Just how much life is left in Confederate ghosts became clear to the world, at the latest, with the election of Donald J. Trump. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents hate crimes, reported a huge spike in the first ten days after the election alone. “I do not think there’s any question that Trump is the cause,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. Suddenly it was acceptable to express the fury that had been rising since a black family moved into the White House. A church burned in Mississippi, a swastika sprayed on a Pennsylvania wall, Confederate flags defiantly raised from Florida to Colorado. No one who knew the South was surprised, for the ghosts had been present all along. Stored in some German attics are boxes of carefully wrapped china decorated with swastikas, but Southern homes display their Confederate memorabilia proudly, and Southern stores make considerable profits selling it.
Nor is the display of loyalty to the Lost Cause a private affair. It’s part of the public arena. Consider Atlanta, which proudly anointed itself capital of the New South not long after the end of the Civil War. Today the city is home to two million African Americans, a series of black mayors, and a thriving hip-hop industry. In addition to the inevitable Martin Luther King Boulevard, Atlanta’s streets pay tribute to less famous civil rights leaders: Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Donald Lee Hollowell. But just sixteen miles outside Atlanta is Stone Mountain, the world’s largest piece of solid granite. At 1,686 feet, it dwarfs the pine and dogwood that surround it, compelling any human in its neighborhood to look up and feel small. Surrounded by a park featuring a steamboat, a petting zoo, and a chintzy re-creation of a Wild West village, it is Georgia’s premier tourist attraction.
There’s no way to tell how many of the four million people who visit each year come for the bas-relief carved on the mountain’s face. It’s a feat of engineering that’s hard to ignore entirely, but it’s possible to enjoy the park’s other attractions, like the miniature train that, somewhere along the ride around the mountain, gets attacked by swooping actors dressed as Indians. I remember whooping it up with the rest of them as a child of seven or eight. The steady, upright Confederate generals carved into the rock only cover, in the end, a fraction of the granite. The train ride was more interesting.
Trips to Stone Mountain were an occasional Saturday treat. My parents never talked about this monument to Confederate glory. The sculpture was first planned in 1915, in the heyday of that Lost Cause historical revisionism that rebranded the Civil War as a noble fight for Southern freedom, and Reconstruction as a violent effort by ignorant ex-slaves and mercenary Yankees to debase the honor of the South in general, and its white women in particular. If you can stand it, watch Birth of a Nation, shown in Woodrow Wilson’s White House that year. A movie milestone, Birth of a Nation was the highest-grossing film ever made until Gone with the Wind came some twenty years later, and between the two of them, the myth of the Lost Cause was blasted throughout the United States. Birth of a Nation is technically and ideologically cruder than Margaret Mitchell’s classic, which makes its message all the clearer. As one of the silent film’s captions puts it, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.” Even a non-Aryan may be swept, for a moment, by the combination of music, mob violence, and melodrama to feel a tinge of relief as the knights ride to avenge the maiden’s death—just as you felt in your childhood watching the cavalry ride to rescue white settlers from what were not yet called Native Americans. That’s the power of movies, even if you know how often the charge of rape was not only a trumped-up excuse for a lynching but a fantasy concocted to conceal the truth of sexual violence—that countless enslaved women were raped, and often impregnated, by their white masters. It wasn’t a truth apparent to Woodrow Wilson, who wrote, “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that Wilson made Birth of a Nation the first film to be shown in the White House. That quote, used as a caption in the film itself, was taken from Wilson’s own History of the American People.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy originally planned for a Stone Mountain monument that would capture the full panoply of the Lost Cause story, with thousands of Confederate soldiers marching across the mountainside. The vision raised no objections in the Georgia of 1915. It was a year when the Klan celebrated the lynching of the Jewish Atlantan Leo Frank, and its own renewal, with a late-night ceremony atop the mountain itself. Nor was the rest of the country opposed to what was called a monument to reconciliation.1 (If you find the word reconciliation an odd way to describe triumphalist sculptures, you’ve forgotten that reconciliation between white and black folk wasn’t on the agenda. Reconciliation between white members of the opposing armies was to be achieved by valorizing the defeated, and ignoring the cause for which they’d fought.) Stone Mountain was intended to rival the Great Sphinx, but internal disagreement and funding problems led to the dismissal of the original sculptor, who went on to ply his grandiose trade at Mount Rushmore. Decorated only with the head and the horse of Robert E. Lee, the mountain was left untouched by human hands for decades.
Work on the monument, downsized to portray three generals without troops, was resumed in the 1960s. Ask yourself why, after nearly forty years of neglect, anyone would bother to raise the sums necessary to put workmen on precarious ledges in order to carve the image of long-dead generals. The first initiatives to finish the bas-relief were undertaken shortly after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation illegal. By the time the civil rights movement had achieved further victories, money and men had been found to complete what was, in effect, a giant fuck-you to the new order. Stone Mountain was only the biggest of such gestures that flourished through much of the South. It was symbolic enough to merit mention in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which expressed the hope that freedom will ring all the way from the curvaceous slopes of California to Stone Mountain of Georgia. Civil rights activists have proposed to set a large bell at the summit, using King’s resonant words to counteract the message of the gray generals; some have called for blasting off the whole damn carving. To date they have yet to persuade their fellow citizens, some of whom still use the mountain for Klan rallies.
The bas-relief is unavoidable, but it’s possible to overlook the worst features of the monument. My mother must have hustled us past the Stone Mountain Memorial Garden on the way to the train ride, so I was all the more disturbed to see it as an adult. It is dedicated to sacrifice and valor, words carved into the granite benches and underlined by quotes from Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Michel de Montaigne. Particularly striking is the quote from the American Founding Father Patrick Henry. Every American schoolchild knows his “Give me liberty or give me death”; chiseled into the Memorial Garden are the lines with which Henry preceded it: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God.” Didn’t the sons and daughters of the Confederacy notice the cognitive dissonance?
The makers of the Memorial Garden were not alone in turning truth upside down. One Southern historian wrote that “white youths found something to envy in the freedom of their [black] fellows’ feet from the cramping weight of shoes and the freedom of their minds from the restraints of school.”2 Others went so far as to argue that caring for their slaves was such a burden for the slaveholders that “the negro was the free man and the slaveholder was the slave.”3
Just to rule out any possible ambiguity, the space between garden and granite is traced by eleven paths, representing the eleven states of the Confederacy, leading down to the base like rays of a rising star. Each path is headed by plaques that purport to describe each state’s reasons for joining the Confederacy and each state’s contributions to it. Alabama blames the war on John Brown, whose “raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 set off a wave of anger in the state.”4 Fierce-looking portraits of Brown accompany the description of Alabama’s losses and hardships. The Mississippi plaque eschews threatening images in favor of a drawing of the state convention, at which 75 percent of the delegates voted for immediate and unilateral secession, for “The people of Mississippi viewed Republican victories in the 1860 elections as a threat to their rights and property.”5 The plaque omits the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, which spelled out what the abstract appeal to rights and property actually meant:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.6
Like the other plaques, the one dedicated to Mississippi forgoes any mention of the enslavement of black people, focusing instead on the suffering of white people.
If you want to make the Lost Cause narrative seem intellectually hefty, you call it the Dunning School of history. The beliefs that the war was not about slavery and that Reconstruction was a disaster were spread academically by W. A. Dunning, a Columbia history professor during the Jim Crow reign of terror, and his students. You might compare him to Ernst Nolte, who ignited the Historians’ Debate by arguing that the Nazis gleaned every wretched trick they knew from the Bolsheviks, who really started the war. A monument in Germany with Nolte’s explanation of the causes of war would never get off the ground. Yet here at the mountain, the Dunning School is literally written in stone.
Elsewhere, you need help to read some of the signposts. Plenty of evidence is written into the landscape: the statues of Johnny Reb raised before the courthouses that anchor a broad square in the center of every town, standing guard to preserve the legacy of heroic resistance to Northern tyranny. All those stately columns gracing mansion porticoes look elegant till you know what ideology was written into the architecture. The Greek Revival movement was not just an ode to the birthplace of Western democracy. It brandished a key claim of the antebellum South: great civilizations are founded on slavery. (The fact that Greek slaves’ lives were considerably better than American ones was never mentioned.) Southerners were proud that prewar European visitors to America generally considered the South to be more civilized than the rougher regions of the North.7
You can find a shade of that civilization in Natchez, Mississippi, a national center of wealth in the days when cotton was key to the international economy. In 1841, Natchez was the richest town in America, and its perch on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River spared it from the Union bombardments that destroyed most of neighboring Vicksburg. As a consequence, it contains more magnificent mansions within a couple of square miles than anyplace else in the South, though the town itself now looks drab, almost shuttered. A couple of downtown blocks of brick and wood house a few antiques shops and an indifferent restaurant. Real life takes place in the suburbs and malls, except for the representation of life on display every year during the Natchez Spring Pilgrimage.
No one who has seen it can repeat the cliché that Americans don’t care about history. The pilgrimage centerpiece is the Historic Natchez Tableaux, a performance of music, dance, and occasional storytelling highlighting scenes of the town’s past, presented by enthusiastic locals. The clerk at my hotel said that four of her children were in it, and she told me to watch for her son. “His teacher says he’s such a pretty dancer, he would have been the talk of the town before the war. Now I ask you: What sixteen-year-old wants to hear he would have been cool two hundred years ago?”
Seated in the auditorium, I had no way to make out which boy was her son, but I wondered what things were like in 1932, when the Natchez Garden Club began to organize these pageants. This one had clearly been modernized. All the white women and girls wore hoopskirts and bows as they danced round a maypole, and the soldiers in gray swung their belles to the tune of “Dixie,” but the pageant did make an attempt to acknowledge the reality of slavery—though not without pointing out that Yankees were slave traders. One tableau depicted the wedding of Confederate president Jefferson Davis to a local beauty, which took place at a house that is now an expensive bed-and-breakfast proudly advertising that happy event. Just after that tableau, however, was a little skit that decried how hard it was for slaves to wed. It even acknowledged what often happened after enslaved people were permitted to marry: a black woman about to be sold away from her child sings a mournful version of “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Other black women introduced themselves as “proud to work building up Melrose Plantation for twenty years, and we protected it when intruders wanted to take the fine furniture in the family’s absence.” The loyal slave who hid the family silver from marauding Yankees is an old Jim Crow trope, though it doubtless happened on occasion. Whether the Natchez tribe after which the town was named would have recognized themselves under the title “Two Cultures Collide” that marked the segment on Native American history is another question. The tableaux ended on a high note as former enslaved men, now Union soldiers, demolished the market where they’d been sold away from their families, though it was a white Union officer who gave the order to tear it down. The crippled Rebel in rags shook hands with the tall Yankee in dress uniform. The master of ceremonies directed the audience to rise and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” along with the cast.
“The British use their history to comfort themselves,” said Neil MacGregor. Southerners who created the Lost Cause narrative set out to do the same. As the Confederate general Beauregard wrote in 1875, “I believe now, as I did when I fired the first gun in 1861 and one of the last in 1865, that the cause we upheld was a just and holy one” and looked forward to “after having taken as active a part in making history, to see that it is correctly written.”8
The writing of that history portrayed the antebellum South as a sweet, slow place where planters’ pretty daughters danced under moonlight and magnolias while placid, loyal slaves served iced tea, rocked their masters’ babies, and sang soft spirituals. When this Arcadia was threatened by base and brutal Yankees, the fathers and brothers of those hoopskirted girls took up arms to defend it, much as their forefathers had done a hundred years earlier when declaring the colonies’ independence from their British rulers. (Among many things left out of the story is the fact that few who actually fought in the Confederate army were slaveholders. The wealthier planters—those owning more than twenty slaves—were exempt from army service in order to protect the home front from possible uprisings of those happy, loyal enslaved people.) Despite the unmistakable words of the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, the Lost Cause narrative insisted that the war was not fought over slavery, but over the issue of states’ rights—an abstract phrase that veils the question of what, exactly, Southern states thought they had a right to do. The valiant efforts of some million Confederate soldiers, the narrative continues, were no match for the greater numbers and industry the Yankees had at their disposal, and so the Cause was lost. The Yankees made defeat all the more bitter by imposing Reconstruction. As one Southern chronicler put it, “They were subjected to the greatest humiliation of modern times: their slaves were put over them.”9
It’s easy enough to understand the appeal of this story for a defeated Confederate general, and perhaps for his daughters and sons. More puzzling is the way the story, slowly and hazily, came to capture the hearts of the North. Weary of war, eager for reconciliation, and keen to get on with the business of industrialization that was changing the American economy, Northerners conceded most of the mythmaking to the South. Not many had been enthusiastic abolitionists anyway. The view that everything was tragic, and everyone was valiant, paved the way for the Compromise of 1877, when a disputed election was settled by a promise to withdraw the federal troops that had guarded the rights of newly freed African Americans. This effectively ended Reconstruction and began open season on those black men and women who were determined to exercise those rights that emancipation, along with three constitutional amendments, had proclaimed. But just as the foggy mantra we were all tragic victims made the compromise easier for Northern whites to swallow, once established, it reinforced that view itself. Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind were only the most famous blockbusters that grabbed the nation’s attention. Hollywood turned out hundreds of films suggesting that the war was a tragic misunderstanding, including two starring Shirley Temple, who made the Lost Cause look not only noble and valiant but incontestably cute.
In 1864, General Sherman’s army laid waste to a wide swath of land between Atlanta and Savannah. The song “Marching Through Georgia” described the devastation as “a thoroughfare for freedom and her train.” In the decades after the war, the song was so popular that Sherman swore, in 1890, never to attend another parade unless “every band in the United States has signed an agreement not to play ‘Marching through Georgia’ in his presence.”10 Nonetheless, the heroic Union narrative faded as war memories did. An immigrant today who wants to become a U.S. citizen must pass a multiple-choice test composed of a hundred questions about American history and tradition. Only one of them allows for more than one correct answer: Name one problem that led to the Civil War. Slavery? Economic reasons? States’ rights? Check any one of them, and the Department of Immigration will count you right.
African Americans continued to insist that the war was a war of liberation, and as early as 1870 Frederick Douglass complained that Americans were “destitute of political memory.”11 “The South has suffered, to be sure,” he said, “but she has been the author of her own suffering.”12 The war, Douglass continued, was not a sectional conflict, but “a war of ideas, a battle of principles … a war between old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.” It was not a fight “between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, but it was a war between men of thought as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.”13 On Memorial Day 1871 Douglass spoke at the mass grave of the unknown Union dead at the newly created Arlington Cemetery: “May … my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that … bloody conflict … I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?”14
Black folk were not the only ones to remember. Abolitionists and philosophers insisted on speaking truth about the moral and political struggles of their day. The monuments over which Americans are now battling were raised after the war in a concerted effort to defeat truth itself. Curiously, the Lost Cause narrative was partially revived in the work of historians in the 1970s who argued that the war was an economic conflict. By that time, the idea that wars may be fought for ideas and principles, so clear to Frederick Douglass and William James, was wholly out of fashion for anyone unwilling to risk the charge of naïveté.
By modernizing the Lost Cause narrative, Natchez preserves it. Though I never heard anyone use the word evil, modern Southerners agree that slavery was wrong. It’s unlikely that the 1932 version of the tableaux featured, much less celebrated, the destruction of the slave market by black men in Union colors, but even the contemporary version of Natchez history highlights the breadth of the gap in white memory. Everything after emancipation is a blank, as if nothing else happened between the races at all. Now the war is over, we can unite as one big family in singing the national anthem and go our separate ways until next year’s pilgrimage.
It’s significant that Natchez’s annual self-celebration, like that of other Southern towns, is framed in religious terms. A pilgrimage is a holy expedition, a journey to sacred space. Seeking meaning in suffering, Lost Cause theologians conceived the South as a nineteenth-century Jesus, innocent and martyred but destined to rise again. The pilgrimage to the past is a form of reassurance and prayer: that our sins will be redeemed if we present them with a dollop of remorse in a sea of innocence. The ritual combines pagan ancestor worship with Christian sacralization of suffering. There’s even a faint smell of theodicy. With an advertisement reading “There is cotton to pick at Frogmore … DELTA MUSIC AND THE COTTON FIELDS THAT GAVE IT BIRTH,” the Natchez Pilgrimage brochure urges the visitor to cross the river to Louisiana and view an old plantation. Tourists are invited to the working cotton plantation to “understand how the wealth was created in the Natchez District, and experience a thorough explanation of slave culture” before visiting the Delta Music Museum “to listen and learn about the music interwoven in the culture.” Everything happens for the best, said the seventeenth-century German philosopher Leibniz. If those cotton fields gave birth to an art form so rich that Mississippi now markets itself as the birthplace of America’s music, wasn’t it a blessing in disguise?
However warped the presence of history, the South does at least present it. This was reason enough for me to be there, even though Martin Luther King said that the hatred he saw on the faces of protesters outside of Chicago was fiercer than anything he’d seen in the segregated South. He was there to focus attention on the struggle to integrate housing, of which it’s often said, “In the South they don’t care how close you are, as long as you don’t get too big; in the North, they don’t care how big you are, as long as you don’t get close.”15 Northern neighborhoods and Northern schools are still often more segregated than Southern ones. There, few white people get close enough to black people to have their stories seep into consciousness.
In the South, the street etiquette that takes place, or does not, every time black and white people meet on a sidewalk makes history inescapable. Do I flinch when a black man moves to let me pass, knowing that in earlier days that move was made in fear? Black men who did not drop their eyes and step into the street when a white woman passed risked a lynching. Or is the gesture simply Southern in a place where white and black men instinctively rush to open a door or pick up a dropped pen for a lady? Street dilemmas are so intense that the repercussions can be analyzed for hours. Any Southern space you pass through will force a reminder of racial history, even if it doesn’t contain a signpost commemorating one or another battle site. Thousands of these sites stud Southern landscapes. Confederate armies never made it past Gettysburg, the one significant Northern space dedicated to Civil War history.
Large and lovely houses, some still complete with the plantations that built them, dot the South. They are usually repurposed as bed-and-breakfasts, complete with servants in antebellum costume, and favored as wedding sites. The Whitney Plantation, an hour north of New Orleans, is completely different. Smithsonian magazine described it as America’s Auschwitz. Whitney does borrow one feature from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. At the beginning of the tour, the visitor receives a tag with the name and imagined likeness of a former slave. On the back of the tag is a quote from one of the thousands of interviews from the federal WPA public works project. Like most of the New Deal programs, this was aimed at creating jobs during the Great Depression—in this case, jobs for writers. Unlike many of the programs, this one yielded long-term treasure, allowing us to hear forever the last voices of those who were enslaved. My tag represented Mary Ann John, who was eighty-five years old at the time she was interviewed. She was quoted:
I was ten years old when peace was declared … what I knows, I was borned with, for I never went to school a day in my whole life. I don’t know A from B. One of my sisters was born right in de fields. Dey just dug two holes … She gets down in dat hole and gives birth to de baby and de baby just rolls out into de hole. Den de boss has someone to take de baby to de house, an’ makes my ma get up and keep right on hoeing; I never will forgit.
Other features of the tour are designed to shift your identification from slaveholder to slave. The central focus of most plantation tours is the Big House, which invites you to imagine yourself as Scarlett O’Hara. At the Whitney Plantation, the Big House is visited last, through the back door, where house slaves would have entered. The tour is focused on enslaved people’s lives: the rough cabins they lived in, the huge copper pots they used to boil and stir the cane into sugar that was taken down the river to New Orleans and thence to the world. They often lost limbs to third-degree burns received while pouring hot syrup from cauldron to cauldron. There are metal cells where slaves were kept before auction, often for months if it served market interests; the prices for black bodies always increased before harvest season. As grim as the rust-colored cells were, they often brought one advantage: to prepare them for market, the slaves were fed considerably better than they would be afterward, their bodies often greased with butter to make them glow with a healthy-looking shine.
There are artworks created for the museum: a memorial to the children who died on the plantation, a series of severed heads depicting the leaders of the 1811 uprising that took place nearby. It was the largest slave uprising in the United States. A plaque reproduces the court judgment handed down when the rebellion was suppressed:
The Tribunal decides that the death penalty will be applied to them without torture, and the heads of the executed will be cut off and planted on the end of a pike at the place where each convict will suffer the right punishment due to his crimes in order to frighten by terrible example all malefactors who might in the future make an attempt on the public peace.
The most compelling monuments are the slaves’ own words, collected from WPA testimonies and etched on granite tablets placed in long rows. The descriptions of what was done to hungry children are so painful that I shed tears. I glanced at the other members of my tour group. There were some twenty of us, white, black, and Asian American, a couple from Holland. Several were families. The pretty, young guide was a knowledgeable black woman in running shoes who grew up a few miles from the site. None of us revealed very much.
The Whitney Plantation’s owner has had to be more expansive. John Cummings is a retired New Orleans lawyer and real estate investor who spent sixteen years and $8 million to construct the museum. He had liberal leanings before that, for he successfully handled several civil rights cases, but when he bought the property as an investment, he realized he had no idea what slavery was. “And this is not black history, it’s our history, my history.”16 He hired a Senegalese historian, Dr. Ibrahima Seck, as director of research while he spent years going to weddings and funerals in the surrounding community, explaining his vision until they accepted it. “It’s people like me who started this mess, dealing in slaves. Why would it be a surprise if some white kid came along and tried to do something that would correct what his own ancestors did?” As Cummings pointed out when the museum opened in 2014, there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Israel, Germany, and Poland combined, but not one devoted to slavery. “By neglecting slavery, we have failed to acknowledge the most significant event in our collective history.”17 His mission is “to present the facts of slavery to all I could find, so everyone would understand how strongly the deck was stacked against African Americans. Plenty of people ask why can’t they get over it? 150 years after emancipation. But unless you know what the ‘it’ is, you can’t get over it. We’re trying to define the ‘it.’”18
John Cummings now spends most of his days at the plantation. Nearing eighty, he often crosses it in a golf cart. As research continues on the lives of the men and women who were enslaved there and on other Louisiana plantations, the museum has rightly received national acclaim, but the experience of reading that testimony on those grounds is more powerful than anything you can read about it.
Some smaller projects deserve equal attention. In 1934, five ladies of the Holly Springs Garden Club visited the Natchez Spring Pilgrimage and decided to start their own. The pretty little town in the hills of northern Mississippi was never as grand as Natchez, but it too has a wealth of intact old mansions that were spared destruction because Union troops occupied the town in the first years of the war. The annual Holly Springs Pilgrimage furthers tourism with talks, period music, and tours of town homes, some complete with Civil War reenactors playing a panoply of Confederate soldiers.
In front of the largest house on the tour, a group of five or six men dressed as different companies of Confederate soldiers was camped on the lawn when I arrived. A round-faced, clean-shaven man in his thirties, sitting on a horse, told me he represented the First Mississippi Cavalry. “Just think about those guys going into combat after coming all that way in the saddle from south Mississippi. There was freezing rain all the way. They had no supply wagons; all their supplies were what they could carry right here.” He tapped the front of his saddle. “I just think it’s a great honor to represent them. If we don’t remember this history, it will come back and repeat itself.”
I could honestly nod in agreement, until I asked what he meant.
“I’m afraid of what you see in the news, taking out this ancestry, tearing down statues in New Orleans, talking about taking down the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis—”
“We went to the Forrest birthday memorial,” interjected his companion, a handsome gray-bearded man on foot. “We rode around, fired a musket in the air. Not a lot of space to do much in that park. What really grabs me is that the Forrest family donated that land to Memphis. He and his wife are buried there. They should leave it alone.”
The Forrests were disinterred from the original cemetery where they’d been buried and placed in the elaborate monument-cum-tomb close to the Memphis city center in 1904, when Southern commitment to memorializing the Lost Cause was in full force. In 2015, however, following the Charleston massacre, the Memphis City Council voted to disinter them again and send the remains to their original burying ground, for Forrest was not just any old Confederate general. He first achieved renown for ordering a massacre of black Union troops who had surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. And though there are still historians arguing over whether he was guilty of war crimes, none dispute that he was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly before his death, sincerely or not, he did disavow the Klan. His funeral was the largest in Memphis history.
“They won,” added a hard-faced, fiftyish mounted man.
“Who won?” I asked.
“All those universities pushing communism, socialism, the indoctrination that started back in the sixties. They won.”
“They didn’t win the White House,” I countered. It was April 2017.
“I don’t know about that yet,” he replied.
The men were eager to reminisce about their fake battles. “We did Shiloh two weeks ago and there were one hundred seventy forces.”
“Who plays the Yankees?”
“We do. Though when you get a real big battle like Shiloh, they come down from Ohio and Michigan. But we’ll do it too,” said the hard-faced one. “I don’t mind putting on a blue coat. I’d prefer not to, but I will.”
“It itches worse than the gray one,” said his comrade. The men laughed.
“The funny thing is, we were in Gettysburg a couple of years ago for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and we saw more Rebel flags and bumper stickers with Pennsylvania license plates than you see down here. Everybody wants to play the Confederates. Guess they like a dying cause.”
The young man on the horse teaches history in a high school in a small Mississippi town, and he asked what brought me to the Holly Springs Pilgrimage. When they heard I was a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi, which they consider a hotbed of socialist indoctrination, they became wary.
“You faculty?” asked the hard-faced man.
I replied that I’d been teaching a little, but my main work at the moment was writing a book.
“What’s it about?”
I reached for the formula I’d used before in situations where I hoped to keep my interlocutors talking about views I abhor. “I’m writing about the different ways Mississippians remember their history, all sides of it.”
“But you’re on our side, aren’t you?” The question came from the man whose hard face grew harder.
I hesitated for a moment that felt very long. “Probably not,” I said, exhaling slowly.
“What’s that mean?” His cold blue eyes fixed mine as he stared down from his horse.
“Got our weapons loaded?” called another, to a general round of laughter. There were six of them, two on horseback, all heavily armed. Inside the mansion, the ladies of the garden club were preparing for the ball, but the afternoon had darkened, the other tourists gone.
“Look,” I said finally, “I am not on the side of the Klan.”
“We’re not either. These aren’t Klan uniforms.”
“We don’t dress up in some stupid sheets.”
“I know,” I replied. “But you were talking about honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
“Well, he wasn’t Klan,” said the older reenactor. “He was offered the grand wizardship and turned it down.”
Checking sources later, I read that Forrest’s relation to the wizardship is still a matter for historical dispute, but not his role in founding the Klan.
The young history teacher looked even more earnest than before. “I’d always taken history for granted,” he told me. “But after the Charleston shooting, when they started attacking everything Confederate, that got me interested in learning more.”
“Me too,” I answered. I did not elaborate.
“There are more Klan members in Indiana than in Mississippi,” added the history teacher. “Sure, money was made with slave labor, but the war was about taxes and federal tyranny.” He prided himself on being a history teacher who shows his students all sides of the story. He’d shown them a film about the Klan in the 1920s, when its membership was highest. “And they weren’t marching behind a Rebel flag; it was an American flag. So my students asked, ‘Why aren’t people calling to change the American flag?’”
“That’s just it,” said the hard-faced man. “They won. Who was Obama’s friend in the Weather Underground? Bill Ayers? All that shit they started in the sixties, they won. They hate America. They hate everything we stand for.”
The ladies of the garden club do not exactly welcome local efforts to combat such views. Following the signs to the library, where tickets for the pilgrimage are sold, I was greeted with a warm Southern smile, brightly gleaming teeth, and a map showing the mansions that were open for the weekend. As the hostess was pointing out the biggest ones, her blond face froze. I’d told her the main object of my visit: the “Behind the Big House” project that is dedicated to restoring the slave dwellings with the care usually devoted to the mansions that depended on them. “We’re not connected with they-em,” she drawled, emphasizing them just enough to indicate disapproval, not enough to signal contempt. It’s not nice, dear. Why dig up those old bones?
“Could you tell me where I can find them?” They were not listed on the map.
“I’m not rightly sure.”
The town is so small that she must have known. Across the room, another of the garden ladies was selling tickets for a festive luncheon. She eyed me with the sympathy any decent local would feel toward a lost out-of-towner. “If you go up the street two blocks and look in at the house on the corner, I’m sure they can tell you.”
No one inside the house on the corner wanted to talk about the rift with the garden club, with whom they had worked during the first year of their program. Behind the Big House began several years before the Whitney Plantation was restored. A very few citizens lobbied for a pilgrimage that told the whole story, including slave dwellings along with the homes of the slave owners. “We worked together for a year, but they decided they didn’t want controversy; they’d rather talk about furniture,” said one of the men who drives the project. He stopped short of criticizing his neighbors more sharply. In small Southern towns, the hope that not naming a problem might make it disappear still rules. In any case, you have to nod, smile, and chat with your opponents on the sidewalk. Even those committed to frank discussion are uneasy about spilling community secrets to a stranger.
Still, they told me quite a lot. David Person’s grandmother was related to the people who owned Montrose, the house where I met the reenactors. It’s the grandest house on the pilgrimage. “Alfred Brooks built that house as a wedding gift for his daughter, and then he took the whole wedding party to New York. Now, who paid for all that?” David speaks with a soft, slow drawl that cushions but does not mask his outrage. “It was all built on the institution of slavery.”
David is a retired lawyer who was born in San Antonio—“My mother went and married a guy from Texas”—where he learned to feel at home as a minority in the majority Hispanic community. “You better understand where you are and make it work. I have a great comfort with color.” But his extended family has been in Holly Springs “since they bought up all the cheap Chickasaw land in the 1830s,” so the local people accept him despite his political views. After six years studying at the London School of Economics, he left London, bought an old house in Holly Springs, and set out to clean up the traces of the thirteen hunting dogs the last owner had kept in her house. He felt obliged to restore it faithfully, but he had no idea where restoration would lead him. It was David’s neighbor, Chelius Carter, who set the project in motion.
While growing up in rural Tennessee, Chelius never questioned segregation. “The sun rose in the east, set in the west, that’s just the way it was,” he told me, though his ancestors were not big landowners, but “dirt farmers. If they owned any slaves, they probably worked alongside them.” A restoration architect who specializes in antebellum houses, he’d decided at an early age that he wanted to live in one. When he bought the place in Holly Springs, the fact that there were slave quarters in town had been lost to living memory. Inspecting the storage shed behind his new house, he was surprised to find a stairwell. Before becoming an architect, he’d worked as a telephone installer, so he was used to fiddling around in people’s attics. Under the insulation was a floor, and it dawned on him that this was where the slaves slept. He realized that this was culturally more important than the Big Houses in the area, since so few slave dwellings remain. He and his wife, Jennifer Eggleston, whom he calls the brains and beauty behind the project, began to envision a way to use this to tell the story of the enslaved population that made the Big House happen. In 2012, there was no similar effort in the entire country.
Yet there was Joseph McGill, a South Carolinian whose ancestors were enslaved. In 2010 he began the Slave Dwelling Project, his mission to sleep in every extant slave dwelling in the country. When I met him in 2017, he had slept in ninety-four, writing a blog about the history of each one. McGill is a short, dark man in his fifties who has always been passionate about history, but it wasn’t his work for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Charleston that led him to the Slave Dwelling Project. McGill spent many of his weekends as a Civil War reenactor, acting as a member of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first African American troops to serve in the Union Army. Tired of simply re-creating their battles, McGill decided to go further. Slave dwellings in America were rarely built with solid material, and those still standing were rotting from neglect. By calling attention to forgotten spaces, McGill hoped to call attention to those who lived and died within them.
McGill knew Eggleston and Carter, who were seeking to enlist other homeowners in showing the darker side of Southern history. Only two Holly Springs homeowners had joined them, but together with McGill and his friend Jodi Skipper, an African American professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Mississippi, they began to restore the dwellings that would illuminate the lives of those who lived in them. Carter’s goal is to create dialogue. “The two races don’t get together at church, at business, in school. We thought we could create meaningful dialogue over this terribly flawed and conflicted shared history. If me and my wife have a problem and put it in a box in a closet, that problem ain’t going away. It’s up in that closet waiting. This dialogue needed to happen generations ago. Not to talk about the people who contributed so much to Southern culture is basically cultural genocide.”
Like the owners of the homes on the Holly Springs Pilgrimage tour, the three Behind the Big House owners open their homes and welcome the tourists themselves, albeit without the hoopskirts that are obligatory in the pilgrimage homes. Chelius created an exhibit of charts describing the history of the cotton industry in Holly Springs, which he patiently shows to every visitor, explaining how cotton was global currency. In the kitchen, Michael Twitty, a Jewish African American culinary historian from New Orleans, served a succulent stew whose ingredients he declined to name. In the back of the Big House, Jodi Skipper and her graduate students, whom the rain had stopped from excavating further that day, welcomed me into the slave dwelling. Her description of every feature mirrors the exactitude you hear on the Big House tours: the utensils are not original, but collected by the owners; the hooks in the ceiling held cooking pots; the open fire cooked the meals for every family, enslaved or not. The children slept upstairs, perhaps in rough beds, perhaps on the floor. The restorations are all works in progress. A pitchfork and plaster shards leaned against the rough wooden planks of the cabin wall. A yellowed photo showed a former enslaved couple who came dressed in round hats and long coats to visit the place in 1924. Most of the visitors are white, sometimes coming by accident if they mistake the house in front for part of the pilgrimage, but African American visitors have been increasing, and school groups now ensure that hundreds of students visit the project every year.
Back in the Big House, I asked Chelius what influenced him. Was there a book or a conversation that had moved him away from the easy soft racism of his youth? “Naw,” he said. “It was just growing up.” Pressed again, he allowed that a Mark Twain quote meant a lot to him, though he couldn’t recall the exact words: exposure to other countries and other cultures is deadly to prejudice. He’d grown up in a family that was “about as fundamentalist as you can get—everything’s literal,” but had spent some time in his twenties as an archaeologist digging in the north Jordan desert. Exposure to other religions gave him a perspective he never found in the South. “You begin to see we’re all trying to get to the same places. Maybe on different buses.” Now he was raising his children to “be curious and question authority. Be the change in your world.”
At the next stop, Joseph McGill stood in the slave dwelling, telling the history of the house. He admired the way its owner, Mrs. Burton, kept and increased her wealth after she divorced. “She had an entrepreneurial spirit. According to the 1850 census, she owned eight slaves, and by the 1860 census there were eighty. She was a phenomenal woman.”
“Growing cotton?” I frowned. “We know how the cotton was produced.”
“Well, there is that,” he said, laughing. “But you’ve got to give her the fact that she was still quite a woman. And you’ve got to remember there were black slave owners too. Didn’t make it right, but that was the business model.”
McGill asks every visitor where they come from. A white woman from Olive Branch, Mississippi, asked him—gingerly—if he feels a presence in the cabins where he sleeps.
“If you’re looking for a presence, you can probably feel one, but I don’t look for the presences, because if communing with the ancestors was possible, I wouldn’t want to. They lived a life no one should have lived, and I don’t need them telling me about it. I’d be pissed off. I couldn’t talk to the owners in that frame of mind. I’m asking them to let me sleep in these spaces, after all.”
Mostly the homeowners are welcoming, often inviting him to dinner and asking about his travels. Whether moved by guilt or something foggier, they sometimes renovate the dwelling in advance of his visit. McGill is glad for anything that encourages the cabins’ preservation. More recently, white people have asked to join him. “Why not? I thought. Everybody needs to know this.” Now the people who join him to sleep in a slave dwelling are about equally divided between black and white.
Back at the Big House, David Person proudly pointed to the photos framed on the grand piano. His great-great-grandfather had been a U.S. senator in the 1840s and later a judge. He was against secession “but went along with it like everyone else.” He and his sons fought in the war he thought was wrong, but he later raised his voice against the Black Codes introduced in Mississippi after the war to deny African Americans the civil rights that the Fourteenth Amendment had just granted them. “He died a broken man,” says Person, pointing to a mournful photo in a bronze-colored frame. “The neighbors saw him in the street, muttering, ‘All is lost. All is lost.’”
Person is relieved that his family did not own slaves, but the Burton family, whose house he lives in, is another story. “This house is built on cotton money.” Even during the war, Malvina Burton lost only two crops: once when Union soldiers burned the harvest on the town square, and once again when they confiscated the cotton she’d managed to get to Memphis, hoping to send it downriver to New Orleans. “But those were the only failures. She made a ton of money. After the war, a lot of the slaves stayed on as sharecroppers—the second form of slavery.” Person put some blame on Great Britain. Though it was proud of abolishing slavery in its own territory, 80 percent of its cotton came from the Deep South. “Eighty percent? They could have shut it down immediately,” he says. “But they vacillated and compromised. Didn’t want France and Belgium to take over the market.”
While renovating the Burton house, Person hired a muralist to paint a history of Holly Springs in the parlor, which he patiently explains to visitors. Holly Springs is the capital of Marshall County, which in 1850 was the largest cotton producer, with the highest number of enslaved people, in Mississippi. As such, it is fertile ground for the Southern history sketched on the wall. “This man in the corner brought the cottonseed from Carolina, and here are freedmen building the houses. Finally we have our brethren the Chickasaw, who owned the land you’re standing on.” Person is as quietly passionate about telling the story of Native American genocide as he is about the story of slavery. “This is Delilah Love,” he says, pointing to a downcast woman in a long green dress, her head crowned with drooping feathers as she uselessly reaches toward two small boys heading for a covered wagon. “This is her saying goodbye to her children; they had to go.” Forty-five hundred Native Americans were forced to leave this part of Mississippi, escorted by federal troops who were ordered to shoot anyone who diverged from the prearranged route. History does not record whether Delilah ever saw her children again.
Person is working with the county to establish a Chickasaw park on land that was stolen from the tribe. It will be dedicated to the history and culture of the Chickasaw, some of whose descendants still live in the area. He hopes to organize a reunion of them along the lines of the reunion he organized for descendants of the Burton estate, white and black. No names of the latter were recorded by the census taker, who was interested in black numbers, not black persons. A descendant of the black Burtons went through cemeteries, church records, and family Bibles until she identified most of them. Now Person holds an annual reunion of about a hundred people. “The white descendants were not ready; they didn’t come the first few times, but when they came last year, they were blown away. We talk about everything.”
“Like guilt? Shame?” I asked.
“None of that,” said Person. “We just talk about the truth of slavery, and how you use that for healing.” How much shame is needed to talk about truth is a question that’s still open for those Southerners working for reconciliation.
Together with Alisea McCleod, an African American professor at the local Rust College, Person founded the organization Gracing the Table, a forum that gives black and white citizens an opportunity for the frank discussion of racist history that we prefer to avoid. The group grew from the spontaneous discussions provoked by visits to Behind the Big House, and they went on to organize conferences, films, and training sessions on community mediation. “When people walk out of the Big Houses, they think about the pretty table that reminds them of one their grandmother had. When people walk out of here”—he gestured toward the slave dwelling—“they come out with a flow of emotions. Some are so upset we have to set out chairs so they can rest.” Person is convinced that the unexamined history of slavery has done immeasurable damage to the white community as well as to the black one. “My people would be appalled at where Mississippi is now. It’s almost a failed state.”
I asked what led to his progressive politics. There was his father, a county judge who was sympathetic to the black community in San Antonio. There was the cousin who married “an ass-kicking Unitarian minister” in Holly Springs. There were his years studying government in the early ’60s at the University of Texas at Austin, where he’d campaigned to desegregate the movie theaters. There was time spent in London, looking at his country from the outside. I always seek to understand what influences people to stand up for what’s right, but in the end there may be no explanations. There are human beings who open their eyes, look at the evidence, and decide to devote their lives to persuading others to do the same.
“It’s like pushing a giant stone,” said Person. “You can get little chips off. It takes time and patience and sometimes a sense of humor. That’s all I’m trying to do—make little whacks at the stone.”
Diane McWhorter presents as a real Southern belle: forty years living in Boston and New York barely dented her drawl, and I’ve never seen her be anything less than gracious, warm, and sweetly attentive. Yet when she returned not long ago to her native Birmingham and greeted the mother of an old friend at a debutante ball, her greeting was returned with “There are about ten people in this room who would like to kill you tonight.” No doubt it was said with a drawl as soft as hers. The homicidal urges resulted from the revelations about proper Birmingham society in her history of the city’s civil rights struggle, Carry Me Home. The book was inspired by the fear that her father might be connected to the men who dynamited the church where four African American girls were murdered. Her work, therefore, is as good an example of homegrown Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as you can hope to find. In nineteen years of research she found out a great deal about the city fathers’ complicity with the Ku Klux Klan. “For black people, my book was reassurance that it wasn’t as bad as they thought; it was worse,” she says.
At the age when I was singing the plaintive civil rights song “Birmingham Sunday,” Diane was getting ready for a prom or a debutante ball, the kind of thing real Southern girls did. She said there was no epiphany, no one moment when she looked at the structures that framed her childhood and said this is wrong. She does remember seeing the movie To Kill a Mockingbird and crying when Tom Robinson was shot, then worrying what her father would say if he saw her crying over a black man. She was ten years old. “That’s about the age when people start deforming their consciences in order to accept something that’s not just manifestly wrong but manifestly contrary to the religious beliefs that are front and center in their lives.” Like Bettina Stangneth or Jan Philipp Reemtsma or David Person, Diane McWhorter cannot say why her conscience resisted attempts to deform it. Coming to understand the evil of segregation was a process that began when she went to Wellesley, where she first met African Americans in a social context. “Interracial socializing was simply not in the cards for a nice white girl in Birmingham, Alabama, where everyone had to be ‘in your place.’ It was an instant switch.” The process culminated in the semester she spent in Berlin researching a book about Hitler’s top rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, who later built the Saturn V moon rocket for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. She began to see her hometown through the lens of Nazi Germany. “Suddenly it dawned on me that the segregated South was a totalitarian society. Every aspect of life was organized around this one thing, race. It determined your emotional and social life, where you were born and educated, and it was enforced by a police state.” It was acceptable for the state to kill its political opponents; Bull Connor organized—fortunately unsuccessful—assassination attempts against the civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, a man of the cloth. “Maybe it wasn’t the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler massacred his opposition in 1934, but it was a criminal state nonetheless.”
For black people, segregation was enforced by terror. For white people there was something more subtle though less comprehensible: shame. The richest black man in Birmingham would lunch with the president of the local U.S. Steel outpost when they were both in New York, but never at home. “Whites were more scared of ostracism by each other than they were of black people. It’s a very childish thing: the same impulse that makes kids not want to be seen being nice to the fat girl at school.” Now those Alabamans want to be seen as having been secret antisegregationists, just as a generation of Germans claimed they had been in “inner exile” during the Third Reich years. “Every time I give a talk, audience members have an irresistible urge to tell me about the small acts of subversion they practiced on behalf of their maids. I’m certainly not knocking that—it’s better than not having the urge—but if everyone had acted on those impulses, segregation would have ended a lot sooner.”
Diane doesn’t minimize how hard it is to behave righteously under an evil system. “What we had in the South wasn’t literal genocide, but it was sociopolitical and economic genocide, and it was conspicuous.” White Southerners were presented with a moral quandary every time they took a drink from a whites-only water fountain, though few chose to face it. Northerners could spend a lifetime without having to think about racism; in the South it was daily. Children did not understand it, but they noticed the fountains, the maid’s bathroom, the maid’s cup.
“So did adults who opposed segregation drink from the colored fountains out of protest?” I asked. Another Alabama woman had told me she always wished to drink from the colored fountain, for as a child, she imagined it rainbow-colored, instead of the dull clear water she drank.
“Honestly,” said Diane, “the colored fountains weren’t usually refrigerated. You’d be getting lukewarm water.”
All those hot Southern days.
She is adamant that if we’re serious about working off the evils of racism, we should count time from the end of segregation, not the end of slavery. For slavery was constantly re-formed and renewed until segregation was legally ended in 1964. She thinks working off takes generational time. “My generation was raised in denial because our parents denied it. Unlike the German ’68ers, we were barely awake at the end of segregation.” Many of her parents’ generation are still in denial. The desire for regional innocence is so powerful that every single Klan witness at the Birmingham bombing trial in 2001 said under oath that he never had any bad feelings about black people. Finally the accused church bomber’s exasperated lawyer said: Martin Luther King’s job would have been a lot easier if someone had told him my client was the only racist in Birmingham. “Do they believe it?” Diane asked. “I don’t know. Do people change?”
They have changed their language. “The country club euphemism for black person is Democrat,” she told me. There are a lot of Democrats staying at our hotel. Statistically speaking, the euphemism is accurate. Scanning color-coded maps after the 2016 election, I saw just one long swath of blue that was neither a coast nor a city. Eighty percent of the Mississippi Delta population is African American, and they colored that piece of the state Democrat. The rest of Mississippi? Like all but a few Southern cities, it has gone Republican, whoever the candidate, since the Civil Rights Act lost the South, as Lyndon Johnson predicted.
Not that the South today is willing to acknowledge it was their opposition to civil rights legislation that sent them into the arms of the Republican Party. “My father, who was a total racist, insisted he never had anything against black people. He was just against communism and the federal government. Which is absolutely a residue of Reconstruction grafted onto the Cold War.” White Southerners tilt toward visceral martyrdom: “Why is the national press always picking on us? There’s a grain of truth in that,” said Diane. “The North had no opportunity to go bad in the same way.”
She thinks the key difference between Germany and the South is that Germany unequivocally lost the war. Surely the loss prevents most any deliberate attempt to mourn a Lost Cause in Germany. Perhaps this is thanks to the length of the Allied Occupation. More likely it’s because the generation of Germans born after the war accepted the international consensus that German behavior during the war was inexcusable. At the most, it could be forgiven.
“It’s still not clear that the South lost the war,” said Diane. “It’s driving the national agenda, after all. You can see it with Trump; that’s the same population who elected George Wallace.”
Growing up in the South of the 1960s, I couldn’t help hear the cry “The South will rise again!” I never connected it with theology until I read Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause. Wilson argued that the Confederate defeat presented a theological problem: If God was on their side, how could they have lost the war? Wilson’s answer is that the South replaced a dead political nation with a cultural identity whose heart was evangelical Protestantism. The South was an innocent victim crucified by superior political and economic forces. “You have to remember that the war was a total disaster for the white South,” Wilson told me when we met for a bourbon in his favorite Oxford bar. “The death rates were comparable to those in Europe during World War I.” What better way to recover from catastrophe than to identify with that long-ago innocent, tortured to death but destined to rise once again?
Wilson’s work, from that first book through the editing of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, made him the grandfather of authorities on Lost Cause mythology. He began his studies because he wanted to understand how a people could be so religious and so racist at the same time. His boyish grin and baseball cap belie the fact that he recently retired as director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Wilson knows that the South’s intense cultivation of history—its plaques and pageants and monuments, so much more evident than they are in any other part of the country—is a direct result of deliberate mythmaking. He’s a historian with many interests, after all. “It’s amazing that William Faulkner and Muddy Waters lived seventy miles from each other in the same period.” He’d be the last to object to Southern focus on its history, if only it were expanded. It’s not only black history that gets lost in traditional narratives; so does the populist movement of the 1890s, which tried to make common cause between poor white and black farmers who shared an interest against the planters. Thanks to right-wing violence, economic pressure, and a considerable amount of vote theft, the Populists lost elections they were predicted to win. After that, racist politicians supported segregation with the argument that whites were superior because of the nobility with which they’d fought the Civil War. “That’s why ninety percent of those monuments were built after 1890.”
I’d been reading old books supporting the Lost Cause in an effort to understand how anyone with half a heart or a mind could defend it. I understand the nostalgia for simpler, softer times; I understand the resistance to a culture that enshrines speed and utility over traditional Southern values like honor. I just don’t understand what is honorable about torturing, raping, and murdering people whose skin was darker than theirs. Further reading has yet to help me grasp how they navigated the contradiction, but it has produced some interesting facts. I asked Wilson what he thought about the argument of one Frank Lawrence Owsley.
“Ah, Owsley.” He smiled ruefully. For scholars of the period, Owsley is notorious.
In the agrarian tract I’ll Take My Stand, Owsley described the rise of Southern religious fundamentalism in response to abolitionist arguments that slavery was a sin. The abolitionists argued from reason: Think of the prophets thundering about justice, think of Jesus’s appeals to love and mercy. Look at Creation: if we’re all descended from Adam and Eve, aren’t we all brothers and sisters at heart? The abolitionists could not deny, however, that there were slaves in the Bible, and that was the slave owners’ focus. If slavery was present in biblical times, why shouldn’t it be present in ours?
“Is that why Southern religious fundamentalists insist on literal readings of the Bible?”
Wilson paused. “As a historian, I’d have a hard time proving it, but my gut reaction says it’s probably true. I think Southern whites are very literal-minded about the Bible, and the Constitution as well, because they are always searching for ways to read texts that would support their racial views. It goes beyond race to support a hierarchical worldview in which everyone has a place: slaves, children, women. A typical Sunday morning starts with a biblical text that gives legitimacy to whatever the preacher wants to say.”
Yet he thinks the forward movement in Mississippi is undeniable, even since he arrived there from Texas in 1981. Black culture is recognized (and marketed) as a state treasure; there’s a thriving African American middle class and business community in Jackson, which recently elected a mayor named for a hero of the African struggle against colonialism. Wilson enjoys the irony of the fact that the Trent Lott Leadership Institute at the University of Mississippi has used the staunch segregationist former senator’s money to subsidize reconciliation projects that bring together students from Mississippi, South Africa, and Northern Ireland. As for the Black Caucus in the Mississippi State Legislature, “it seldom gets its way, but it’s listened to,” Wilson said. The caucus focuses on social projects such as education in rural counties that makes a difference to the communities where its members were born. “It’s easy to portray the South as racist and retrograde, but that ignores all the people who are doing good work in local communities. The steps are incremental, but they matter in people’s lives.”
The South has felt besieged, Wilson told me, since the newsman William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his abolitionist paper The Liberator in the 1830s. “Southern whites became incredibly defensive, and they’ve been defensive ever since. They think they never get a proper hearing in the national culture; they’re never taken seriously.”
“They run the national culture, politically,” I countered. It isn’t just the originalism—religious and constitutional. I never met anyone in Mississippi who didn’t own a gun, however progressive she might be. Indeed, progressives are especially careful to keep one in the glove compartment of their car. They know how many arms the other side has. And the insistence on small government and resistance to federal authority is emotionally fueled by buried memories of Reconstruction.
“What drives me nuts about Southern Republicans,” said Wilson, “is the way they rail against the federal government while taking more federal tax money than any other part of the country.”
“Do you think that stems from antipathy to Reconstruction?”
“Reconstruction reverberates,” Wilson told me. In the ’50s and ’60s, racists like James Eastland and Strom Thurmond referred to Reconstruction all the time, but Republicans don’t mention it today. Wilson finished the bourbon he’d been nursing and paused once more. “This is hard to talk about as a scholar, but it’s like a vanished memory, almost subconscious. It would be hard to prove that, but I think it’s still there.”
“I am careful with neuroscientific claims,” I told him, “but there’s a lot of new evidence about intergenerational trauma. It does get passed down.”
“Reconstruction was their trauma, for sure.”
“Can we say that an unconscious memory of Reconstruction is one of the forces driving the worst of our national politics—all the way to resistance to Obamacare?” Historians are wary of speculation, but philosophers don’t have to be.
“That’s certainly where the hostility to the federal government was implanted. It’s their original sin,” concluded Wilson.
“You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish,” wrote Bob Dylan of the time he spent in the New York Public Library’s archives, reading microfiche copies of Civil War journals. “The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever … Back there America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected … The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”19
“We will always be fighting the Civil War,” said Diane McWhorter. “It’s just the basis of this country.”
Even towns that see themselves as enlightened can surprise you. A good place to see how Oxford prefers to preserve its Confederate history is the Lamar House, located near the center of town. The lovely white clapboard house, done in modest Greek Revival style, was built by Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. Today it serves as a museum to honor nineteenth-century Mississippi’s most important statesman. He represented Mississippi in Congress until he resigned in December 1860 to draft the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession. His contemporaries found him an exceptional writer and orator, and Lamar’s support of the state that was founded to defend the institution of slavery was not confined to words. He also served the Confederacy as a lieutenant colonel and as Jefferson Davis’s envoy to England, France, and Russia. His lugubrious, long-bearded gaze is preserved in a life-size bronze statue that stands before the house, not far from a flash of wisteria.
When the cause for which his heart and soul had burned was lost, Lamar set his sights on reconciliation, which is why he is honored today. After receiving pardon for his allegiance to the Confederate cause, he went on to serve in the U.S. Congress, Senate, and Supreme Court. In 1874, shortly after returning to Congress, he asked, and was allowed, to give a eulogy for Charles Sumner that made his fellow lawmakers weep. For Senator Sumner was a fiery abolitionist from Massachusetts who was nearly beaten to death on the floor of Congress by a senator from South Carolina who loathed Sumner’s fierce opposition to slavery. For this eulogy, which ended with the appeal “My countrymen! Know one another, and you will love one another!,” Lamar received a chapter in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. The Lamar House marks this distinction by placing Kennedy’s book under a spotlight in the center of one of its ample rooms.
Why did Kennedy choose to honor this man? The president wrote that few speeches in American history had such immediate impact as Lamar’s eulogy for Sumner, “the most significant and hopeful utterance that has been heard from the South since the war.” But Lamar’s speech was no mea culpa for the Confederate cause. In pleading for all sides to forget the strife, he was skillfully asserting that all sides were at fault. Even worse, he slyly managed to repeat all the Confederate arguments for slavery while professing to praise Charles Sumner. Sumner, said Lamar, was born with “an instinctive love of freedom,” and to restrict anyone’s freedom was “a wrong no logic could justify … it mattered not … how dark his skin, or how dense his ignorance … It mattered not that the slave might be contented with his lot; that his actual condition might be immeasurably more desirable than that from which it had transported him; that it gave him physical comfort, mental and moral elevation, and religious culture not possessed by his race in any other condition.” Lamar’s speech goes on and on, repeating well-rehearsed arguments in favor of slavery while ostensibly eulogizing its steadfast opponent. You needn’t read far between the lines to come away with the impression that Sumner had been a decent, principled, wrongheaded fool. As the congressmen cheered and wept, Charles Sumner must have fumed in his grave.
Kennedy didn’t quote the backhanded defense of slavery in Lamar’s speech, only the nicer, conciliatory bits. But Lamar’s plea for reconciliation had a clear purpose; his real goal was a plea for the end of Reconstruction and the removal of Union troops from the South. As he wrote to his wife just after the speech, “I never in all my life opened my lips with a purpose more single to the interests of our Southern people than when I made this speech. I wanted to seize an opportunity, when universal attention could be arrested, and directed to what I was saying, to speak to the North on behalf of my own people. I succeeded fully.”
No one who has studied Reconstruction doubts that it was accompanied by abuse and corruption, just as no one who has studied it doubts that those Union troops were all that stood between the newly emancipated African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan. It’s the latter fact that was obscured by the Lost Cause version of history that clearly shaped Kennedy’s views. In the same chapter he described Reconstruction as “a black nightmare the South never could forget” and the Radical Republicans as “Congressional mob rule that would have ground the South … under its heel.”20 But Kennedy was a politician, not a historian, and Lost Cause mythology wasn’t confined to the South. It crept into normal discourse without the flowers and the flourishes so impossible to miss in Mississippi—much like Lamar’s own defense of the Confederacy snuck into his tribute to the Confederacy’s most hated foe.
Representing Oxford’s favorite way of eliding its history, Lamar House acknowledges that Lamar was the author of the infamous Ordinance of Secession, which directly linked the Confederacy to slavery without obscuring the cause of the war by reference to ambiguous states’ rights. It avows its dedication to showing one slave-owning statesman’s transformation, and it highlights—as does Kennedy’s book, and most any other text about Lamar—his famous eulogy for Sumner. But it cannot be an accident that nothing in the museum points to the odd underhandedness with which Lamar buried a defense of slavery in an alleged plea for reconciliation. The reconciliation Lamar sought was a reconciliation between Northern and Southern white people that, by obscuring the causes of the war, would leave racism untouched. Without reflection or critical analysis of what the famous speech actually said, the museum leaves you with no model for facing the past except let bygones be bygones. It’s a genteel sort of refusal to face up to history. I doubt that anyone in town belongs to the Klan, or even its more respectable cousin, the White Citizens’ Council. They’d simply prefer to leave the past unexamined, cover it with honeysuckle, and go back to their bourbon. It’s the kind of response that ensures no one will reflect on the ways that past seeps into present.
For nearly forty years Mississippi activists had demanded a museum in Jackson, the state capital, that would tell the story of the local civil rights movement. It was finally opened in December 2017, just in time to fit into the celebrations of the Mississippi Bicentennial. The construction of the museum, which received $90 million in state funding, came at a price: Governor Phil Bryant and the legislature insisted that a museum devoted to the entire history of the state be built next to the civil rights museum. Since it was Bryant who initiated Confederate Heritage Month, expectations for the history museum were very low. Surely it would glorify the story white Mississippi prefers to tell about itself, a story of well-mannered men and gracious ladies, a culture more kind and more civilized than any you can find up north. Thoughtful Mississippians sighed in anticipation. They had no choice but to accept the Museum of Mississippi History as the price of the civil rights museum, whose opening was eagerly awaited.
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is indeed a triumph. It tells the story of the movement in each of Mississippi’s communities, with inventive and challenging exhibits showing the best that contemporary museum design can offer. It’s easy to spend hours there, sunk in stories of those heroes who risked and sometimes lost their lives in the struggle for justice. And justice is done to Medgar Evers, James Meredith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and many others whose names resound less loudly in the history books. In addition to a trove of interviews and films, the artifacts can be chilling: a charred cross, a re-created jail cell, shards of glass from a bombed-out church, the rifle that killed Medgar Evers. I left the museum feeling lightened and raised. Though I knew many of the stories, it was impossible not to be inspired by the courage and wisdom that is honored there.
Yet the museum has few surprises for anyone who has seen the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis or the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Mississippi’s museum is no better or worse than these, and all three are important. What is truly surprising is the Museum of Mississippi History. Instead of the whitewashed story so many had expected, the museum is organized around the heading “One Mississippi, Many Stories.” It begins with a gallery devoted to the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, sparing few details about the laws that forced them to abandon their homes. The director, Rachel Myers, is determined to show what Mississippi looked like from the perspective of Native Americans, enslaved people, women, and others whose stories are often obscured. “It’s the only way to do justice to the richness of Mississippi,” she said, smiling innocently. You can compare the dwellings of wealthy planters, yeoman farmers, and enslaved people, all of whose homes have been carefully reconstructed. There is, to be sure, an exhibit of the many flags used during the Confederacy, but there are also the tools used during Reconstruction by African American blacksmiths, information about the evils of the sharecropping system, and several damning quotes of the Ku Klux Klan. The final gallery, devoted to the years from 1946 to the present, begins with a SNCC symbol showing white and black clasped hands. “However did you get away with it?” I asked the young director. She smiled and said there wasn’t much oversight. Politicians had too much to do to examine the content of the museum they’d demanded. The result is an honest portrait of a very complicated place that is indeed able to face up to its history—at least as long as it’s inside a museum.
The grand opening was marred by Donald Trump’s decision to crash the party, causing black activists—from Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, to Congressman John Lewis—to boycott the occasion. But Trump came and left quickly, and his appearance could not overshadow the power of Myrlie Evers-Williams, who spoke that day. Evers is the widow of the murdered civil rights hero Medgar Evers, an activist in her own right, and an eighty-four-year-old woman whose strength and beauty would be formidable in a woman half her age.
“I stand before you saying I believe in the state of my birth,” said Evers-Williams. “And that is something I never thought I would say.”21 She had been skeptical about the concept of two museums, she continued, fearing that Mississippi was returning to the old idea of “separate, and possibly equal.” Former Governor Winter, standing frail on the podium at ninety-three, convinced her that both might be necessary. “Going through the museum of my history, I wept,” said Evers-Williams. “I felt the blows. I felt the bullets. I felt the tears. I felt the cries. But I also felt the hope that dwelt in the hearts of all those people.” The two museums, she concluded, are not separate. “Both buildings share the same heart, the same beat. My hope is that people will come here from all over the world to study humanity, to see how we made progress.” If that’s not the voice of Enlightenment, nothing is. Evers-Williams’s voice climbed in cadences that grew headier with every sentence. “Make use of these jewels that we have here. Walk through the halls and put your finger in the bullet holes, hear the sounds of the gospels, the cries and the tears. Lead the way throughout America, because we are being challenged almost as much as when Medgar Evers was alive. This is my state! This is my country! And I refuse to turn it over to anyone who challenges that.” The unnamed object of that remark had already boarded Air Force One, though I doubt that Myrlie Evers-Williams would have hesitated to say it to his face. “Stand tall,” she concluded, “and go tell it on the mountain that Mississippi has two museums linked together in love and hope and justice. If Mississippi can rise to the occasion, the rest of the nation should be able to do the same thing.”
Reacting to the murder of Medgar Evers, even John F. Kennedy changed the views he’d had when writing the tribute to Lamar.
“I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat [the Confederates].”22