Gilded Age Richmond: Gaiety, Greed & Lost Cause Mania
By Brian Burns
()
About this ebook
Author Brian Burns traces the history of the River City as it marched toward a new century.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Richmond entered the Gilded Age seeking bright prospects while struggling with its own past. It was an era marked by great technological change and ideological strife. During a labor convention in conservative Richmond, white supremacists prepared to enforce segregation at gunpoint. Progressives attempted to gain political power by unveiling a wondrous new marvel: Richmond's first electric streetcar. And handsome lawyer Thomas J. Cluverius was accused of murdering a pregnant woman and dumping her body in the city reservoir, sparking Richmond's trial of the century.
Brian Burns
Brian Burns grew up in Chapel Hill and attended UNC his freshman year. After graduating magna cum laude in 1983 from the School of Design at North Carolina State University, he worked as an art director for advertising agencies. As the years passed, he turned to copywriting. He got his first taste of history writing in 2006 as co-producer of The Rainbow Minute , a radio show about LGBTQ+ heroes, history and culture. He has three previous titles with The History Press: Lewis Ginter: Richmond's Gilded Age Icon (2011), Curiosities of the Confederate Capital (2013) and Gilded Age Richmond (2017). Brian currently lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, maintaining strong ties to Chapel Hill.
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Gilded Age Richmond - Brian Burns
ago.
INTRODUCTION
Ah, the Gilded Age—with its cigar-puffing tycoons, palatial mansions and decadent, spare-no-expense parties. Refined ladies donned exquisite silk gowns, jewels and ostrich-plume hats. Alighting fancy horse-drawn carriages, society flocked to a dizzying array of affairs, like hours-long horse shows and lavish performances of the opera-comique The Chimes of Normandy. But it wasn’t all glitz and glamour. The industrialization of the era, circa 1870–1900, left the masses in grinding poverty as wage laborers.
In fact, underneath the thin layer of gilding, the manufacturing city of Richmond suffered from a terrible lack of growth and prosperity. Compared to places like Chicago, Birmingham and St. Paul, it was considered finished.
Even as late as 1890, a city booster declared it dead.
As with much of the South, capital was in short supply. Virginia had the added burden of huge prewar debt. And to top it all off, the Panic of 1893 triggered a major depression. When calling Richmond home, citizens blushed.
Part of the problem was conservatism, which had deep, tangled roots in the former Confederate capital. The Lost Cause movement diverted eyes to the past rather than homing them on progress. Amid a propaganda war with the North, the movement’s leaders framed the Confederate cause as a heroic struggle
for states’ rights. In the white, Gilded Age South, Confederate leaders and their flag were sacred. Lost Cause ideology permeated every fiber of life. Confederate monuments sprang up anywhere enough money could be scraped together. After Jefferson Davis’s death in 1889, Richmond’s elite Lost Causers were forced to scale back their grandiose schemes. As idolized as the former Confederate president was, it took eighteen excruciating years to find funds for his monument and erect it. When it was finally unveiled in 1907, cheers nearly ruined many a southern vocal cord.
Richmond conservatism was also tied to city politics and a hefty dose of fear. The cumbersome bicameral city council resisted changes like street improvements and extending Richmond’s borders. In a bitter debate over electric streetlights in the early 1880s, council progressives accused their opponents of old fogeyism.
The city languished as a provincial backwater.
But there was hope. James Dooley, Joseph Bryan and other battle-hardened ex-Confederates fought to reinstate Richmond as the queen of the Southland.
Having joined the frenzied scramble for personal wealth, they had the means to deliver progress, prosperity and growth. The war taught them not only to lock arms in a common cause but also to place Richmond’s welfare first. They established hospitals, libraries, orphanages, parks, streetcar suburbs and a technical school to rival New York’s Cooper Union. They also worked feverishly to attract northern capital. But these civic-minded men were conservative themselves—culturally, at least. Steeped in antebellum racial codes, they did anything and everything to secure wealth and power.
A Gilded Age Richmonder offered a window into the capitalist’s burning soul: As the world goes, in business, as in war, everything is fair, and sentiment is an element that does not and cannot control commerce in its eager strivings for big prizes.
¹
Yes, the era was marked by fierce, monopolistic combinations, rapacious business practices and huge income disparity. But let’s not forget the virulent southern racism and labor strife. During a hotly contested mayoral race in Richmond, blacks and whites exchanged deadly gunfire in the streets. As the city hosted a major labor convention, a face-off between the races nearly turned Broad Street into a river of blood. Elites used trickery and legislation to deny blacks the vote. What’s more, the Law and Order League enforced segregation, vigilante-style. In this era of white supremacy, black lives didn’t matter. At least blacks had a friend in former slave John Mitchell Jr., who fought the lynch law and other racial injustices with his gutsy Richmond Planet columns.
With television half a century away, citizens were glued to their newspapers. Eyebrows went up when Joseph Bryan delivered the deathblow to the Virginia tradition of dueling. Jaws dropped when black Baptist preacher John Jasper insisted the sun rotated around the earth. And readers were nearly thrown from their chairs when an eight-months-pregnant woman turned up dead in the city reservoir. The murder suspect—a handsome, young attorney—took center stage in America’s trial of the century. Of course, there were many silent heroes like Grace Arents, a forgotten leader in the southern education movement.
Women were put on a pedestal, as long as they knew their place. They couldn’t vote. Many occupations were closed to them, too, including the practice of law. But in 1895, feminist Belva Lockwood swept through Richmond and scored a historic victory for her gender.
As for polite Richmond society, it reveled in all things bright and gay.
Social calendars were crammed with formal receptions, dances, weddings and parades. America’s first major streetcar system was born in the city, with citizens giddily hopping aboard. Other fashionable crazes arrived too, like the cycle.
And fresh, exuberant architecture sprang up, like a towering, Victorian Gothic city hall built with a mountain of granite.
It all made for one of the most fascinating periods in Richmond history. And one that—for all its evils and excesses—saved the city’s very existence.
1
REVEREND JASPER’S MEDIA CIRCUS
SERMON ON ASTRONOMY SPARKS NATIONAL CONTROVERSY
Thousands of Richmonders, white and black, were desperate for a seat at the big event. So on Sunday, March 17, 1878, they flocked to the colored
Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church in Jackson Ward. At three o’clock that afternoon, quoting his Bible, charismatic Reverend John Jasper would prove the sun revolves around the earth.
The massive crowd waited outside the church for hours, its excitement mounting. When the doors finally opened, a frantic stampede broke out—trampling one woman nearly to death. While a charity wagon
rushed her to the hospital, the church quickly packed to overflowing. Hundreds were turned away and dashed to the windows, craning their necks to catch a glimpse. As momentous as this whole thing was, no one could have predicted that Jasper’s sun sermon
would reverberate across the nation.
John Jasper was born into slavery on the Peachy Plantation in Fluvanna County on July 4, 1812. As a young man, he was sold to tobacconist Sam Hargrove in Richmond and worked as a stemmer at a chewing tobacco factory. Jasper fondly recounted his spiritual transformation. Seated at his worktable—feeling his sins piled on him like mount’ns
—he flung up to heav’n a cry for mercy.
Before he knew it, salvation rolled like a flood
through his soul. He shouted with joy, loud enough to be heard clean ’cross Jeems River to Manchester.
²
With his slave dialect and flair for the dramatic, Reverend John Jasper charmed crowds everywhere. Courtesy Library of Virginia.
Jasper became a slave preacher known for his religious zeal. He preached with every faculty of his mind, with every passion and sentiment of his soul, with every nerve, every muscle, and every feature of his body.
³ He couldn’t have been more animated:
He circled around the pulpit with his ankle in his hand; and laughed and sang and shouted and acted about a dozen characters within the space of three minutes. Meanwhile, in spite of these things, he was pouring out a gospel sermon, red hot, full of love, full of invective, full of tenderness, full of bitterness, full of tears, full of every passion that ever flamed in the human breast. He was a theatre within himself, with the stage crowded with actors.⁴
When the Civil War ended in April 1865, Jasper became a free man. With just seventy-three cents in his pocket, he was forty-two dollars in debt. In 1867, he founded the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church in an abandoned Confederate horse stable on Brown’s Island. It began with nine members. Two years later, the growing congregation moved to its current site on Duval Street. Jasper’s popularity soared. People, white and black, came to Sixth Mount Zion just to hear him,
said church historian Benjamin Ross. It was a festival, a circus, a spectacular scene. Up front, they were hooting and hollering.
⁵ Jasper’s sun sermon would take him higher yet.
Six-foot-one and dressed in a black clerical suit, the preacher stepped up to the pulpit. Heavy silver spectacles were tied on the top of his head with string. The philosophers say the sun don’t move,
Jasper began. I want to make a fire with those philosophers’ books this evening.
Their theory was hogwash. Where in the name o’ God he gets his authority from I don’t know,
he continued. This morning when the Sun rose it was over thar [pointing east]. How in the name o’ God could the Sun get from that side of the house to this [pointing west] unless it moved?
He said that, by the time he finished his sermon, he’d convince everyone in the audience "that the sun do move." And if he fell short, he would never preach again.⁶
Jasper quoted one Bible verse after another. In one, God sends Hezekiah a sign by making a sundial’s shadow move ten degrees backward. "Here, said Jasper,
God declared that the Sun go backwards. That man who says the Sun do not move, he don’t read this Bible. Then he brought up Solomon.
Do you know that he is the man who said, ‘the Sun ariseth and goeth down and hasteneth back to the place she moved from.’ It is nonsense to say the Sun don’t move. Jasper rattled off a torrent of passages in which the sun rises and sets. He dared any grammarian to say that
rising means
standing still." Believing philosophers or Galileo was calling the Bible a lie.⁷
Finishing his sermon drenched with sweat, Jasper scanned the crowd with his eyes. Now,
he implored, all you what believe that the sun do move, hold up your right hand.
Every man, woman and child raised a hand. I hope you will always take your stand on God’s side,
Jasper said, beaming. Do not suffer yourself to be carried away by doctrines. Confide in God’s word.
⁸
Word of the sensational sermon flashed over the telegraph wires, making news all over the country. Every newspaper offered its own spin. Pennsylvania’s Centre Reporter ribbed Jasper for believing the world was flat, quipping, Rev. Johnny-cake Jasper thinks philosophers and astronomers are all wrong.
But the New Orleans Daily Democrat praised Jasper and his congregation, which stood out as a conspicuous picture of faith and courage.
As Jasper’s staunch beliefs and fighting spirit rose to national attention, both races flocked to standing-room-only encores of The Sun Do Move
sermon. Trains unloaded crowds from Lexington and Lynchburg. Students came from Richmond Female College and Richmond College. Jasper preached his famous sermon before the entire Virginia General Assembly. Around 1885, he even went on a lecture tour of Washington, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Crowds ate Reverend Jasper up—and not just for the pure entertainment value. They loved his eloquence, his wit, his sincerity and especially his slips into slave dialect. Because of his beliefs on astronomy, he was actually compared to Aristotle, Socrates and Plato.
Of course, not everyone was a convert. White-owned newspapers roundly ridiculed him. Oddly enough, however, his archrival was Reverend Richard Wells of Richmond’s colored
Ebenezer Baptist Church. He ran a blurb in the Dispatch, calling the sun sermon a base fabrication.
Jasper, along with his entire congregation, was indignant. Responding in kind, he said he preached nothing but the word of God. He labeled Wells a hypocrite, full of jealousy and hatred, which enraged the Ebenezer congregation. Amid this nasty public feud, four hundred ministers and deacons from area black churches were empaneled to arbitrate. In the end, the two preachers made amends and shook hands.
Jasper had a secret admirer who said, One could not fail to see that his fight on a technical question was so manifestly devout, so filled with zeal for the honour of religion, and so courageous in the presence of overwhelming odds, that those who did not agree with him learned to love and honour him.
⁹
Over the span of two decades, Jasper preached his sun sermon more than 250 times. He was held up as an example of the self-made man.
On March 30, 1901, Jasper lay dying in his home