Matthew Fontaine Maury
Richmond, Virginia

Matthew Fontaine Maury and Globe, 1929 with paint from 2020
Bronze statue with spray paint
90 x 63 x 66 in. (228.6 x 160 x 167.6 cm) (figure)
154 x 120 x 132 in. (391.2 x 304.8 x 335.3 cm) (globe)
Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
Filed Under:
Matthew Fontaine Maury
Sponsor: United Daughters of the Confederacy, Matthew Fontaine Maury Association, State of Virginia, City of Richmond
Dedicated: 1929
Removed: 2020
Scientist and naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) is considered the father of modern oceanography. In his 1847 Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, he aggregated ship logs to collect information on winds, currents, and whale migration, creating a uniform system of recording oceanographic data that was adopted by navies and merchant marines worldwide. Maury’s system led to improved commercial routes throughout the Atlantic, revolutionizing steamship commerce. This achievement, however, was hardly an end in itself. Maury was an ideologue for whom science and exploration served the expansion of U.S. commercial interests, notably into South America. For Maury, ventures into the Southern Hemisphere would include the expansion of slavery, a position for which he lobbied strenuously in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Although not a slave owner himself, Maury was an ardent Southerner who supported the institution of slavery. Envisioning a future for slavery in which Americans would settle with their enslaved people in Brazil, he wrote, “[t]here is no colonizer, civilizer, nor Christianizer like commerce,” but the work “must be done by the African, with the American axe in his hand.” His plan, he argued, would serve a twofold purpose. American interests could extract Brazil’s natural resources, including spices, rubber, and gold, while also acting as a “safety-valve” for the enslaved population in the American South. Like many white Americans, Maury believed that a race war, or what he called “a death struggle for the mastery,” was inevitable. Uprisings like those led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner frightened slaveholders, who were determined that the enslaved should not outnumber whites. Maury claimed that his plan of offshoring slavery would lead to gradual emancipation in the U.S. and prevent more slaves being made of free Africans via the transatlantic trade, ignoring the creation of new chattel of babies born to enslaved mothers.
When Virginia seceded from the Union, Maury resigned from the federal military and enrolled in the Confederate navy, where he was made a commander. In this role, he traveled Europe purchasing ships and other supplies while also attempting to persuade European leaders to recognize the Confederacy. At the end of the war, he sent a letter of surrender but remained abroad to avoid arrest and trial for treason. He landed in Mexico, where he was appointed Imperial Commissioner of Colonization by Emperor Maximilian with the intent of convincing former Confederates to immigrate there. This plan failed; as Robert E. Lee wrote, “I prefer to struggle for [the South’s] restoration, and share its fate rather than give up all as lost.” After Maximilian was deposed and former Confederates were pardoned, Maury returned to the United States, teaching at the Virginia Military Institute and giving scientific lectures until the end of his life.
In December 1912, nearly forty years after Maury’s death, Richmonder Gaston Lichtenstein wrote to the Richmond Times-Dispatch that “the capital of his own State ought to take pleasure in erecting a statue to his memory.” Lichtenstein had been inspired by seeing Maury’s name displayed at the Seaman’s Institute in Hamburg, Germany. The Matthew Fontaine Maury Association formed in 1915 for the purpose of building a monument in Richmond. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) joined the effort in 1920. They selected Frederick William Sievers, a Richmond-based sculptor whose practice centered on Confederate memorials, including the Virginia Monument at Gettysburg and the Stonewall Jackson Monument formerly on Monument Avenue.
The design of the Maury monument focuses on his oceanic and meteorological accomplishments, which are depicted on a bronze globe surrounded by allegorical figures with “a storm raging on land and sea, encircling the earth.” While Maury’s Confederate service was not visually represented in the monument’s composition, the cornerstone box laid in 1922 contained tiny Confederate flags from every division of the UDC ranks. The last major Confederate monument erected on Monument Avenue, it was unveiled on Armistice Day, November 11, 1929, signaling the start of a new era of Lost Cause mythologizing, a conflation of Confederate heritage and American patriotism. Regional hostility began to subside as Northern and Southern soldiers fought alongside each other in the Spanish American War and the Great War. Confederate monuments, once viewed by Northerners as offensive and treasonous, were now seen by the white public as part and parcel of honoring important American historical figures.
Despite the grandiose memorial to his legacy, Maury never became a household name or figured prominently in Civil War histories. Absent blatant Lost Cause symbols, his monument did not generally attract protesters but was still considered part of the city’s Confederate backdrop. In the late 1970s, after Richmond elected a majority Black city council, which selected its first Black mayor, Henry Marsh, political leaders were absorbed with “a plate full of issues—housing, transportation, education, unemployment” and removing Confederate statues was not a priority, as former councilman Chuck Richardson noted in 2020. Willie Dell, the city’s first Black councilwoman, also recalled of that period, “Robert E. Lee is dead. It ain’t him I got to worry about. It’s the racist living and sitting across from me at Council.” But in 2020, Maury’s treasonous Confederate service drew the ire of social-justice advocates armed with spray paint. The bronze elements came off on July 2, 2020, and Team Henry Enterprises removed the pedestal in February 2022.









































































































































































































































































































































































