The Lee statue was a threat from the White League.
White League Terrorism
Photo of the statue of the traitor Lee from 1896ish. Credit to Froggy for sharing it to our “Ain’t There No More New Orleans” Zuckergroup. The statue stands on its column of “White Georgia Granite” in the foreground. Several “moonlight towers” stand in the background. An electric streetcar rounds Tivoli Circle, operating on the St. Charles Streetcar line. While the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad still owned the line, that would change quickly. The original operators did not fare well with electrification. The city forced them into several consolidations and re-organizations to keep transit running. Here’s Froggy’s caption to the photo:
Unusual view of the Lee Monument at Tivoli Circle, c. 1896-1897, with Howard Avenue and some of the “Moonlight Towers” (early electric street lighting system) in the background. Photo by Boris Dmitrievich Vostryakov, a traveler from Russia visiting the States.
So, the White League monument stood out in Uptown.
Moonlight towers
Clay monument in front of a moonlight tower, 1890s
We’ve talked about these towers before. They appeared in the 1880s, as part of commercial electrification. The towers included electric arc lights. Those lights cast down onto the street. They provided illumination over a wide part of the area. Moonlight towers offered an alternative to incandescant “Edison bulbs.” Spoiler alert: incandescent bulbs won out.
Lee
The White League erected the memorial to the traitor Lee in 1884. Segregationists and Lost Cause advocates raised the funds. These folks made their intentions clear at the dedication. Since New Orleans had a large immigrant (non-WASP) population, the city was not solidly behind the Confederacy. German and Irish families in particular suffered during the Union Navy’s blockade of the city. Confederate soldiers of Irish and German extraction mutinied at Fort Jackson in 1862, enabling Farragut and Butler to advance on the city. Families of planters and other owners of enslaved people didn’t forget this. They re-asserted control upon the exit of the Union forces.
The monument was more than a statement of authority. The White League threatened anyone who might challenge their control of the city. By the 1880s, that included free Blacks and Sicilians, as well as the Germans and Irish. This photo shows how visible the monument was. If a photographer at the statue could see the moonlight towers, others could see the statue from a distance. So, the traitor Lee stood as a warning. It conveyed a threat easily understood by the mafia-influenced groups that sought to challenge the white establishment.
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