“All of his census documents show he never owned a slave and he did not believe in slavery.” He also said that although many of the statues are seen as symbols of slavery and oppression, his ancestor did not own slaves. Hill said he was opposed to the removal of all the Richmond-owned Confederate statues because he sees them as a part of history. I just feel like anybody else's headstone with their family name on it, you don't want to see that come down,” he said. He said the family considers the statue Hill's headstone and wanted the statue and Hill's remains to stay together. Hill, 33, said he is a distant cousin of Hill's and his closest living indirect descendant. But the plaintiffs wanted ownership to be transferred to them in hopes of moving the statue to a battlefield or some other location, said John Hill, one of Hill's descendants who drove eight hours from his home in Ohio to watch the statue be removed. The remains were moved in 1867 to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, where they remained until 1891, when they were moved to the spot where the monument was unveiled the following year.Īttorneys for Hill’s indirect descendants agreed his remains would be moved to a cemetery in Culpeper, near where Hill was born. His remains were interred in a family cemetery in Chesterfield County, according to a city petition to move the remains. Some Confederate tributes remain in Richmond, but they’re on state land, including on Capitol Square surrounding the Virginia State Capitol building.Īmbrose Powell Hill died days before the war’s end in 1865, according to a timeline provided in court documents during a legal battle over the removal. Many Confederate statues in Virginia were erected decades after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed new segregation laws, and during the “Lost Cause” movement, when historians and others tried to depict the South’s rebellion as a fight to defend states’ rights, not slavery. But efforts to remove the Hill statue, which sat in the middle of a busy intersection near a school, were more complicated because the general’s remains were interred beneath it about 25 years after his death at the end of the Civil War. Richmond removed its other Confederate monuments amid the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in 2020. ![]() Several dozen people, including neighbors, some of Hill’s indirect descendants and supporters and opponents of the removal, stood in the closed intersection watching the crew work. After the statue was removed, the crew got to work removing the base. Hill from its base, before a crane using yellow straps looped under the statue’s arms lifted it onto a bed of tires on a flatbed truck. ![]() It took just minutes to free the statue of Confederate Gen. (AP) - The city of Richmond - the capital of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War - removed its last city-owned Confederate statue on Monday, more than two years after it began to purge itself of what many saw as painful symbols of racial oppression.
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