History may not repeat itself, but could it rhyme?
Civil War historian Dr. Michael R. Bradley raised that possibility Thursday at The Rotary Club of McMinnville during his homage to Sam Davis, known as the “boy hero of the confederacy.” The 21-year-old Davis, son of a prosperous Smyrna plantation owner, was hanged Nov. 27 1863 after a Union courts martial at Pulaski.
After his capture with incriminating documents on Union movements and fortifications, Davis faced his death sentence with calm resolve and the determination not to reveal his collaborators in espionage against the Northern army then occupying Middle Tennessee.
“If I had 1,000 lives to lose, I would lose them all before I would betray a friend,” he told his Union captors, who had offered to spare his life and set him free if he would just give up their names, Bradley said.
In an effort calculated to force that information out of their prisoner, Federal officers applied psychological pressure in the expectation he would save his own life at the expense of others. That calculation failed even as he stood on the gallows, Bradley said, because Sam Davis was “a man of integrity, a man of principle.”
Some 153 years later, U.S. Navy Capt. Jeff Kuss, piloting his FA18 fighter jet as one of the six members of the Blue Angels precision aerobatic squad, died in a fiery crash only 100 yards from Davis’s home near Smyrna. The jet clipped trees and power lines, barely missing the restored historical farmhouse, toward its thunderous impact in a field once tended by the “boy hero.”
Kuss, who had logged more than 1,200 hours of flight time, was practicing an aerial maneuver June 2, 2016 with his teammates in preparation for a demonstration in the annual Smyrna Airshow a couple of days later. The Blue Angels canceled their appearance, but the remainder of the show was presented, though under a cloud of sorrow over the tragedy.
With the explosive population and economic growth of Rutherford County, practically all of the area surrounding the preserved Davis home site was filled with houses, apartments and, notably, an elementary school. Bradley told the Rotarians he believed Kuss, in the critical last seconds of his stricken flight, made the decision to guide his jet into the one spot of open ground rather than ejecting to safety.
“He flew it into the ground.”
If he had ejected, the speaker observed, Kuss probably would have survived. But his aircraft would have fallen randomly, likely killing or injuring people on the ground.
Bradley, a Vanderbilt University PhD in history and retired 36-year professor at Motlow State Community College’s main campus near Tullahoma, further discusses his research on Sam Davis when he appears this week in the FOCUS interview series on WCPI 91.3.
The half-hour FOCUS conversation, which also reflects on the Civil War lives of ordinary civilians in Warren County and Middle Tennessee, airs this Tuesday at 5 p.m., Wednesday at 5:05 a.m.; Thursday at 1 p.m.; and Friday at 1:05 a.m.
Davis gave his life to protect friends
