” enters the record as sculpture by Edward Virginius Valentine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Statue, Robert and Valentine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Statue of Robert E. Lee (Valentine)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Statue, Robert and Valentine provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q37830943. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1909 and 2020.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Statue of Robert E. Lee (Valentine)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.