Last Confederate Comes Down

by Charles McGuigan 12.2022

One hundred and thirty years ago, at the direction of Major Lewis Ginter, a nine and a half foot bronze statue of Confederate General A.P. Hill was erected atop a twenty-four and a half foot pedestal of finished granite blocks in the dead center of the intersection of Hermitage Road and Laburnum Avenue. Like hundreds of other monuments to Confederate leaders, the A.P. Hill monument was a nod to the evils of the Jim Crow era, a dark period in our history when white southerners decided African-Americans should remain dehumanized, and essentially enslaved. These white men resented their terrific defeat at the hands of the Union, and scorned a peaceable Reconstruction. Instead of accepting the equality of all human beings, they reaffirmed their commitment to the lunatic notion of white supremacy and embraced what was called the Lost Cause.

Just a few days ago, on December 12, A.P. Hill was finally removed from his perch, and laid out on the flatbed of a truck, strapped down, and taken to the Black History and Cultural Center of Virginia.  Aside from several statues that reside behind the gated walls of the Virginia state capitol, A.P. was the last Confederate monument standing in Richmond.

The day after the statue came down, crews removed the remnants of the pedestal and unearthed the remains of A.P. Hill which were laid out in a hearse and driven to a cemetery in Culpeper, where his bones will be buried, not too far from the place where he was born.

As one woman told me that cold bitter morning when the state came down, “It’s about time. It should never have been put there in the first place. I am relieved it is gone.”