UK Edition
'Confronting our history is often uncomfortable': Kentucky the new flashpoint in Confederate icons row
In the main street of Lexington, Kentucky an imposing statue of John C. Breckinridge, the Confederate Secretary of War, stands on what was once the site of America's biggest slave market.
Thousands of men, women and children were bought and sold in the courthouse square, often before being transported to a life of fear and servitude in the Deep South.
But, a week after neo-Nazis rallied around a statue of Robert E. Lee, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Breckinridge, who has occupied his pedestal since 1887, is coming down.
So is an edifice of John Hunt Morgan, another Confederate icon, who sits on his horse a little further down the high street next to a fashionable wine bar.
The fate of Breckinridge and Morgan was decided at a passionate three-hour council meeting in Lexington last week.
People overflowed onto the balcony of City Hall and passing motorists honked horns in support. To applause and cheers the 15-strong council voted unanimously to banish the Confederate leaders to an as yet unknown location.
"This is really about standing up, stepping up, speaking out. Don't sit back, don't be silent," Lexington's Mayor Jim Gray told The Telegraph in his office, a short walk from the statues. "It's about our core fundamental American values of justice and freedom."
Across America mayors like Mr Gray are filling what many see as a vacuum of leadership left by President Donald Trump, following his equivocal comments condemning white supremacist violence in Charlottesville.
Some 240 mayors have now signed a joint pledge to "speak out against hate". Many believe that this is a pivotal moment in American history, a chance to finally break with the spectre of slavery, America's "original sin", that still looms 154 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
In Kentucky the divisions are deeper than in most places. It was the only US state to remain neutral in the Civil War amid divided loyalties. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, lived in Lexington as a young man. Lincoln's wife Mary was born and grew up there.
The decision to move Breckinridge and Morgan has also made Lexington a potential flash point, a possible "next Charlottesville". A leading white nationalist group has already said it plans to march, and some local people are nervous. The FBI and Secret Service are advising local officials.
"We're prepared, We have to stand up to fear," said Mr Gray, a Democrat who ran for the US Senate against Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican, last year. "If there are outsiders coming in to demonstrate they will be greeted and welcomed with an overwhelming police presence," he said.
"I know this decision is going against the grain. There are still many people with a different point of view, who think that this is erasing or hiding our history. But I think we are doing the right thing in the right way.
"These were men who made tragically flawed moral decisions in joining the Confederacy, and its mission to preserve slavery.
"We all know, in many ways, this war is unfinished. An important step we can take toward finishing it means facing up to our history."
Breckinridge was the youngest ever US Vice President, aged 36, before joining the Confederacy. Morgan, a raiding soldier, reached further into the North than any other Confederate General.
Today their statues sit rather incongruously opposite a shiny mirrored skyscraper. In recent days they have been guarded by a police.
Jonah May, 48, a local worker, who walks past them every day, said they should stay.
"For good, bad or worse they're still part of history," he said. "Those who don't learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. I think they should stay there to remind people."
But John Davidson, 52, another local worker, said: "Why don't we just build statues of Adolf Hitler? Or Americans who joined the Taliban? Or the British who fought against us?"
A group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans opposed moving the statues. Sam Flora, a spokesman, called it a "sanitising of the history of Lexington".
And despite the decision, and moves by mayors around the country to dismantle statues, it would seem the majority of Americans are against a widespread defenestration.
A national poll taken after Charlottesville showed 62 per cent believe Confederate statues should remain, with 27 per cent saying they should be removed. Only six per cent of Republicans thought they should be taken down.
Mr Trump himself has bemoaned the "foolish removal of our beautiful statues and monuments".
Those in the other camp include two great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate General. They have applied for a statue of their ancestor in Richmond, Virginia to come down, saying they were "ashamed of an overt symbol of racism and white supremacy". Rev. Robert Wright Lee, IV, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, believes the same.
Robert E. Lee's journey to far-right icon began long after his death when Southerners adopted "The Lost Cause," a revisionist historical narrative that cast him as having led a heroic struggle to preserve the Southern way of life and states' rights, minimising both the evils of slavery and its role as a cause of the Civil War.
Many years after the war, amid a background of segregation laws and rising Ku Klux Klan violence, statues of him went up and he became a symbol of white supremacy.
In addition to Lee many other Confederate figures are now expected to be dismantled. At 2am on Saturday a flatbed truck and crane arrived at the State House in Maryland to remove a statue of Roger B. Taney, the segregationist Supreme Court justice behind the 1857 Dred Scott pro-slavery decision.
The statue had been there for 145 years. A few late night onlookers sang “Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye."
In Tampa, Florida, the city's major sports teams said they would help fund the $140,000 cost of removing two Confederate statues from the courthouse.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, a plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis was tarred and feathered. A statue of Confederate soldiers in Leesburg, Virginia was spray painted. By contrast, Chicago saw a bust of Abraham Lincoln set on fire.
Baltimore's Mayor Catherine Pugh, who ordered several statues taken down in the middle of the night, said: "I just wanted them out of the city. There’s enough speeches being made. Get it done."
Steve Adler, the Mayor of Austin, Texas, added: "Only the Statute of Liberty should be carrying a torch these days."
However, the US National Park Service said Confederate monuments at Gettysburg, the battlefield visited by 3.7 million tourists a year, would remain in place.
Barb Adams, a volunteer at Gettysburg, where 7,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the bloodiest ever battle on US soil, said the removal of statues would break her heart.
“It’s just so upsetting to me," she said. "These men, these soldiers, fought for what they believed in."