Statue of Sam Davis, Rebel Martyr

Pulaski, Tennessee

Sam Davis, "The Boy Hero of the Confederacy," had been dead for over 40 years before he got a suitably heroic statue. In 1906 Pulaski, the town where Davis was hanged, erected an impressive marble likeness of him supposedly carved by an Italian master. It stands atop a gaudy 15-foot-tall pedestal, in a place of honor on the courthouse lawn. Sam, his arms crossed rebelliously, looks far younger than a similar Sam Davis statue erected only three years later on the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville (The Nashville statue is probably a less-idealized likeness of the 21-year-old non-Boy Hero).

Sam was a Confederate spy, hanged by the Yankees when he refused to reveal his sources or the identity of his spy leader. The pedestal of his statue is engraved with a defiant quote attributed to Davis, a Bible verse, a pithy line from a poem written in his honor ("Let come what must, I keep my trust"), and a claim that he was executed as a spy even though he was "a Confederate soldier in the line of duty." Davis himself insisted that he wasn't a spy, although the secret documents found hidden in his shoe, stolen from the desk of a Union general, suggested otherwise.