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Published: January 6th 2012
Richmond at war
Artifacts from the battles for Richmondis a very odd place culturally.
Most of the city feels and acts like a modern regional capitol that is slowly being absorbed into the Washington DC exurbia.
The rest feels like an important outpost of a
distinct regional culture.
This difference appears most dramatically where the Civil War is concerned.
The former viewpoint sees the war as a complex conflict over many issues, particularly slavery, and discusses the less honorable parts of the southern war experience.
The latter viewpoint sees the war as a
highlight (WARNING: Link may be offensive) of everything that makes Southern culture distinctive and valuable (honor, valor, family, etc.) and celebrates Richmond as the Confederate capitol.
I had to get used to the latter culture, since it would appear with increasing frequency as I headed south.
Falls of the James
The first site I saw today is the
Falls of the James.
The James River crosses the fall line at this long set of rapids, and they are the reason Richmond exists.
At most water levels, the river splits into many channels and falls over series of granite ledges.
The Falls is ranked as the best
urban whitewater in the
Falls of the James in flood
The falls of the James at 12 feet. The trees in the water in the distance are normally on dry land US.
I originally planned to
raft them today.
A line of heavy thunderstorms had swept through days before, forcing me to change plans.
The city closes the river for safety reasons once the water reaches nine feet (and most raft guides will not run the river above seven feet).
Today, the river was at a scary twelve feet.
At this level, all the rocks in the river are covered and they become roiling boils and whirlpools.
Small rocky islands at moderate water levels became clumps of flooded trees.
Bridge embankments generated long violent wave trains.
The sheer power of the water was amazing to see, especially when huge driftwood logs floated past the viewpoints.
I certainly glad I wasn’t floating on it!
Tredegar Iron Works
After the Falls, I delved into the Civil War.
Richmond, as the Confederate capitol and main manufacturing center, was the epicenter of the fighting.
Two main
waves of battles occurred around the city (in 1862 and 1864), during which more soldiers died than Virginia had residents at the time.
The story is recounted at the Richmond Civil War Center
Driftwood in the Falls of the James
The Falls of the James at 12 feet. Note the driftwood log on the left, and the wavetrains in the distance at the Tredegar Iron Works.
The Iron Works was founded in the 1830s to exploit the water power of the Falls of the James.
In the late 1850s, the plant became a munitions factory.
It ultimately supplied over half of all Confederate cannons, and the armor plate for the
CSS Virginia (Merrimack to northerners)
The cannons used to attack Fort Sumpter came from Tredegar.
The Center has three main components.
The first is a Park Service Visitors Center.
All of the battlefields around Richmond have been consolidated into a
National Park, and the Visitors Center is the orientation point for all of them.
It has the usual map that describes the battle routes.
On the second floor it has a display of artifacts on the Civil War in Richmond.
It’s divided into two parts, one for the soldiers and one for the home front.
I found the home front part more interesting.
For example, Richmond was not well managed during the Civil War.
The city contained three separate governments (city, state of Virginia, and Confederate) and they did not always get along.
This led to
food shortages as refugees and wounded poured into the city from the battlefields, and ultimately caused a riot.
At one point, there were so many people living in the city that every inhabitable space was taken, including the coal cellars.
The one exception was slaves, who were sent into the Virginia countryside to prevent their liberation by union troops.
Lincoln
visited Richmond only two days after Union troops captured it.
He was met by ecstatic cheers by most blacks, and stony silence by most whites.
He visited the
White House of the Confederacy, and made a point of sitting in the same chair that Jefferson Davis had used a mere week before.
Two weeks later, he was assassinated.
The second Civil War site at Tredegar is the
armaments factory itself.
Only a small fraction of the buildings still exist.
The factory was burned to the ground as confederate troops fled the city to prevent Union soldiers from finding useful war material.
Much of it was rebuilt afterwards and operated into the 1930s.
The park service has restored some of the machinery that was inside, including the canal that powered the
whole thing.
One of the canons it manufactured sits in the entry plaza, along with a portrait of its creator, J. R Anderson.
He developed a way of creating a spiral barrel, so the short spun like a rifle bullet when fired and was much more accurate.
American Civil War Center
The final site is the
American Civil War Center.
The goal of the center is to describe the Civil War and its effects on society.
The museum is fairly new and very high tech.
In addition to the usual array of artifacts and information filled panels, it adds films, interactive maps, and computer displays.
The information is presented from three main points of view: Northerners, Southern Whites, and Southern Blacks.
While the center tries to be evenhanded, it has a particular point of view.
The Civil War was really caused by messy compromises over the meaning of liberty, and the Northern victory decisively resolved that debate.
In the early US, Africans were not really considered to be part of humanity.
There were human, but they were a lower type of human that did not
have the mental faculties necessary to participate in civil society.
Northerners disapproved of slavery on both moral and economic grounds.
Africans may be less than fully human, but this did not automatically give whites the right to own them and abuse them.
Slavery also provided unfair competition to the paid workforce.
Southerners fully embraced slavery, and many believed it was a civilizing experience for natural savages.
The designers of the Constitution knew it needed significant levels of support in many states to be enacted.
The support of both Northern and Southern states was crucial.
To ensure this support, the final document very carefully
tiptoes around the slavery issue.
It refers to “all other persons” in one clause (the infamous part of
Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 which counts a slave as three fifths of a person for apportioning House seats) and indirectly affirms right to persons as property in another (
Article 4, Section 2).
As long as the regions of the country were in balance, the compromises held.
This balance did not last.
The North embraced industry, and attracted thousands of immigrants.
Equally importantly, the US acquired a large amount
Richmond on the home front
Artifacts from life at home in the Civil War of
new territory though the Louisiana Purchase and war with Mexico.
Much of this new territory was unsuited to plantation based agriculture.
Southern states started to see their political power wane, and the expansion of slavery to new territory became a
pressing issue.
Then abolition of slavery became a moral issue in the North, fueled by works such as “
Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.
The election of
Abraham Lincoln, who had pledged to prevent slavery in the new territories, was the final straw.
Southern states seceded and the war was on.
Initially, the war was formally only about secession vs. preserving the union.
Many soldiers thought there would be a big battle and the war would be over.
Reality quickly set in, and keeping people motivated proved to be difficult.
Certain Northern politicians, called the
Copperhead Democrats (because they were sneaky and deadly, like the snake) by Lincoln allies, even started to complain that preserving the Union was not worth the steep cost in bloodshed.
Britain was
friendly toward the South, which was a major supplier of cotton.
For these reasons as much as the fiery speeches of abolitionists like
Frederick Douglas, Lincoln turned the war from
Lincoln monument
Sculpture commemorating Lincoln's visit to Richmond days after it fell to Union forces one about succession to one about slavery.
The famous
Emancipation Proclamation is carefully worded to only apply to territory held by the Confederacy not occupied by the Union Army, so it had little immediate practical effect.
Its political effect was enormous.
A war over political concepts became a moral crusade, the Copperheads disappeared, and British forces stayed out of the conflict.
Near the end of the war, with victory near certain, the US congress passed the
13th amendment to the Constitution, which formally abolished slavery.
After the war was over, Congress mandated that 50%!o(MISSING)f white male residents of a state had to take a loyalty oath, and the state had to ratify the 13
th amendment, before it could be readmitted.
This firmly resolved the slavery issue, and stated that liberty applied to all people, regardless of skin color or origin.
The one part of the exhibit where I think the center falls short is what happened after the Civil War.
After all, the Southern states found ways to recreate slavery in all but name with the
Jim Crow laws and segregation.
The wounds the war created lasted a century or more
Tredegar Iron Works Machinery
Reconstructed Iron making machinery from Tredegar Iron Works and in certain areas still run raw.
The center mentions all this in passing, but does not delve into it.
I believe the exhibit would be much richer for exploring this area.
On the whole, I enjoyed the visit.
There is a lot of information, and it’s well presented.
It did have the feel of a museum trying to appeal to school kids in places (especially the films) but that is not a bad thing in small amounts.
It was a great overview before seeing sights further south.
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