This Museum Isn’t Confederate Enough for These Losers

In the spirit of the popular rallying cry, “The South Will Rise Again,” the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) recently announced that they would spend $5 million on a 17,000 square-foot museum to be built in Elm Springs, Tennessee, the location of their national headquarters. The announcement comes amidst the most sustained assault on Confederate iconography, including monuments and battle flags as well as the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. “At the completion of this museum,” according to Lieut. Commander Paul Gramling, “it will be out of the reach of the long arm of political correctness. This will be ours.”

The SCV failed to point out, however, that there is already a museum devoted to the Confederacy located in its former capital of Richmond, Virginia. It is also a museum that many SCV members now largely reject as having distorted the history of the Confederacy and the South and betrayed the men and women who sacrificed in its name.

What eventually became known as the Museum of the Confederacy opened its doors in 1896 as the Confederate Museum. Organized by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and staffed entirely by women—many of whom had been involved in commemorative activities going back to the end of the war—the museum preserved important artifacts within the walls of President Jefferson Davis’s former executive mansion, including the Great Seal of the Confederate States of America. The mansion’s rooms were divided between the former Confederate states, including Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which never formally seceded from the United States. Prominent widows and daughters of Confederate leaders, such as Winnie and Varina Davis, served as regents and vice-regents for individual rooms and functioned as living reminders of the war.