- BY JAMES GILL | Contributing writer
- Sep 5, 2021 (Nola.com)
Now that New Orleans has officially disavowed its long homage to the Confederacy, you may be surprised when I tell you who will be turning in his grave.
The Southern states in the Civil War had fought for the same principles that now inspired his native Ireland in its struggle for independence from British rule, a distinguished visitor to New Orleans declared in 1882.
Oscar Wilde had a familial motive for drawing this dubious analogy, for his mother’s brother, John Elgee, had emigrated to Louisiana, where he prospered as a lawyer and judge. He soon embraced the mores of his new home, wound up owning a plantation worked by hundreds of slaves in Rapides Parish, and signed Louisiana’s Secession Ordinance in 1861. His son, Charles LeDoux Elgee, was a captain on the staff of Confederate Major General Richard Taylor. Both Elgees died before the end of the Civil War, but Wilde apparently prized the Confederate connections he had never met.
Although New Orleans had surrendered barely a year into the Civil War, once peace was restored, it enthusiastically embraced the myth of the Lost Cause as a noble defense of a superior civilization.
Wilde came to New Orleans in 1882, at the age of 27, in the course of a lecture tour that took him all over the United States and Canada. His literary triumphs, and subsequent disgrace and ruin, were some years in the future, although he had already achieved considerable renown as a wit and leader of the Aesthetic Movement.
Two years later, the statue of Robert E. Lee was to be hoisted onto to the lofty perch it occupied until 2017. That statue was the earliest of the four Confederate monuments that have now been purged from the streets of New Orleans.
Wilde declared that Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederate States of America, was the American he most wanted to meet because “the principles for which the South went to war cannot suffer defeat.”
Wilde might have come close to getting his wish when he was not quite 16 years old and Davis visited Dublin, in 1870. Wilde’s mother invited him over, but Davis sent his regrets that he was unable to “pay his respects in person to the Sister of his friend, the late Judge Elgee.”
Davis did oblige Wilde with an invitation to spend a night in 1882 at Beauvoir, his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The evening was quite a thrill for Davis’s daughter, Winnie, whose 18th birthday it was, but her father did not take to Wilde, evidently considering him to be too much of a fop. That was not an uncommon view of Wilde, who wore velvet jackets, satin breeches, black capes, buckled shoes and ruched shirts.
James Gill and Howard Hunter chronicle monuments controversy in ‘Tearing Down the Lost Cause’
Anyone familiar with the book I co-authored on the history of New Orleans’s Confederate monuments, and the controversy that led to their removal, may wonder why Wilde was not mentioned in it. The answer is that I, probably in common with most people, never suspected that “The Importance of Being Earnest” was written by a Confederate sympathizer.
But that is what Wilde was. According to the Daily Picayune, he was able to persuade himself that the Confederacy and the Irish resistance were similarly committed to a “struggle for autonomy, self-government for a people.”
Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.
