The Confederate veteran among the first residents of Monument Avenue regretted his military service. Businessman Lewis Harvie Blair considered “the more than three years wasted in the vain effort to maintain that most monstrous institution, African slavery, the real, tho’ States’ Rights were the ostensible, cause of the War.”
Yet in 1913 he built a columned Colonial Revival mansion at 2327 Monument Ave. near the outstretched hand of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The statue installed in 1907 within feet of Blair’s portico seems to either be ushering Blair back into the fold of the Lost Cause or gesturing to the world that even this wayward old soldier had at last learned his lesson. The point is underscored by the allegorical figure of “VIndicatrix,” perched 60 feet up, her finger raised in a perpetual scold.
Blair was born in Richmond, June 21, 1834, the 11th of 13 children of John Geddes and Sarah Ann Eyre (Heron) Blair. His father died when Lewis was 17, which ended his formal education. Nonetheless, he maintained an enduring enthusiasm for scholarship.
He joined the Confederate military in 1862 ahead of the draft to assure choice of service. He became an artillerist because he thought it the safest branch. Blair could’ve used connections to angle a commission, but he started and finished the war as a private. He didn’t respect authority, got into fights and spent time in stockades. A case of typhoid kept him from active duty until war’s end.
In the ruined Richmond of 1865, his mother gave him $20 that he used to start a store and auction business in Amelia County. His 1867 union with Alice Wayles Harrison (1842-1894) resulted in six boys and a girl. He got into the Richmond grocery trade, profited by real estate investments, and by 1878 became an executive with the Stephen Putney Shoe Company. (The firm’s much remuddled factory and offices stands today empty at 2220 W. Broad St.).
He didn’t join fashionable men’s clubs; he didn’t golf, gamble, drink, smoke or attend church. He busied himself with his family, collecting art and antiques, reading and writing.
His first book in 1886 condemned high protective tariffs. Unwise Laws: A Consideration of the Operations of a Protective Tariff Upon Industry, Commerce and Society was reviewed with general favor.
Blair’s observations came during a crucial juncture in Virginia’s sociopolitical history. The Readjuster Party, under former Confederate general and railroad executive William Mahone (1826-1895), dominated the state during 1879-1883. The Readjusters reformed education and prisons while seeking an alliance between the black and white working classes. Then the 1883 U.S. Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. The Readjusters, a wobbling coalition not helped by Mahone’s mercurial personality and insistence on loyalty, suffered a mortal blow in Danville on the eve of the General Assembly elections on Nov. 3, 1883. Readjuster control of the Danville’s governing council outraged white conservatives who publicly made known their displeasure about “the injustice and humiliation to which our white people have been subjected and are daily undergoing by the domination and misrule of the radical or negro party.” White conservatives demanded the social subjugation of blacks. They wanted a fight and got one when a street brawl turned into a gun battle between black and white police and the white militia. The ensuing mayhem caused the deaths of five people. And the Readjuster Party died that day, too, with blame heaped on the organization and Mahone’s opportunism. Thus Virginia underwent final conversion to the Lost Cause movement. Richmond continued with its frenzied memorialization of the lost war and its dead with pyramids, plaques and statues.
Lewis Harvie Blair didn’t have time for that.
He submitted to the New York Independent in the summer of 1887 a series of articles, “The Prosperity of the South,” about his socio-economic ideas. Apart from a few urban centers, Blair showed that the South wasn’t prospering.
He deemed it “the height of folly” to insist upon segregated schools that couldn’t be well-maintained. The split social order wasted money and bequeathed to the South a generation of ill-educated and therefore useless workers and voters, both black and white. He stated that blacks should be “inspired with self-respect, their hope must be stimulated and their intelligence cultivated.” He believed the prosperity of the South “depended upon the elevation of the Negro.”
The book version of the articles was published in 1889. Blair later described that his writing, “brought me both [financial] loss and odium at least at home in Virginia, tho’ it spread my name favorably from Maine to California.”
He nonetheless kept sending letters to Richmond’s newspaper editors objecting to their stances, contributed to African American causes and donated new editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica to Richmond’s black schools. He composed by hand a 357-page autobiography in which he denounced the Confederacy and regretted his service in its ranks. He wrote the memoir probably as instruction for his growing family without intention of publication.
His wife Alice died in Feb. 3, 1894. In 1898, he married his secretary, Martha “Mattie” Ruffin Feild, who was less than half his age. They had four daughters. The later lives of two of them are of interest, Jean Blair Hélion (1900-1944) and Louise Heron Blair Daura (1905-1972).
Jean Blair, a graduate of Sweet Briar College, while in Paris in 1932 married French painter Jean Hélion whose work and career brought him to the United States. They divided their time between the Blair summer retreat in Rockbridge Springs, Va., and New York, while Hélion worked toward U.S. citizenship. Then he returned to Europe to fight the Nazis. He left behind Jean and their two sons. The personal campaign led to his capture in June 1940 and 21-month imprisonment, daring escape and assorted adventures that he chronicled in his 1943 memoir, “They Shall Not Have Me.” Jean Blair Hélion died in New York and is buried here in Hollywood Cemetery. The artist widow soon married the daughter of modernist art collector Peggy Guggenheim, the unstable and tragic artist, Pegeen Vail.
Louise Blair graduated as an English major from Bryn Mawr College in 1927 and while studying art in Paris took classes from the Catalan painter Pierre Daura. They wed in 1928 and settled in the south of France until 1938 when they returned to Rockbridge. Louise did not pursue abstraction, as did her husband, but found some success as a figurative painter and portraitist. She kept up a prolific correspondence and detailed diaries.
Daura chose not to sit by and watch his country torn apart by civil war. He went to Spain to fight the fascists. While recovering from wounds he lost Spanish citizenship. He made it back to Rockbridge, resumed panting, became a citizen, and taught at Randolph-Macon Women’s College and Lynchburg College. One of his students matured into one of the better known modernist artists of the 20th century, Cy Twombly.
Between 1898 and 1915 Louis Harvie Blair underwent an inverse epiphany concurrent to moving the family from 511 E. Grace St. into a grand Monument Avenue house. He wrote a 270-page untitled manuscript that urged the repeal of the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution — to revoke the U.S. citizenship of former slaves and blacks’ right to vote. And he argued for making African Americans a “ward of the nation.” A 349-page, typed rewrite of his autobiography bore no resemblance to the first. He explained in a letter that his previous anti-segregationist philosophy was extrapolated from faulty premises.
Blair, aged 82, died of a heart attack at his Monument Avenue home on November 26, 1916, and was buried at Hollywood Cemetery.
The obituaries make no mention of any Confederate last rites.
