How does Tennessee Confederate Women's Monument elucidate its Presentation Ceremony?
The Tennessee monument was erected on Sunday October 10, 1926 on the grounds of the capitol in Nashville. The presentation ceremony was supposed to be held outside, but due to rain, only the actual unveiling of the monument took place outside. Tennessee and Confederate representatives were present at the unveiling. Kinney, who was working in New York on other commissions for the state of Tennessee, did not attend.Reverend James I. Vance, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, delivered an introductory prayer.An article from the Nashville Banner in 1926 quotes Tennessee Governor Austin Peay's speech from the day. Peay spoke on behalf of the 1915 legislature that provided the funds for the monument. Peay explained how the Confederate soldiers “waged no foreign war; his battles were fought around the very doorsteps of the South.” He went on to praise the women who supported their husbands and families during the war in the ways that they could.
Kinney was frequently praised at the event. Governor Peay referred to Kinney as “a brilliant and gifted daughter of the South.” The Nashville Banner described her as “the most outstanding living Tennessee woman” in the field of art.The state commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, J.L. Highsaw of Memphis, Tennessee, also spoke at the monument's presentation ceremony. He claimed that this celebration paid a “fitting tribute to the most stout-hearted and valiant women whom the world has ever known” and not to the women of the lost cause, “for there was no lost cause, as historians and speakers of the past would have you believe.” He expressed his hopes that this monument and others, along with continued Confederate sentiment, would “establish in this Western hemisphere the eternal truth of freedom and local self-government as written by the fathers of that immortal charter of constitutional freedom.”
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