Uncle Davey’s Americana, Civil War Antiques and Collectibles

by Tim Gilmore, 6/25/2023

When David Nelson was growing up in the 1970s in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, he felt such reverence for Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart “that it was like, instead of ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ it was ‘What Would Lee Do?’ or ‘What Would Stuart Do?’” Now, more than a century and a half after Appomattox — metonymy for Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant — Nelson’s Richmond has finally fallen.

Richmond’s former J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School has become Barack Obama Elementary. Richmond has removed Confederate cannons, celebratory highway markers and grand intimidating statues honoring Generals Lee and Ambrose Hill and Confederate President Jefferson Davis and envoy Matthew Fontaine Maury. More Confederate monuments lined Richmond’s streets than those of any other American city, as if Richmond told the rest of the country, “We still remain apart from the United States. We remain the Confederate States of America.”

Nelson, “Uncle Davey,” talks about growing up in Richmond, soaking into himself Richmond’s hagiography of the Confederacy, and how identifying with Richmond seemed to float him toward the 21^st century while keeping the ghosts of the Confederate States alive.

Speaking of Lee, Nelson speaks of Freeman, name doubly ironic, a free man who wrote of slavery and whose middle name was Southall. There’s still an elementary school just outside Richmond named Douglas Southall Freeman.

“Some people say Freeman wasn’t objective enough in writing about Lee,” Nelson says. “They say his feeling toward Lee was almost that he idolized him. Every day when Freeman went to work and again when he came home, he’d stop at the statue of Lee on horseback and salute him. I say that means he got it about right.” In a nearby bookcase stand all four volumes of Freeman’s biography of the general, which won the “tramp newspaperman,” as he called himself, the Pulitzer Prize in 1935.

Nelson opened Uncle Davey’s Americana in 1989, served as “commander” of the local “camp” of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans organization, and has become one of the premier collectors of Confederate memorabilia. If the name of the business seems confusing, since “Uncle Davey” focuses his interests in those who fought against the United States in the Civil War, some of the contents of Uncle Davey’s store are equally surprising.

The sign out front advertises “relics, books, photos, swords, muskets and currency,” and inside you find advertisements for reenactments at Olustee Battlefield, where Confederates won a surprising victory in Florida, and Confederate flag license plates and MAGA hats.

You find the hollow bullets known as Minié balls and actual powder horns fashioned from cow horns and blackface golliwog dolls and books fomenting the devious and fictitious narrative that black Southerners served the Confederacy in defense of slavery, but you also find objective histories in bookcases – like Dan Schafer’s Thunder on the Water: The Civil War in Northeast Florida and, on Lincoln, the populist Chicago poet Carl Sandburg and Pulitzer-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Nearby I spy spinning wheels and antique cash registers and a framed copy of that 1920 John Ward Dunsmore painting Betsy Ross and the First Stars and Stripes, 1777.

“Standing under the tallest tree at the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, a young David Nelson picked up a leaf that had fallen to the Virginia earth.” So began a 1999 Associated Press profile by Jacksonville’s Ron Word that ran in newspapers nationally. “Standing under that tree and picking up that leaf,” Nelson told Word, “I just got chill bumps all over me thinking that Robert E. Lee most likely stood under that same tree.”

One room of Uncle Davey’s feels like a shrine to Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The room centers on a kind of triptych of generals in ormolu-esque frames. Forrest, sallow with sunken cheeks, glares out from the middle painting, smaller portraits of Lee and Stuart on either side, each separated by a wall sconce. Underneath, steel drawers labeled by subject hold laminated photo reproductions and documents. A Nathan Bedford Forrest drawer opens to scores of copies of the general’s rat-like visage.

In January 2014, when local activists were working to change the name of N.B. Forrest High School, from which I graduated in 1992, Uncle Davey was on the front lines of defending the name. Once scores of schools named Forrest had dotted the Southern landscape, but now Jax had one of the last. Folio Weekly’s Susan Cooper Eastman spoke with Nelson and said he summed “the argument up nicely.”

It went, in Eastman’s words, like this: “Yes, Forrest was a slave trader, but that was perfectly legal back then, and it’s not right to judge historical figures by modern morality. Also, he was nice to his slaves. He tried to keep slave families together.” Then Eastman quotes historian Albert Castel, 1959, on the April 1864 Fort Pillow Massacre: “Not only had the Confederates [under General Nathan Bedford Forrest] murdered most of the [United States] garrison after it had surrendered, but they had buried Negro soldiers alive” and “set fire to tents containing Federal wounded.”

Nelson rebutted that Forrest showed up late to his own show and shut the atrocities down. Why else would President Andrew Johnson, who’d remained with the U.S. even as his home state of Tennessee seceded to the Confederacy, have pardoned him? Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner’s response: “Every war criminal in history says that he didn’t know. [But Forrest] was in command. He was responsible for what happened. That’s why his name was on the school.”

In 1999, Uncle Davey told the AP, “This is not some redneck shop. It is truly a memorial to the War Between the States.” In that sense, it’s true that his store sells “Americana.” The word doesn’t require that it distinguish with which American nation – the USA or the CSA – it sides.

Then comes the eternal rat’s-nest lemniscate of trying to talk to Confederate defenders. “That flag,” Nelson told Ron Word, pointing to the Confederate flag, “never stood for racism.” It gets so tedious.

Even though the Ordinances of Secession from every Southern state choosing to leave the U.S. for the Confederacy named defense of its investment in slavery as its cause. Even though on March 21, 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said, in his infamous Cornerstone Speech, that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid,” that its “corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

Standing with his hands out over a display case, wearing a ring showing a Confederate flag, Nelson told Word, “There is nothing wrong with that flag,” though Stephens called “African slavery, as it exists among us, the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization,” and said that “This, our new government, [the Confederacy], is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth, that slavery subordination to the superior race is [the ‘negro’s’] natural and normal condition.”

For years before opening his shop, Nelson taught history in Duval County Public Schools. He loved praising his Confederate heroes. He loved teaching Florida’s once-required “Americanism vs. Communism” high school course and says, “When students came out of my class, they didn’t have any doubt about what side they were on.” Apparently, here also, “Americanism” didn’t differentiate between USA and CSA, though United States and Confederate troops killed 620,000 of each other during the Civil War.

Nelson misses teaching history in the classroom, but in his shop, he’s found a better way to teach it. His audience is smaller, but it’s devoted. He speaks of students being “victims” of desegregation busing in the ’70s. He stares at the floor, purses his lips and slowly moves his head from side to side. “That right there’s when it all started,” he says mournfully.

Part of the problem with confronting David Nelson is that he’s such a nice guy. He doesn’t come out in a Klan hood. He doesn’t froth and foam at the mouth and blow steam out his ears like Trump and DeSantis. Unlike The Museum of Southern History, he trades both in blatantly racist fictitious non-history and in legitimate sources with a side in antiques.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe he sells more muskets and spinning wheels than claptrap about how slaves loved slavery. Instead of meeting you at the door with the n-word and a shotgun, he just looks sad. He looks like a decent, kind, sad man who doesn’t understand why the world has turned against what he loves. It humanizes him, makes him sympathetic, but it doesn’t make what he stands for any less toxic or dangerous.