By Clint Confehr
COLUMBIA, TN — The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on a horse — moved from Memphis — is at an ante-bellum mansion and national headquarters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans which plans to reconstruct a memorial with reinterred remains of the Confederate general and his wife.
SCV Executive Director Adam Southern discussed the plans in a library at the National Confederate Museum, 2357 Park Plus Drive, Columbia. How the statue got here five years ago was explained by Franklin-based attorney H. Edward Phillips III of Nashville, the Forrest family’s attorney who, while researching monumental technicalities of law, realized he’s a cousin of Tennessee’s famous Confederate cavalryman.
The statue’s removal from a public park to private ownership was facilitated by Phillips who approached the well-publicized controversy about five years ago with legal points and the state Antiquities Act. Human remains were part of Forrest’s memorial. Demands for statue removal raised questions on where to put it. And what about the Forrests’ remains? Phillips’ answer: SCV HQ.
“We buried him and Mary Montgomery Forrest in 2021” at SCV HQ, Southern said in the William D. McCain Research Library. “The statue came about that time.”
Near a portrait of McCain, windows provide a view into the museum. McCain was: an SCV adjutant; a 1950s-’60s Mississippi politician; a segregationist; and one of World War II’s Monuments Men cataloging art stolen by Nazis. McCain increased SCV membership in the early 1900s, up from a few thousand. Now, it’s about 30,000, internationally.
Southern resigned as Maury County’s library director in 2018 to be SCV’s executive.
“We don’t want this to become a monument graveyard,” Southern said of the SCV position against accepting more monuments for permanent display at the National Confederate Museum. “Certain monuments are specific to a certain area. In Mt. Pleasant, there’s a Bigby Grays monument. It needs to stay there to honor the men from that area.” The museum includes a Union flag captured by Forrest who gave it to a woman for warning Confederates in Mount Pleasant before a Union raid.
The museum displays a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, removed from Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery, Ala., Southern said. It’s “on-loan.” It’ll go back to Alabama when the Robert E. Lee SCV Camp has a place for it.
Meanwhile: Sam Davis’ statue stands on the Pulaski Square where Union officers hanged him as a spy; and Forrest’s bust was moved in July 2021 from the state Capitol to the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. Franklin’s traffic circle has a statue nicknamed “Chip” because part of the brim of his hat chipped off in 1899 when the United Daughters of the Confederacy placed it.
A Black Union soldier is portrayed in bronze hunting to shoot from Williamson County’s old courthouse toward Franklin’s traffic circle. Also in bronze is a Union Colored Troops soldier counseling a youngster in Pulaski.
“It’s a great concept,” Southern said. “Instead of taking down, add to. Tell the rest of the story. The Confederate monument is just one part of the story.”
SCV gets a bad rap because of the stars and bars Confederate flag, Southern said. “Other groups have used our battle flag in ways they shouldn’t.” A “small percentage” of Southerners “owned slaves,” he said, naming a mid-1800s ancestor, Georgia infantryman Alford D. Southern, who didn’t enslave people.
SCV membership is for Confederates’ ancestors. The museum displays photos of African Americans wearing Confederate uniforms. There are Black members of the SCV, Southern said. SCV has genealogists who’ve traced families to a Brazilian town settled by Confederates “who didn’t want to live under reconstruction.”
Forrest died in 1877, buried in Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis, and reinterred in 1904 with his widow. Their graves were in the memorial disassembled five years ago. Its stone blocks are at Elm Springs awaiting reassembly, a long-term SCV commitment.
“The name, The National Confederate Museum, draws people,” Southern said of “several hundred” monthly visits. “All are welcome,” Southern said. It’s southeast of East James Campbell Boulevard at Mooresville Pike; a seven-minute drive from The President James K. Polk Home & Museum at 7th and High streets.
Phillips says, “Objects commemorate people and times. We assign something to them. You can let that object drive your life or say, ‘I’m not going to let it have power over me.’ Then, you can look at it for what it is.”
