‘They asked no forgiveness.’ Here are the origins of Gulfport’s Confederate monument.
Gulfport’s Confederate monument is inscribed with the words “In Memory of Our Confederate Dead.”
But the statue was erected nearly 50 years after the end of the war, and stands not at a cemetery but on public land outside the Harrison County Courthouse.
To the people who erected it more than 100 years ago, that was the point.
“It implicitly shows the endorsement of the local government of what that statue stands for,” said historian Douglas Bristol, a professor of African-American history at the University of Southern Mississippi and a fellow at the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society.
The Gulfport monument, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Harrison County Board of Supervisors in 1911, is similar to hundreds of others around the country. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has documented about 70 Confederate monuments, in addition to battlefield earthworks, cemeteries and veterans’ homes.
Today, the history of Gulfport’s monument is largely forgotten. But newspaper archives reveal its significance at the time and the centrality of the Confederacy in public life in Gulfport long after Appomattox.
The Daughters of the Confederacy originally grew out of organizations of women who were working to transport their family members’ remains from mass graves near battlefields to proper cemeteries. The earliest monuments to Confederate soldiers were in family cemeteries where they were buried, Bristol said.
The lost cause
Over time, their work took on an increasingly public dimension. They led the push to install monuments, memorials and markers commemorating the Confederacy across the South.
The ideology they championed, known as the Lost Cause, presented the Confederacy as noble and just. They viewed slavery as a benevolent institution, historians say, and minimized its centrality to the Civil War. According to an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the year 1911 was the peak of the Confederate memorial movement in the United States, with more monuments erected that year than any other.
The timing is no coincidence. The Civil War had ended decades ago. For a brief period during Reconstruction, African Americans gained political power across the South. Mississippi elected the country’s first Black Senator in 1870.
But with the end of Reconstruction, officials say, Southern states began enacting Jim Crow laws and campaigns against Black Americans.
The Daughters’ efforts to establish Confederate memorials accelerated as part of that same backlash against Black political and economic power, said Bristol.
“Not only does that period from 1890 to World War I have all the monuments erected ... it’s also the time period that had the highest number of lynchings and the imposition of segregation laws,” Bristol said. “These things are all of a piece.”
A Confederate reunion
The plans for the Gulfport memorial were finalized in September 1911, when the Harrison County Board of Supervisors agreed to contribute $1,000 to the statue, on top of the $1,500 raised by the Daughters. Bristol said that was also typical — members of the organization were generally from wealthy families, with close connections to local officials who were willing to support their efforts.
The Daughters planned to erect the statue the next month, at the reunion of Mississippi Confederate veterans and their sons, who had formed their own organization.
According to stories published in the Jackson Daily News at the time, hundreds of gray-clad veterans and their family members arrived from all over the state by train and ship that October.
“The vanguard of Confederate Veterans entered Gulfport yesterday,” the paper reported. “She immediately capitulated and today the city is theirs, and through the streets echo voices heard on famous battlefields of long ago, and the Stars and Bars once more float bravely on the soft Southern breezes.”
Attendees enjoyed musical performances of “Dixie” and “Bonnie Blue Flag” and lunch prepared daily by the local chapters of the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, Jr., relative of the Confederate cavalry hero and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, delivered a speech. U.S. Senator Hernando Money assured the crowd that although the war was over, the Confederate spirit had not been crushed.
“They had asked no forgiveness for what they had done,” the New Orleans Times-Democrat described Money saying. “They were now back under the old flag where they had a right to be.”
Programs for the event announced that on Oct. 12, veterans and their sons would march in a parade to 24th Avenue, where they would stand in front of the courthouse and watch as the statue was unveiled.
Unveiling the monument
But just a few days before the reunion began, the UDC received news: the monument had not been shipped as early as expected, and would not arrive in time for the reunion.
Instead, the monument was unveiled on Thanksgiving Day, at a ceremony hailed as the day’s “most important event in Gulfport.”
Thirteen young women representing the 13 states of the Confederacy stood around the monument. A Mrs. Blanche McClure Fernsenius told the crowd about the Daughters’ efforts to raise funds for the monument. A local judge and a U.S. Congressman delivered speeches on “what the Confederacy stood for.”
After the speeches, the statue was unveiled. It stood in bronze, depicting an anonymous infantryman (a popular style at the time, according to Bristol, to communicate that the Confederacy and its ongoing cause belonged to ordinary white Southerners, too).
The crowd of hundreds said a prayer. Then they left the grounds of the courthouse with a new symbol in Gulfport.
