David Richmond Quotes

The Donald Fraser of The Story Girl was Donald Montgomery, and Neil Campbell was David Murray, of Bedeque. The only embroidery I permitted myself in the telling of the tale was to give Donald a horse and cutter. In reality, what he had was a half-broken steer, hitched to a rude, old wood-sled, and it was with this romantic equipage that he hied him over to Richmond Bay to propose to Nancy!

At the end of its eight-minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper’s eyeballs. The rods and cones packing his retinas convert the light into electrical impulses that travel along optic nerves into his brain, which translates the varying wavelengths of light into ‘Virgin Mary blue’, ‘blood of Christ red’, ‘Gethsemane green’, and interprets the images as twelve disciples, each occupying a segment of the cartwheel window. Vision begins in the heart of the sun. Jasper notes that Jesus’s disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements and a guru.

At the end of its eight-minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St. Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper’s eyeballs. The rods and cones packing his retinas convert the light into electrical impulses that travel along optic nerves into his brain, which translates the varying wavelengths of light into “Virgin Mary blue,” “blood of Christ red,” “Gethsemane green,” and interprets the images as twelve disciples, each occupying a segment of the cartwheel window. Vision begins in the heart of the sun. Jasper notes that Jesus’s disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements, and a guru.

While the Reconstruction struggle ensued in Washington and across the South, Edward A. Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote his long manifesto, The Lost Cause, published in 1867. Pollard issued a warning to all who would ever try to shape the memory of the Civil War, much less Reconstruction policy. “All that is left the South,” wrote Pollard, “is the war of ideas.” The war may have decided the “restoration of the union and the excision of slavery,” declared Pollard, “but the war did not decide Negro equality.”39 Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and memory.

Fundamentally, however, blacks resented not only the incidents of slavery—the whippings, separations of families, and countless rituals of subordination—but the fact of having been held as slaves at all. During a visit to Richmond, Scottish minister David Macrae was surprised to hear a former slave complain of past mistreatment, while acknowledging he had never been whipped. “How were you cruelly treated then?” asked Macrae. “I was cruelly treated,” answered the freedman, “because I was kept in slavery.”4

The Richmond Enquirer, the South's leading paper, called antislavery senators “a pack of curs” who “have become saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen” and thus “must be lashed into submission…. Let them understand, that for every vile word spoken against the South, they will suffer so many stripes, and they will soon learn to behave themselves like decent dogs—they never can be gentlemen.