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But Chaney appealed the decision, and despite the soggy weather, reveled in the dedication ceremony.“I feel good!” he said.Sculptor Ron Moore of Mountain Home, Ark., said the bronze and granite statue weighed 2,200 pounds and took two years to complete. He couldn’t yet say how the finished work affected him, he said, because it’s too fresh.“When you work on something a long time, you lose your perspective,” he said. “I have to go away for a while and then look at it again in a year or so.”Visitors gathered to hear remarks from Chaney, Moore and former Maryland Transportation Secretary James Lighthizer, now president of the Civil War Preservation Trust. Confederate re-enactors — a color guard from the Maryland division of the Sons of the Confederacy — mingled among them.“We started three years ago with the idea that restoring the farm would be a good idea,” Chaney told the group.Then he discovered that battlefield monuments dedicated to the Union outnumbered the Confederates by 99 to 3, he said, and he wanted to “even that up a little bit.”As to the contention that placing a statue of Lee on a portion of the battlefield held by the North was “historically incorrect,” Chaney countered that Lee had ridden down that road before the battle.Courting controversy may be a family trait.Despite his impeccable personal reputation, Lee, a distant uncle to Chaney, sparked a little controversy himself. While historians say he despised both slavery and secession, he despised the thought of taking up arms against Virginia even more.But “people after the war, North and South, admired and loved him,” Chaney said.
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Herald M.
MD, USA 19 Aug 2017
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