June 10, 2008
Sons of Confederate Veterans proposes Davis statue at Tredegar
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is offering to donate a bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the the Confederacy, to be placed at Tredegar Iron Work to mark the bicentennial of his birth. [via]
This is a wonderful idea.
Richmond and surrounding communities suffered before, during and after the, “War of Northern Aggression.”
Those of us who live in the Twenty-First Century, citizens of every background, could make a lot of money from Confederate era tourism if Virginia and the City of Richmond would only promote Civil War tourism, instead of trying to deny that chapter of our history.
What better way to move forward into a new century, than to make money as we teach future generations about our past as the Capital of the Confederacy?
If packaged properly, destinations all around the Richmond area could attract tourists from all over the world who study the American Civil War. It would be truly just, for the Whites and Blacks of today to make money together as we teach others about the lessons of one of the more challenging periods in our Republic’s history.
We could all give a hearty Rebel Yell as we carry all of those tourist dollars down to our local banks.
It’s one thing to depict history, but we shouldn’t be idolizing him.
I don’t get this, I just don’t. I am a Richmond lifer, I’ve studied our history and written about the many aspects. But this idea of yet another statue to Jefferson Davis strikes me as, at the very least, redundant.
Jeff has two, count’em two, full-length statues in quite public places; one on Monument Avenue with his arm outstretched beseeching passersby, and the other, on his grave site, in Hollywood Cemetery. There he looks as though he’s waiting to be introduced on a dais.
If you want to make much over him about his 200th anniversary, use those already existing figures.
if further honoring of his memory is desired, how about chipping into a fund to restore and maintain the the Monument Avenue piece, which, by the way, is showing the wear of a century of auto exhaust and acid rain. Rather than go through all the hummer-bugger about putting up another Jeff, use the Jeffs you got.
Some unreconstructed types remain annoyed that Abraham Lincoln sits there by Tredegar on National Park Service property. I could care less about his presence. I’ve always thought the piece resembled nothing so much as a lawn ornament.
Lincoln strode into still-smoldering Richmond, holding his son Tad’s hand, and accompanied by a contingent of about 20 service personnel. (The exact days, hours and course of Lincoln’s Richmond tour have been in dispute ever since it happened; suffice to say, he came, he saw, he sat in Jeff Davis’ former chair.)
Why a better and more courageous depiction of Lincoln in Richmond wasn’t chosen befuddles me –and there was scandal mongering at the time about that statue’s design and placement. Just him striding with purpose, wearing his stove pipe hat, and Tad looking around wide-eyed, would’ve been far more accurate.
Meanwhile, Davis had fled with the rag tag remnants of the Confederate government to Danville. He imagined re-instituting authority –which was delusional.
It’s interesting, too, that after the war and following his Fortress Monroe incarceration (where the Pope sent him a crown of thorns), Jeff Davis’ reputation plummeted–after all, the South got trounced and somebody other than Bobby Lee needed to catch the blame.
Davis toward the end of his life wrote his version of events and embarked on a lecture tour in support of his memoirs, reinstating him in the affections of his former countrymen. When he died in 1889, 200,000 people attended his funeral at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.
Then in 1898, at the upsurge of the Lost Cause movement, Davis was disinterred, crated up and put on a train that took a funereal last tour of the South to Richmond for re-burial in the Southern shrine of Hollywood Cemetery.
Civil War Center agrees to accept statue (RTD 8/13/08)
Maybe just need to place old JD in a different setting - like the look on face when one of his aides tapped on the shoulder at St. Paul’s to let him know that the Confederate lines had been breached and the Union troops would be in Richmond in just a couple of hours.
It would have been nice to see the money better spent on battlefield preservation instead of a poor piece of sculpture. ~G