At over seventy-five feet tall, this monument looms large over Broad St. Atop the spire is statue of an everyman soldier, modeled after an Augustan who famously never surrendered. At each corner of the base are life-size statues of four Confederate generals, Stonewall Jackson, Thomas R.R. Cobb, William H.T. Walker, and Robert E. Lee. Each of these men came from slaveholding families.

In the still rigidly patriarchal post-bellum South, mourning the dead was considered women’s work. This monument was erected by the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Augusta. The statue was custom made from fine Italian Carrara marble and cost a staggering $20,000 (over $540,000 in today’s currency) when it was commissioned in 1875.  

This monument was at the leading edge in a shift in monument construction. Most Confederate monuments constructed in the first decades after the war had been erected in cemeteries or battlefields and generally mourn the dead. Most Confederate monuments nationwide were constructed after the 1890s as expressions of Jim Crow era white supremacy that overtly lionizing the Lost Cause. The Broad St. monument is particularly early example of a monument which does the latter. The base of the monument has a series of inscriptions glorifying the Confederacy.

Expressions of Black citizenship during Reconstruction, like parades and celebrations in downtown Augusta, had agitated many white Augustans who were eager to reclaim public spaces as Reconstruction failed. Over 10,000 people, a full third of the county’s population, attended the dedication festivities in 1878, which included virulently white supremacist speeches.