The many images of Jefferson Davis

Peter Manseau, the author, most recently, of One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History,
has an article in The New York Times about Jeff Davis:

The president of the Confederate States of America still watches over much of the nation he hoped to destroy. Statues, memorials, or roadside markers in honor of Jefferson Davis stand in a dozen states; his bronze presence in the United States Capitol is a public relations coup unmatched in American history; and last week’s conflict in Congress over rebel flags on federal property made his ghost difficult to ignore.
Reveling in Davis’ image is mostly a Southern phenomenon. Yet, when the Civil War was barely over, a prominently displayed depiction of the man once commonly called an “archtraitor” was also unveiled in the North. Its spectacular demise a hundred and fifty years ago today prefigured the passions such symbols continue to ignite.
Just before his arrest in May of 1865, Davis made a decision that would haunt him. As a Union general reported, he “hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses” while attempting to escape. In fact, he was apprehended wearing, not a dress, but his wife’s raincoat and shawl, which, his defenders argued, were nearly unisex in the style of the day. To the Northern press, however, the story was too good to check. Newspapers and magazines rushed to publish sketches of Davis as a bearded Southern belle (illustration). “No one will attempt to make a hero of such material,” one account said. “He will appear in petticoats in history.”
Few capitalized on these events as quickly as P. T. Barnum. The era’s undisputed master showman announced that he would pay five hundred dollars for Davis’ dress. The possibility that it would soon appear at the Manhattan headquarters of Barnum’s entertainment empire set the country abuzz.
Barnum’s American Museum was then the nation’s most popular tourist destination. Located on lower Broadway, it was said to be either the greatest collection of diversions in the greatest city on earth, or an “ill-looking, ungainly, rambling structure” containing a “paltry collection of preposterous things.”
In truth it was both: where else could you see a waxwork Last Supper, a mermaid stitched from a monkey’s torso and a fish’s tail, and a collection of exotic animals including living white whales? Barnum’s singular skill was concocting new realities from unlikely ingredients; his genius was in what was known as “puffing”: selling nonsense as if it was his audience’s deepest desire.
In the summer of 1865, Davis became a star attraction. Banners painted with the feminized image of the Confederate leader draped the museum’s facade. A song from the war promised to “hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree,” but Barnum had other plans. Why hang a man once when you could mock him for profit all season long?
Barnum called his Davis display The Belle of Richmond. A wax figure of a man wearing a dress similar to those seen in the sketches that had already made the story notorious, it might have enjoyed an epic run. But the fervor that made it a hit also doomed it from the start.
The fire that broke out at the American Museum on 13 July 1865, was a destructive marvel. Thirty thousand people turned out to watch the conflagration, while Barnum’s menagerie spilled onto Broadway. When firemen smashed the whale tank to help extinguish the flames, Barnum’s belugas burned alive.
In the midst of this mayhem, the Davis statue came tumbling down. While the crowd jeered, a bearded mannequin dressed in women’s attire was hurled into the street, its skirt acting briefly as a parachute. “As Jeff made his perilous descent,” The New York Times reported, “his petticoats again played him false, and as the wind blew them about, the imposture of the figure was exposed.” Landing to “cheers and uncontrollable laughter,” the statue was then promptly hanged, just as the song suggested.
The cause of the fire remained a mystery, but many assumed arson. “It is suspected,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, “the guilty parties were rebel sympathizers offended by the prominence Barnum has given to the manner of Jeff Davis’ capture.” A Confederate partisan who witnessed the blaze wrote that the banners painted with Davis’ image “gave the flames such an impetus, that they could not be controlled.”
This was only the beginning of Davis’ fraught place in the American imagination. Among Southerners, the abuse he endured at the hands of both wags like Barnum and his jailers at Virginia’s Fort Monroe took on a life of its own. His suffering became a passion play of the Lost Cause, the nearly religious cult of grievance that convinced subsequent generations of the Union’s intent not only to defeat the Confederacy, but to emasculate it. “The North’s treatment of Jefferson Davis,” the historian Andrew F. Rolle wrote in 1965, “symbolized the humiliation being inflicted upon the South.”
Barnum surely would have admired the puffing necessary to transform an arch traitor into an American hero. The commanding poses struck by Davis in statues across the country are anxious correctives to depictions that troubled his followers long after the war’s end.
Recent debates over relics of the Confederacy— in South Carolina, the United States Capitol, and elsewhere— only underscore how successful a hundred and fifty years of revisionism can be. If Jefferson Davis manages to survive current efforts to remove him from several of his pedestals, his old antagonist would likely know why.
“The American people,” Barnum famously said, “like to be fooled.”

Rico says it is amazing that his statue still sits in the Capitol...