It
isn’t that hard to find the place in the West Hospital at the V.C.U. Medical
Center, even if the way is not marked.
It is on the 17th floor, behind the only unlabeled door on the elevator
lobby. Inside, on the far end of an
otherwise blank hallway is a monumental doorway in white marble, above which is
the inscription: JEFFERSON DAVIS MEMORIAL CHAPEL.
A
sterile hallway furnished with used office chairs leads to the Jefferson Davis
Memorial Chapel.
The
City of Richmond is dotted with mementos of a failed age, vestiges of the Cult
of the South filtered through the rosy lens of Victorian-era
sentimentality. Most of these statues
and sites, cemeteries and museums celebrating what was sentimentally referred
to as the “Lost Cause” were established during Reconstruction, bolstered first by
Confederate veterans themselves and later codified by groups like the United
Daughters of the Confederacy.
A
vintage postcard of the Memorial Chapel as it appeared when it opened in 1960.
The
centennial of the American Civil War in 1960 gave new life to Confederate
romanticism, even as the storm clouds of the struggle for Civil Rights swirled
above this country. In the American
South, celebrations, publications, and events promoted the Lost Cause as the
Good Cause – a production featuring the usual stereotypes: the Southern Belle,
the Kindly Master, the Grateful Slave. Slavery,
that ever-present ugly subtext to any discussion of the Civil War, was
trivialized or smothered under sentimentality.
The Jefferson Davis Chapel is a small, concentrated instance of that
sentimentality.
The
Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel as it appears today.
The
United Daughters of the Confederacy held their 87th annual meeting
in Richmond in November, 1960, and among the items on their program was the inauguration
of a small chapel at the Medical College of Virginia. This space was dedicated to the memory of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
The U.D.C. felt the site would be especially appropriate, explaining the
chapel would be near both the White House of the Confederacy and Davis’ grave
in Hollywood Cemetery. The U.D.C. also
noted with pride that the Medical College of Virginia was “the only medical
college to keep its doors open during the war between the states.”
The U.D.C. delegates began their day of dedication by
gathering at Davis’ grave in Hollywood Cemetery, where Samuel J. T. Moore, Jr.,
a Richmond attorney, described Davis in grand terms, assuring the crowd that the
Confederate president “…headed the highest society within Anglo-Saxon
civilization.” In less lofty terms, Delegate
Deseree Franklin of New York took the graveside podium and thundered against
subversive elements within the theater and movie industry. These forces were arrayed against organizations
like the U.D.C. because “they hate the South because we are such real Americans.”
Worked up to a proper pitch by their speakers
with this combination of romantic sentiment and militancy, the group moved
east, to the Medical College and the Davis Chapel.
The
chapel on top of the hospital cost the U.D.C. $30,000 in 1960, and in 1962 the
Daughters passed their flowered hats once again to furnish the room with a
small Baldwin organ, which still sits forlornly behind the door. Since then there does not seem to have been a
lot of maintenance money available for the chapel. The windowless, low-ceilinged space is
counter to what you would expect on such a lofty site, seventeen floors above
Broad Street and looking out far above Shockoe Valley. The ceiling is tired and stained, and the acoustic
tiles it is made of are warped and sagging.
Nine
pews face a communion rail separating the altar from the rest of the small
space, while above the altar, a popular image of “Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane”
hangs on the wall under a spotlight.
A photo of the current painting of “Christ in the Garden of
Gethsemane” hanging in the Chapel.
Compare with the original painting pictured in the 1960 postcard.
The
bronze plaque on the wall of the Jefferson Davis chapel testifies to the
sanctimonious nature of the former Confederate president and presents him as
such a stainless, pure figure as to ensure sainthood. The oblique mention
of “persons low rank and high” hints at the role of slaves and how they
appeared in an imagined antebellum society. This was an invented culture
that universally loved Jefferson Davis and where low rank recognized
high.
The plaque on the Chapel wall, commemorating Davis’
“veneration” by bishops of the Episcopal church, signals the former Confederate
president’s elevation into the ranks of the Southern Saints, to join the shades
of Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart and the sainted Robert E. Lee. The long, bloody war that cost more than half
a million American lives is dismissed by the euphemism, “the struggle between
the states.”
FOR THE GLORY OF GOD
AND TO THE MEMORY OF
JEFFERSON DAVIS,
AMERICAN PATRIOT AND
PRESIDENT
OF THE CONFEDERATE
STATES.
A VIRTUOUS AND
RESOLUTE MAN
WHOSE CREED WAS
EXEMPLIFIED IN HIS LIFE
OF DUTY, HONOR,
SACRAFICE,
DEDICATED TO SERVING
HIS FELLOW CITIZENS AND
DEFENDER OF THE
RIGHTS OF SOVEREIGN STATES.
DOMINATED BY
INTEGRITY AND COMPASSION, HE
WAS BELOVED BY
PERSONS OF LOW RANK AND HIGH
AND VENERATED FOR HIS
STAINLESS CHARACTER
BY BISHOPS OF THE
EPISCOPAL CHURCH
OF WHICH HE WAS A
COMMINICANT AND YESTRYMAN.
SUSTAINED IN HIS
OREDAL BY FAITH IN GOD, HE
BORE NATIONAL
TRAGEDIES AND PERSONAL ANGUUSH
WITH HEROIC PATIENCE
AND FORTUTUDE.
NOW A CENTURY AFTER
THE STRUGGLE
BETWEEN THE STATES,
JEFFERSON DAVIS
BECOMES A POSSESSION
OF THE ENTIRE NATION
AND THE IMMORTAL
FUTURE,
A GALLANT FIGURE FOR
YOUTH TO EMULIATE.
The
condition of the little chapel may underscore the attitude of V.C.U. regarding
this potentially embarrassing part of their facility and their history.
Lights in the chapel are burned out and the carpet is threadbare. There was a
wedding in the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel as late as 1976, but today the
whole space looks depressing and hardly the place to celebrate a
marriage. The copy of the popular painting of Christ in the garden of
Gethsemane that hangs in the chapel in 1960 has been replaced with a
cartoon-like replica of the same scene, painted by some unskilled hand and
hoping, perhaps, that nobody would notice the substitution. A torn and
battered Bible rests on the altar below the painting.
Current societal conditions have called for a reassessment of
the manifestations of Confederate culture in Virginia. With removal of icons and statues, the
renaming of streets and parks, the fate of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel
is in doubt. The fact it is located in a
State-owned building only ensures that its presence there will be examined
closely. In fact, MoveOn.Org has an
online petition to rename the space: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/rename-the-jefferson.
Before the space is renamed or obliterated entirely, a trip
to the 17th floor of the hospital may be in order soon to experience
this run-down tribute to a romanticized and saintly version of the Confederate
president. Until popular demand makes it
go away, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel remains one of Richmond’s saddest
and lesser-known mementos of The Lost Cause.
- Selden
Posted 6:50 p.m., March 12, 2019
7 comments:
Those forgotten nooks and crannies....Another "stranger than fiction" post form Seldon. The sanctimony surrounding Davis is astounding. At the Confederate Museum in New Orleans there is displayed a crown of thorns although the provenance has become confused; Piux IX sent a photograph to Davis of HIs Very Own Holiness during Davis' Fortress Monroe incarceration. HIs wife, Varina, apparently wove her husband a symbolic Crown of Thorns to hang his cell. A bizarre metaphor not to mention tough on the fingers to say. nothing of the disregard for hundreds of years of slavery and all the suffering that went with it. The Chapel created by the UDC seems absurd today, except, well, such veneration remains among us. Though apparently not often in the Jefferson Davis Chapel. I wonder whatever happened to the marrieds who participated in their union there?
Great story Harry. If we call you The Hat, would we have called J. Davis The Crown?
Nice piece, but in the words of Andrew Breitbart; "So what"?
West Hospital hasn't been an in-patient facility for decades. But I can bet the grieving families that prayed there or grieved there from 1941 to the early 1990s cared less about the name or UDC insignia. It was a hospital chapel for crying out loud; for what was at the time the main MCV hospital!! Perhaps I assumed too much that research staff and/or historians associated with a major university library would understand basic moral relativism 101. Maybe not.
So where do we go from here? Full Goebbels-April 1933? Rally at Hollywood and exhume old Davis and the Confederate command staff? What about the Confederate unknowns under the granite pyramid? Turn them all into kitty litter?
And what's to be done with the Cabell room in the VCU library? I can only imagine the febrile hysteria of the average VCU undergrad snowflake when they learn that Cabell's mother was, God forbid, Anne Harris Branch (1859–1915) daughter of Lieutenant Colonel James R. Branch, of the Army of the Confederate States of America!!
And there's a Star Bucks in the lobby!
How can this stand?
R. D. Lunsford
BS, VCU-1982
PhD, MCV 1986
Dr. L. Please read Selden's response to your comments on his blog entry on the Davis Chapel. You can find it here:
https://theshockoeexaminer.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-jefferson-davis-memorial-chapel.html
Thanks Ray. And I agree whole heatedly with Selden's response. However, I will not comment to that post as it does not rise to the level of a comment exchange.
The basic question for historians remains; where does it end?
In this age of revisionist history, moral relativism and the "perpetually offended", we can lock a chapel door today, but what of tomorrow? Shouldn't we just purge everything now and get it over with? And a big job that would be.
Another little bit of latent history, the old Dooley Pediatric Hospital. That building is long gone but the original door jam remains behind the current medical education building and right next door to where St. Philip Hospital once stood. James Dooley was a Richmond philanthropist during reconstruction. But before that he served in the First Virginia Infantry (CSA), was wounded, captured for a short time and served out the war in the Confederate Ordnance Department. Perhaps that needs to go too?
I walked the halls of the hospital in the mid 1980s for med school and never heard a word about the chapel. I later attended classes for my masters in the mid to late 2000s and never hear a word. I sat with families in that chapel and never heard a word. As the one post said..."so what". I guess when you go so far out of the limb....there is still more to find!!
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