And then Lynn Haines told the story of Stone Mountain. Or rather he told an important part of it. He neglected to call attention to the fact that what one man can do another man can undo.
In 1910 the Civil War was still one of the South’s active and bitter memories. There were still plenty of people alive who could tell from personal experience of the pillaging of homes, the burning of Atlanta, the devastation of the Southern countryside by Federal troops.
The women of the South had banded together as The United Daughters of the Confederacy to alleviate as well as they could the misery caused by the war and to cherish the memory of their heroes. Gutzon had been commissioned by a branch of the U.D.C. to carve a memorial to the first Southern soldier killed in battle; so he came to meet many of the remarkable membership, including the national president, Mrs. C. Helen Plane of Atlanta.
Mrs. Plane was a singularly able woman. Although nearly eighty years old when Gutzon first saw her, she was still vigorous and highly opinionated. She was a person for whom the War between the States had never ended.
She was living in Mississippi in the first part of 1861 when her husband, a surgeon, had been killed. With her old colored nurse for company she had toured the battlefield in a one-horse wagon looking for his body. She had found it and taken it home for burial.
Years afterward, when she and the sculptor had become friends, she asked him if he had noticed that she didn’t shake hands with him when they first met ... and she explained. “I was afraid,” she said, “that you might in some way have been responsible for my husband’s death.”
For many years there had been talk in Atlanta about using the flat granite front of Stone Mountain to present some sort of Confederate Memorial. The U.D.C. approved the idea and Mrs. Plane gave impetus to it. Her plan had little more form than anybody else’s, except that she had seen the head of Lincoln, by Borglum, in the national capital. She said that she would like to have the same man carve a head of Lee on Stone Mountain’s great bare wall.
She interviewed the owner of the mountain, Sam Venable, who promised her a spot twenty feet square near the base of the cliff on which to carve the memorial to Lee. And armed with this promise, she wrote to Borglum.
Gutzon did not know anything about Stone Mountain, but he was interested in Lee. So, in the summer of 1915, he came to Atlanta to meet Mrs. Plane and her committee. The women met him at the railroad station, drove him to Stone Mountain, and pointed out the spot donated by Venable. He looked at it in puzzled silence.
“Well,” snapped Helen Plane, “what do you think of it?”