WORDS Brent Rosen PHOTOS Jon Kohn
Sam Davis, boy hero of the South, was executed as a spy by Union Forces just after Thanksgiving in 1863. He’d been captured a few days before, well behind Union lines in Minor Hill, Tennessee, carrying papers and information on Union troop movements near Nashville. Had Sam Davis been nothing more than a soldier carrying out orders, his life would have been spared; he would have sat out the remainder of the war in any of a number of prisoner of war camps. But spies were different. The laws of war did not apply to spies; if a spy was caught, the spy was killed.
When Union troops caught Davis, he carried letters and other effects that Union General Grenville Dodge believed could have only come from his personal desk. Fearing a mole in his organization, General Grenville decided to press Davis on the source of his information. Davis was given a choice: he would be freed immediately in exchange for the names of his superior officers and the names of any turncoats in the Union ranks. Davis admitted to being a Confederate courier, but refused to name names and denied any involvement in any sort of Confederate espionage. When Davis refused to assist the Union investigation, he was court martialed on charges of spying against the Union.
The coat Davis wore at the time of his capture became an important piece of evidence against him during the trial. While the modern imagination often envisions the Civil War fought between the South in gray and the North in blue, the reality at that time was not so clear cut. Many soldiers wore irregular uniforms and often took clothing from fallen soldiers regardless of affiliation. In addition, soldiers fighting during the Civil War had limited ability to wash their uniforms, and after a few weeks of marching, fighting, sleeping out in the elements and marching some more, Union and Confederate uniforms would become filthy to the point of indistinguishability.
When Davis was caught, the fact it looked like he was wearing a Union greatcoat was used to support the charges against him. If Davis had tried to conceal his identity as a Confederate by wearing the uniform of his enemy, the thinking went, then the likelihood of him being a spy increased greatly. Davis protested during the court martial that his mother had dyed a found Union coat Confederate gray, but that the color didn’t hold. The failure of the color to hold, coupled with the jacket’s filthy condition, Davis argued, made the jacket appear Union blue. Unfortunately for Davis, his protestations fell on deaf ears, and the military court convicted him of espionage. His sentence: death.
The next day Davis stood, on the gallows, noose around his neck, the skies presumably overcast, maybe even a bit rainy, grimly ready to face his fate. The Union officer overseeing the execution gave Davis a final chance — he offered imprisonment instead of hanging if Davis would reveal his Union source. In response, Davis uttered the words that would make him a Southern hero: “I would die a thousand deaths before I would betray a friend.” Shortly thereafter, 21-year-old Sam Davis was hung until death.
Just before ascending the gallows, Davis gave his coat to a soldier in the Union camp, asking only that someone return the coat to his family and inform them of his fate. The coat eventually ended up back in Smyrna, Tennessee, where the Davis family had a 160-acre cotton farm. Immediately, there was speculation that Davis’ execution was unwarranted, based mainly on the coat -- to Davis’ friends and family, the coat appeared standard Confederate issue. As the story of Davis’ honor in the face of death spread, the boy wrongly executed as a spy became a mythical figure. The legend spread across Tennessee - the Davis family farm was turned into a museum in 1930 and the state of Tennessee erected a statue commemorating Davis on the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol. But the mystery remained: was Davis wrongly executed, or was he a spy?
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Howard Sutcliffe took the long way to Montgomery, Alabama. Born in Manchester, England, he attended design school at the University of Dundee, in Scotland. When he enrolled in design school in 1993, his initial intention was to design cars. But when Howard learned that car design is not “sitting in a farmhouse in Tuscany sketching Ferrari’s all day,” he decided to follow his other passion: textiles. So he received a B.A. in tapestry weaving, a degree that would have been extremely useful 500 years ago.
But Howard understood the avenues that opened up for a textile expert, especially in the world of historic preservation. Think about a museum, or a historic home, or the contents of an old wealthy family’s attic. While all of those places are likely filled with paintings, books, and papers, they are equally likely to be full of textiles: rugs, tapestries, blankets, quilts, clothing. Textiles, just as paintings, books, and papers, need to be restored if worn from age or otherwise damaged.
Howard learned the textile conservation trade at Hampton Court, a royal palace in Southeast London. An old palace makes the perfect training center for a textile conservator -- it’s full of old tapestries, rugs, and other artifacts of daily life that need frequent restoration. For three years, Howard trained by working on royal artifacts from the palace, but eventually moved on to museum work in Liverpool. In Liverpool, Howard would restore the museum’s fabric-based pieces before they were exhibited and would repair those pieces damaged while on display.
In early 2000, Howard came to America, where he worked in Lowell, Massachusetts. During the Industrial Revolution, Lowell served as the epicenter of textile production in the United States. In 1860, the city of Lowell housed more cotton spindles than all 11 of the Confederate states combined. Lowell reached its peak in the 1920’s, but the combination of cotton production’s movement to the South and the Great Depression crushed the city’s economic base. Between the 1930’s and the late 1990’s, Lowell could charitably be described as unpleasant. But the city’s historic status as the former center of the textile industry in the United States gave reason to build the American Textile History Museum in Lowell. The museum established a textile conservation program in the late 1970’s, and Howard worked in that program for a few years, preserving and curating the remnants of the New England textile trade.
Following his work in Lowell, Howard moved on, first to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and then to the Detroit Institute of the Arts, where he conserved that museum’s massive collection of Native American and African textiles. While in Detroit, Howard started coming to Montgomery, Alabama, the family home of his partner Rusty, and during his time in Montgomery, Howard came to a realization: textile conservatorship barely existed in the South. Approximately 200 textile conservators work in the United States, but they are clustered mainly in between Washington, DC and Boston, in LA and San Francisco, and in the major mid-western cities of Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis. Howard saw the dearth of conservatorship across the South, and recognized the opportunity.
“I sent information to pretty much every museum and historic house in the Southeast, certainly all of them in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, because there really was no one working in textile conservation in the region,” Howard said. The South generally holds its history in high esteem, but when it came to textiles, things were in a very raw state. Historic houses in Boston knew where to send their textiles for cleaning and servicing and had taken advantage of the service of conservators for years. In the South, not so much. Howard went part time with the Detroit Museum and started spending more and more time in Montgomery.
Private commissions make up a good portion of Howard’s work in the South. For instance, in December 2013, a descendant of President Andrew Jackson living in Atlanta contacted Howard about the restoration of a fan that had belonged to Jackson’s wife, Rachel. The jubilant citizens of New Orleans gave Rachel Jackson the fan after the battle of New Orleans in 1815, one of many gifts showered upon Andrew Jackson, his family, and his troops after the successful repelling of the British invaders.
The fan remained in the Jackson family, but for years no one paid the fan much attention. Over time, the structure of the fan had degraded to a state of catastrophic fragility or as Howard explained, “I’d worked on mummies that were in better condition.” Howard did structural support work with polyesther crepoline (fake silk fabric (I think)) and slowly worked the fan back into shape. When Howard returned the fan to the descendants of our seventh president, they were thrilled with the result. So much so, in fact, they gave Howard another project: the repair of a family wedding veil first worn by President Jackson’s granddaughter.
While private commissions from the families of prominent historical figures are nice, what’s really kept Howard busy for the last few years has been the various 150th anniversaries surrounding the Civil War. The Civil War began in 1861; therefore, starting in 2011, every day a battle, a death, a turning point, or a hero reaches the commemorative milestone of 150 years. These anniversaries created a bonanza for textile conservators, as the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy supported the conservation and restoration of flags, hats, and uniforms for use in 150th commemorations across the South. One such project supported by the Sons of the Confederacy involved the restoration of Sam Davis’ coat. The Sons wanted the coat for the festivities surrounding the 150th Anniversary of Davis’ execution.
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The coat remained in the Davis family for some years before it found its way into the collection of the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. And there it sat, until 2013. The Sons contacted the museum, expressing interest in using the coat during a series of events commemorating the 150th anniversary of Davis’s execution and the museum agreed to loan the coat to the Sons for the commemoration. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just Sam Davis who had a rough go of it after he and the coat parted ways. The coat needed significant restoration. The Sons contacted Howard, and soon after, the coat was in Howard’s Montgomery studio on Ridge Avenue.
When he received the coat, Howard thought it was a mess. “It was in very rough shape, it had been souvenired, was missing chunks, and had lived a tough life at the museum,” he said. Most museums kept atrocious records before the 1970s because no one outside of the museum was paying attention. Things that should have been well-preserved and taken care of simply weren’t. The coat had been in the Nashville Museum since at least 1942, when the director of the museum wrote a letter to someone explaining that the coat was falling to pieces, and that the museum was willing to pay $5.00 to a tailor to stitch it back together.
Modern textile conservators work a bit differently (and for more money). A tenant of textile conservatorship: one should do nothing that cannot be undone. You don’t want to do anything irrevocable as a conservator, because in 10 years, a new process could be available that could restore the work more effectively and authentically. The field is constantly evolving, with new treatments being developed every year.
One of those new innovations in textile conservatorship recently occurred in dye analysis. In the past, in order to analyze the dye in a garment to determine its age — or its color — a sample of the garment had to be taken, and through the process that sample was destroyed. This precluded dye analysis for a number of pieces because of the “nothing irrevocable” tenant of textile conservatorship. Removing a portion of a garment and destroying it = irrevocable. But within the last few years, a new method of dye analysis was invented, and this new method was non- destructive. Suddenly, a whole new class of textiles became eligible for dye analysis. Within that class was Sam Davis’ coat.
As Howard conducted the dye analysis, he realized a 150-year-old mystery was about to be solved. The dye analysis revealed the coat had originally been gray, and that it had been dyed a dark blue sometime after its creation. Sam Davis had lied, his mother had not dyed a blue coat gray — she died a gray coat blue. Although it was a bit more CSI than Da Vinci Code, Howard had solved the 150 year old mystery. Sam Davis was a spy — the condition of his coat, an alibi.
Thanks to Howard, we now know the execution of Sam Davis was not the travesty claimed by Davis partisans. But Howard’s work also confirmed Davis’ incredible bravery. Davis was a spy; he did have names to name. All Davis needed to do was identify his co-conspirators and his life would have been saved. Howard’s work proved Davis made the ultimate war-time sacrifice: he kept his honor, but he lost his life.
