Hamilton County's A.P. Stewart statue and its historical revisionism

The question of the statue of former Lt. Gen. Alexander P. Stewart occupying the front lawn of the Hamilton County Courthouse should be examined in the context of factual history of both the county in relation to the Secession and the War of the Rebellion and the history of the statue’s being installed there in 1919.

Hamilton County and the Secession

In the less populous northern counties of Alabama, the great majority were against secession.  Their political leaders initiated discussions with fellow anti-secessionist leaders in East Tennessee and the Northwest Georgia counties of Dade and Walker about seceding from their respective states together as the neutral State of Nickajack.  The citizens of Dade, in fact, were so adamant about it that they’d already seceded from the State of Georgia in July 1860 as the Free and Independent State of Dade.

On 9 February 1861, on the question of secession from the Union for the State of Tennessee, the enfranchised citizens of Hamilton County voted overwhelmingly (1445 vs. 445) against even considering the matter.  The citizens enfranchised at the time were limited to citizens who were male, white, free, and over 21 years of age.  At first, free blacks could also vote under Tennessee’s original constitution in 1796, but this right was taken away in 1834 in the same vote which adopted universal suffrage for white men (dropping property qualifications).

Four months later, after the Battle of Fort Sumter, fanatic secessionist Gov. Isham Harris convinced the legislature to hold a special election on the question.  On 8 June 1861, the enfranchised citizens of Hamilton County voted 1260 to 854 against the State of Tennessee’s secession (as did their neighbors in Bradley and Marion Cos.).

The overwhelming majority of counties in East Tennessee voted likewise, and held two conventions to consider secession of themselves from the State of Tennessee in order to remain in the Union.  A little like some people in Scotland currently considering secession from the UK solely in order to remain in the European Union rather than seceding in order to gain actual independence from a decrepit union.

The two foremost hotbeds of Unionism in East Tennessee were widely recognized as Scott County on the Kentucky border and North Hamilton County, although Unionist sentiment was widespread across the division of the state.  For instance, Bradley County was overwhelmingly Unionist as was Cades Cove area of Blount County.

While it may be true that the majority in the Town of Chattanooga, whose southern boundaries at that time were West 23rd Street and Baldwin Street, voted for secession, the statue of A.P. Stewart stands in the front lawn of Hamilton County Courthouse not that of Chattanooga City Hall.  The county seat at the time was Harrison, the original site of which is now under the waters of the bay bearing its name, and it voted along with the rest of the county to remain in the Union both times.

Resistance to the Secession

In the aftermath of the vote, dedicated Unionists began congregating in northern Hamilton County on the right bank of the Tennessee River, seeking sanctuary near the plantation of the leading Unionist in the county and one of the leading Unionists in East Tennessee, William Clift.  Clift, commander of the county’s militia regiment, mustered his troops to the Sale Creek Camp Ground as the 7th Tennessee Federal Militia to fight to restore the Union, building Fort Clift.

Meanwhile, the citizens of the North Alabama counties of Winston, Marion, Franklin, Lawrence, Morgan, Blount, Marshall, Walker, and Fayette met at Looney’s Tavern in Winston County to draft a formal condemnation of their state’s secession from the Union.  Afterwards, those of the host county voted to declare themselves the Free State of Winston.

Military units from Hamilton Co. in the War of the Rebellion

Although more more individual units were raised for the Confederacy, those raised for the Union were by far larger. 

The Confederacy raised twenty-three companies, one battalion, and two guerrilla units whose members were later recognized as legitimate Confederate veterans in Hamilton County.

The Union raised five regiments (a standard regiment had ten companies, ideally speaking) and five individual companies in Hamilton County.  Two of the regiments were raised from “contrabands” (slaves who had escaped or been freed by Sherman’s army and settled in the county) and one was raised from veterans of five Ohio regiments demobilized here.

Confederate units from Hamilton Co.

In the following units, PAT = Provisional Army of Tennessee, PACS = Provisional Army of the Confederate States, and ACS = Army of the Confederate States.

The PAT was strictly a state affair that began organizing in April 1861, with its units gradually absorbed by the CSA by the end of December 1861.

The PACS made up the overwhelming bulk of Confederate forces, the nonregular, or “volunteer”, branch.

The ACS did not really constitute a separate organization, this designation being merely a sign of prestige.  It was intended to be the regular army of the CSA, but the CSA failed before that happened.

Gordon’s Mountain Rifles (later the Raccoon Roughs), tri-state area, mid-April 1861; became Co. I (later Co. D), 6th Alabama Infantry, PACS.

Hamilton Grays, Tennessee Infantry, Chickamauga (Shepherd), Tennessee, May 1861; became Co. B, 2nd East Tennessee Infantry, PAT, then Co. A, 19th Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

Marsh Blues, Tennessee Infantry, Chattanooga, May 1861; became Co. A, 2nd East Tennessee Infantry, PAT, then Co. I, 19th Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

Ragsdale’s Lookout Rangers, Knoxville, 15 June 1861, with men from Hamilton County; became Co. A, 4th Tennessee Cavalry Battalion, PACS, then Co. H, (Ashby’s) 2nd Tennessee Cavalry, PACS.

Snow’s Company, Tennessee Cavalry, northwestern Bradley County, Tennessee, 7 August 1861; became Co. C, (Brazelton’s) 3rd Tennessee Cavalry Battalion, PACS.

Spiller’s Company, Tennessee Cavalry, Chattanooga, 11 August 1861, with men from the Third Civil District of Hamilton Co. (North Chattanooga, Red Bank) and some from North Alabama; became Co. B, (McClellan’s) 5th Tennessee Cavalry Battalion, PACS.

Bird Rangers, Tennessee Cavalry, Knoxville, 24 August 1861, with men from the Fifteenth Civil District of Hamilton Co., North Georgia, and North Alabama; became Co. F, (Roger’s) 1st Tennessee Cavalry, PACS.

Co. G, 3rd East Tennessee Infantry, PAT, Knoxville, August 1861 with men from Hamilton County; became Co. G, 26th Tennessee Infantry, PACS, later 2nd Co. K, 1st Confederate Infantry, ACSA.

Co. H, 3rd East Tennessee Infantry, PAT, Knoxville, August 1861 with men from Hamilton County and North Georgia; became (1st) Co. H, 26th Tennessee Infantry, PACS, then (2nd) Co. I, 1st Confederate Infantry, ACSA.

Co. D, 1st East Tennessee Rifles, PAT, Chattanooga, September 1861, with men from the Second and Third Civil Districts (Moccasin Point, North Chattanooga, Red Bank, Browns Chapel); became Co. D, 37th Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

Co. H, 1st East Tennessee Rifles, PAT, Hamilton County, September 1861, with men from the Fifth and Fifteenth Civil Districts (southeast corner, Concord, Chickamauga, Tyner, Zion Hill) and North Georgia; became Co. H, 37th Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

Co. I, 5th East Tennessee Infantry, PAT, DeKalb County, Alabama, September 1861, mostly with men from that Dekalb as well Hamilton and Bledsoe Cos. in Tennessee; it (1st) Co. I, 35th Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

Co. K, 5th East Tennessee Infantry, PAT, Ooltewah, 17 October 1861, with men from eastern Hamilton County; became Co. K, 43rd Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

McKenzie’s Company, Tennessee Cavalry, 1 November 1861, Decatur, Meigs Co., with men from Meigs and Hamilton Cos.; became Co. B, Rogers’ 1st Tennessee Cavalry, PACS.

Lea’s Lookout Rangers, Tennessee Cavalry, Nashville, 1 November 1861, with men from DeKalb Co., Alabama, and Marion and Hamilton Cos., Tennessee, as part of (Smith’s) 10th/11th Tennessee Cavalry Battalion, PACS, which later grew into Smith’s 2nd Tennessee Cavalry, PACS.

Co. H, 36th Tennessee Infantry, PACS, Knoxville, 26 February 1862, with men from northern Hamilton County.

Co. K, 36th Tennessee Infantry, PACS, Knoxville, 26 February 1862, with men from Harrison and vicinity in Hamilton County.

Tyner’s Company, Tennessee Cavalry, Tyner,  with men from Tyner, Harrison, and Ooltewah; became (2nd) Co. K, 1st Confederate Cavalry, ACSA, and later Tyner’s Company of Sappers and Miners.

Lookout Battery, Tennessee Light Artillery (aka Barry’s Company), Chattanooga, 15 May 1862 with men from Hamilton County.

Carter’s Company, Tennessee Cavalry, Chattanooga, 14 June 1862; became  Co. A, (Murray’s) 4th Tennessee Cavalry, PACS.

Clark’s Independent Company, Tennessee Cavalry, Chattanooga, 31 August 1862.

Mitchell’s Mountain Rifles, Tennessee Infantry, Chattanooga, 1 October 1862; became (3rd) Co. F, 35th Tennessee Infantry, PACS.

Co. D, Avery’s 23rd Squadron of Georgia Dragoons, PACS, Wauhatchie, Hamilton County, October 1862.

19th Alabama Partisan Ranger Battalion, PACS, Chattanooga, 21 November 1862, intended to be part of Howard’s Legion (3rd Confederate Cavalry) but ended up as an independent unit.

Snow’s Scouts, Snow Hill and Ooltewah, May 1862.

Osborne’s Scouts, Fifth Civil District (Spring Creek, Concord,  Tyner, Chickamauga), Hamilton Co., 1863.

Union units from Hamilton County

The Union army had a similar division between regulars and volunteers, with the regulars designated United States Army and the volunteers designated United States Volunteers, the regiments of which included the state in which the unit was raised in their designations.

7th Tennessee Federal Militia, Sale Creek Campground, 10 August 1861; disbanded 13 November 1861.  This had been the county’s militia regiment (37th Tennessee Militia) until the secession.

Co. I, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, USA, Sale Creek, 27 November 1861 (with vets from Clift's 7th Tennessee Federal Militia).

Co. C, 5th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, USA, Hamilton Co., Tennessee; 25 February 1862.

Co. G, 5th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, USA, Pine Knot, Campbell Co., Tennessee, May 1862, with men from Hamilton and Bradley Cos.

In addition to the above two companies, Hamilton Co. men served individually in Cos. E, F, H, I, and K of the 5th Tennessee Volunteers.

7th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, USA, Huntsville, Scott Co., Tennessee, 1 June 1862, with men from Hamilton, Scott, Anderson, and Morgan Cos. as a partisan unit until on 1 June 1863.

44th U.S. Colored Troops, USA, Chattanooga, 7 April-16 September 1864.

42nd U.S. Colored Troops, USA, Chattanooga and Nashville, 20 April 1864-6 July 1865.

Co. E, 5th Tennessee Mounted Infantry, USA, Cleveland, Bradley Co., Tennessee,  8 October 1864 with men from Hamilton, Bradley, and Meigs Cos.

Co. D, 10th Tennessee Cavalry, Nashville, 25 January 1864 with men from Hamilton and McMinn Cos.

18th Ohio Veteran Infantry, USA, Chattanooga, 31 October 1864, with veterans of the 1st, 2nd, 18th, 24th and 35th Ohio Infantries.

6th Tennessee Mounted Infantry, USA, Chattanooga, 24 October 1864, for one-year service.

Confederate occupation of Hamilton County

In the aftermath of the two “Clift Wars” (September and November 1861) as well as the East Tennessee Bridge Burnings, Chattanooga along with the rest of East Tennessee was occupied by first the Provisional Army of Tennessee, then by the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. 

The first units of the Confederate occupation of Hamilton County were the 7th Alabama Infantry out of Pensacola and the 16th Alabama Infantry from Virginia, both commanded by unrelated colonels named Wood.  Chattanooga eventually became the headquarters of the Confederate army’s Department No. 2 (later reorganized as the Department of the West). 

Col. Clift’s militia voted to disband in November 1861, and veterans of it formed the core of the 7th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry (USA), organized May 1862 in the Free and Independent State of Scott, as Scott County in East Tennessee had become known (it held a special vote to secede from Tennessee in July 1861).

The county was occupied by the Army of the Mississippi (Confederate) in July and August of 1862.  That organization’s successor, the Army of Tennessee, occupied the city and county from early July through early September in 1863.  The Confederate military occupation of Chattanooga and vicinity lasted from November 1861 through 9 September 1863.  Two months shy of two full years.

Union occupation of Hamilton County

The official Federal Military Occupation of Chattanooga and vicinity lasted from 9 September 1863 through 31 December 1866.  Three years and nearly four months.  For the last eight months of that, federal authority was represented solely by a Union military provost officer; the occupation’s last regiments, 16th and 44th U.S. Colored Troops, mustered out in April 1866.

Postbellum carpetbaggers

Practical occupation by former Union soldiers, their civilian friends, and other opportunistic businessmen from the North lasted decades longer.  In this case, however, the so-called “invasion” was not against the consent of the residents but with their avid encouragement.  Papers in Chattanooga even published explicit invitations to carpetbaggers to come to the city, and other parties took out ads in Northern newspapers with the same invitation.

In 1888, the citizens of the community of Tunnel beyond the western mouth of the Whiteside Tunnel through Missionary Ridge on the East Tennessee, Virginia, & Georgia Railroad voted to rename their community Sherman Heights.  For balance, they named the inn which became their municipal center Cleburne Hotel after the actual victor of the engagement known then as the ‘Battle of Tunnel Hill, Tn.’.  In the 21st century, the neighborhood association adopted the name Glass Farm District. 

In the adjacent community of Boyce (now Boyce Station) on the Western & Atlantic Railroad, its citizens named their main inn and meeting place the Sherman House.

The names Sherman Heights and Sherman House are not exactly the Lost Cause names we would expect given the romanticized propaganda claims of the neo-Confederate movement.

Hamilton County’s neo-Confederates

In 1867, citizens of Chattanooga bought a section of Chattanooga City Cemetery in which to inter Confederate dead.  To oversee its development and maintenance, they formed the Confederate Memorial Association.  In all, the remains of 877 Confederate soldiers who died in area hospitals are buried in Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery.  

Not long after, these same people and others decided there ought to be a monument in the city to the Confederacy, so they formed the Confederate Monument Association. 

In 1874, these two groups combined as the Chattanooga Confederate Memorial Association, with Penelope McDermott (wife of Tennessee Supreme Court Judge J.B. Cooke) as its president.  The CCMA may be regarded as a precursor to the county’s chapter of the UDC.

Former Confederate officers in Louisiana formed the Southern Historical Society in 1869.  In 1870, the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia organized, followed seven years later by the Association of the Army of Tennessee.  All these were restricted to former commissioned officers.

An 15 September 1885, a group of Confederate war veterans organized as N.B. Forrest Camp No. 3, Confederate Veterans.  The chief organizer was Joseph Shipp, formerly captain of Company G, 60th Mounted Tennessee Infantry Regiment.  In 1889, this group became a charter local of the United Confederate Veterans Association as N.B. Forrest Camp No. 4.

The leading instigator of the UCVA was, once again, Capt. Shipp, who in his networking to build support for the hoped for Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park had frequent dealings with the Grand Army of the Republic and wanted a counterpart national organization for Confederate veterans of the war.  The majority of the founding members and groups came from Tennessee and Louisiana.

At their organizational meeting, Shipp invited the association to hold its first annual convention in Chattanooga in the following summer (1890).  As part of the convention’s proceedings, Chattanooga’s Frank M. Walker Camp No. 1, Sons of Confederate Soldiers, petitioned to be recognized as an official auxiliary of UCVA.  In response, delegates authorized the formation of groups for “Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans”, implying these could be separate organizations.

And yes, by the way, Capt. Shipp is the same Shipp who was Sheriff at the time of the Ed Johnson lynching.

In August 1894, UCVA’s N.B. Forrest Camp No. 4 voted to allow sons of its members to join their camp as nonvoting associates.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy was founded in Nashville in 1894 as the National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy.  It was not, like the later USCV, an auxiliary of the UCVA but a separate entity in its own right, with its purpose being more to glorify the Confederacy than to support Confederate veterans, though it did do some of the latter.

The A.P. Stewart Chapter No. 81 of the UDC formed here on 5 September 1896.  In 1904, the Francis Marion Walker Chapter No. 784 formed in St. Elmo, initially as the John B. Gordon Chapter; it dissolved 1969.  The UDC currently has a second local affiliate here, Missionary Ridge Chapter No. 1777.

In 1896, the UDC authorized an affiliate organization for non-adult sons, daughters, and later descendants of Confederate veterans called the Children of the Confederacy (COFC).  Each COFC chapter is attached to a mother chapter in UDC, and in Chattanooga that is Jonathan W. Bachman Chapter No. 21.

The United Sons of Confederate Veterans finally came into being 1 July 1896.  Its name was changed in 1912 by dropping “United” so that its acronym would not be the same as that of the United States Colored Veterans (“USCV”).  In Chattanooga, the local USCV affiliate was Jonathan W. Bachman Camp No. 3.  Initially, the USCA was solely concerned with the welfare of Confederate veterans, but as members aged and began to die off, they began to look to preserving the mythology invented and propounded by the UDC.

When the local Confederate veterans died out, the Jonathan Bachman Camp of UCVA died out too.  The whole UCVA ended in 1952.  In Chattanooga, the Jonathan Bachman Camp of the SCV died out not long afterwards.  There was an attempt to reestablish an SCV camp in Chattanooga in 1971, but the effort failed to get very far.  Another effort occurred in 1983, and the members chose to call themselves Chattanooga Camp No. 3, SCV.  This attempt to restart local SCV activity also failed soon after.

The current group, Nathan Bedford Forrest Camp No. 3, SCV, organized in the mid-1990s, probably so designated in memory of the UCVA camp.  In the mid-1990s, there was an A.P. Stewart Camp of SCV in North Hamilton County, but it has long been defunct.

Hamilton County’s Unionist organizations

The Grand Army of the Republic (created 1866), the premier organization of Union veterans, had posts across the South in the early years after the war, but they fell off after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and sold out the former slaves.  These began to revive and add new posts in the mid-1880s, about the same time as Confederate veterans began to mass organize, but with far fewer Afro-American members since the resurrected posts in the South adopted Jim Crow attitudes.

Where the UCVA had just the one chapter (“camp”) in Hamilton County, the revived GAR had five posts:  Lookout Post No. 2, Chickamauga Post No. 22, and Mission Ridge Post No. 45 in Chattanooga; Robert L. McCook Post No. 36 in Soddy, and Gordon Grainger Post No. 84 in Sale Creek.

The GAR created the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War in 1881.  The affiliate of SUVCW in Chattanooga is Missionary Ridge Camp No. 63.

The National Alliance of the Daughters of Veterans of the United States of America organized in 1885 but was not recognized as an official auxiliary by the GAR until 1900.  In 1925, the NADVUSA became the Daughters of the Union Veterans of the Civil War. 

By the early 20th century, a tent of the NADVUSA  existed in Chattanooga, but it apparently failed because in 1930 the national office of DUVCW proudly announced the organization of a tent in Chattanooga.  This too soon crumbled, apparently.  In 2009, a group of women organized the Andrew Jackson Penny Chapter under the National Alliance of the Daughters of the USA, a separate association which organized in 1904.

Another Union veterans organization with a presence in Chattanooga and vicinity, this one strictly for former officers of the erstwhile field command, was the Society of the Army of the Cumberland (1870).  There were like groups for commissioned veterans of the Army of the Tennessee (1865), the Army of Georgia (1868), the Army of the Ohio (1868), and the Army of the Potomac (1869), but none had locals in the county.  The SAC had two here, the Lookout Mountain Camp and the Moccasin Point Camp; in the mid-1890s these two chapters voted to merge as the Mountain City Club.

Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

The primary movers behind U.S.A.’s first national military park were Gen. Henry Boynton on the Union side (assisted by Maj. Frank G. Smith) and former Capt. Joseph Shipp on the Confederate side.  It was the latter who suggested the Blue & Gray Barbeque of Union and Confederate veterans of the two battles be held at Crawfish Springs in 1889 to drum up their support for the legislative effort.  As we know, this proved successful and the park was authorized the next year.

With the approval of the park, a board of commissioners was appointed, with its headquarters in Washington, D.C.  Former brigadier general in the Union Army of the Cumberland Joseph Fullerton was its chairman as well as the representative of the Grand Army of the Republic.  Active duty Capt. Sanford C. Kellog represented the War Department.

Former lieutenant general and last commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee Alexander P. Stewart represented the United Confederate Veterans and was the only on-site commissioner.  As such, he also became the park’s first superintendent, a position he held until his death in 1908, though his active service ceased after 1905.

Thomas Dixon

After coming across a performance of a play version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly, former preacher and then current lecturer Thomas Dixon became enraged a its depiction of Southern life under the slave-owning plantocracy.  Stowe’s anti-slavery novel is widely credited as the most popular of  the 19th century not only in the U.S.A. but across the world.

Nephew of a Grand Titan in the postbellum Ku Klux Klan of North Carolina, Watson vowed to write a novel to counter it.  In fact, he wrote three, known collectively as the “Trilogy of the Reconstruction”, these being The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900 (1902); The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905); and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907).

In the postbellum KKK, a Grand Titan was over a Dominion, which covered a third of a Congressional district.  The basic local unit was a Den, governed by a Grand Cyclops; a county was a Province, governed by a Grand Giant; the Dominion and Grant Titan came next; a state was a Realm, governed by a Grand Dragon; and the whole area of KKK operations was called simply the Empire (no “Invisible” added) ruled by the Grand Wizard.  The Empire included the states, or “Realms”, represented by the thirteen stars of the Confederate flag, the eleven of the Confederacy plus Kentucky and Missouri.

Due to the presence of so many Union veterans in the City of Chattanooga and its suburbs, the overhwhelmingly pro-Unionist sentiment in North Hamilton County, and the absence of the Confederacy’s most stalwart proponent (William Snow) from East Hamilton County, there was no Ku Klux Klan activity in the county during Reconstruction, despite what a fanciful short bio of Judge Lewis Shepherd may say.

Watson went on the write nineteen more novels and several plays, the most popular of the latter being his own adaptation of the second novel in the Reconstruction trilogy, case titled eponymously The Clansman.  To give an idea of the scope of his influence at the time, no less than W.E.B. DuBois referred to Watson’s works as read more widely than those of Henry James.

The Birth of a Nation

The influence of D.W. Griffith’s movie should not be underestimated.  It was, for instance, the first motion picture ever to be shown in the White House, for a President Woodrow Wilson who at its conclusion sobbed that, “It’s all too true”. 

Leo Frank lynching

In the summer of 1913, Leo Frank, a director of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, and president of the city’s B’nai Brith organization, was wrongly convicted of the murder of 14-year old worker Mary Phagan in the basement of the factory.  Frank’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed in April 1915.  The case connects to Chattanooga because the lawyers working on his appeal leaned on Hamilton County’s Judge Lewis Shepherd for advice and direction.

After reviewing the evidence and considering other information that had not been available at trial, Gov. John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment.  The Georgia National Guard had to be called out to protect Slaton from the outraged public. 

Thomas Watson, a former Georgia U.S. Congressman, openly called for Frank to be lynched.   Founder of Georgia’s branch of the Populist Party, Watson once strongly advocated for poor whites and blacks working together and for the right of blacks to vote.  After the Populists reorganized in the 20th century, he became the party’s strongest advocates of segregation and white supremacy, serving as its presidential candidate in 1904 and 1908.

After Slaton’s commutation of Frank’s sentence, a Judaeophobic secret society formed to take matters into its own hands called the Knights of Mary Phagan, made up of some 28 men.  On 16 August 1915, a mob led by these so-called “Knights” broke into Milledgeville State Penitentiary where Frank was being held, kidnapped him, and hung him at Frey’s Gin, two miles east of Marietta, at 7 am the next morning.

The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

The evening of Thanksgiving 1915 (November 25), Indiana-born William J. Simmons and seventeen other men (almost all alumni of the Knights of Mary Phagan, founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan atop Stone Mountain in Georgia, with the permission and participation of Venable brothers William and Samuel, who owned it and quarried rock there.

Despite claims to the contrary, the new organization had no connection to the postbellum terror organization.  Instead, it was based on Simmons’ interpretation of the highly romanticized fictional version he had seen in that year’s blockbuster movie, The Birth of a Nation, released in February.  The movie which inspired their cosplay and the White Caps movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the group’s actual antecedents.

Unlike the postbellum Ku Klux Klan, the 1915 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had a klavern in Chattanooga, a quite strong one, in fact.  In 1923, it ran its own slate in the city’s municipal elections in a campaign which included soliciting votes from Afro-Americans in their own neighborhoods.

This new Knights of the KKK remained small and confined to the South for five years, until Imperial Wizard Simmons contracted the marketing services of Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke in 1920.  It was they who moved the organization from romantic historicism-based cosplay of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy into a Stars-and-Stripes waving, cross-bearing facist terror organization for enforcing law and order, traditional Protestant Christian values, and “one hundred percent Americanism”.

Tyler and Clarke thus enabled the new Knights of the KKK to breach the borders of the former Confederacy and spread across the country, even into Canada.  Its largest “realm” in the 1920s was Indiana.

The Town of North Chattanooga

By the second decade of the 20th century, the area immediately north of downtown Chattanooga across the Tennessee River had become widely known as North Chattanooga.  It was originally called Hill City.

In 1915, the almost exclusively white neighborhoods of eastern North Chattanooga incorporated themselves as a town.  In early November that year, Mayor J. Read Voight introduced an ordinance prohibiting Afro-Americans from settling inside its borders, with a grandfather clause allowing the two families already within the town to continue living there. 

It was also around this time that the name of Forest Avenue, which divided the Town of North Chattanooga from the unincorporated and mostly Afro-American section to the west, was changed to Forrest Avenue in honor of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first and perhaps only Grand Wizard of the postbellum Ku Klux Klan.

Within just a few years, however, the council of the town voted to annex the remaining unincorporated area of North Chattanooga, effectively nullifying Voight’s racist ordinance.

The UDC and the Lost Cause

The UDC’s primary mission has always been to “tell of the glorious fight against the greatest odds a nation ever faced, that their hallowed memory should never die”.  In other words, to gaslight everyone in reach and rewrite history in the name of the Lost Cause.

The year after the release of The Birth of a Nation, a member of the national leadership of UDC, Laura Martin Rose, published a romantic historical account of the postbellum Ku Klux Klan, based largely on the fictions of Dixon’s trilogy, called The Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire.  Though not in origin a project of the UDC, the fake history was endorsed by the national organization and most of its state organizations.

To help indoctrinate the members of its Children of the Confederacy auxiliary, the UDC published A Confederate Catechism in 1920, which is a collection and concentration of Lost Cause myths.

Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association

In 1916, the national office of the United Daughters of the Confederacy formed the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association, its goal being to carve a massive memorial to the Confederacy with engravings of Jefferson Davis and the C.S.A.’s most prominent generals.  As part of this endeavor, the UDC partnered directly with the Knights of the KKK as well as approving several of its members on the board of the SMCMA.

Hamilton County endorses white supremacy

In 1917, the A.P. Stewart Camp of the United Daughers of the Confederacy proposed a memorial to the Confederacy on the front lawn of the courthouse of a county which had voted overwhelming against joining the Rebellion.  It joined with the local klavern of the Knights of the KKK to accomplish this, and in 1919 installed an equestrian statue of former Lt. Gen. Alexander P. Stewart, last general commanding of the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee, on the front lawn of the courthouse, in full Confederate uniform.

For eighteen years, Stewart was a commissioner of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.  Its board was composed of three members, one from the War Department, one from the GAR, and one from the UCVA.  It was by mutual agreement of the first two that Stewart was chosen as the last.  The only member of the board, whose headquarters was in Washington, D.C., present in the region, Stewart also became the park’s first superintendent.

At the ceremonies, the flags of the United States of America and the State of Tennessee flew alongside what was described at the battle flag of the Confederacy, but whether of the Army of Tennessee or the Army of Northern Virginia was not specified.  In addition to the three flag bearers, there was an honor guard, composed entirely of Confederate veterans.

Col. Jonathan W. Bachman, former commander of the 60th Tennessee Mounted Infantry as well as Chaplain General of the United Confederate Veterans Association, gave the invocation. 

Capt. Henry A. Chambers, former commander of Co. C, 49th North Carolina Infantry, officially presented the statue to the county. 

County Judge Samuel Conner, whose father Asbury B. Conner was a captain in William Clift’s 7th Tennessee Federal Militia then a first lieutenant in Cos. A then H of Clift’s 7th East Tennessee Volunteers, USA, accepted the statue on behalf of the county. 

Thomas C. Thompson, the former mayor of Chattanooga whose father’s Battalion of State Cadets (from The Citadel and The Arsenal campuses of the South Carolina Military Academy) fired the first shots of the war when they opened up on the U.S.S. Star of the West in Charleston Harbor on 9 January 1861 as it attempted to relieve Fort Sumter with troops and supplies, gave an address on the life and character of Stewart.

Lapsley G. Walker, editor-in-chief of the Chattanooga Times whose father Col. Francis M. Walker commanded the 19th Tennessee Infantry then the former Maney’s Brigade until being killed at the Battle of Atlanta, also expounded on Stewart’s good character.

Representative from the War Department Maj. Phil Whitaker “stressed the value of monuments because they hold ideals from which the younger generation seems to have strayed: and stated his belief that, sooner or later, all will stand for what the heroes of the Confederacy stood.” (quote is from the contemporary description of the event in Confederate Veteran).

Dr. I.D. Steele, whose brother Miley died fighting with Co. D, 32nd Mississippi Infantry at the Battle of Franklin, gave the benediction.

The ceremony closed with the song “Dixie”.

And thus is rewritten to repaint it and its entire population as fervent secessionists, ardent supporters of slavery, and diehard white supremacists the history of a county which:

(1) twice voted overwhelmingly against secession;

(2) whose militia regiment mustered to fight for the Union;

(3) produced five and half regiments to fight for the Union versus three regiments two guerrilla units to fight for the Confederacy;

(4) was occupied for one year and ten months by the Confederate army but occupied by the Union army for three years and four months;

(5) hosted five posts of Union veterans versus a single camp of Confederate veterans after the war; and

(6) whose later county seat was built into the “Dynamo of Dixie” by carpetbagging northern industrialists who were almost all former Union officers who were explicitly invited here to do just that.

Briefly on the career of A.P. Stewart

Prior to the war, Stewart had been an emancipationist on the slavery question, at least according to several accounts.  This was different from being an abolitionist in that the latter wanted to end slavery by law and with force if necessary, while the former wished to accomplish it solely by positive encouragement on a voluntary basis.

On the question of the Secession, Stewart was very much against it, but like many who shared his sentiments, went where his state followed (or rather was dragged by) “fire-eater” Isham Harris, the state governor.  In fact, he accepted a commission as an artillery officer of the Provisional Army of Tennessee in May 1861 before the state had even voted to secede. 

Stewart commanded a brigade in the Army of the Mississippi and later Army of Tennessee until being promoted to major general and division commander just before the Tullahoma Campaign in June 1863.  He became commander of Third Corps after Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk died at Pine Mountain during the Altanta Campaign.  For the Carolinas Campaign, he became last general commanding of the Army of Tennessee.

When the Army of Tennessee’s foremost division commander, Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, introduced to his fellow generals in the winter camp at Dalton, Georgia, in January 1864 his memorial which recommended the Confederacy arm the South’s slaves and give them and their families freedom in return for their service, Stewart remarked that the proposal was “at war with my social, moral, and political principles”. 

Those do not sound like the words of an emancipationist, though this was after several years of hard, bitter warfare.  However, for Stewart to have been the first and only choice of the War Department and the Grand Army of the Republic to represent the United Confederate Veterans on the board of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, his conduct and publicly expressed views must’ve been such as would support and enhance the reconciliation which most veterans of both sides sought at the time.

As superintendent of the park, Stewart made his residence in the City of Chattanooga and thus has a connection to the city, his greater connection to the area is with Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.  His statue thus belongs there, not forcibly occupying the front lawn of the court house of the county which was overwhelmingly Unionist.  Even he himself would no doubt agree.  The statue belongs at the headquarters of the park to which Stewart devoted the last eighteen years of his life.

Moving the statue of Alexander P. Stewart from the front lawn of the Hamilton County Courthouse to the front lawn of the headquarters of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park will not be rewriting history but restoring true history rewritten fifty-eight years later.