Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/364

 EMMA SANSOM, HEROINE OF IMMORTAL COURAGE. By MARY BANKHEAD OWEN, in the Montgomery Advertiser. .—Emma Sansom was born at Social Circle, Walton County, Ga., in 1847. Her father removed his family to the farm near Gadsden, Ala., in 1852. In 1864 she married C. B. Johnson, a Confederate soldier of the 10th Alabama Regiment. She died in Calloway, Texas, in 1900, leaving five sons and two daughters.

On July 4, 1907, there was unveiled in Gadsden, Ala., near the site of her immortal deed of courage, a monument to Emma Sansom, the Confederate heroine.

No such signal of honor has been bestowed upon any other woman participant in the daring deeds of those epic years in our history embraced in the early sixties of the nineteenth century.

It is true that a memorial tomb has been placed above the grave of Winnie Davis, in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, because she was tenderly cherished as the "Daughter of the Confederacy," having been born to the family of the new republic's President during the existence of that historic government; but the conditions are not comparable.

The United Sons of Confederate Veterans have in operation plans by which they propose erecting in every Confederate State one splendid monument of uniform type to the "Women of the Confederacy." The citizens of Macon and of Sandersville, Ga., respectively, have laid corner-stones of proposed monuments; and Captain E. White has reared a shaft to them in Confederate Park, Fort Mill, South Carolina, but so far, to the girl heroine of Alabama the distinction belongs of having reared in her honor an individual monument, which bears upon its pedestal her figure in Italian marble, and in relief upon the base, scenes from the incidents which gave her fame, together with epigramimatic inscriptions that perpetuate that fame for all time in history.