The following story originally appeared in the December issue of Richmond magazine, on newsstands now.
Photo illustration by Sarah Lockwood; Lincoln: Library of Congress; blueprint: Library of Virginia; monument: Cook Collection/The Valentine
The pedestal of the Robert E. Lee monument might hold an amazing secret — a legendary and irreplaceable artifact related to President Abraham Lincoln worth upwards of a quarter-million dollars. Or it could be a fake.
The rich history of the Lee monument pedestal at Monument and Allen avenues often goes overlooked in the storm surrounding the Marius Jean Antonin Mercié-created bronze statue that stands atop it. The 40-foot-high granite base was designed by French architect Paul Pujol and constructed by James Netherwood, a Richmond sculptor and quarryman. Netherwood also created the A.P. Hill, J.E.B. Stuart, and Libby Hill Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument pedestals.
The elaborate scrollwork featuring a roaring lion head festooned with acanthus and laurel leaves on the north and south pedestal ends was created by New York City-based Caspar Buberl, who was also known for his bronze statues of both Confederate and Union soldiers in Alexandria, New York and Gettysburg. Original pedestal blueprints show that additional scrollwork was proposed around the base of the pedestal, but it was never applied.
The unveiling of the Lee monument took place May 29, 1890. (Photo courtesy the Cook Collection/The Valentine)
The cost of the Lee monument, which was unveiled in 1890, was staggering in those post-Civil War days. The pedestal alone cost $41,500, even after being scaled back from its original, more ostentatious concept, yet it still greatly eclipsed the cost of the bronze statue, which was designed and cast for about $18,000. Additional expenditures of $18,000 in fees and expenses rounded out the total monument cost to $77,500 — equal to about $2 million today.
Time capsules were popular in the Victorian era, but it wasn’t until 1936 that the modern expectation for an eventual opening date took hold, Erik Rangno writes in a 2015 article for The Atlantic magazine. In “The Paradox of Time Capsules,” he describes them as “vehicles for self-commemoration, a means to ensure that future anthropologists, scientists and historians include us in the stories they tell. … They celebrate the talismanic quality of their objects, packaged to deliver the vicarious experience of having occupied a particular cultural moment.”
Construction of the monument, circa 1890 (Photo courtesy the Cook Collection/The Valentine)
During the planning of the Lee monument, it was agreed that a copper capsule about 14-by-14-by-8 inches would be created by Capt. J.E. Phillips, one of the engineers hired to excavate the property. That box and its contents would be set inside the Lee pedestal’s cornerstone, which was cut by Thomas J. Smith and Associates, then sealed with a heavy lid. The stone, measuring 48-by-48-by-24 inches, with the cap almost 18 inches deep, would then be placed in the pedestal foundation in an elaborate ceremony planned for Oct. 27, 1887.
A commemorative ribbon from the cornerstone-laying ceremony (Photo courtesy James Mountain Antiques, Ashburnham, Massachusetts)
The placing of a time capsule in the cornerstone of the statues along Monument Avenue became a tradition. On June 4, 1915, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that a box “with a number of articles associated with the [laying]” was placed in the cornerstone of the Stonewall Jackson statue at Monument Avenue and Boulevard “in a grand ceremony.” The Jefferson Davis monument has one, and a small box was even placed inside the monument to Matthew Fontaine Maury at its cornerstone dedication on Nov. 11, 1929. Since there are no known retrieval dates for any of these capsules, Mechanicsville antique paper dealer and former Virginia Union University history professor John Whiting agrees that it has to be assumed that these capsules were “designed to last in perpetuity.”
William B. Isaacs, grand secretary for the Masons, called for unique Civil War- or Richmond-related objects and artifacts to place inside the Lee capsule — and Richmond responded. George Fisher contributed a history of Monumental Church. Cyrus Bossieux chipped in his collection of Confederate buttons. J. W. Talley donated a square and compass made from a tree growing over the grave of Stonewall Jackson. J.W. Randolph & English publishers donated a copy of Carlton McCarthy’s “Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia,” as well as a guide to Richmond with maps of the city and Virginia, among others.
In all, 37 residents, organizations and businesses contributed about 60 objects to the time capsule. A Hanover County school principal, Pattie Callis Leake, donated what may be both the most astonishing and most perplexing artifact of all — a “picture of Lincoln lying in his coffin” — according to the Oct. 26, 1887, Richmond Dispatch.
While the appropriateness of placing a picture of a murdered U.S. president inside a monument dedicated to the glorification of Confederate Army leader Robert E. Lee is open to discussion, what makes the artifact so potentially extraordinary is that there is only one genuine photograph of Lincoln’s corpse — and it was supposed to have been destroyed, per the wishes of Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow. And while the other items listed in the cornerstone are described in detail, the description of the Lincoln picture is maddeningly vague, which only increases the speculation about what exactly it is.
After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, his body embarked on a somewhat ghoulish two-week, multi-city excursion throughout the North on the way to Springfield, Illinois, for burial. Embalming methods at the time failed to compensate for jostling train travel, extreme changes in humidity and open-air display, so after several days, Lincoln’s skin began turning brown. His eyes sunk and his jaw slipped open, exposing his teeth. Doctors applied chalk to his skin, wired his mouth shut and pumped him with more embalming fluid so the tour could continue.
On April 24, 1865, the former president was laid on display in the rotunda of New York’s City Hall for an estimated 120,000 people. Just before the doors opened to the public, Brig. Gen. E.D. Townsend allowed a local photographer named Jeremiah Gurney Jr. to set up and take a daguerreotype photo, despite Mary Todd Lincoln explicitly banning photographs of her deceased husband.
As word spread of Gurney’s photograph, dozens of his fellow photographers sent outraged telegrams to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, protesting the unfair advantage afforded to Gurney. When Lincoln’s widow also expressed displeasure, Townsend’s superior officer demanded that the photographic plates be seized and destroyed.
Gurney implored the slain president’s oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, to keep one plate for posterity, but he refused, and Stanton took it with the intention of destroying it.
But Stanton did not have the heart. He saved the plate and buried it in his office files, telling his son Lewis it was there sometime prior to his death on Christmas Eve 1869. On Jan. 17, 1887, Lewis Stanton mailed the surviving plate from his home in northern Minnesota to John Nicolay in Washington, D.C., for possible inclusion in Nicolay’s serialized Lincoln biography in Century magazine. Nicolay did not use the photograph (perhaps recalling Mary Todd Lincoln’s objections), instead stashing it in a box with other materials, which his daughter, Helen, unknowingly donated to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield in 1940.
The photo remained hidden until 1952, when it was discovered by 14-year-old Ronald Rietveld, who had been given permission to dig through unopened and uncatalogued boxes and folders in a storage room while visiting the museum. It remains up to this point the only known picture of Lincoln in his coffin.
“Assuming that the image is an original 1865 photographic print,” Warrenton-based historic photography specialist and appraiser Cliff Krainik says of the possibility of a second photograph, “a fair market value would be in the $250,000 to $300,000 range based on its absolute rarity … and its comparability to the previously most expensive photograph of President Lincoln to sell at auction for $206,500 in 2009.”
The only known photograph of Lincoln in his coffin was taken on April 24, 1865. (Photo courtesy Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum)
Little to nothing is known of the political proclivities of Pattie Leake, the woman who donated the mysterious picture to the pedestal cornerstone, or her family. The oldest of nine children, she was born in Ashland in 1841 to Samuel Davies and Fanny (Kean) Leake, and other than 10 years spent in Goochland, she remained in Ashland the rest of her life. Never married, Leake was appointed principal of the first graded school in Hanover County in 1878 by her brother William, who had been selected as the first Ashland School District chairman in 1870.
Pattie’s grandfather Josiah Leake Jr. served as a captain in the Goochland Militia during the American Revolution and later represented that county in the 1810-1811 Virginia General Assembly. In addition to being the school district chairman, William was a Confederate veteran, attorney, president of the Virginia State Bar Association and “cultured gentleman” who later became a judge in the Richmond Chancery Court. It was Judge Leake who issued an 1891 injunction accusing John Mitchell Jr. of financial malfeasance in the management of his newspaper, the Richmond Planet, which had been an outspoken opponent of the Lee monument at its dedication a year earlier on May 29, 1890. In 1895, William married a colorful Ashland woman named I.S. “Mary” Beirne, the widow of Richard Beirne, the late editor of the Richmond State newspaper.
Members of the Leake family were also prominent landowners, and Hanover County deeds record over 100 land transactions in Ashland and Beaverdam between the Leakes and other renowned Hanover names such as bank president Stonewall J. Doswell and Dr. Hill Carter Sr., as well as Randolph-Macon College.
There is only one genuine photograph of Lincoln’s corpse — and it was supposed to have been destroyed.
Pattie Leake’s death certificate states that she died in Wytheville at age 80 of paralysis, aggravated by age, on July 9, 1922. Her funeral was conducted at Ashland Presbyterian Church, which her family helped found, and she was buried among over 400 Confederate soldiers in nearby Woodlawn Cemetery.
Lincoln scholar James Cornelius at the museum in Springfield finds it “highly improbable” that Pattie’s picture is a second long-lost photograph, suggesting that it more likely may be an eyewitness drawing or even an anonymous Currier & Ives artist’s print, the kind sold at New York newsstands by the end of April 1865. It could also be the cover of the May 6, 1865, edition of Harper’s Weekly, which featured an engraving of Lincoln lying in state in New York.
“Should by some miracle, fortuitous or not, the cornerstone be opened and the [image] be revealed, we would love to know what it shows,” Cornelius says.
Two other photographs purporting to portray a deceased Lincoln have been dismissed as fakes, as they show a figure in a bed, not in a coffin; the beards are too long, and the hair is styled differently than Lincoln’s. One of them appeared in the Feb. 15, 1941, Saturday Evening Post under the headline “Is This Lincoln?”
Whiting notes that almost any non-photographic representation of Lincoln in his coffin from the time period has value, even a hand-drawn sketch if it were “unpublished and drawn from real life,” but that none would match the historical uniqueness of a second photograph.
On Oct. 27, 1887, eight mules pulled the heavy cornerstone for the Lee monument via wagon from Ninth and Byrd streets before a massive parade began at Broad Street and Brook Road for the laying ceremony. “Broad Street, as far as the eye could reach, was lined with spectators,” reported the Richmond State newspaper, “and every window in every house was packed with people.” It seemed that all of Richmond had turned out, even 450 Marylanders under the command of Confederate Brig. Gen. Bradley T. Johnson.
Once the cornerstone was on site, the 60 donated artifacts, including Pattie Leake’s cryptic picture, were sealed in the copper box at 2:30 p.m. and placed inside the stone. An engraved inscription states, “This corner-stone of a monument to be erected to the memory of General Robert E. Lee was laid with Masonic ceremonies on the 27th day of October, 1887, by the Grand Lodge of Virginia, A.F. and A. Masons.”
In the presence of an estimated 25,000 rain-soaked witnesses (but not former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was unable to attend), Masonic Grand Master William F. Drinkard, under the watch of Gov. Fitzhugh Lee, took charge of the cornerstone, and “in due and ancient form” proceeded to lay it after a long and fervent prayer by the Rev. Dr. Moses D. Hoge.
After the placing of the stone, Richmond architect and engineer Collinson Pierrepont Edwards Burgwyn, who designed the circular monument plot and the two streets that converged there, announced, “Most worshipful grand master, I hereby accept these implements of operative masonry, and I pledge my best ability and skill in seeing that this structure is erected according to the designs of the sculptor and plans of the architect. I trust that this monument may rest upon its foundation as firmly as the veneration of the great chieftain is rooted in the memory of our people.” The rain then became so heavy that the governor had to suspend the rest of the activities.
A depiction of the scene at the Lee monument unveiling, drawn by T. De Thulstrup from a photograph, published in Harper’s Weekly on June 14, 1890. (Image courtesy VCU Libraries)
“We used to follow Marse Bob in much worse weather than this,” one white-bearded Confederate veteran in his tattered, rain-drenched uniform confided to a New York Sun reporter about his former commander, “and surely we can cheerfully stand this to do him honor.”
After pedestal construction was completed in May 1890, two of the four marble columns bracketing the “Lee” plaques on both the east and west sides were found to be defective, and they were replaced in time for the installation of the equestrian statue on May 29, 1890.
Questions surrounding the image of a deceased Lincoln hidden inside the concrete vault remain mired in the murkiness of history. What exactly is it? The description calls it a “picture,” not a drawing or “steel engraving,” as other images were described. Did an Ashland school principal’s wealthy and connected family somehow acquire a rare photographic plate, or did she or a family member visit Lincoln’s body and sketch it from life? What was the motivation behind placing a picture of an assassinated U.S. president inside a monument among numerous Confederate items, including treasury notes, coins, a genealogy of the Lee family and a muster roll of Richmond sharpshooters in the 21st Virginia regiment? Was it meant to be a commemoration or a slap in the face to Lincoln and what he represented?
John Kneebone, chairman of the VCU history department, was humorously perplexed by the situation when recently asked about its significance. “Why anyone would donate such a portrait, and why those pious old Richmond Confederates would have accepted it, is beyond me,” he says.
Whether there is actually a unique artifact inside the Lee monument’s pedestal or not, perhaps one day — and maybe sooner than the monument’s planners could have envisioned, given the ongoing debate about the future of Confederate monuments in Richmond and elsewhere — these questions may be answered.
