BALTIMORE — It happened in the dead of night.

Around midnight, as Tuesday turned into Wednesday, a crew of police officers and workers wielding a large crane began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, hauling away monuments to Confederate heroes.

When they were through, before sunrise, four statues that had stood for decades were gone, one chapter in a searing drama that is roiling cities across the county, particularly in the South.

“I thought that there’s enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made,” Mayor Catherine E. Pugh of Baltimore said at a news conference on Wednesday. “Get it done.”

Elsewhere it was not so simple. From Birmingham, Ala., to Gainesville, Fla., to Durham, N.C., to Lexington, Ky., local and state officials this week faced bitter divisions over Confederate statues. Many of the issues had been building for years, but were now freshly volatile in the wake of the violence that exploded Saturday in Charlottesville, Va.