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Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue part two
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Jefferson Davis Memorial, Monument Ave, Richmond
Jefferson Davis
As President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis just had to have a memorial on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy.
Jefferson Davis fits the pattern in that he was a West Point graduate, and fought in the Mexican American War as a colonel. He was also a politician, serving as United States Secretary of War for President Franklin Pierce, and a Representative and U.S. Senator from Mississippi.
Davis resigned from the Senate when his then home state Mississippi seceded from the Union. His family connections and places he lived included many states, such as Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, Illinois, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Tennessee. His position was similar to that of a number political figures of the time, however, who did not agree with secession, but believed the states had the right to secede. He returned to Mississippi.
As an experienced military man and politician, Jefferson Davis was the choice of the Confederate states to be their first president. Davis and his wife moved to Richmond. While not a native Virginian, his position as sitting president in Richmond made him a natural choice when recognizing Richmond’s famous figures with large and conspicuous monuments.
After the war, he wrote books, and eventually finished his career as president again, but this time of an insurance company in Memphis, Tennessee.
Stonewall Jackson
Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in what is now West Virginia. He attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served in the Mexican War, and then resigned from the army to become an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. The home he lived in with his family while teaching in Lexington is operated as a museum by the Stonewall Jackson Foundation.
Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA Photo/P.Dolinski
In the Civil War battle near Manassas, he was a brigadier general. He was a famous and brilliant military mind. The story is that General Bernard E. Bee proclaimed, "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall," and he got the nickname which is so famous that most people don’t know him by any other.
At the Battle of Chancellorsville in May of 1863 he was shot by one of his own men by mistake. His arm was amputated, and was buried separately. Jackson died of pneumonia just days later. The Jackson Shrine, administered by the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, is at Guinea Station south of Fredericksburg.
Read more about Monument Avenue:
Part One: Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart
Part Three: Arthur Ashe and Matthew Fonataine Maury
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