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Sam Davis (October 6, 1842 – November 27, 1863) was a Confederate soldier executed by Union forces in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a spy, during the American Civil War. He is popularly known as the Boy Hero of the Confederacy, although he was 21 when he died. He became a celebrated instance of Confederate memorialization in the late 1890s and early 1900s, eulogized by Middle Tennesseeans for his valor and sacrifice. Davis' story was popularized by editor J. B. Killebrew and later by Sumner Archibald Cunningham. Due in part to the story's themes of piety and masculinity, Cunningham's portrayal of Davis fit into mythology of the "Lost Cause" in the postwar South.

Early life

Born October 6, 1842, in Rutherford County, Tennessee, he was the oldest son of Charles Lewis Davis and Jane (Simmons) Davis. The Davis family owned fifty-one enslaved people by 1860. As a boy Sam Davis was gifted his own enslaved person, named Coleman Davis. He attended school in Smyrna, Tennessee, and was educated at the Western Military Institutenow Montgomery Bell Academyfrom 1860–61. While there he came under the influence of headmaster and future Confederate General Bushrod Johnson.

Capture and trial

Davis was captured by Union forces near Minor Hill, Tennessee, on November 20, 1863, having been detailed for special, hazardous duty within the Union lines of occupation around Nashville. At the time of his arrest by Union secret service agents, Davis had in his possession a miscellany of newspapers and intelligence sources, which included detailed drawings of Union fortifications at Nashville and other towns in Middle Tennessee. Davis was charged with spying and carrying messages to Confederate leaders. He maintained his innocence regarding espionage but accepted responsibility for the papers he carried.

Imprisoned in Pulaski, which at that time was a garrisoned Union town under command of General Grenville M. Dodge, Davis faced charges of spying and carrying messages to Confederate leaders. Despite offers of clemency in exchange for information about his contacts, Davis resolutely refused to reveal the names of his informants. After Davis was found guilty, General Dodge announced that he should be hanged on a hill described by a report from the Cincinnati Daily Commercial as "a pretty eminence, north east of Pulaski, and overlooking the town." When local citizens protested at so visual a display of a gruesome act, Dodge allegedly replied, "I want him hung where you all can see him."

Accounts of Davis' death appeared in writings by Union soldiers, who witnessed the execution, and by a journalist from the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. Bearing his fate bravely, Davis apparently touched upon the sympathies of all observers, including his captors. The reporter recorded the scene thus:

After a white hood was tied over Davis' head, the trap door was sprung at 10:30 a.m. Union soldiers turned away as Davis writhed in death agony for three minutes. "He stood it like a man," one Union soldier noted in his diary the following day. "He never paled a bit but stood it like a hero." That night, the Daily Commercial reported, "evergreens were planted, and now sigh in the wild wintery winds o'er his grave, while flowers culled by fair hands, were strewn upon it."

Davis wrote a letter to his mother before his execution, "Dear mother. Oh how painful it is to write to you. I have got to die tomorrow morningto be hung by the federals. Mother do not grieve for me. I must bid you good bye for ever more Mother, I do not hate to die. Give my love to all. Your Dear Son." There was a postscript for his father, too. "You can send after my remains if you want to do so, they will be at Pulaski Tenn. I will have some things too with the hotel keeper for you. Pulaski is in Giles Co Tenn, South of Columbia."

The execution gained some notoriety at the time, especially among soldiers of the Army of Tennessee. Writing in his memoir Co. Aytch, published in the early 1880s, Private Sam Watkins recalled that in 1864 his regiment had assembled to watch the hanging of two young Union spies, eager to see the condemned men die because "they had hung one of our regiment at Pulaski – Sam Davis."

Honors

thumb|Sam Davis statue dedication in 1909, Tennessee State Capitol

Davis' execution was not that unusual an event. He suffered a fate shared by many intelligence gatherers operating around Nashville. Most of the rural counties surrounding Nashville were only nominally under Union control, and this 'no-man's land' witnessed over three years of bloody internecine conflict and the steady dissolution of the institution of slavery. In this context, execution for espionage was not uncommon. The Provost Marshal records for Middle Tennessee offer evidence of scores of execution on espionage charges, with not all the victims receiving trials (as Davis did). Six months before Davis's execution, Union commanders publicly executed Joseph Smith in Carthage, a rural town east of Nashville. As was the case with Davis, some of these events generated newspaper coverage and featured in private letters. Most executions, however, went unrecorded apart from a perfunctory note in the Provost Marshal's records. Today, nearly all of these men are forgotten – except for Sam Davis.

For nearly thirty years after the war, the story of Sam Davis's execution was not widely remembered. In 1866 Davis's father erected the first monument to his son, a twenty-five foot shaft of Italian marble, at the back of the family's plantation home outside Smyrna. The Sam Davis story became part of a broader social memory only in the mid-1890s and chiefly through the efforts of Andrew Cunningham, the founding editor of Confederate Veteran magazine. A native of Middle Tennessee, Cunningham had an undistinguished record of Confederate service, having deserted the Army of Tennessee after the Battle of Nashville in 1864. After the war he worked as a newspaperman before becoming the general agent for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Fund after the former Confederate president's death in 1889. He left this position shortly after launching the Nashville-based Confederate Veteran in January 1893.

Before he founded the Confederate Veteran, Cunningham had never heard of Sam Davis. When an early subscriber to the magazine submitted a school oration about Davis for publication, Cunningham rejected it, "feeling that there were so many equally worthy heroes it would hardly be fair to print this special eulogy." But at a Blue-Gray veterans reunion in April 1895, on the battlefield at Shiloh, Cunningham again heard about the story of Davis's execution – and this time from two federal veterans, witnesses to the execution, who claimed, as Cunningham phrased it, that "the Federal Army was in grief over it." These accounts struck a chord and convinced Cunningham of the merits of publicizing the story. The Union veterans' story of an ordinary soldier's heroic death, couched in the language of reconciliation, fit perfectly with the spirit of the times and the viewpoint of the Confederate Veteran. "I resolved to print the story," Cunningham recalled in 1899, "and [to] reprint it until that typical hero should have as full credit as the Veteran could give him."

Legacy

thumb|[[Sam Davis House (Smyrna, Tennessee)|Sam Davis House in Smyrna, Tennessee]] thumb|Interpretive exhibit displays at Davis Home Since the late 1890s, Davis has towered above any other Tennessean in the pantheon of Confederate Civil War heroes. Today, representations of the life and death of Sam Davis mark the historical and geographical landscapes of the Middle Tennessee heartland. While the narrative of Davis is an ingrained part of regional recognition, Davis' story did not spread beyond Tennessee despite efforts after World War II to give the story a wider circulation.

Monuments commemorating him stand at the scene of his execution and on the court square in Pulaski; at his childhood home outside Smyrna, Tennessee; and in the form of a life-size statue positioned prominently on the southeast corner of the state capitol grounds in Nashville.

An exhibition case of Sam Davis artifactsincluding the overcoat worn at the time of his arrest and the boot in which papers were concealedis on permanent display at the Tennessee State Museum. Over the years, archivists at the Tennessee State Library and Archives have procured and catalogued scores of documents: firsthand recollections, poems, commemorative speeches, at least four published biographies, and the papers of the Sam Davis Memorial Association.

In 1912 a Sam Davis memorial window was installed in the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

In 1927, the State of Tennessee purchased the Davis family home as a memorial site. Operated as a private nonprofit by the Sam Davis Memorial Association, the Sam Davis House outside Smyrna is open to tourists and school groups.

In 1928 the 175-foot-tall, 200-room Sam Davis Hotel opened in downtown Nashville. On February 16, 1985 it was demolished to make way for a new convention center parking garage.

Illustrated Features Syndicate created a newspaper comic strip, "The Story of Sam Davis" in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The strip portrayed Davis, looking remarkably like Clark Gable, as an all–American hero caught up in a tragic era.

Davis was named "Historical Personality of the Year" in 1992 by the Tennessee Historical Commission.

In 1992 the Sam Davis Memorial Association, who manage the Sam Davis Home on behalf of the State of Tennessee, were inundated with complaints from Confederate supporters angered by the rumor that the battle flag of the Confederacy no longer flew at the Sam Davis Home. The Association responded that "the only trouble we have is trying to satisfy different demands over which Confederate flag should be flown on a regular basis. At the present time, in an attempt to please as many of our supporters as possible, the several Confederate flags are flown on a rotating basis; but a Confederate flag is always flown."

In the early 2000s historical archaeologists at Middle Tennessee State University criticised the "shrine mentality" and cited a lack of authenticity in the material culture and historical interpretation at the Sam Davis Home. The custodians of the home complained about policy changes that were inconsistent with the original purpose of the home – including the flying of the U.S. flag, which the Nashville chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy called "an insult, not only to Sam Davis and his Family, but to the entire Confederacy and its descendants."

Notes

External links

Sam Davis Home