The Confederate general Robert E. Lee monument in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photo / AP
The Confederate general Robert E. Lee monument in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photo / AP
Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee was vilified during the US Civil War only to become a heroic symbol of the South's "Lost Cause" - and eventually a racist icon.
The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia started after the local council voted to have a statue of Lee removed from what was called Lee Park and is now known as Emancipation Park.
It follows similar moves across the US, including in Houston where Robert E. Lee High School was last year renamed Margaret Long Wisdom High School.
But who was Robert E. Lee? Why are there memorials in his honour in the first place?
The defaced Gen. Robert E. Lee statue stands at the Duke Chapel in Durham, North Carolina. Photo / AP
A son of American Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 and later distinguished himself in various battles during the US-Mexico War (1846-1848).
As tensions heated around southern secession, Lee's former mentor, General Winfield Scott, offered him a post to lead the Union's forces against the South.
However, Lee declined, citing his reservations about fighting against his home state of Virginia and resigned from the US Army.
Lee accepted a role commanding the Virginia state forces of the Confederacy and became one of its generals, even though he had little experience leading troops. He would experience what political science Marshall L. DeRosa called a "mixed record" of military endeavours throughout the war.
Lee eventually commanded troops in the field, winning battles largely because of an incompetent Union General George McClellan, according to historians.
He was famously defeated at Gettysburg by Union Maj. Gen. George Meade.
Lee's infantry assault across a wide plain was a gross miscalculation in the era of artillery and rifle fire.
A few weeks after becoming the general in chief of the armies of the Confederate states, Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865.
A plaque recognising confederate general Robert Lee lies on the ground after its removal from the premises of St. John's Episcopal Church in Bay Ridge, New York. Photo / AP
The slave owner
A career army officer, Lee didn't have much wealth, but he inherited a few slaves from his mother.
Still, Lee married into one of the wealthiest slave-holding families in Virginia - the Custis family of Arlington and descendants of Martha Washington.
When Lee's father-in-law died, he took leave from the US Army to run the struggling estate and met resistance from slaves expecting to be freed.
Documents show Lee was cruel to his slaves and encouraged his overseers to severely beat slaves captured after trying to escape.
Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor said in a 2008 American Heritage article that Lee was angry about the slaves' demands for freedom and "resorted to increasingly harsh measures to maintain control," breaking up most slave families.
One slave at Arlington, Pryor noted, called Lee, "the worst man I ever see".
Lee wrote that God would be the one responsible for emancipation and that blacks were better off in the US than Africa.
Statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Photo / AP
The lost cause icon
The ironic thing about today's fight by some to retain statues to Lee, he himself resisted efforts to build Confederate monuments in his honour and instead wanted the nation to move on from the Civil War.
After his death, Southerners adopted "The Lost Cause" revisionist narrative about the Civil War and placed Lee as its central figure.
The Lost Cause argued the South knew it was fighting a losing war and decided to fight it anyway on principle. It also tried to argue that the war was not about slavery but high constitutional ideals.
As The Lost Cause narrative grew in popularity, proponents pushed to memorialise Lee, ignoring his deficiencies as a general and his role as a slave owner, according to Gary Gallagher, a University of Virginia professor specialising in the history of the Civil War.
Lee monuments went up in the 1920s just as the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence.
The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville was erected in 1924.
A year later, the US Congress voted to use federal funds to restore the Lee mansion in the Arlington National Cemetery.
Shawn Alexander, associate professor of African and African-American studies at the University of Kansas, said that despite the attempt to use Lee as a reconciliation figure, many African-Americans spoke out saying Lee had betrayed the US and was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. "He was no hero in their eyes," Prof. Alexander said.
By the early 20th century, Northern state politicians - fearing deadly violence over black civil rights in the South - caved to pressure from Southern leaders to cast Lee in a more conciliatory light, said Gerald Horne, a professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston. "The South showed it would shed blood," Horne said.
Light shines through the trees near where a Confederate statue stood in Baltimore. Four statues, including the one pictured, in Baltimore were removed under the cover of night. Photo / AP
A new memory
A generation after the civil rights movement, black and Latino residents began pressuring elected officials to dismantle Confederate memorials honouring Lee and others in places like New Orleans, Houston and South Carolina.
The removals partly were based on violent acts committed by white supremacists using Confederate imagery and historians questioning the legitimacy of The Lost Cause.
A Lee statue was removed in New Orleans in 2015 - the last remaining of the city's four monuments to Confederate-era figures.
Earlier this year, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove its Lee statue from a city park, sparking a lawsuit from opponents of the move.
The debate also drew opposition from white supremacists and Neo-Nazis who revered Lee and the Confederacy. The opposition resulted in rallies to defend Lee statues this weekend that resulted in at least three deaths.
