Well, I'm back in lovely Chapel Hill after a few days in Williamsburg. I went up there to attend a conference on the Lemon Project, which is William and Mary's examination of its connections to slavery. The papers were fabulous. Lorena Walsh spoke about her work on seventeenth-century probate records (available in her new book Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763), which pinpoints when the transition to slavery occurred. Really great stuff, inspiring for those of us interested in quantitative legal history, especially of the trusts and estates kind. Jennifer Oast spoke about her work on institutional owners of people, including the Episcopal Church and W&M itself. Michael Blakey of W&M's anthropology department framed the whole discussion and Robert Engs and Terry Meyers anchored it with talk about their intensive work on W&M.
Close readers of the faculty lounge know what's next ... pictures! I have some of Williamsburg. I can never quite figure out how much of the Williamsburg landscape is original (to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and how much was re-created in the twentieth century. I think the Bruton Parish Church is original. Think, but am not 100% certain; something I read recently talks about the rebuilding of the church, so while I understand that the inside was redone, I'm not certain that the outside's original.
It's a mighty impressive structure today; you can imagine it in the eighteenth century. And since it's a church, of course there's a graveyard there. I had to start heading home before the church yard opened on Saturday morning, so what I have is a picture (at the top on the right) I took while looking over the brick fence. But get this -- it's a monument to one of the people I study: Beverly Tucker. In fact, Professor Tucker sets in motion University, Court, and Slave.
I came home via Richmond, because I wanted to see some family friends there. That gave me a chance to stop by New Kent County Courthouse (sort of on the way). Guess what's on the lawn out from the courthouse? There's a picture of it at the right. Not the largest of the ones I've seen. And no soldier, just a granite obelisk. Hmmm, all of this makes me think that it would be a fun project in "quantitative monument history"--if this hasn't been done already--to correlate the size/grandness of Confederate monuments with the African American population, the white population, and the per capita wealth of the counties where the monuments were put up, around the time they were put up, 1900-1920. Size of the monument would be the dependent variable, obviously.
I don't know much about New Kent County, though now that I'm home I realize that it's the location of an early eighteenth century church that's often photographed, St. Peter's Episcopal Church. Really beautiful and looking back at a map I realize I was only a few miles from it. Ah, well, next trip -- or one of the next trips, I'll stop by there.
After a really lovely lunch in an Irish bar in Richmond (where I got a belated corned beef and cabbage dinner), I started laying down tracks for Chapel Hill. Along the way I drove on route 1 and, because of a detour in Petersburg, ran across a most extraordinary monument. As I was approaching it, I thought -- hmm, that looks more late nineteenth century than early twentieth. And, my, my, that sure doesn't look like a Confederate solider (I was wrong on that -- should have stuck with my stock phrase--that must be from the early twentieth century). Isn't that guy holding old Glory? So what is this. And then, after I parked and got closer and read the inscriptions "Army of the Potomac", "Pennsylvania Company...." Not very Confederate. Then up the steps in back, to look at a small plaque, way up on the monument -- in very small and hard to read print -- is a statement that this was put up the state of Pennsylvania. (You may recall my pictures of the Union statue in my home town of West Chester, Pennsylvania, from last winter break.) Apparently this was dedicated by President Taft in 1909; it's on the site of Fort Mahone, one of the last battles of the Civil War -- fought just on the outskirts of Petersburg on April 2, 1865. This makes me realize how close the United States was to Peterburg, because the statue's not far, at all, from downtown.
The monument is signed by F.W. Ruckstuhl -- you can see it if you blow up the picture to the right of this paragraph. His name is beneath the cannon. Now get this: Ruckstuhl also designed Confederate monuments -- in fact, he seems to be better known as artist behind Confederate monuments than United States monuments. Here's a New York Times story on the Wade Hampton statue he prepared for the Columbia, South Carolina statehouse grounds. What do you make of that? Art knows no political boundaries, perhaps? Or that it's more evidence of how Americans shared after the war all sorts of common bonds? Or maybe that the memory business was, well, a business.
So, this is a monument to the United States in Petersburg. I realized as I was driving away that it's about a block from Crater Road, so it makes some sense that the place where the Pennsylvania soldiers spent a bunch of time is the place where they'd put up a monument. But I haven't seen a ton of Civil War monuments to the United States south of the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, other than at National Parks, I'm not sure I've ever seen one of them. Then again, I'm not sure I've ever seen one to the Confederacy north of the Mason-Dixon line, other than at Gettysburg. Though there is at least one at the site of a prisoner of war camp in Chicago.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. I passed by a bunch of old gas stations in my rush to get home. But I did go through Boydton to check in on Randolph Macon College's old campus. Tragically, the main building looks in even worse shape than I remember. My final monument picture is of a granite marker for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.
WHAT
Posted by: jenna | May 19, 2010 at 07:21 PM