Sometime in the spring of 1893, Cassie Kirby Smith contacted Alexander Darnes, one of Florida’s first formally trained Black doctors. She shared news of a memorial honoring her recently deceased husband, Edmund Kirby Smith, a former Confederate general and professor at the University of the South.
Though Cassie’s original communication has not survived, Darnes’ reply has, and it suggests that someone made a special request: Might he be so kind to share a few words, destined for a Confederate veterans’ publication, about Cassie’s dear spouse?
Darnes agreed, and in a self-described “humble attempt” that ran almost 20 handwritten pages, Darnes extolled the virtues of the man, who was among the last Southern generals to surrender—more than a month after Robert E. Lee negotiated the end of the Civil War.
“He was a generous, virtuous Christian gentleman … a brave soldier with a benevolent turn of mind and heart of a nobleman,” Darnes wrote. “I had a good opportunity to see and know much of this good and most excellent gentleman in his private as well as in his public life. I speak truthfully when I say he was no slave to any habit whatever that was not good”—not drinking, gambling, swearing or other raucous behaviors.
That was high praise indeed, for Darnes had accompanied Kirby Smith across the country and beyond as his enslaved manservant. They’d been stationed at Jalapa and Veracruz during the Mexican-American War, and when that conflict ended, they headed to West Point, where the bespectacled and studious Kirby Smith taught math to soldiers. Darnes and Kirby Smith then traveled the West together during campaigns against Native peoples resisting American encroachment. And eventually, as he recounted in his long letter, Darnes was nearby when Kirby Smith took a shot in the shoulder at the First Battle of Bull Run, near Manassas, Virginia.
Privilege tends to create archives. Anyone today who wants to learn more about Kirby Smith can go to the University of North Carolina, where his archival collection contains more than 2,000 personal and family items spanning from 1776 to 1906—everything from diaries to stock certificates. His military travels; his administration of the sprawling Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department (which included parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas and points west in then-Indian Territory); and his geographically sprawling family meant that his letters landed in archives far and wide. His camp trunk, a traveling footlocker, now rests in the Smithsonian. Thousands of preserved plant samples he collected reside in a University of Florida museum. In the 1950s, Kirby Smith was the subject of an award-winning biography. Until recently, there was a Kirby Smith Middle School in Florida and a Kirby Smith dormitory at Louisiana State University. The Jacksonville “camp” of the Sons of Confederate Veterans still bears his name, as does a chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Tennessee. Famously, a statue of Kirby Smith was installed in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol in 1922, where it remained until it was replaced in 2022 by a statue honoring the African American educator Mary McLeod Bethune. The sculptor of the Kirby Smith likeness, a fellow Floridian, was able to use one of the general’s actual army coats to size him up. Occasionally, eBay vendors still sell Christmas tree ornaments, pillow shams and T-shirts with Kirby Smith’s image.