The George Davis Monument is a monument to Confederate politician George Davis in Wilmington, North Carolina erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Davis was sent to the Confederate senate and was that ultimately failed government's final 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. The statue was unveiled on April 20, 1911 — 46 years after the defeat of the Confederacy — to the chimes of the Delgado Band hired for the occasion for $25. In the early morning hours of June 25, 2020, the City of Wilmington removed the statue of Davis reportedly "in order to protect the public safety and to preserve important historical artifacts." The dismantling, said to be temporary, was coincident with the firing of three city police officers following the discovery of their "brutally racist" discussions on official police recording equipment. The city government did not disclose the storage location or announce a date for re-erection of the statue. The pedestal, with its false Lost Cause inscriptions, remained. By June 30, the pedestal was covered with a black shroud, which obscured the inscriptions.
History
Davis Remembered for Oratory
Davis was well-remembered among the city's white elite as a skilled orator. The statue depicts Davis, hand on lectern, giving a speech.
March 1861 Speech: Secession to Preserve Slavery
On March 2, 1861, just days after his return as a delegate to the failed Washington Peace Conference, Davis gave a speech in Wilmington announcing that he had become a secessionist. He said that the cause of secession should be to preserve chattel slavery in North Carolina:
"The division must be made on the line of slavery. The State must go with the South."
Inception
The idea for the monument was conceived by Cape Fear Chapter 3 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy 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. It would take all of a decade for Cape Fear Chapter 3 of the UDC to realize its vision.
Funding
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. Sprunt provided funding he said he had gathered from friends and colleagues. His portion brought the total amount raised to $5,010.34.
Creation
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. The sculptor's travel was paid for by Sprunt. Packer's sculpture was cast by the Gorham Manufacturing Company in 1910 in Rhode Island. 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. Inscriptions on the pedestal include a long, spurious encomium to Davis's alleged virtues.
Siting and Context
The monument stands in a grassy traffic island in Market Street just east of its intersection with Third Street-the crossroads of the city. It is within sight of Wilmington's city hall, the New Hanover County courthouse and St. James Episcopal Parish, the city's oldest Christian church. The statue faces west, toward the terminus of Market Street at the Cape Fear River, a marketplace where slaves and their 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. The cornerstone of the monument was laid on October 14, 1909, during a Masonic ceremony. Within the cornerstone were placed:
A copy of the first number Carolina Churchman, dated October 1909
A copy of the commission of George Davis as Attorney General of the Confederate states, dated January 4, 1864
Coins
The George Davis monument was dedicated in 1911. A decade later, the UDC would hire Packer to sculpt another confederate memorial one block south at Third Street and Dock Street.
Damage and Restoration
The monument was struck by a motor vehicle and toppled in 2000. It was removed for repair, and then re-erected in its original location.
Dismantling and Covering
In June 2020, the City of Wilmington removed the statue, but not its pedestal, to "protect the public safety and to preserve important historical artifacts." Later, the pedestal was covered with a black shroud, obscuring its inscriptions.
