A.P. Hill Coming Down

by Charles McGuigan 11.2022

In the not-too-distant future, the last statue still standing in Richmond of a man who betrayed his country and fought to uphold the institution of slavery will finally come down and join many of his bronzen co-Confederates at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia in Jackson Ward. The statue stands in a rotary across from Linwood Holton Elementary School where the majority of students are Black. And that rotary makes the intersection of Hermitage Road and Laburnum Avenue among the most dangerous in Richmond.

When we die most of us are buried just one time. That wasn’t the case though for Confederate General Ambrose Powell Hill. To date he’s been buried on three separate occasions. And fairly soon he’ll be re-interred once again.

It all started back in 1865 with the fall of Petersburg.  On April 2, just seven days before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Union troops broke through the Confederate lines and during the melee that followed a Union soldier shot Hill. The single bullet severed the general’s left thumb, plunged through his chest, and exited above his right shoulder blade. He died almost instantly. Interesting to note: Hill, a week before he was killed, said he had no desire to live to see the collapse of the Confederacy. A dying wish, if ever there was one.

Hill was hastily buried in a family graveyard outside of Richmond on the south bank of the James River just off Cherokee Road. Here’s the funny thing: he was buried standing up, something he had requested well before his death.

After moldering in the earth for two years, gravediggers grabbed their spades, shovels and mattocks, dug him up, then carted him over to Hollywood Cemetery where he was interred in among other Confederate officers. 

Then, in 1891, Lewis Ginter, who had served as a Confederate major, spearheaded the relocation of Hill’s remains once again. This time Hill was buried at the juncture of Hermitage Road and Laburnum Avenue near the neighborhoods Ginter was at the time just laying out. By then there wasn’t much left of Hill, just a few bones and some tattered cloth. On top of the burial mound Ginter had a statue of Hill erected.

Like the hundreds of other Confederate memorials that cropped up across the country, primarily in the South, the A.P. Hill statue was erected at the dawn of the Jim Crow era that would see the lynching of more than 3,000 Black men, and the terrorizing of Black communities across the country by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia. 

Hill’s scant remains will be re-interred at Fairview Cemetery in Culpeper County, making it the fourth time the dead Confederate will have been buried.

And thanks to a recent ruling by Judge David Eugene Cheek, Sr., the city is free to relocate the statue to the Black History Museum where it will be rightly interpreted for the first time in its history. 

Says 3rd District Councilwoman Ann-Frances Lambert: “I am extremely happy about his decision and, barring an appeal, I hope the administration moves forward with the removal expeditiously so that we can make the intersection of Laburnum and Hermitage safe for children. Making this intersection safe has always been my top priority.”