Old Glory: The Symbol of One AmericaPosted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, United States, Virginia on 2015-03-18 16:19Z by Steven |
Old Glory: The Symbol of One America
1696 Heritage Group
2015-03-16
Keith Stokes, Vice President
Richard Gill Forrester, c. 1850
The photograph taken in 1850 during the earliest years of a new-fangled technology called photography, captures a well-dressed, handsome five year old boy named Richard Gill Forrester, of antebellum Richmond, Virginia. Just as the photograph represented a new era in the technology of imagery, young Forrester, and others like him, represented a new-fangled generation of what it meant to be an American. Our national motto, “E Pluribus Unum” Out of Many, One, whose meaning some have come to suggest that out of many ethnicities, races, and religions would emerge a single people and America, seems to be embodied by the little boy pictured. And Forrester, who was my great, grandfather, with blended Jewish and Christian religion; black, Indian and white race; and northern and southern political persuasion, would grow and defend his right to be called an American.
After four long years of war, Union Troops on the morning of April 3, 1865 entered the city of Richmond, Virginia then capital of the Confederate States of America. Richmond had become the single-minded focus of the Union war effort, in a civil war between Americans of Northern and Southern persuasions that would claim an estimated three quarter of a million combatants…
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