UPDATE: This bust has been removed and placed in storage.
ORIGINAL WAYMARK:
This bronze bust of Confederate Army Captain J. Harvey Mathes stands on a concrete pedestal in Confederate Park in downtown Memphis.
The memorial was erected by the J. Harvey Mathes Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy before 1911.
From the 1911 book "Historic Southern Monuments, Representative Memorials of the Heroic Dead of the Southern Confederacy", compiled by Mrs. B. A. C. Emerson, a free e-book available on the Google Play Store, we found this biography: (
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"[page 321] CAPTAIN J. HARVEY MATHES
As brave and gallant a soldier as ever drew sword for the Southland, his personal courage was proven on many a bloody battlefield and even in greater degree was he possessor of that intrepidity. Yielding to non-in his loyalty to the lost cause and his comrades in arms, no appeal to him for the South or her fallen heroes ever went unheeded. And when the campaign of slander and vilification had started in the dark days after Appomattox to tarnish the luster of the Confederate cause, foremost in the ranks of those who strove for truth stood our noble fellow-citizen. To the contest he brought the finest weapons, a perceptive and analytical faculty, which was unerring, and a sense of justice and proportion which prevented him from falling into overzealous praise or unfair denunciation.
Firm of purpose in maintaining a cause his conscience told him was right, he never swerved a hair's breadth from a position once assumed. Connected for years with our daily press, his depth of thought and originality of expression made him a leader in the great movement for a regenerated country.
Wounded at the Battle of Atlanta, served actively at Dalton and on the campaign to Atlanta; was almost constantly at the front, and was under fire 70 days out of 75, and was acting Adjutant General on the staff of Gen. Tom Benton Smith, when desperately wounded on July 22, 1864, in front of Atlanta. The shell that wanted him killed his horse. That night the leg of the young staff officer was amputated by surgeon JC Hall of Anguilla, Mississippi. Col. L. P. Dupre, who was present as war correspondent, wrote a very pathetic account of the event. Capt. Mathis saw no more active service; was in the hospital at Columbus, Georgia, several months, and was forced to submit to another operation upon his leg.
[page 322] He was a consistent Christian character, and in his church sought and found that “peace which the world cannot give,” and though devoted to the denomination of his choice, he manifested no narrow spirit of bigotry, but was broad and liberal in his belief, and recognized good wherever he found it. Thus his manly Christianity was part of his daily life, manifesting itself in kindness, patience, and forgiveness under strongest provocation.
For many years he was a great sufferer from his wounds; he never burden others with his complaints, but bore his sufferings silently and bravely. His private life, his charm of heart and depth of soul would have one deepest admiration, should all his public services be forgotten.
He was loyal to his friends and generous and magnanimous to those who opposed him. No man was freer from bitter hate; none strove to impute unworthy motives, and none quicker to accord to others the same charity and freedom he would wish for himself. Possessor of so many noble qualities, and gifted with an intellect of unusual force, he was singularly modest and
[page 323 – photo plate of monument]
[page 324] unobtrusive in his life and had a sweet sympathy of a woman for those in sorrow and distress.
The name of our chapter, the J Harvey Mathes, is a living monument to our admiration for him and this simple bust is our tribute to his memory, bearing with it the love and devotion of faithful hearts. Many lofty shafts erected to fallen heroes bear testimony of no greater merit than should be accorded to our own Harvey Mathes, a gallant soldier, a loyal friend, a Christian gentleman.
J Harvey Mathes was born in East Tennessee.
The monument to his memory was built by the Harvey Mathes chapter, Daughters of the Confederacy."
2023 UPDATE: The bust of Capt. Mathes was removed in 2017.
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"DAVID WATERS
Waters: Capt. Mathes, forgotten casualty of statue war
David Waters
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest weren't the only Confederate casualties reported in Memphis last week.
The new owner of two city parks also removed from its pedestal a bronze bust of Capt. J. Harvey Mathes, a long-forgotten Confederate soldier who lost his leg in the Battle of Atlanta.
The captain's family would like to get him back.
"It just makes me sad," said Rev. Ben Mathes, a graduate of White Station High (Class of '71) and Rhodes College, and a Presbyterian minister in Georgia for nearly 40 years. "We've been trying for years to move that thing. We'd just like to find an appropriate place for it."
The Mathes family has been trying to reclaim the captain's bronzed likeness since 2013 when the city first began talking about renaming parks and removing statues dedicated to the Confederacy.
James Harvey Mathes was a Confederate soldier and a war correspondent for The Memphis Daily Appeal. After the war, he became editor of The Memphis Evening Ledger and a two-term state senator.
He also wrote "General Forrest," a biography of his friend, the former slave trader, brutal war hero and first imperial wizard of the terrorizing Ku Klux Klan. The book was published in 1902, the year Mathes died.
His widow, Mildred Spottswood Cash Mathes, was among the ladies of the Forrest Monumental Association's Women's Auxiliary who raised money for a statue of Forrest.
Forrest Park and its towering equestrian statue was dedicated in 1905. Three years later, Memphians dedicated Confederate Park, a memorial to the Battle of Memphis. The park included a bust of Mathes.
Not anymore.
"I've written very polite letters to the city asking how we can move my great-grandfather's bust out of the park. I've even got guys in Mississippi who are willing to go 'steal' it for me," Rev. Mathes, founder of Mission: Hope, an international public health ministry, said with a laugh. "Now it has been moved out of the park and we don't know where it is. It's just kind of silly."
It's likely they can, said Van Turner, director and president of Memphis Greenspace Inc., the new nonprofit that bought both parks from the city last week and moved the statues.
Turner said the state attorney general has asked him to develop a process to transfer the statues to interested and appropriate parties. He said his attorney will work with the Mathes family.
"The bust of Capt. Mathes is being stored in a safe and secure place," Turner said Saturday. "If the Mathes family wants it, they should probably have preferential status in that process."
In recent months, local officials and protesters rightfully have worked to remove the statues of Forrest and Davis, racist propaganda from the past, symbols of a shameful era of slavery, lynching and other crimes against humanity.
No one paid much attention to Capt. Mathes.
"We were focused on statues, but I always held the belief that, from street signs on up, things should change," said Tami Sawyer, a leader of #TakeEmDown901. That includes the removal of all Confederate symbols.
The bust of the uniformed bust – inscribed Capt. J. Harvey Mathes, 7th Tenn., C.S.A. – clearly is that. It was rightly moved out of the park, but it should be sent back to the Mathes family.
Forrest and Davis were Confederate heroes who, however courageously, sought – in Lincoln's words – to "dissolve the union" in order to "strengthen, perpetuate, and extend" the enslavement of people of color.
Their statues belong in a museum or a Civil War cemetery, not a public park. The bust of Capt. Mathes belongs with his family, which includes his great-great grandsons, Benjamin, an actor, and Adam, a Marine major and United Methodist pastor.
"We really hope we can get J Harvey back," said Rev. Mathes.
The removed statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Fourth Bluff Park Thursday morning. The city of Memphis sold two public parks containing Confederate monuments to a nonprofit Wednesday in a massive, months-in-the-planning operation to take the statues down overnight."