When Robert E. Lee died in 1870, a memorial association was formed in the City of New Orleans. After six years had passed, the association raised an amazing $36,400 – during the throes of Reconstruction – to construct a monument. The world-famous New York-based sculptor Alexander Doyle (who studied in Bergamo, Rome, and Florence) was commissioned, and it was installed at Tivoli Circle – renamed Lee Circle – in 1884. The statue was placed atop a granite pedestal consisting of a 60 foot column. The statue itself is 16.5 feet high and made of bronze. Attendees at the dedication included Jefferson Davis, two daughters of General Lee, and former Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard.
Monuments such as these also memorialized the many common soldiers whose bodies were never recovered for burial, or who lie strewn across battlefields in unknown, unmarked, or even mass graves. The postwar monuments provided solace for survivors and healing between the regions as monuments to the dead of both sides in the war were erected as the veterans were dying off. The Lee statue was a rare early monument erected during the post-war federal occupation of Louisiana.
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