Workers removed a Confederate statue early Monday from the grounds of the Talbot County Courthouse on the Eastern Shore with plans to reassemble the monument on a Civil War battlefield in Virginia, the county manager said.

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       Its removal was approved last year by the Talbot County Council following public protest and contentious debate.

       “[T]he civil war monument in front of the courthouse was carefully and respectfully packaged and removed,” Talbot County Manager Clay B. Stamp said Monday in an interview. “However we handled the statue, we wanted to make sure we showed due respect for it, because there were many people that honored its purpose.”

       The 13-foot copper statue of a young soldier, which stood atop a pedestal inscribed with the names of those Talbot County men who died for the Confederate cause, is thought to be the last Confederate monument standing on nonfederal public land in Maryland, according to the Move the Monument Coalition. The nonprofit organization said in a statement that $80,000 had been raised to relocate the monument to the Cross Keys Battlefield in Harrisonburg, Va.

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       “We commend our many supporters as well as the County Council for seeing that this symbol of the Jim Crow-era no longer sits on the site where justice for all is supposed to reign,” the organization’s statement says.

       Efforts to remove the Confederate monument took on urgency in 2020 as protests for racial justice swept the nation following the murder of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police. An initial vote by the Talbot County Council that summer to retain the statue was met with local protests that eventually led council members to reverse course in September.

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       Stamp said workers spent Sunday preparing the courthouse grounds for the monument’s removal. Early Monday, a dozen workers, assisted by a specialized crane, disassembled the monument into two pieces and lifted them onto a trailer for removal. The job was wrapped up by about 1 p.m., Stamp said, with delivery to Virginia expected in the next day or so.

       “It’s all going to the same place, and it will be re-erected at that location,” Stamp said.

       The Confederate monument was built between 1914 and 1916, nearly 50 years after the Civil War’s conclusion. The statue depicted a young boy, his chin up and hat tipped back, holding a furled Confederate flag to his side. The granite pedestal carried an inscription, “To the Talbot Boys. 1861-1865. C.S.A.”

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       The monument had been built partly through the efforts of Joseph B. Seth, a lawyer in Easton who said the county had “just pride in her contribution of men to the Confederate cause.” In a memoir he co-wrote, Seth wrote that “the bulk of the slaves were devoted to their masters and their families,” which “were equally devoted to the slaves and with the whole Southland had the tenderest affection for the faithful old Mammies and Uncles.”

       The Talbot County branch of the NAACP had long wanted to get rid of the monument, calling it an offensive symbol of racism and oppression. The Southern Poverty Law Center said nearly 170 Confederate symbols, including monuments, were removed in 2020 following Floyd’s killing.

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