While enjoying watching the Kentucky Wildcats continue their historic run to an undefeated regular season and their 28th SEC Conference Tournament title, it was some other Nashville history that captured my eye this past weekend.
For more than a decade now I’ve been making the annual pilgrimage to the tournament with my usual traveling crew of Kent Moore of Philadelphia and Casey Clark and Dr. Bruce Longest of Bruce. This year, Dr. Longest’s high school friend Brad Cliburn of Florence joined us as well.
Joel McNeece
In the dozen years I’ve been making the trip, Nashville has been the most frequented destination and will remain so with eight of the next 10 tournaments there with the only exceptions Tampa and St. Louis.
Very familiar now with the Nashville tournament scene, I looked for some new discoveries each morning while the rest of my crew was still tucked in their beds, except for Casey who was often headed to the treadmill – an obsession the rest of us can’t relate to.
One of my biggest personal changes, or curses, as I advance in years is the inability to sleep late, so in Nashville I took to the streets to explore each morning. The first day involved a tour of the Johnny Cash Museum, which was outstanding. I love the Man in Black’s music, but the highlight of the tour was a motorcycle honoring Cash built by Jim Holstein.
The other morning adventures involved true history exploration, touring the war memorials around the state Capitol a few blocks from our hotel and the wonderful statues that flank all sides of the Capitol grounds.
I loved the giant statue of Sergeant Alvin C. York, the Nashville native who was one of the most decorated American soldiers in World War I. He received the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine gun nest, taking 32 machine guns, killing 20 German soldiers, and capturing 132 others.
I wasn’t aware the unforgettable statue of Andrew Jackson on horse back that anchors Jackson Square in New Orleans is a duplicate of one outside the Nashville Capitol. There’s also a third in Washington, D.C. Standing on the Capitol steps and looking at Jackson, considered by most the “Founding Father” of the state of Tennessee, sitting tall in the saddle gave the appearance of him riding across the Nashville skyline.
Just around the corner stood a statue of the 17th president of the United States Andrew Johnson, not to be confused with Andrew Jackson, previously mentioned, who was the seventh U.S. president. Johnson, a native of North Carolina who settled in Tennessee, is best known as Abraham Lincoln’s vice-president, assuming the presidency after Lincoln was assassinated.
The 11th president of the United States, James Knox Polk, is buried on the grounds of the Capitol in Nashville. His modest grave site noted his successes with foreign policy during his tenure as president (1845-49), particularly his leadership in the Mexican-American War.
The most interesting of the exhibits to me personally was the most controversial. Standing most prominently at the front steps of the Capitol is the fascinating Edward C. Carmack who was an attorney, newspaperman, and political figure who served in Congress and unsuccessfully ran for governor of Tennessee.
Carmack, who served as editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville during it’s first year and later the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, is best known for his “Pledge to the South” – a speech he gave on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“The South is a land that has known sorrows; it is a land that has broken the ashen crust and moistened it with tears; a land scarred and riven by the plowshare of war and billowed with the graves of her dead; but a land of legend, a land of song, a land of hallowed and heroic memories.”
People don’t write or speak like that anymore, which is a shame.
I can’t say the same for his politics, however, which were nasty and reprehensible in many instances such as his editorials attacking civil rights activist Ida B. Wells. That’s one of many reasons there have been many efforts over the years by some groups to get his statue removed from the Capitol grounds.
Carmack’s fiery career ended when he was gunned down on the streets of Nashville over something he had written in a newspaper editorial regarding Duncan Brown Cooper, a rival journalist and politician.
Email Joel McNeece at joelmcneece@gmail.com & follow him on Twitter @joelmcneece