Robert E. Lee monument, Richmond, Virginia, 2020. Photograph by Joseph. Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Criticism of the Lost Cause and Confederate symbols stretched back as early as 1870, when Frederick Douglass called out the “ nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee” that poured in after the Confederate general’s death, asking, “Is it not about time that this bombastic laudation of the rebel chief should cease?” Until his death in 1895, Douglass engaged in an uphill battle to dislodge the Lost Cause narrative that had gripped the national consciousness while still seeking to preserve the memory of emancipation. But the pull of the Lost Cause was strong. Even white Northerners were willing to make a devil’s bargain with the South’s Confederate tradition for the sake of sectional reconciliation. And the race to build “monuments of folly,” as Douglass called them, had yet to peak by the time of his death.