Flagging the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Twenty years after Gen. Robert E. Lee rode into Appomattox and surrendered his tattered army, ending the War Between the States, a memorial chapel was built in Richmond in memory of the 260,000 Confederate soldiers who died during the conflict.. The Pelham Chapel – Confederate War Memorial is designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S., and has been granted the status of Confederate Monument by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The organ in the chapel was donated by a group of Union veterans from Lynn, Mass. One of the contributors to the soldiers’ home that surrounded the chapel was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. And a Union private from Massachusetts donated his annual pension to support the home. A pair of Confederate flags had flown over the Confederate Memorial Chapel in Richmond since 1887. Those two flags did not trouble the Union soldiers who donated the organ to the chapel; nor did they trouble Ulysses S. Grant. They were placed there by Confederate Veterans, to memorialize the Confederate dead, and honor the living.

Fast forward 150 years…on the eve of the Sesquicentennial Commemoration of the War Between the States, June 1st, 2010, these two Confederate Battle Flags were forcibly removed from the Memorial by a restriction in the lease renewal, at the insistence of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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