34°14′08″N77°56′45″W / 34.23556°N 77.94577°W | |
Location | Wilmington, North Carolina |
---|---|
Designer | Francis Herman Packer |
Type | Monument |
Material | Bronze, granite |
Height | 8 feet |
Weight | 1,700 pounds |
Dedicated date | April 20, 1911 |
Restored date | 2000 |
Dedicated to | George Davis |
Dismantled date | 2020 |
The George Davis Monument is a monument to attorney and Confederate politician George Davis that was erected in Wilmington, North Carolina by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It was removed by the City of Wilmington in August 2021.
Davis, a railroad attorney and minor local figure before the war, was a pro-Union member of the Whig Party. After secession, he accepted appointments to the Confederate senate and as attorney general. He was a skilled orator who spoke publicly in March 1861 that North Carolina should secede from the United States of America principally to preserve the economic interest in chattel slavery. [1]
The statue was unveiled on April 20, 1911 [2]
In the early morning hours of June 25, 2020, the City of Wilmington removed the statue of Davis "in order to protect the public safety and to preserve important historical artifacts." [3]
The dismantling was coincident with the firing of three city police officers following the discovery of their "brutally racist" discussions on official police recording equipment. The pedestal, with it’s Lost Cause inscriptions, was covered with a shroud. [4] By June 30, the pedestal was covered with a black shroud, which obscured the inscriptions. [5] [6]
On August 2, 2021, the City Council voted to permanently remove the monument from public property. The city recognized ownership by Cape Fear 3, United Daughters of the Confederacy. The city will store away the statue and pedestal until the UDC is ready to take possession. In a statement, the government said it considered the matter of the disposition of the statue closed. [7]
When the monument project was conceived, Davis was well-remembered among the city's white elite as a skilled orator. The statue depicts Davis, hand on lectern, giving a speech.
In his political life before 1861, Davis was not a member of the regionally dominant Democratic Party, but a Whig. Until March 1861, he opposed secession. During the election of 1860, he supported a pro-Union, third-party candidate for president.
However, his position changed during his attendance at the failed Washington Peace Conference in February 1861.
On March 2, 1861, Davis gave a public speech in Wilmington on secession. In it, he declared himself a secessionist. He argued that North Carolina should secede in order to preserve slavery:
"The division must be made on the line of slavery. The State must go with the South." [8]
The idea for the monument was conceived by Cape Fear 3, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1901 — three years after white mobs used violence to illegally remove a duly elected biracial government during the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, five years after Davis's death and 36 years after the Confederacy's defeat.
Historians have stated that similar monuments are evidence of a wide effort by the UDC and others, long after the failure of the Confederacy, to insert the false Lost Cause Narrative into the cultural memory, announce to nonwhites the final defeat of Reconstruction, and to support white supremacy. [9]
It took years for the women of Cape Fear 3 to realize their vision.
UDC Cape Fear Chapter 3 began raising money in 1904 but fundraising was slow, despite the urgency the UDC presented to the community. The minute book of the chapter shows fundraising was complete in April 1909, with the chapter having raised nearly $900.
The rest was raised by James Sprunt, a cotton brokerage heir who as a young man had worked aboard blockade-running commercial ships and was a profiteer during the US Civil War. [10] Sprunt provided funding he said he had gathered from friends and colleagues. His portion brought the total amount raised to $5,010.34 ($169,906 in 2023 dollars). [11]
The statue was sculpted by Francis Herman Packer, a native of Germany who lived on Long Island, New York and was a student of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. [12]
The sculptor's travel was paid for by Sprunt. Packer's sculpture was cast by the Gorham Manufacturing Company in 1910 in Rhode Island. [13]
The statue is 8 feet tall bound bronze weighing 1,700 pounds. The stone pedestal weighs five and a half tons and shows gilded seals of North Carolina and the former Confederate States of America. [13]
Inscriptions on the pedestal include a long, spurious encomium to Davis's alleged virtues. [14]
A decade later, the UDC hired Packer to sculpt another confederate memorial (removed, August 2021) one block south, at Third Street and Dock Street.
The monument stood on a grassy traffic island in Market Street just east of its intersection with Third Street — the crossroads of the city. It stood within sight of Wilmington's city hall, the New Hanover County courthouse and St. James Episcopal Parish, the city's oldest Christian church. [15]
The statue faced west, toward the terminus of Market Street at the Cape Fear River, a marketplace where enslaved men, women and children were sold from the days of the city's settlement in the early 18th century until the city's capture by the Union Army in 1865 during the US Civil War. [16]
The cornerstone of the monument was laid on October 14, 1909, during a Masonic ceremony. Within the cornerstone were placed: [17]
The monument was dedicated on April 20, 1911, by four of Davis's grandsons: M.F.H. Gouverneur Jr., Donald McRae Jr., George Rountree, and Robert Cowan Davis.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry G. Connor of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, delivered the dedication speech. The Delgado Band was hired for $25 to provide musical accompaniment. [18]
Connor's dedicatory remarks contained hallmarks that many historians have ascribed to examples of revisionist Lost Cause mythology. [19] Connor falsely described Davis's making war against the United States as "patriotism" and Davis's call for secession from the Union as "moderation in speech":
“You shall bring your sons to this spot, tell them the story of his life, of his patriotism of his loyalty to high thinking and noble living, of his moderation in speech, his patience under defeat, of his devotion to your City and State as a perpetual illustration and an enduring example of the dignity, the worth of a high-souled, pure-hearted Christian gentleman.” [20]
The Sons of Confederate Veterans "George Davis Camp 5" celebrated George Davis's birthday at the monument.
Davis's descendants held a ceremony at the monument.
In October, a truck belonging to Hanover Iron Works knocked the statue from its base, causing a dent to the back of the head and cracks to the neck and right shoulder. Repairs, which included re-carving the base, cost $25,000 and took more than a year to complete.
The monument was re-erected in February 2002, 6 feet from its original site, and raised up on a new 6-inch curb. [21]
On June 29, a crowd rallied, demanding the city to remove the monument. [22]
In the early hours of July 4, an unknown person threw orange paint on the monument. [23]
In June, the City of Wilmington removed the statue, but not its pedestal, to "protect the public safety and to preserve important historical artifacts." [3] Later, the pedestal was covered with a black shroud, obscuring its inscriptions. [5]
In September, Wilmington's mayor said that the threat to public safety that conditioned the memorial's dismantling continued. A majority of the Wilmington City Council told a journalist that the disposition of the city's Confederate monuments was not a high priority. [24]
The city attorney had been assigned to research ownership and other issues. During that process, Cape Fear 3, United Daughters of the Confederacy approached the city and asserted a claim on the statue. The claim was based on the facts that, at the time, the UDC chapter had commissioned the statue and had sought city permission to erect it on public property using private funds.
The city attorney concurred. In a July 5 letter to the city, Cape Fear 3 requested that the city hold the monument in storage until Cape Fear 3 had made arrangements to take possession. With the statue already in storage, the city agreed to move the pedestal into storage as well.
In August, the City Council approved the agreement. In a statement, the government said the effects of the vote were to permanently remove the monument from public land and avoid litigation. [25]
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
Monument Avenue is a tree-lined grassy mall dividing the eastbound and westbound traffic in Richmond, Virginia, originally named for its emblematic complex of structures honoring those who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Between 1900 and 1925, Monument Avenue greatly expanded with architecturally significant houses, churches, and apartment buildings. Four of the bronze statues representing J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Matthew Fontaine Maury were removed from their memorial pedestals amidst civil unrest in July 2020. The Robert E. Lee monument was handled differently as it was owned by the Commonwealth, in contrast with the other monuments which were owned by the city. Dedicated in 1890, it was removed on September 8, 2021. All these monuments, including their pedestals, have now been removed completely from the Avenue. The last remaining statue on Monument Avenue is the Arthur Ashe Monument, memorializing the African-American tennis champion, dedicated in 1996.
The Confederate Monument, University of North Carolina, commonly known as Silent Sam, is a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier by Canadian sculptor John A. Wilson, which once stood on McCorkle Place of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) from 1913 until it was pulled down by protestors on August 20, 2018. Its former location has been described as "the front door" of the university and "a position of honor".
George Davis was a Confederate politician and railroad counsel who served as attorney general of the Confederate States for 480 days in 1864 and 1865.
The Confederate War Memorial was a 65 foot (20 m)-high monument that pays tribute to soldiers and sailors from Texas who served with the Confederate States of America (CSA) during the American Civil War. The monument was dedicated in 1897, following the laying of its cornerstone the previous year. Originally located in Sullivan Park near downtown Dallas, Texas, United States, the monument was relocated in 1961 to the nearby Pioneer Park Cemetery in the Convention Center District, next to the Dallas Convention Center and Pioneer Plaza.
The Confederate Monument in Danville, originally located between Centre College and the First Presbyterian Church at the corner of Main and College Streets in Danville, Kentucky, was a monument dedicated to the Confederate States of America that is on the National Register of Historic Places. The monument was dedicated in 1910 by the surviving veterans of the Confederacy of Boyle County, Kentucky and the Kate Morrison Breckinridge Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). In 2021, it was relocated to a museum in Meade County, Kentucky.
The Confederate Monument in Owensboro, Ky., was a 16-foot-tall, two-part object — a 7-foot-tall bronze sculpture atop a 9-foot-tall granite pedestal — located at the southwest corner of the Daviess County Courthouse lawn, at the intersection of Third and Frederica Streets, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Nearly 122 years after the monument was dedicated in September 1900, the monument was dismantled in 2022, beginning with the removal of the sculpture in May 2022; the sculpture was placed in storage, pending a decision on what to do with it.
The Confederate Memorial was erected in 1924 by the estate of veteran Gabriel James Boney, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and a Confederate veterans association in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. In August 2021, the City of Wilmington removed it from public land and stored it, awaiting the UDC chapter to take possession.
Confederate monuments and memorials in the United States include public displays and symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), Confederate leaders, or Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. Many monuments and memorials have been or will be removed under great controversy. Part of the commemoration of the American Civil War, these symbols include monuments and statues, flags, holidays and other observances, and the names of schools, roads, parks, bridges, buildings, counties, cities, lakes, dams, military bases, and other public structures. In a December 2018 special report, Smithsonian Magazine stated, "over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments—statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries, and cemeteries—and to Confederate heritage organizations."
Appomattox is a bronze statue commemorating soldiers from Alexandria, Virginia, who had died while fighting for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The memorial was located in the center of the intersection of South Washington Street and Prince Street in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria.
There are more than 160 monuments and memorials to the Confederate States of America and associated figures that have been removed from public spaces in the United States, all but five of which have been since 2015. Some have been removed by state and local governments; others have been torn down by protestors.
The Confederate Monument, also known as Chip, or Our Confederate Soldiers, is located on the grounds of the Williamson County Courthouse in the county seat - Franklin, Tennessee, United States. Installed in 1899, it is an Italian marble statue portraying a single Confederate soldier atop a tall column and base. The Battle of Franklin took place here during the American Civil War, and was won by the Union.
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The Vance Monument was a late 19th-century granite obelisk in Asheville, North Carolina, that memorialized Zebulon Vance, a former North Carolina governor from the area. The monument was designed by architect Richard Sharp Smith and was an "iconic landmark" and key structure in the Downtown Asheville Historic District. Smith was the supervising architect for George W. Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate and the leading architect of the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He donated his services to design the monument, which was a project envisioned by community leaders.
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Eliza Hall "Hallie" Nutt Parsley was an American civic leader and educator. She worked as a school teacher after the American Civil War and established her own school for children in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1894, four years before the Wilmington massacre. A war widow, she was active in glorifying the Confederacy through her role as a member of the Ladies' Memorial Association, raising money to build Confederate monuments in North Carolina. Parsley became a prominent figure within the United Daughters of the Confederacy, establishing the Cape Fear Chapter in 1894 and the North Carolina Division in 1897. She served as president of the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy for two years, travelling across North Carolina to recruit new members and promote the pseudohistorical narrative of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Under her leadership, in 1898, the Cape Fear chapter established the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science.
With the settlement agreement now approved, no further council action is required," officials said in the news release. "The city will now work with relevant parties to coordinate the removal of the statue bases.
At age fourteen [1860] James Sprunt left school to assume family responsibilities. He also studied navigation at night and after three years [in 1863] secured the purser's berth on the blockade-runners 'North Heath' and 'Lilian.' In Nassau, Bermuda, he purchased sugar which he sold in Wilmington and acquired cotton.
[I]t is probably no exaggeration to say [Southerners] were to become in Reconstruction years the most sentimental people in history. . . . [The] Southern legend . . . moved, more powerfully even than it moved toward splendor and magnificence, toward a sort of ecstatic, teary-eyed vision of the Old South as Happy-Happy Land.
Judge H.G. Conner (sic), at Statue-Unveiling Ceremony, 20 April 1911: "You shall bring your sons to this spot, tell them the story of his life, of his patriotism of his loyalty to high thinking and noble living, of his moderation in speech, his patience under defeat, of his devotion to your City and State as a perpetual illustration and an enduring example of the dignity, the worth of a high-souled, pure-hearted Christian gentleman."
Nearly a year and a half after being knocked from its base, the bronze statue of George Davis, Confederate senator and attorney general, stands again at Third and Market streets. "To have a senator and attorney general from your hometown is a pretty big deal," said Jimmie Davis, of the local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter: George Davis Camp No. 5. "We can't afford to forget our history." Mary Ann Barrett, of the Cape Fear Chapter No. 3: United Daughters of the Confederacy, watched with delight Saturday morning as workers hoisted the statue back in place.[ permanent dead link ]
Councilman Neil Anderson said it hasn't been at the top of his mind, nor has he spoken with any of his fellow council members about it. Instead, he would prefer to hold off on those discussions right now. "Putting them back up right at this moment, anywhere, is not a priority," Anderson said. "More of a cooling-off period is probably wise. And you have to remember that to place them anywhere, someone has to accept them." Councilman Clifford Barnett Sr. also said he would prefer to wait on those discussions and focus on other things affecting the city. But Councilman Charlie Rivenbark said the council's lack of action already speaks volumes. "Our silence on this is deafening," Rivenbark said. "It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room and no one wants to touch it."