The final resting place of Civil War Gen. A.P. Hill has been anything but that, as his remains were put in the ground, dug up and moved, three times in the 19th century. Then, when the city of Richmond decided to do away with its Confederate monuments in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and amid the Black Lives Matter movement, the general’s remains were moved once more. A statue of Hill with his bones in the base was taken down last month from the intersection of Laburnum Avenue and Hermitage Road in the state capital.
Neither the first burial or the reinterment services that followed came with military honors, said Patrick Falci, a New York actor and historian who’s portrayed Hill for 30 years. Those who gathered at a cemetery in Hill’s hometown of Culpeper made up for all that on Saturday with a ceremony for the ages.
An estimated 600 people, including Confederate reenactors wearing gray and butternut uniforms, gathered to pay their respects to the general at what they hope will be his permanent resting place at Fairview Cemetery. A mule-drawn wagon brought the coffin, draped in an old Virginia flag, into the cemetery as hundreds of soldiers stood at attention. Next came a rider-less horse as a drummer provided a steady beat. After Falci’s eulogy, songs and prayers, Longstreet’s Corps loaded muskets and fired a 21-gun salute while those with Knibb’s Battery let off three rounds from a spit-polished shine cannon named “Jeb.” The VA Scots Guards played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes; Susan and Scott Carraway played a mandolin and acoustic guitar and led the crowd in “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny;’ and a solitary bugler played “Taps.”
“Gen. Hill has been known as Lee’s forgotten general,” said a theatrical Falci, as he took microphone in hand and walked among the gravesites. “But not today. Not here in Culpeper. Not here in Virginia.”
Comment: Yup, another Civil War story. This one, by Cathy Dyson, was the lead story in today’s Free Lance-Star. The online article has a series of photos and a video of the reburial.
AP Hill’s monument and burial site was in an odd spot in Richmond. He was first reinterred in Richmond’s Hollywood cemetery a few years after his death at Petersburg. I don’t know why he was much later moved to a street intersection in northern Richmond. Someone please enlighten me if you know the answer. Clearly the third time is the charm. He is now back home in a Culpeper cemetery that he would have known in his youth. When his monument was removed and his remains exhumed, they were covered not with a Confederate flag but with a Virginia state flag. At his reburial, the same state flag covered his new coffin. At the December exhumation there was no demonstration. One argument erupted, but it ended in an embrace of tolerance and understanding. There were no demonstrators or protestors at this weekend’s reburial. That’s as it should be.
TTG
TTG,
This is about the present, and it’s about power. The transplants really don’t like us, and so they’re dismantling all the monuments to our culture and history. That’s why they destroyed the Lewis and Clark monuments in Charlottesville.
– Eliot
Local blacks probably support removal.
morongobill,
Of course they do. Richmond is not a white minority city. Blacks and Hispanics together make up the majority. The neighborhood where the AP Hill monument stood is definitely black majority.
morongobill,
You mean they did not “embrace of tolerance and understanding”? I wonder why they didn’t demand this be removed during the “great society” programs, the Clinton admin, Obama, etc? I wonder what it could have been that got the outrage going…..
Fred,
Virginia state law prohibited the removal of Confederate war memorials. In 2020 the law was changed to allow local governments to decide their fate.
TTG,
There are a lot of people the left hates whose history will have to be erased to consolidate your party’s position in power. Or as you put it “embrace of tolerance and understanding”.
Where once there were cool monuments surrounding Court Square in Charlottesville, there is left just scruffy areas of grass. Near the courthouse itself there is one of those small blue and white commemorative signs made of metal announcing this as the location where some unremembered rapist was “lynched”. He was black and for all we really know he was also guilty. Though the sign is on the courthouse lawn, the actual lynching occurred some 20 miles away. We have strange new heroes. I was with a friend driving me back from an outpatient procedure and he detoured to circumvent where once stood aesthetically pleasing bronze equestrian memorials to Jackson and Lee. Even the civil war artillery piece that used to stand is gone. Now all that’s left is ugly lawn, with grace and dignity.
A. Pols
Well put and better by far than my usual rants on this.
Correction; without grace and dignity. Sorry
“…an embrace of tolerance and understanding”.
LOL thanks for the morning humor.
Fred,
The two literally hugged after their argument/conversation.
TTG,
Yes, nice story. What was done when people were shouting BLM all over and others resonded with ALM? Oh, wait, this is just today’s isolated story from Culpepper. Back to the standard narrative shortly.
Never could I figure out why Lee placed A.P. under Stonewall’s command. Preachers and playboys don’t play well together.
Wikipedia links to an article of 1892 in the Richmond Dispatch, that may enlighten you:
The wiki summary reads:
Hill’s remains were reinterred twice in Richmond. In February 1867, Hill’s remains were reinterred in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. During the late 1880s, several former comrades raised funds for a monument to Hill in Richmond. Hill’s remains were again transferred, to the base of a monument that was dedicated on May 30, 1892 on land donated by developer Lewis Ginter. General Henry Heth led the procession to the dedication and General James A. Walker gave an oration.[61] A bronze statue of Hill, created by Caspar Buberl after William Ludwell Sheppard’s design, topped the monument,[62] while its plaster cast was given to the A.P. Hill Camp of Petersburg.[63] The monument was located in the center of the intersection of Laburnum Avenue and Hermitage Road in what is now the city’s Hermitage Road Historic District.[5][64] This monument was the only one of its type in Richmond under which the subject individual was actually interred.[65]
Source:
Unveiling of the statue of General Ambrose Powell Hill at Richmond, Virginia, May 30, 1892.With the Oration of General James A. Walker on the occasion.
[From the Richmond Dispatch, May 31, 1892.]
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2001.05.0278%3Achapter%3D1.27&force=y