Devotion, Deception, and the Ladies Memorial Association, 1865–1898: The Mystery of the Alabama Confederate Monument

The eighty-eight-foot tall Alabama Confederate Monument (Figure 1) on Montgomery’s Capitol Hill stands in commemoration of the service and sacrifice of 122,000 Alabamians who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Fund-raising for the $47,000 monument began in 1865 and was largely the work of white women, as was typical of Civil War memorial patronage in the South. The Ladies Memorial Association (LMA) raised most of the money through lengthy efforts involving bazaars and appeals to private donors and the state government. Due to pressing post-war needs for proper burial of many Confederate bodies lying in shallow battlefield graves, and the needs of widows, orphans, and Confederate veterans during Reconstruction, plus an economy slow to recover from the war, the cornerstone was not laid until 1886. More than 5,000 people witnessed Jefferson Davis perform that ceremony with full Masonic rites near the spot where he had taken the oath of office as the only President of the Confederacy. Another twelve years passed before the monument designed by New York sculptor Alexander Doyle (1857–1922) was completed with his handsome bronze finial figure of Patriotism and bronze relief sculpture of a generic battle scene encircling the column. Granite statuary by Frederick Barnicoat (1857–1942) of Quincy, Massachusetts, representing the Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry, and Navy was added by the patrons to complete Doyle’s design. The elaborate dedication on December 7, 1898 (near the

Figure 1.

Alabama Confederate Monument, state capitol grounds, Montgomery

photo courtesy of the author

fortieth anniversary of the Confederacy’s surrender, the highpoint of its commemoration both North and South), was attended by thousands who cheered the bombastic orations, flowery poetry, and pageantry of the Lost Cause. Despite a decade of involvement in the monument’s design and construction, Doyle was not present.

At that time, few knew the truth behind a lengthy disagreement between the monument’s designer and the patrons that had delayed construction and deprived Doyle of either providing the statuary at the monument’s base or earning any profit. Documents in the remarkably comprehensive records of the LMA—and two or three that are conspicuously absent—coupled with modern scientific analysis of the monument’s limestone indicate that the stone is very likely not all Alabama limestone as the LMA proudly proclaimed in the 1880s and 1890s. Although there are still small holes in the historical fabric that are not definitively filled by scientific analysis, a plausible explanation for some of the delays in the protracted construction of the colossal column proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the stone in the shaft is not Alabama limestone but rather Indiana limestone from near Bedford, Indiana, where Doyle’s family owned a quarry. It further appears that the LMA was aware that the colossal stone shaft eventually erected was not native stone but instead northern stone, yet they chose to keep silent on the issue.

The LMA certainly did not initially intend to use Yankee stone in their Confederate monument, but the implications of public knowledge of the final outcome may have influenced the Ladies’ initiative to find alternatives to Doyle and his design, thus causing delays and tempering decisions regarding the forms and materials that ultimately came to commemorate Alabama’s Confederate soldiers and sailors. Southern patrons of Civil War soldiers and sailors monuments often favored local designers and materials suppliers for financial as well as patriotic reasons, but there were few sculptors and no bronze fine arts foundries in the South in the nineteenth century. Many patrons of larger memorials tacitly conceded the inclusion of northern materials and manufacture, as did the LMA for Patriotism, the circular bronze relief, and the New England granite statuary they eventually acquired instead of Doyle’s bronzes. Still, white southern pride may well have influenced the LMA’s actions regarding the northern designer and his design, much as it affected the decision to commission a Frenchman, Jean Antonin Mercié, to create the monumental...