Crews removed Baltimore’s Confederate statues early Wednesday, days after the deadly unrest in Charlottesville instigated by white nationalists rallying to defend a downtown Confederate monument.

The quiet and sudden removal of four monuments, with little fanfare and no advance notice, marks an attempt by the city to avoid a long, bruising conflict that has embroiled Charlottesville and other communities rethinking how they honor figures who fought to preserve slavery.

Baltimore Mayor Catherine E. Pugh (D) announced Monday she was in talks with contractors to haul away the statues, and the city council approved a removal plan that night. Some activists had vowed to destroy the monuments before government could act.

A bystander takes a picture of the monument dedicated to the Confederate Women of Maryland after it was taken down Wednesday morning. (Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Sun)
The Jackson-Lee Monument in Wyman Park is removed Wednesday morning. (Denise Sanders/The Baltimore Sun)

Photos and video posted on social media Wednesday morning showed crews using cranes to remove statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, hauled away on a flatbed truck. Statues honoring Confederate women and Roger B. Taney, the former chief justice who authored the notorious proslavery Dred Scott decision, were also removed.

[Removing a slavery defender’s statue: Roger B. Taney wrote one of Supreme Court’s worst rulings]

A statue to Confederate soldiers and sailors, which was defaced with bright red paint over the weekend, is also gone.

On the base of the now-empty Jackson and Lee monument are messages saying “Black lives matter” and “F— the Confederacy,” according to photos shared on Twitter.

Pugh told the Baltimore Sun on Wednesday that crews worked from 11:30 p.m. Tuesday to 5:30 a.m. Wednesday to remove the statues. She said swift overnight removal with little fanfare was meant to stave off the kind of violent conflicts that embroiled Charlottesville. That’s a change from Tuesday, when she said in a statement that her office would seek approval from a state panel to remove the Lee-Jackson monument and provide a “public timeline” for monument removal.

“It’s done,” she told the Sun on Wednesday. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.”

But Carolyn Billups, former president of the Maryland Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, criticized Pugh for apparently bypassing the Maryland Historical Trust, which has easements on the Lee-Jackson monument, in the rush to remove the statues.

“That’s an act of lawlessness in my mind,” said Billups, who lives in St. Mary’s County. “This is a public figure, this is the leader of a city. If you expect or hope that your constituents to respect the law, you have to toe the line.”

A spokesman for the mayor told The Washington Post that Pugh will decide what to do with the monuments after consulting “interested parties.” The mayor’s office is also reaching out to cemeteries where Confederate soldiers are buried to see if they want the statues.

Baltimore City Council member Brandon Scott said the statues should be melted down and used to create a statue of Kurt L. Schmoke, the city’s first black mayor. He praised the mayor’s handling of the issue.

“Taking the right action in a swift way kept all of Baltimore safe,” he said. “My worry was that some young kid that wants them to come down goes out and gets hurt.”

The empty pedestal of the former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney is seen before dawn in Mount Vernon after workers took four Confederate monuments overnight in the city. (Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Sun)

A commission appointed by former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake after a white supremacist killed nine African Americans in a historically black church in South Carolian recommended the removal of the Lee-Jackson monument, and signs adding historical context to two other statues. Pugh criticized the inaction following the commission’s recommendations.

[Anarchists and the antifa: The history of activists Trump condemns as the ‘alt-left’]

“Baltimore is setting an example that others should follow,” said Del. Cheryl Glenn (D-Baltimore), who chairs the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. “If this neo-Nazi movement is intent on exacting violence where we have these Confederate statues, then if you take the statues down, you reduce the potential for this kind of divisiveness.”

Across the nation, Confederate monuments have come under renewed scrutiny following widespread disgust at how the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville became a rallying point for white supremacists this year.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Tuesday announced he’d support removing the statue of Taney from State House grounds. The statue had been defended by Democrats and Republicans alike, and Hogan last year described calls to remove it as “political correctness run amok.”

Elsewhere, activists have been pushing to bring monuments down with or without the government’s support. A woman in North Carolina faces felony charges in connection with the vandalism and toppling of a monument to Confederate soldiers in Durham.

President Trump on Tuesday seemed to defend Confederate monuments during a combative news conference where he declared “both sides” were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, and suggested memorials for slave-owning founding fathers would be next if monuments for Confederate generals were removed.

Workers remove a monument dedicated to the Confederate Women of Maryland near the intersection of Charles Street and University Parkway early Wednesday. (Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Sun)

Read more:

Maryland governor calls for removing statue, saying it’s the ‘right thing to do’

White supremacist group denies Charlottesville ramming suspect was a member

Heather Heyer’s grieving mother readies herself for ‘huge public farewell to my child’

White nationalists are yelling the loudest, but quieter forms of racism need to be tackled, too

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.

“What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers emails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian.

The request, which DreamHost made public Monday, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community.

“What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

Media and protesters move through the smoke of percussion grenades as protesters and police clash on the streets of D.C. on Inauguration Day. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, which sought the warrant, declined to comment. But prosecutors, in court documents, argued that the request was constitutional and there was no reason for DreamHost not to comply.

The search warrant was issued July 12 by a Superior Court judge in the District of Columbia and served on DreamHost on July 17.

The request marked an escalation from January when prosecutors investigating the protests asked DreamHost to preserve records and issued a subpoena for a limited set of data on the site. The company complied with both requests, Ghazarian said.

In April, the federal government charged more than 200 people in connection with the protests that injured six police officers and damaged store windows and at least one vehicle. The charges included property damage and assault.

After the search warrant was served, DreamHost raised concerns with Assistant U.S. Attorney John W. Borchert, according to court documents. The company thought the request was overbroad and that it sought information — such as draft blog posts — in violation of the 1980 Privacy Protection Act.

Prosecutors responded July 28 with a motion to compel the company to turn over the data on DisruptJ20. “That website was used in the development, planning, advertisement and organization of a violent riot that occurred in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017,” U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips said in the motion. DreamHost’s concern about breadth “simply is not a sufficient basis . . . to refuse to comply with the warrant.”

The prosecutors also argued that the warrant identified the “precise categories of information” that DreamHost must provide and “precise limitations” on the information that the government may seize. They also argued that the Privacy Protection Act does not preclude the government from seizing even “protected” materials with a search warrant.

On Friday, DreamHost filed a reply arguing that the warrant’s breadth violates the Fourth Amendment because it failed to describe with “particularity” the items to be seized. Asking for “all records or other information” pertaining to the site, including “all files, databases and database records” is far too broad, the company said.

The warrant also raises First Amendment issues, it said. Visitors to the protest site should have the right to keep their identities private, but if they fear that the Justice Department will have information on them, that will chill their freedom of speech and association, the company argued.

The company said that the warrant would require them to turn over data on potentially tens of thousands of law-abiding website visitors.

Mark Rumold, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that no plausible explanation exists for a search warrant of such breadth, “other than to cast a digital dragnet as broadly as possible.”

He said that the government appears to be investigating a conspiracy to riot, “but it’s doing it in a blunt manner that does not take into account the significant First Amendment interests.”

Even people who were nowhere near Washington on Inauguration Day who visited the website will have their data “swept into a criminal investigation,” he said.

A hearing is scheduled for Friday in Superior Court before Judge Lynn Leibovitz.