HEROES: Jeff Davis Back

After an absence of 69 years, Jefferson Davis was last week ready to re-enter the U. S. Capitol as a representative of Mississippi. In heroic bronze he will take his place in Statuary Hall. Sculptor Henry Augustus Lukeman has finished the figure—erect, head high, eyes front, topcoat flowing from his shoulders, a pair of eyeglasses held loosely in his right hand—the President of the Confederacy entering an important situation with none of the air of a Lost Cause.

When, in 1908, Virginia sent General Robert E. Lee to Statuary Hall as one of its two most distinguished sons (Washington was the other), embers of Civil War bitterness flared afresh in sectional denunciations. With the return of President Davis as one of Mississippi’s two finest citizens, no voice was raised against him, so dead are the fires of that old strife.

In the Jeff Davis face modeled by Lukeman lurked the same inexplicable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln which has bred gossip of kinship between the two. Such report is based largely on the fact that Lincoln and Davis were born eight months apart, within 100 miles of each other in Kentucky. Dr. William Eleazar Barton, foremost Lincoln scholar, has flayed such gossip as baseless and untrue.

To compare the Lincoln and Davis faces, one will only have to stand in the narrow connecting passage between Statuary Hall and the Rotunda where is placed the Lincoln head, rising as if half-finished out of solid stone, carved by Gutzon Borglum (donated by Eugene Meyer Jr., onetime Farm Loan Commissioner). To the sorrow of romantic historians the two antagonists of the Civil War will not gaze mournfully upon each other.

Were Jefferson Davis to re-enter Statuary Hall alive, he would instantly recognize it as the old House of Representatives where, at 37, he first sat as a Mississippi Congressman. Any diffidence would quickly drop when he looked about the chamber to recognize a host of old friends and comrades-in-arms. The first to make him welcome would naturally be Alexander Hamilton Stephens from Georgia, his colleague in the House, his Vice President in the Confederacy. General Lee, trim and spruce as he was in life, would have a courteous greeting for his commander-in-chief.

Close by stands Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry from Alabama, a member of the Provisional Confederate Congress which elected Davis & Stephens to office, a lieutenant colonel of cavalry. He now lies in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va. not far from the grave of Jefferson Davis.

Confederate Generals would well serve as a guard of honor for their President—Edmund Kirby Smith from Florida, whom Davis saw fighting at Bull Run, the last Confederate Commander to surrender his arms (May 26, 1865); Joseph Wheeler from Alabama, second only to Stuart as a cavalry general, who lived long enough to command U. S. troops as a major-general of volunteers at the Battle of San Juan in the Spanish War; Wade Hampton from South Carolina, aristocrat and planter, leader of “Hampton’s Legion” at Bull Run, commander of Lee’s cavalry after Stuart’s death.

Against this Southern squad in Statuary Hall stand Federal generals—Philip Kearny from New Jersey (for whom the town of Kearny is named), an Army-of-the-Potomac divisional commander, killed while reconnoitring at Chantilly, whose body General Lee, always gallant, sent back under escort to the Federal lines: Lew Wallace from Indiana who saved Washington from capture by Early’s raiders; James Abram Garfield from Ohio, who quit the war at the halfway mark to become a Congressman; James Shields from Illinois who led a volunteer brigade for two years.

But to Davis perhaps the warmest greeting would come from James Zachariah George, Mississippi’s other distinguished citizen in Statuary Hall. George served under Col. Davis in the Mississippi Riflemen in Mexico, was a colonel of cavalry in the Civil War, lived to serve 16 years in the U. S. Senate. Mississippians prize him as the framer of the State law which circumvented the U. S. Constitution, prevented Negro voting in their State.