Her Favorite Son, the Slavery Leader

ECW welcomes back guest author Samuel Flowers.

For close to a decade now, debates have circulated concerning whether Confederate monuments and memorabilia are appropriate for public display. The American South is littered with monuments and markers in key community locations like town squares, cemeteries, courthouses, and parks.

One recently discussed place is Confederate soldiers and politicians enshrined in marble at Statuary Hall, a chamber inside the U.S. Capitol. Each state nominates a figure to be honored in the hall and represent them in the chamber and on the national stage. In 1931, the state of Mississippi unveiled its statue of the man they believed represented their values: Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

The official ceremony for Davis’s statue was held on June 2, 1931. Statuary Hall was filled with onlookers, along with family and friends in attendance, including Adele Hayes-Davis, the honoree’s great-granddaughter. During the commemorative speeches, the orators praised Davis by linking him to the same standards as Abraham Lincoln.

Journalist Edgar Wilson criticized Reconstruction and the amendments that came from it, stating, “I sometimes think that when these drastic laws were passed Providence must have been asleep.”^[1] A speech by U.S. Senator Pat Harrison added to the Lincoln comparisons by arguing that he would have been for secession and the Confederacy had Davis moved to Illinois and he to Mississippi.^[2] Senator Harrison, for the rest of his speech, argued Davis’s achievements while simultaneously side-stepping the Confederate president’s opinions on secession, slavery, and the influence he had on the Lost Cause after the war.

While researching the unveiling of Davis’s statue in the chambers of Capitol Hill, I found newspaper articles that argued for its removal. What was shocking was that the controversy over this statue did not originate ten years ago, but days after the official ceremony. Two editorials from the same month the statue appeared in Statuary Hall criticized its existence and the region that produced it.

The Daily News in Jersey City published an editorial two days after the ceremony, bluntly stating how they felt about Davis. They argued that Jefferson Davis’s motivation for joining the Confederacy “was based on the [most] barbarous, cruel, and vicious institution ever invented- human slavery.”^[3] It continued by directly defying the Lost Cause rhetoric of the day as the editor declared that the Civil War was waged by the planter class at the cost of the lives of both enslaved blacks and poor Southern whites.

According to the Daily News, Mississippi chose “her favorite son the slavery leader” to hold up the state’s values and beliefs.^[4] The editorial concluded with an ironic analogy to fit the times in which the article was written, saying “the strangest part of the whole business is the South’s attitude today toward the eighteenth amendment, the most outrageous invasion of State’s rights in our history.”^[5] The irony was not lost on the author for noticing that while the South enforced state-regulated segregation, many of those same people also pushed for a national ban on alcohol, cultivating Prohibition across the nation.

The second opinion piece came out within the same month from the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. Although a slightly smaller word count compared to the Daily News editorial, the message of opposition was still clear. The Vermont editorialist argued that if Davis was “an arch-traitor and unrepented” in life, then it was determined “incredible that his lifeless image should have been admitted to the National Capitol.”^[6] He also predicted that if Davis was free and able to stand in effigy within Statuary Hall, then members of his Cabinet would be next. To the editorialist’s credit, he was correct that this would happen, but was unaware that Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s statue was unveiled in the same space in 1927. The Burlington Free Press concluded by arguing those who idolize the beliefs of the Confederacy, and even John Wilkes Booth, would look “complacently upon the iconology.”^[7]

Both editorials spoke out against the Jefferson Davis statue on Capitol Hill. They countered the Lost Cause persona of Davis, his views on slavery and the causes of the war, and additionally feared that more like this would follow without protest. To some history buffs, it would be easy to assume that these archived newspapers were originally published in 2015, 2017, or over the summer of 2020. The fact that these were published days and weeks after the initial ceremony shows that resistance to Confederate monuments and memory is not a recent phenomenon. The struggle over Civil War memory has been around since practically the end of the war and continues into the present day.

Sam Flowers is an assistant professor and teaches history at Louisburg College. He received his B.A. from UNC-Charlotte and graduated with his M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington under the guidance of Angela Zombek, PhD. His thesis looked at the importance of the Overland Campaign from the lenses of military significance, common soldier experience, and memory and memorialization. He is researching multiple topics, including the Third North Carolina Infantry as its war service transitioned, perpetuating Confederate myth and memory. He is also in the process of collaborating with Gene Schmiel in the hopes of creating a revised version of his book, The Civil War in Statuary Hall.

Endnotes:

[1] United States. 72d Congress, 1st sess., 1931-1932, Acceptance and Unveiling of the Statues of Jefferson Davis and James Z. George. Presented by the State of Mississippi. Proceedings in the Congress and in Statuary Hall, United States Capitol (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932), 29-30.

[2] Ibid, 34.

[3] “Davis Reaches Statuary Hall,” Daily News, June 4, 1931.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Objects to Davis Statue in Capitol,” Burlington Free Press, June 24, 1931.

[7] Ibid.