Led by Mayor Levar Stoney and backed by Governor Ralph Northam, anti-history Democrats in Richmond, Virginia are finalizing plans to dig up the remains of Confederate General Ambrose Powell Hill, who lies beneath a towering statue dedicated in his honor and now marked for removal amidst efforts to erase all traces of the Confederacy from its former capital.
Though nearly all of Richmond’s other Confederate monuments were removed amid the fatal Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led riots that gripped the city in 2020, the statue and resting place dedicated to Confederate General A.P. Hill stayed put, with officials reportedly having trouble finding legal authority to desecrate the grave. Now, under a new set of plans being considered by Richmond’s Commission of Architectural Review, the grave site is designated a threat to traffic safety, conveniently providing the city’s Democrat-dominated government with the authority to remove it.
The grave and statue, however, have existed in the same location since 1892, when the City of Richmond assisted the Hill Monument Association in finding a location to move Hill’s body and erect the statue. At the time, the grave site was described by a local newspaper as “a very beautiful one at the corner nearest the city of Major Ginter’s country place.” The land itself was donated by The Ginter Real Estate Development Company, owned by Major Lewis Ginter, who served under Hill prior to his death. The statue and relocation of Hill’s remains cost an impressive $15,000, equivalent to $440,198.90 in 2021.
According to the removal plans, which are expected to sail through the approval process, workers will remove the bronze statue of the General before destroying its stone pedestal and removing the sarcophagus containing his remains. Details of what the city plans to do with Hill’s remains are unclear, and the project is estimated to carry a taxpayer-funded price tag of over $33,000.
“I think we have drawn this out as long as we can and longer than it should have been,” City Councilman Mike Jones said of the grave site’s desecration. “I know that so many Richmonders are just ready for this saga to be over so we can put a pin in this portion of our painful past,” said Jones, who also called the General’s resting place a “painful trinket of white supremacy.”
In a statement to National File, Barry Isenhour, a spokesman with the Virginia Flaggers, a group dedicated to celebrating and preserving Confederate history, blasted the city’s plans, accusing the “degenerates” running Richmond of cowering to anti-history “social justice terrorists.”
“It comes as no surprise to us that the degenerates in Richmond have announced plans to desecrate the grave of a war veteran by literally digging up his remains in their ongoing quest to eliminate any trace of the city’s history and heritage which might happen to ‘offend’ the small but howling mob of social justice terrorists,” said Isenhour. “As Thomas Carlyle observed, ‘It takes men of worth to recognize worth in men.’ That leaves those in charge in Richmond, OUT.”
A pivotal but lesser-known figure in Confederate history, Hill, affectionately known throughout the Confederacy as “Little Powell,” was a Culpeper, Virginia-born West Point graduate. Opposed to slavery, Hill resigned his commission in the United States Army upon Virginia’s 1861 secession, going on to command the Army of Northern Virginia’s Light Division and quickly gaining a reputation as one of the Confederate Army’s ablest officers.
A true believer in his native southland’s fight for independence, Hill reportedly stated he’d rather die than see the end of the Confederacy and was later killed in combat during the Siege of Petersburg, in the closing days of the war.
When General Robert E. Lee was informed of Hill’s death, aides reported the General being overcome with emotion before stating, “he is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer.” Years later, as Lee lay on his death bed, witnesses described Hill’s name being among the last words the General uttered.
As previously reported by National File, Virginia has become an epicenter in the fight to preserve American history. In recent weeks, officials at the Virginia Military Institute announced a Soviet-style purge of the school’s Confederate history that will include ripping General Stonewall Jackson’s name away from his own words and reattributing them to figures more palatable to the left.