Quote:
Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby
The statue was erected in 1890, on Monument Avenue, which existed to glorify and celebrate people who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Glorify and Celebrate - the people who rejected the Union (which was, at the time, what we know now as the United States of America) and fought against it. This war, this Civil War, was the culmination of an attempt to overturn the government. An insurrection of "monumental" proportions (pun intended). The population in Richmond was mostly wealthy white people and poverty-stricken black people. The abolition of slavery only happened 25 years prior, so most adults living there were former slaves with no job, no prospects, few people willing to actually PAY them to work. I would venture to guess that the blacks living in Richmond would not have been very happy to see the figure of their former oppressor be placed proudly and prominently in their town center.
|
While I agree in general, I would suggest kindly that further reading in history would be interesting for you. Most white people in Richmond were NOT wealthy in 1890. Indeed, there were only a few thousand white people in the Confederate states BEFORE the war who were wealthy, and a large percentage of those who were then were not wealthy after the war. The vast majority of Southern whites in 1860 were poor, often miserably poor, and had never owned slaves. The same was true in 1890. Many of their descendants are still poor. Most of the Southern soldiers who died had never owned a slave. Perhaps they supported slavery for various reasons (such as hoping they might someday be able to afford one), just as plenty of poor whites today who depend on government handouts want lower taxes on the rich because they hope to someday be rich, but they still lived in poverty and dressed in rags.
Meanwhile, while there were millions of “poverty-stricken black people,” the two were not synonymous. There had been “free people of color” in the South for centuries, and a number of them owned slaves, owned farms, or were respected small business owners and craftsmen. This was even more the case in the North.
However, I agree with you in thinking about how the black citizens of Richmond must have felt in 1890 as they saw tax dollars go to memorialize those who had fought to keep them enslaved.
A couple of my great-grandparents were from British Guiana or Suriname and racially mixed. (One of my third great-grandfathers was a Scot who owned four plantations in Suriname and several hundred slaves, married an African woman he had purchased, and left his plantations to his mulatto children. Two of those mulatto sons were tried for beating a thief to death on one of their plantations in 1867. History is complicated!) When slavery was ended in those countries, instead of having a war, the governments of Great Britain and the Netherlands bought each slave, reimbursing the owners, and freed them. But the slaves were required to stay and work on the plantations for several years while indentured servants were brought in from India to take their place. Eventually, the government bought a lot of these plantations, which were often about 500 acres, divided them up into plots of two to five acres, and gave them to ex-slaves. They could live on that in a shack they built and with a big garden. Many, of course, left the plantations and moved to town, even though it was hard to find work there. Lincoln offered the South a similar deal, buying slaves instead of fighting, but the Southern politicians refused, alas. It would have been very expensive, but still cheaper than the war. Plantations should have been confiscated and divided up and distributed to ex-slaves, but alas that didn’t happen.