Cultivars, or “cultivated varieties,” are variants of domesticated plants adapted to specific uses, climates, and soils. Soybean Digest printed the names of varieties recommended for specific locations over an outline map of the U.S. that extended far enough west to include a corner of Texas.

Unlike names for apples or other public-facing produce, the names for soy cultivars were not intended to entice consumers with appetizing imagery. Instead, they were a pragmatic means to keep a wealth of genetic lineages straight: single proper names chosen, it often seemed, for reasons known only to the breeders. What to make of “Clark” and “Kent,” often recommended for neighboring counties in the North? Or, in the South, such varieties as “S-100,” “CNS,” and “JEW 45” (bred by South Carolina farmer John E. Wannamaker, who lent his initials)?

There were, however, discernable shifts in naming practices. In the early 1900s, when the USDA began taking an active hand in importing thousands of samples of soybeans from Asia and sorting them into cultivars for American farmers, names indicating geographic origin, such as “Peking,” were common. By the late 1940s, names like “Mandarin” and “Hongkong” had become increasingly rare. Breeders instead chose names for soybeans, still widely regarded as a “botanical immigrants,” that more firmly rooted them on American soil. Northern breeders favored the names of presidents—“Adams,” “Madison,” “Lincoln”—and tribal nations: “Chippewa,” “Blackhawk,” “Ottawa.” Southern names of the time included “Arksoy,” “Volstate” (for Tennessee, the Volunteer State), and “Pelican” (in honor of Louisiana’s state bird).

These practices were inconsistent, though, next to one that emerged in the South in the mid-1950s that embodied a very specific regional identity. Somehow, a century after losing the Civil War, Confederate generals had returned—at least on the inside pages of an obscure trade journal. A new form of geographic identity was appearing in the South, beginning with a smattering of “Jackson” and “Lee” cultivars. By the last map of the series, in 1966, the rout of older varieties was nearly complete. They were crowded out by “Hood,” “Hill,” “Hampton,” “Stuart,” “Bragg,” “Hardee,” and “Pickett.”

This was not simply an invasion on paper. It pointed to a dramatic transformation of Southern agriculture, in which new soybean varieties played a major role once held by cotton. It was also a vivid indication of how this transformation largely excluded African Americans sharecroppers, who were being actively pushed off the land.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

As much as the Confederate cultivars reflected large structural forces at play, they were largely the work of a single man, responsible both for the painstaking scientific work it took to breed them and for the choice of this particular naming practice.

Edgar E. Hartwig was not a born Southerner. He grew up in Minnesota and received his Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Illinois. He joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1941. Founded in its current form during the Civil War, the USDA was tasked with conducting research of direct benefit to American farmers, often in cooperation with state agricultural research stations. In 1948, Hartwig was assigned to oversee the cooperative soybean breeding program for 12 Southern states: the 11 former Confederate states, plus Oklahoma. The North/South divide in cultivar breeding was not unusual. Soybeans, like many crops, are sensitive to conditions that vary markedly from north to south, such as summer daylength and the length of the growing season. An unintended consequence: soybean breeding did rather precisely map onto American sectional divisions.

Hartwig’s outsized influence on Southern soybeans was, in part, due to his consummate skill at the exacting and time-consuming technique of backcrossing. Previous generations of American soy breeders had largely focused on sorting through existing lineages from the rich genetic heritage of Asia to find those well adapted to the country’s needs. Backcrossing was a more active form of breeding, in which two variants were mated, and then one was bred with successive generations of the resulting crosses until the other’s contribution was diluted to a small cluster of genes or even a single desirable trait.

This ability to mix and match genes was crucial for the success of soybeans in the South. Earlier in the 20th century, existing cultivars in the region were generally short and bushy plants, grown for hay. Increasingly, however, the real money in soybeans was coming from growing beans that could be processed into oil and animal feed. This required plants tall enough to be harvested by combines, pods not easily shattered by mechanical harvesting, and high yields of long-maturing beans rich in fat and protein. Northern cultivars had these traits, but breeders needed to combine these qualities with adaptations to Southern conditions, including shorter summer days and more numerous plant diseases. Hartwig was adept at the work, and as his cultivars went into circulation, soybean acreage in the 12 states in his program increased sixfold between 1954 to 1974 to almost 16 million acres, one quarter of the nation’s total at the time.

While the supply of new cultivars was crucial for this growth, it was only because fundamental changes in the agricultural economy of the South had created demand. New Orleans, for instance, grabbed a big share of the growing soybean export market to Europe, which sought the crop to help raise the postwar standard of living through increased meat production. Initially, this benefitted Midwestern farmers who could ship down the Mississippi, but Southern farmers soon recognized the opportunity as well. Soy acreage in Louisiana accordingly shot up from 73,000 acres in 1954 to 1.8 million in 1974. This period also saw the rise of the “broiler belt,” ranging from Arkansas, down into the Gulf states, and up through Georgia and the Carolinas, where caged chickens bred for breast meat were fattened on soy-enriched feed. The poultry industry helped Georgia’s soy acreage increase by a factor of 31 in 20 years.

Above all, soy appealed to farmers because it was not cotton. For decades, the region had struggled with gluts of its main cash crop and consequent low prices. The government periodically attempted to limit supply through acreage allotments and marketing quotas, but with limited success. Reformers had long sought to convert the South’s cotton monoculture to mixed rotations of small grains, oats, and winter wheat, but the Southern landowners were uninterested in any system that did not provide them a robust cash flow. This is what Hartwig’s soybeans provided, enabling them to cut back cotton production. By 1960, American farmers were planting a little more than 15 million acres of cotton, down from almost 45 million acres at the crop’s peak in the 1920s.

This might provide the best clue for Hartwig’s commitment to naming cultivars after Confederate generals. (Beyond acknowledging the obvious fact that this was his practice, he never publicly discussed his reasons.) As an agricultural modernizer, he was selling Southern landowners on an entirely new, mechanized system of agriculture, of which soybeans were only one element. Confederate generals, memorialized throughout the region in monuments and the names of parks, towns, and military bases, were a readily available form of nostalgia to drape over disruptive innovation.

Key to the effectiveness of this pitch was the race of the intended audience, which remained a constant as the region shifted from sharecropping to mechanized farming. Nearly 90 percent of landowners were white, who were initially attracted to the prospect of increased earnings. With cotton, they had customarily sold the fiber while allowing their tenants to sell the cottonseed to local mills. Now they could dispense with the labor of sharecroppers and keep the profits from soybeans for themselves. As a Louisiana State University bulletin calculated in 1943, it took 184 hours of labor for each acre of cotton, compared to 10 hours for soybeans.

The tradeoff was the need to invest more heavily in equipment, such as combines, as well as fertilizers—particularly potash and phosphates—and pesticides. As Hartwig emphasized in the many articles he wrote for such venues as Soybean Digest, the large yield of beans promised by his new varieties required this kind of capital investment. At a meeting of farmers in 1975, he in fact chided them for only getting 22 bushels of beans per acre. “You ought to get 35,” he told them. At the same meeting, however, an agricultural economist reported that soybean processors had “soybean meal coming out of their ears” in a tight buyer’s market, indicating that there was no guarantee that farmers would recoup their investment.

This highly competitive environment cut both ways. As the number of farm operators decreased by more than half between 1954 and 1987, the number of farms in the South partly or fully owned by their operators rose from 71 percent to 91 percent, making the region’s agriculture in this sense more equal. But it was those best positioned to receive credit and government aid who benefitted. Such farmers were predominantly white. African Americans, poorer to begin with, suffered from discriminatory practices by both private and public lenders, notably the Farmers Home Administration, which systematically shut out Black applicants from government loans.

In 1920 there were 920,000 nonwhite farms in the South, a majority of them operated by tenants. In 1954, this had fallen to 430,000, or 26 percent of the region’s farms. By 1987, the number would drop to a mere 27,000, or 3 percent of farms in the South. This decline represented the virtual disappearance of Black sharecroppers, but also of tens of thousands of Black owner-operators unable to compete on a fair basis. Ten years later, the number was 19,000.

So as Southern agriculture became less unequal, it also became much whiter. Even at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Hartwig could thus avoid pushback from Black farmers over his choice of symbolism.

The influence of the Confederate cultivars waned after the 1970s, when commercial seed developers—given more patent rights to their seeds through the Plant Variety Protection Act—largely took the reins from USDA breeders like Hartwig. With a deluge of new cultivars, proper names were supplanted by alphanumerical designations like “AG2702” and “5344STS.”

In the meantime, Hartwig persisted in his enthusiasm for Confederate cultivar names, suggesting an embrace of Lost Cause mythology that went beyond strategic persuasion. He used all three of Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest’s names on separate cultivars. “Lamar” was probably named after Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar of Georgia, who, while not a general, was famed for being the last Confederate officer killed in the Civil War. Lamar also invested in the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade as late as 1858. Hartwig’s last Confederate soybean was “Lyon,” released in 1993, three years before his death.

By then, he was widely honored as the “father of soybeans in the South.” An endowed chair in Soybean Agronomy at the University of Mississippi was named after him and his wife. He was awarded the USDA Superior Service Award and the USDA Distinguished Service Award.

The Confederate soybean cultivars have receded into the past, but they were part of a larger pattern of systemic racism whose legacy can be felt to this day. Facing decades of pressure, the federal government has made halting progress toward redressing the wrongs it committed to farmers of color, most recently by promising them $4 billion of debt relief in the latest COVID aid package. Critics such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have decried this as reparations. In this context, is worth recalling Hartwig’s soybeans as one illustration of the USDA’s longstanding, built-in assumption that it served, above all, the interests of white farmers.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that the pelican is Louisiana’s state bird.

The post The 20th-Century Rise of the Confederate Soybean appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many politicians of the period avoided serious talk of sectionalism and slavery at such “mixed” gatherings, in the interest of keeping things civil. But the holiday atmosphere lent itself to informality, and the men haphazardly started proposing ideas. Some favored letting individual states and territories decide whether or not they should have slavery within their borders, while others wanted to simply draw a geographic line from the Mississippi River to the Pacific, prohibiting slavery above the line and allowing it below. The conversation grew heated—and within minutes, two of the politicians came to physical blows, their colleagues pulling them apart as they rolled around on the floor like a pair of angry schoolboys. But despite the topic of discussion, sectionalism and slavery had little to do with this fistfight. It was the physical manifestation of an already strained relationship between two politicians who should have had a lot in common: Mississippi’s U.S. senators, Henry Stuart Foote and Jefferson Davis.

In the history of American politics there have been many ugly rivalries—Andrew Jackson versus John C. Calhoun, Lyndon Johnson versus Robert Kennedy—but none was more bitter than the animus between Foote and Davis, which lasted from the 1840s until Foote’s death in 1880. The two men despised one another, and the higher they rose in political circles, the greater their hatred became. Both were ambitious political climbers, but in different ways. Foote was a street fighter, while Davis, who would later become president of the Confederacy, was calculating and somber. Foote was more publicly aggressive, never missing an opportunity to prod Davis. Davis, who was more famous, met Foote’s jabs with intimidating, withering glares and steely silence. Foote resented Davis for his natural aloofness; Davis bristled at the venomous personal barbs that punctuated Foote’s rhetoric. For Davis, the violent encounter at the Washington boarding house was an uncommon loss of self-control, a rare emotional display of barbarism from a man who was accustomed to public formality. For Foote, the fight was business as usual.

Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 and moved with his family to Mississippi when he was a small boy. He attended the United States Military Academy and later became a successful planter. Born in 1804, Foote was a native Virginian who came to Mississippi while in his twenties. He practiced law and owned a newspaper. Both men became involved in politics during the Jacksonian period, and both were very ambitious. The genesis of their feud lay in the 1844 trial of local district court clerk John T. Mason, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mason was accused of killing Davis’s brother-in-law in a duel, and Foote, then a successful attorney, led his defense. His closing argument dazzled the jury, who voted to acquit, ruling that the killing was an “excusable homicide.” As was his way, Foote trumpeted his success to anyone who would listen, angering Davis and his family, who naturally felt that the killer should be punished.

Davis and Foote both entered the U.S. Senate during the late 1840s, at a time when slavery was becoming the dominant national issue. Mississippi was one of the leading cotton-producing states, and its politicians joined the rest of the South in pushing back on perceived threats to slavery posed by Northerners, creating a siege mentality that dominated daily life. During these volatile times, both Foote and Davis wanted to be the leading political voice of their state on the Senate floor, which set them on a collision course.

Both men were pro-slavery ideologues, but aside from that, they agreed on almost nothing. During the months-long, tumultuous debates that culminated in the Compromise of 1850, the last political deal over slavery between the North and the South prior to the Civil War, Foote and Davis were consistently hostile toward one another on the Senate floor. At a time when some Southerners were already talking about secession, Foote was a unionist: He took a moderate position that secession was dangerous and claimed that slavery could be protected without alienating the North, and that compromise was possible. Davis was less willing to make any sort of compromise, taking a harder line. One witness who heard them both speak later compared Davis’s “dignified and commanding, soft and persuasive” oratory to Foote’s “[f]iery torrent of fierce invective and brilliant declamation.” In heated moments, Davis labeled Foote “a Constitutional liar,” while Foote claimed that Davis “speaks only for himself, and under the promptings of his own ambition.”

During all the turmoil, most Southern politicians, in Mississippi and beyond, rallied around Davis, whose honeyed pro-slavery oration on the Senate floor helped him emerge as one of the primary spokesmen for the South—a rational, stable presence during an angry, uncertain period. Davis’s increased national profile irritated Foote, who was also well known, but not as well respected. Foote exacted his revenge in 1851, when the two men faced each other in a contest to become Mississippi’s governor. Foote won the election, but his tenure as governor was a disaster, in part because Davis and his allies in the state worked tirelessly to undermine him. They held up legislation and funding for almost every initiative Foote advanced, and blocked his appointments to government posts.

After Foote’s term ended in 1854, he relocated to California, hoping to get a new political start. Davis likely thought that he would never have to worry about his rival again—but if so, he was sadly mistaken. Still hoping to capitalize on his name recognition in the South, Foote moved back east to Nashville, Tennessee in 1859. He arrived just in time to watch the nation come apart on the eve of the Civil War. The seceding Southern states formed the Confederacy, electing Davis as president, and Foote decided to run to represent Tennessee’s 5th District in the new Confederate Congress.

Foote’s hostility toward Davis was well known, and some political observers believed that his run for Congress was little more than a ploy to put him in position to continue his feud with the Confederate president. Foote won the race—and indeed, his tenure as a Confederate lawmaker seemed driven by his hatred for Davis. He was an instant critic, delivering verbal broadsides against the Davis administration that became more frequent and bitter as time wore on. He blamed Davis for Confederate military failures and for weaknesses in the Confederate economy, and frequently questioned his personal integrity. He called the president a despot and tyrant, and during one notable tirade, a “fiendish character responsible for more barefaced acts of corruption than any single individual has ever been known to commit in the same space and time in any part of Christendom.” (Foote admitted after the war that “not a day passed while I occupied a seat in the Confederate Congress that was not more or less signalized by my vehement opposition to Mr. Davis.”) Davis did his best to ignore the inflammatory rhetoric, but his allies did not—and tangled often with Foote on the floor of Congress, in verbal confrontations and at least two fistfights.

As the Confederacy began to crumble during the war’s latter stages, Davis became an easier target for abuse. Foote continued his rhetorical assaults on the president, and also demanded investigation after investigation of the administration’s conduct of the war. He attacked Davis’s political allies, his appointees, and anyone with whom the Confederate president was friendly. Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, who was Jewish, was a favorite target, inspiring a number of Antisemitic rants. Foote questioned the competence of Davis’s preferred generals in the field, going so far as to call Major General Thomas C. Hindman, Jr. a “fiend in human form.”

While other Confederate congressman disparaged Davis and complained about some of his decisions, few were as long-winded as Foote. Eventually, open sighs greeted Foote every time he stood up in the House chamber to speak. Newspaper reports of his tirades against Davis filtered into the North, where they were employed as propaganda, proving that the Confederate government was in disarray.

The end of the Confederacy, in 1865, did little to temper the ill will between Foote and Davis, who continued their sniping until Foote’s death in 1880. Davis lived until 1889, long enough to enjoy his own elevation to hero status throughout the South—an outcome that would have appalled Foote.

In the years immediately after the war, Davis slowly tried to rebuild his reputation, and Foote remained in Nashville practicing law. Both men also joined a battle of the books that took place in the years following the Civil War, as principal players in the conflict rushed to tell their sides of the story. Foote wrote a history of the Civil War and an ominously titled memoir, Casket of Reminiscences. Both of Foote’s books devoted a good deal of space to sharp criticism of Davis, calling him “a shameful, hypocritical and tyrannical chief executive,” and condemning “that compound of weakness, and corruption, and servility in the form of a cabinet which Mr. Davis so stupidly called around him.”

For his part, Davis privately criticized Foote for being “faithless to his trust as a representative in the Congress of the Confederate States”—but continued ignoring his rival in public. The former Confederate president also produced a massive, post-war tome, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It did not mention Foote at all.

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In December 2017, he sat down with Zócalo Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Gregory Rodriguez in Los Angeles to talk about what “the South” is, how the South came to embrace Thanksgiving, and why old country songs often reinforce a cult of the noble loser.

This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

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In one sense, the Calhoun Monument is a remarkably honest, and conspicuous, acknowledgment of Charleston’s dedication to slavery, even after its abolition in 1865. Here in the capital of American slavery—the city where nearly half the enslaved persons brought to the United States first stepped foot on our shores, and where Confederate troops fired the opening shots in a war launched to defend slavery—a group of elite white women worked for decades to honor slavery’s great champion with a statue.

Yet the Calhoun Monument tells another, less visible story, too—one of black resistance to those commitments. The lesser-known history of protest against this statue, and against a similar one it replaced, is as integral to its existence as anything Calhoun and his supporters advocated. For over 100 years, critics of these two Calhoun memorials have waged war against statues they see as the ultimate symbols of white supremacy.

The battle over the Calhoun Monuments is just one front in a larger struggle over how slavery should be remembered in Charleston and across the country. As early as 1865, former slaveholders and their descendants began working to construct a whitewashed memory of the antebellum South, downplaying or even ignoring slavery at times, only to cast it as benevolent and civilizing in other moments. In contrast, formerly enslaved persons, their descendants, and some white allies have worked to preserve an honest, unvarnished account of slavery as the cruel and pervasive institution that it was.

Nothing better encapsulates the whitewashed memory of slavery than the Calhoun Monuments, and nothing better encapsulates the unvarnished memory than the long campaign against them.

The Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association actually began its crusade to erect a Calhoun memorial not long after the statesman’s death in 1850. Calhoun’s distinguished political career was certainly a factor in their decision. He had served as a congressman, senator, secretary of war, and vice president over his 40 years of public service. But another reason loomed larger. During his tenure in office, Calhoun had been the white South’s most dogged defender.

When northern reformers flooded the nation with antislavery petitions and pamphlets in the mid-1830s, for instance, then-Senator Calhoun led protests in Washington, D.C. Abolitionism, he insisted, “strikes directly and fatally, not only at our prosperity, but our existence, as a people…. It is a question, that admits of neither concession, nor compromise.” Far from a necessary evil, as early American slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had framed the institution, slavery, insisted Calhoun, was a positive good that benefited slaveholders and the enslaved alike. Although Calhoun did not live to see the Civil War, he was the ideological godfather of the Confederate cause.

Yet the bloody conflict that began in Charleston Harbor in 1861 slowed the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association’s progress on their memorial to Calhoun, and the final months of the war unleashed a wave of vandalism against anything associated with the proslavery statesman. Calhoun’s gravesite was desecrated by multiple parties, and a formerly enslaved person destroyed a bust of Calhoun that she found in the offices of the Charleston Mercury, the city’s leading secessionist newspaper.

Empowered by the occupying Union Army, Charleston’s freedpeople made sure that the unvarnished memory of slavery predominated in their hometown, at least in the short term. In the spring of 1865, they orchestrated a striking parade featuring a mock slave auction and a hearse, carrying a coffin, on which were inscribed the words “Slavery Is Dead.” Annual Emancipation Day and Fourth of July parades celebrating black freedom flourished into the 1870s, when the biracial, progressive Republican Party controlled Reconstruction in South Carolina.

This 1892 photograph of Marion Square shows the first version of the memorial to John C. Calhoun, which was later replaced. The figure at the base of the statue is Justice. Photo by A. Wittemann. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association did not resume their work in earnest until after white conservatives resumed power across the state and brought Reconstruction to a close in 1877. Finally, a decade later, in April 1887, the association unveiled its statue in Marion Square, a park in the heart of Charleston. At the top of a massive pedestal, Calhoun, cast in bronze, appeared to be just rising from his chair to speak, his right index finger pointed outward. The statue was to have been surrounded by four female allegorical figures representing Truth, Justice, History, and the Constitution, though only one—Justice—was actually installed.

The location of the monument was imbued with symbolism. Marion Square was home to the Citadel, the military college that was originally founded as an arsenal to better police the enslaved population of Charleston after a failed 1822 slave insurrection. The ladies hoped that with Calhoun’s stern countenance watching over them, Citadel cadets might learn to “emulate the virtues of the great statesman.” It was also where the Slavery Is Dead parade had begun and ended back in 1865.

The Calhoun statue was one of hundreds of Confederate and other white supremacist monuments that were erected in the same period. Like most of these tributes, the Calhoun Monument didn’t mention slavery. Yet it signaled an attachment to the racial ideology of the Old South in a more direct fashion than other Lost Cause memorials: Calhoun was featured standing up, both literally and figuratively, for his region’s interests, on the Senate floor, so that the monument harkened back to a time when the Civil War’s precipitating cause—slavery—occupied the energies of South Carolina’s politicians. And at the dedication ceremony on April 26, the keynote speaker, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a former Confederate officer from Mississippi, discussed the institution Calhoun had fought so hard to defend. True, Lamar admitted, slavery was dead, but during its time the institution had been beneficial, especially because it had “civilized” the enslaved.

Black Charlestonians also viewed Calhoun and the statue erected in his honor through the lens of slavery, albeit from a different angle. Elijah Green, who claimed that as a young enslaved boy he had helped dig Calhoun’s grave, once said: “I never did like Calhoun ’cause he hated the Negro; no man was ever hated as much as him by a group of people.”

Thus, when the monument went up in Marion Square, African Americans like Green may not have been surprised—whites were at that very moment implementing a segregationist regime, after all. But they were outraged. They knew exactly why the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association had never abandoned its project, despite nearly three decades of challenges. Indeed, the long delay in the monument’s construction provided a new use for Calhoun’s ideology in the present.

“Blacks took that statue personally,” remembered Mamie Garvin Fields, born in Charleston in 1888, one year after the Calhoun Monument was installed. “As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place’…he looked like he was telling you there was a place for ‘niggers’ and ‘niggers’ must stay there.” In Fields’s and other black Charlestonians’ eyes, the Calhoun Monument invoked slavery to justify segregation. “I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through that statue.”

Black Charlestonians talked back as best they could, given the strictures of Jim Crow. “We used to carry something with us,” Fields explained, “if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue—scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose.” Local newspapers are full of stories documenting this campaign of guerrilla vandalism in the late 1880s and 1890s. In one instance, a young black boy shot a tiny pistol at the statue. In another, the face of Justice, the allegorical figure, was painted white under the cover of darkness.

Although the racial identity of the whitewashers was left unmentioned, the press invariably noted that black Charlestonians were responsible for the other major form of attack against the monument: relentless mockery. Justice bore the brunt of African Americans’ verbal volleys. They dubbed the lone, curiously out-of-place figure who sat at Calhoun’s feet ‘he wife,’ or Calhoun’s wife, in the local Gullah dialect.

From the beginning, in other words, Charleston’s black community transformed the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association’s white supremacist shrine into an object of vandalism and ridicule.

By the early 1890s, the association had determined to remove the Calhoun Monument and install a replacement. The women publicly explained that they had always felt the original monument could have been more aesthetically pleasing. Historical evidence suggests, however, that black defacement and mockery played a role in their decision to erect a second statue in 1896, the one that still stands today and that is, significantly, much taller than the first.

The second Calhoun Monument, erected in 1896. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association likely assumed that this new Calhoun, perched on his column over 100 feet in the air, was now out of harm’s way. They were mistaken. Although a fence and lights were installed as defensive measures, the vandalism continued for decades. “Wanton mutilation,” officials complained, kept necessitating repairs into the mid-20th century. Oral history indicates that some of the vandals targeted the new monument specifically because of Calhoun’s outspoken stance on slavery. This was certainly true of the protestors who defaced the Calhoun Monument after the murders at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015. They painted the word “racist” in red near the base of the statue and modified the monument’s engraved testament, which reads “Truth Justice and the Constitution,” by adding the words “and Slavery.”

During segregation, of course, physical and verbal attacks on the Calhoun Monuments were the only real weapons that politically disenfranchised African Americans had at their disposal. In fact, the monuments themselves helped facilitate black repression. It is no coincidence that the major wave of Confederate memorialization dovetailed precisely with the formalization of Jim Crow laws and customs throughout the South. As Confederate veteran Wiley N. Nash observed in the 1908 dedication speech for a Confederate monument in Lexington, Mississippi, “these sacred memorials, tell in silent but potent language, that the white people of the South shall rule and govern the Southern states forever.”

Wiley N. Nash, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Mamie Garvin Fields—white and black citizens alike—understood why these memorials were erected across the Southern landscape. The difference, of course, was their response. Nash, Lamar, and white Southerners cheered the commemorative impulse; Fields and black Southerners denounced it.

Since the Emanuel Massacre in 2015, defenders of controversial Confederate and white supremacist monuments have offered numerous reasons why such memorials should not be taken down. A common refrain is that monument critics are using contemporary standards to unfairly judge the past. Why, they ask, should we remove memorials that honored ideals and individuals not seen as problematic at the time? As the history of the Calhoun Monuments shows, the premise underlying this query is, in fact, ahistorical. These ideals and individuals were never universally sanctioned.

Plenty of Southerners objected to men like Calhoun, what they stood for, and memorialization efforts in their honor. Indeed, in Charleston, which had a black majority in the late 19th century, it is likely that most city residents disliked the Calhoun statues when they went up. The second Calhoun Monument still towers over Charleston today, and it would take an act of South Carolina’s legislature to remove it. There is an effort underway to add a contextualizing plaque to the monument that would make clear both Calhoun’s fidelity to slavery and the white supremacist roots of the statue. But proposals to also include the monument’s many detractors have gone nowhere. The fact that the traces of opposition to the statue and the one that preceded it are difficult to see today, while the second Calhoun Monument and hundreds more like it stand in plain sight, should not diminish this more complicated—and accurate—history.

The post The South Carolina Monument That Symbolizes Clashing Memories of Slavery appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“February 18, 1861…. I do not allow myself vain regrets or sad foreboding. This Southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination and cool brains. We have risked all, and we must play our best, for the stake is life or death.”

With that entry, Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary, chronicling the momentous four years that encompassed the American Civil War. Chesnut’s diary is one of the most significant and intimate sources for understanding the Southern Confederacy. Chesnut and her husband, James Chesnut Jr., moved within the highest circles of the Confederate government and Southern society. Her entries, candid, caustic, and at times, sarcastic, demonstrate how women’s roles evolved and how social class and status remained a defining feature in the Confederate nation, even after the war destroyed their wealth and privilege.

Mary Boykin Miller was born in Statesburg, South Carolina, in late March of 1823. Her mother came from a wealthy South Carolina family, the Boykins, while her father, Samuel Decatur Miller, was of yeoman roots. However, her father rose to prominence in South Carolina politics, serving as governor, U.S. congressman, and senator. Perhaps because of that, Chesnut received a classical education, first in Camden and then in Charleston at the prestigious Madame Talvande’s boarding school. While at Madame Talvande’s, Mary met James Chesnut Jr., who was considerably older. Chesnut’s parents finally relented to the courtship and they were married in April 1840. It was then her adventures in politics on the state, national, and Confederate level began.

In February of 1861, Chesnut recorded her feelings regarding the secession crisis: “My father was a South Carolina Nullifier… so I was of necessity a rebel born.” She went on to note, “I remember feeling a nervous dread & horror of this break with so great a power as U.S.A. but was ready and willing.” Little could she know how the “power” of the Union would shatter her world.

Perhaps the most significant parts of the diary are Chesnut’s musings while she and her husband resided in the Confederate capital at Richmond, from June to December 1861 and from late December 1862 until March 1864. Upon her arrival, Chesnut sought out the head of the Richmond Hospital Association to offer her services as a nurse. This in itself was important, because at the time, nursing in the South was regarded as suitable only for lower-class men. To expose 19th-century Southern women, especially elite women, to sick, wounded, and maimed men was decidedly unusual.

Chesnut toured the various Richmond hospitals in the aftermath of the Battle of First Manassas and was shocked by what she saw: “Then we went to the St. Charles. Horrors upon horrors…. Long rows of them dead, dying. Awful smells, awful sights.” Chesnut began “making arrangements with the nurse…. I do not remember any more for I fainted. Next thing that I knew of, the doctor and Mrs. Randolph were having me, limp rag, put into a carriage….” Throughout the war, Chesnut would do her share of nursing, but she never became accustomed to the “awful smells, [and] awful sights” that she witnessed.

In many ways, the war frustrated Chesnut. Often in her diary, she lashed out against her gender and her inability to serve in the army. In late August of 1861 she wrote, “I think these times make all women feel their humiliation in the affairs of the world. With men it is on to the field—‘glory, honour, praise, &c power.’ Women can only stay at home—& every paper reminds us that women are to be violated—ravished & all manner of humiliation. How are the daughters of Eve punished.” On another occasion, Chesnut wrote that if she were a man, she would have pursued a battlefield commission: “I should have either been killed at once or made a name & done some good for my country. Lord Nelson’s motto would have been mine: Victory—or Westminster Abbey”—a reference to the great London church where many of Britain’s military heroes are entombed.

Chesnut was intelligent, educated, and ambitious, but she chafed at her subordinate status in Southern society. Nonetheless, the war years marked a watershed of sorts for women. Because the men were off fighting, women in the Confederacy were forced to assume roles heretofore unheard of for their gender. They managed farms and plantations, worked in every government bureau, became nurses and labored in Confederate factories. But in all these positions, social class played a prominent role. Only women who were literate could work in a government bureau, for they were required to take tests in grammar, spelling, and basic mathematics. Poor and illiterate women were relegated to dangerous jobs in munitions factories or to sewing uniforms at home or in the Quartermaster Bureau.

Another way in which class distinctions dominated during the war was in accommodations. When James was made an aide to President Jefferson Davis, Mary Chesnut sought out lodgings in Richmond. Accustomed to the grandeur of the Chesnuts’ Mulberry plantation, Chesnut was not happy to live in a boarding house run by “some ‘decayed ladies’, forced by trouble, loss of property, &c to receive boarders.” According to Chesnut, “A dreadful refuge of the distressed it was. The house was comfortable and the table good,” Chesnut admitted. But it rankled her that “you paid the most extravagant price, and you were forced to assume the patient humility of a poor relation.

So fine was the hauteur and utter scorn with which you were treated.” Still, as Chesnut was aware, “We had no right to expect better lodgings, for Richmond was crowded to suffocation—hardly standing room left.”

Indeed, by 1863 Richmond’s population had grown from 38,000 in 1860 to more than 100,000. Most of the new arrivals were refugees fleeing from Union incursions. Ultimately, Chesnut would find a house near the White House of the Confederacy on East Clay Street. But that was unusual: Most newcomers were forced to wander the streets, seeking accommodations, or were compelled to lodge with other families because housing was so scarce.

Equally troubling was the shortage of food in the capital city. Bad weather and government policies such as impressing agricultural goods to feed the armies and forcing farmers to pay a 10 percent tax in kind on produce and livestock discouraged farmers from bringing their goods to market. Too, the Confederate government set prices 50 percent below what the market would bear, which created a disincentive for farmers to bring their goods to Richmond’s markets.

The situation became so desperate that a group of working-class women met April 1, 1863, and resolved to seek aid from Virginia’s governor. On April 2, 1863, these women marched to the Governor’s Mansion. Not getting any satisfaction, the mob, variously estimated to be anywhere from 500 to 5,000, proceeded to loot stores, seizing food, clothing and other goods in the so-called Richmond Bread Riot.

Curiously, though she lived near the business district and could undoubtedly see and hear the commotion, Chesnut did not remark upon the violence in her diary. Instead, she noted that although “Turkeys were thirty dollars apiece,” James’s slave, Laurence, “kept us plentifully supplied.” While others in Richmond realized the Christmas holidays were going to be Spartan, Chesnut recorded that for their dinner, “We had… oyster soup, soup a la reine…. Besides boiled mutton, ham, boned turkey, wild ducks, partridges, plum pudding. Sauterne, burgundy, sherry, and Madeira wine.” Even though many civilians would go hungry and Confederate soldiers were on short rations, Chesunt and her family were happily sated. As a government aide, James could shop at the local commissary, and there are numerous references in the diary to boxes sent from Mulberry plantation that contained all sorts of foods and wines. And given Laurence’s declaration that if they paid him, he would find food, he probably took advantage of the black market.

Portrait of James Chesnut Jr., husband of Mary Boykin Chesnut. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.

James Chesnut frowned upon Mary’s proclivity for dining well and entertaining. Consequently, Chesnut would wait until President Davis sent James on a trip to assess the army in the western theater of the war. When he would arrive home unexpectedly, he would usually find “the party in full blast.” After the guests left, he “laid down the law.” “’No more parties, he said. “The country is in danger. There is too much levity here.’” The war was going badly for the Confederacy and there was real fear of famine in Richmond, but for a member of the Confederate elite, Chesnut never felt want.

All that came to an end when James’s mother passed away and he felt the need to return to South Carolina with his wife. But their journey placed them squarely in the track of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman as he swung north after his “March to the Sea,” laying waste to everything in his path. James insisted Mary leave Mulberry. For the first time, she became a victim of war, a refugee.

Chesnut wound up in Lincolnton, North Carolina, and although she was beholden to a stranger who took her in, she still focused on her superior social status: “The next day came here brokenhearted & in exile. Such a place! No carpet—a horrid feather bed—soiled sheets—and a pine table, &c, &c—for this I pay $30 a day.” On another occasion, she remarked that her new hostess was “N.C. [sic] aristocracy as far as it will go—but does not brush her teeth—the first evidence of civilization—& lives amidst dirt in a way that would shame the poorest overseer’s wife…. A lady she evidently is in manners and taste! & surroundings worthy a barbarian.” Apparently, while Chesnut was in exile, she was forced to work and made strong mention of that reality: “Well this day I have worked! I made my own tea—boiled my own eggs—& washed up my own tea things.”

Yet for all her sense of noblesse oblige, Chesnut was chastened when she and James returned home and found their former world destroyed. “When we crossed the [Wateree] river, coming home, the ferryman at Chesnut’s Ferry asked for his fee. Among us all, we could not muster the small silver coin he demanded. There was poverty for you.” Mulberry plantation was still standing, but the house had been badly damaged by the Union Army and the interior had been ransacked. Even worse, James’s father had invested his entire fortune in worthless Confederate bonds.

Penniless, Chesnut supported James and the other relatives who came to Mulberry to live with them after the war. Once one of the wealthiest women in South Carolina, she was reduced to going into business with Molly, formerly her enslaved servant. With a rescued cow and some chickens, Chesnut sold sell butter and eggs to her neighbors and supported her family on $140 a year.

Chesnut had always battled depression, but the poverty into which the family was plunged deeply affected her. In May of 1865, she wrote, “We are scattered—stunned—the remnant of heart left alive with us, filled with brotherly hate.” Just a year later, she admitted to a dear friend, “[T]here are nights here with the moonlight cold & ghastly & the whippoorwills & screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear out my hair & cry aloud for all that is past and gone.”

Chesnut spent most of the 1880s revising her diaries and taking care of her mother and her husband. She died in 1886 and was buried next to James. But her diaries, edited by a friend and later, by a novelist were substantively rewritten from the original journals. Eminent Southern historian C. Vann Woodward meticulously went through the original journals and published the most accurate edition of Chesnut’s diary in 1981. That edition presents us with an unvarnished and detailed look at the life and death of a planter class that went to war to preserve their privileged way of life based on slavery.

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The white South began to erect soldiers’ monuments soon after the Confederacy’s defeat. In the first two decades after the war, communities most often chose a simple obelisk or other monument of funeral design and placed it in a cemetery. Former Confederates thereby mourned their dead and memorialized their cause. Even in the early years after the war, though, some monuments featured a sculpture of a soldier and occupied a more public place—a practice that increased over the next two decades.

The vast majority of Confederate monuments were erected between 1890 and 1912, and most of these consisted of a single soldier, with his hands folded over the top of his rifle’s barrel and with its stock resting on the ground. Typically, the soldier stood atop a column on the courthouse lawn or some other central public space. These statues hardly seemed martial, much less ready to attack. Indeed, they looked surprisingly calm and at ease. They did not always face north, as folklore has it but, rather, whichever way the courthouse faced.

An advertisement for soldier monuments in the magazine, Confederate Veteran. Image courtesy of Gaines Foster.

The origins and purposes of these monuments to the common Confederate soldier is complex. They resulted, in part, from a commercial campaign. Monument companies advertised in veterans’ magazines and hired agents to travel the South. They offered credit terms (lest the veterans die before a town could raise the money for a memorial) and, in one ad, even offered a free marble breadboard to the secretary of any United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter that ordered a monument.

The companies, though, were exploiting an important cultural movement. Putting up soldiers’ monuments was a central ritual of the Lost Cause, a shorthand term for an organized attempt by the Daughters, Confederate veterans, and many other white Southerners to shape the memory of the Civil War. Southern whites erected Confederate soldier monuments for at least three interrelated reasons.

The leaders of the Lost Cause first sought to honor the veterans of the war. The monuments expressed white society’s appreciation and respect for the soldiers’ wartime sacrifice, constituting a more profound and permanent version of today’s off-hand “thank you for your service.” The monuments also reassured the veterans that, despite losing on the battlefield, they had fought honorably and well—and for the noblest of reasons.

The Lost Cause and the monuments that emerged from it also sought to vindicate the Confederacy itself. The white South’s memory of the war claimed that soldiers fought for states’ rights and the defense of their homes and families. The Lost Cause also proclaimed secession to be legal, denied the centrality of slavery to the war, ignored the evil inherent in the South’s peculiar institution, and over time romanticized it. The monuments thereby celebrate not just the veterans but the Confederacy and, despite the attempt to deny it, its cause—slavery.

Finally, although they celebrated the Confederacy, the monuments and the Lost Cause were as much about the present as the past. In honoring the faithful soldier, the Lost Cause’s leaders made him a model for the lower classes in a turbulent period of change in the South and the nation.

The erection of the monuments followed the populist revolt and widespread labor unrest. The soldier statues were a reminder that, as during the war—when Confederate soldiers loyally followed aristocratic leaders like Lee into battle—the middle and lower classes should be loyal to a hierarchical society. The Lost Cause thereby offered a vision of the “proper” social order, one in which the lower classes deferred to leaders, women proved loyal to men, and African Americans remained subservient to whites. In the same decades in which most of the soldiers’ monuments went up, the white South created a repressive racial order based on segregation, disfranchisement, lynching, and other forms of white racial violence.

The story of the Lost Cause’s monuments to the Confederate soldier reveals the difficulty of knowing how to honor soldiers’ sacrifices without embracing or even justifying their cause—a problem also faced by later generations of Americans struggling over some subsequent wars. It shows that monuments emerge more from memory—an attempt to shape the past—than from the history that actually happened. And, in the midst of a public debate over Confederate monuments, it reminds us that memory and its symbols have less to say about history and more to proclaim about the shape of society in the present and the future.

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It may seem strange to compare Confederate statuary erected in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century South to the self-aggrandizing monuments built by former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. But despite the vast differences in time, geography, and culture, there is a certain symmetry between Saddam’s attempt to unite Iraqis by forging a revisionist ethno-nationalist history and equating his exploits with those of ancient Babylonian rulers and the strategy of postbellum Southern leaders, who sought to instill a sense of nationalistic pride and purpose among white Southerners by rallying them around a glorious if illusory past.

Like the some 680 other monuments still scattered across the Confederate and border states, those in New Orleans were meant to reaffirm the nobility and legitimacy of the “Lost Cause” of Southern independence and justify efforts to roll back the challenges to white supremacy posed by emancipation and so-called Radical Reconstruction. After the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877, the Lost Cause ethos quickly gained a firm grip on the Southern white psyche. Not only did it ascribe the North’s victory solely to its overwhelming advantages in numbers and firepower, which had simply been too much even for the supposedly superior courage and dedication of the South’s fighting men, but it offered a none-too-subtle suggestion that if white Southerners remained true to the ideals and racial foundations of the Lost Cause, its aims might yet be regained.

For generations after the Civil War, Southern white politicians intent on denying blacks their political, legal, and civil rights tirelessly invoked the seductive imagery of the Lost Cause that was embedded in the profusion of Confederate monuments and memorials that fairly blanketed the region’s landscape by 1920. The move to enshrine the Lost Cause had frequently gone hand-in-hand with campaigns for segregation and disfranchisement that, replete with incendiary rhetoric, more than once fueled outbreaks of mass violence against blacks.

No white leader better illustrated this pernicious fusion of manipulated memory and racial persecution than ex-Confederate and former North Carolina congressman Alfred Moore Waddell. Waddell worked vigorously in conjunction with women’s memorialist groups to secure public monuments to the state’s “fallen sons,” while warning that the only real means of preserving their heroic legacy was denying black men the vote even if “we have to choke the Cape Fear [River] with carcasses”—words that foretold Waddell’s role as the principal instigator of the infamous Wilmington, N.C., riot of 1898, which left at least two dozen blacks dead.

When the Civil Rights era finally brought the formal legal demise of racially oppressive and discriminatory Jim Crow policies, it was not surprising that white Southerners who could not accept this outcome chose to cloak themselves in the Confederate flag, and not only hold rallies at the base of Confederate monuments but even erect a few more of them. Even among white Southerners who did accept these advances in black rights, there was a reluctance to go cold turkey on their allegiance to the Lost Cause ethos, lest they effectively surrender what had long defined their cultural identity.

But over the last 60 years, the insistence that continued affinity for Confederate symbols could be grounded in “heritage” rather than “hate” finally became blatantly untenable. Rebel flags and the Confederate monuments haunted the grounds of courthouses where the 1955 trial of the murderers of Emmett Till and the 1964 trial of the slayers of four civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi took place. By 2015, when the grisly slaughter of nine black parishioners occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, Lost Cause iconography and paraphernalia had become a constant thread in a lengthy but tightly interwoven tapestry of racial hatred and injustice. The Charleston massacre forced many white Southerners at long last to weigh the abstractness of heritage against the concreteness of hate, leaving them little choice to withdraw, however grudgingly at first, from the active battle over Confederate symbols, largely leaving the field to an outnumbered, under-resourced minority for whom white privilege was all that was left of their identity to defend.

Perhaps that is why, for all the reported death threats and precautionary measures that marked last week’s events in New Orleans, from the outset, the proceedings gave off more than a whiff of a fait accompli. It is particularly noteworthy that the removal of the first three monuments was accomplished in the dark semi-secrecy of night. Yet the fourth and most significant extraction, that of a likeness Gen. Robert Edward Lee, who until recently had ranked as a national as well as Southern icon, came in broad daylight and on a pre-announced schedule.

Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers pull down a statute of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, April 9, 2003. Photo by Jerome Delay/Associated Press.

The decision to remove Lee’s statue in New Orleans actually seems less bold and definitive than one in Charlottesville, scarcely 100 miles southwest of his Virginia birthplace, where torch-bearing opponents of the move gathered recently to hear white nationalist Richard Spencer, sparking a candlelight counter protest in which a “Black Lives Matter” banner was laid at the statue’s base. Legal action has guaranteed that the statue will stay put for six months, but if the ultimate failure of efforts to block the removal in New Orleans is any guide, General Lee and his storied mount, Traveler, will soon be on the move in Charlottesville as well.

There is further reason to suspect that, at long last, the days of Confederate monuments dominating so many high-profile public spaces in the South may be numbered. Since the Charleston killings two years ago, at least 60 publicly sanctioned Confederate monuments and memorials have reportedly been relocated or removed. Confederate Memorial Day is no longer observed as such in Georgia, and the holiday is under fire in Arkansas and other states as well. There will be rear-guard counteroffensives, to be sure, as attention-seeking legislators seek to reinstitute Confederate holidays or impose legal restrictions on the removal of Confederate monuments, but the broad sense that symbolic tributes to the Confederacy will soon be much less central to Southern culture is hard to shake.

If this protracted and often agonizing process has triggered a certain splintering of Southern white identity, then it is a small price to pay, compared to the benefits of forging a more just and inclusive society. But there remains the question of what to do with all of these statues. And it is here that Iraq’s example is both instructive and cautionary.

Much like resurgent Southern whites in the wake of Reconstruction, when Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party came to power in Iraq in 1968, he tried to instill a sense of national pride and identity in his subjects by deliberately glorifying (and embellishing) Iraq’s historical achievements. He demanded that writers and visual artists present positive and compelling representations of Iraq’s past, stretching back all the way to ancient Mesopotamia, complemented by a variety of overpowering monuments such as the Arc of Triumph, which featured gigantic hands holding swords. This new public landscape was meant to instill nationalistic fervor and secure support, or at least acquiescence, to Saddam’s brutal and reckless leadership.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam, photos of his statues being toppled by troops defined the moment symbolically. The U.S.-led military coalition quickly launched a radical and sweeping effort to “de-Baathify” the country by purging the government and its bureaucracy of former Baathist members and erasing the cultural and architectural remnants of the selective historical memory that Saddam had fabricated. But merely removing the former symbols did not help Iraq forge a new national identity or unity, and in fact left something of a vacuum in that respect.

Iraqi art expert Nada Shabout conceded in a BBC interview that, “Some of the [Baathist] monuments were in bad taste and were ugly, and I would not be heartbroken if they were brought down. But … they were nevertheless part of the history of the country …. So do we throw away the baby with the bath water?”

Like Saddam’s memorials, Confederate monuments may no longer be acceptable as public historical symbols, but they nonetheless retain a distinct and indelible value as historical artifacts. Placed in museums, with appropriate contextualization, Confederate statuary might even succeed in persuading whites that they don’t belong on public property while convincing blacks that they should not be destroyed.

An exemplary effort to properly contextualize such a monument can be found on the campus at the University of Mississippi, where a tablet has been affixed at the foot of a statue of a Confederate soldiers. While respectful of the idea of honoring “the sacrifice of local Confederate soldiers,” the tablet also cautions that such monuments “were often used to promote an ideology known as the ‘the Lost Cause,’ which claimed that the Confederacy had been established to defend states’ rights and that slavery was not the principal cause of the Civil War.” In addition to a reminder that the Confederacy’s defeat “meant freedom for millions of people,” the plaque also notes this particular monument’s enduringly divisive legacy as “a rallying point for opponents of integration” on the evening of the deadly riot that marked James Meredith’s arrival on campus in September 1962.

Modest as it might seem, this effort might be a step toward the day when white and black Southerners not only find a way to share their common but traditionally conflict-ridden past, but to make it the foundation of a new and profoundly more representative regional identity. If this should indeed come to pass, the Lost Cause will have given way to one infinitely more inclusive and inspiring.

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These events are a great story—and even better history. This summer, Free State of Jones will bring to movie theaters across the country a thrilling and relatively unknown tale of Civil War insurrection, romance, and interracial collaboration. The film, inspired by several historical books about these events including my own, shows how far scholarly research—and popular entertainment—about the Civil War has come.

Free State of Jones is a Civil War movie that privileges neither Gods and Generals nor genteel plantations à la Gone with the Wind. White yeoman farmers represented a class disproportionately devastated by battlefield deaths and Confederate seizures of home front produce and property. As they increasingly desert the Confederate army, an inner civil war erupts in Jones County between the Knight Company and Confederate troops. Soon, fathers, mothers, wives, and children join forces to defend and hide deserters from authorities. Meanwhile, social disorder empowers slaves and runaways, offering the promise of true and lasting freedom.

In the movie, class and race converge when the deserter Newt is run down and mauled by the Confederacy’s “nigger hounds.” Taken to the swamps by Rachel, he encounters Maroons, escaped slaves who formed clandestine communities, for the first time. “Are they runaways?” Newt asks Rachel with hesitation. “Ain’t you runnin’?” she responds. The interracial alliance is born.

Newton Knight, 1837–1922.

The events in Jones County demonstrate a larger truth of dissent and violence that erupted throughout the South during the Civil War. This research presents a crucial corrective to the Lost Cause version of history that afflicts us still—not simply in movies and novels, but also in the classroom, where even my college students have frequently assured me that “Granny said our slaves were treated just like family in the old days,” or on internet message boards and chat rooms, where self-proclaimed authorities insist the Civil War was never really about slavery.

Scholars like myself have long struggled against this version of Civil War history. It was created only around the turn of the 20th century, when a few influential Northern and Southern historians strove to heal the war-damaged United States by creating a more conciliatory vision of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Denouncing the war as a needless slaughter brought on by politicians, historians such as William Archibald Dunning and his followers portrayed the Reconstruction that followed as a tragic era of “Negro rule,” carpetbagger corruption, and scalawag treason. The Dunning School soft-peddled slavery’s role as the major cause of war. The myth of a Civil War fought over “states’ rights” hardened into orthodoxy, providing a “noble cause” for white Southerners seeking to sanctify the sacrifices and deaths of their ancestors.

Hollywood soon celebrated the Lost Cause version of the war in its 1915 production of Birth of a Nation. Directed by D. W. Griffith, and the most technologically-advanced movie of its time, this film glorified Ku Klux Klansmen as rescuers of virginal white womanhood from black male rapists portrayed as little better than beasts. In the process, the movie legitimized segregation and lynching as tools of racial control.

Some scholars fought back against the flawed history of the early 20th century. In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois eviscerated Lost Cause orthodoxy with his masterful, now classic book, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois pulled no punches in describing the political corruption and white terror that dominated Reconstruction. Few people, however, read Black Reconstruction before the 1960s. Du Bois held a Ph.D. from Harvard, but he was a man of color. In 1930s America, where racial segregation relegated people of color to second-class citizenship and black men were lynched with impunity, a historian of African-American ancestry—especially a politically far-left one—had little credibility, even among educated whites. With notable exceptions, white academics dismissed Du Bois’s challenge to prevailing historiography with faint praise and sometimes outright contempt.

Historian C. Vann Woodward, one of those few who praised Du Bois’s work, refuted Lost Cause history again in his own 1951 book, Origins of the New South. Yes, Woodward asserted, slavery had caused the Civil War; yes, Reconstruction was a tragic era—not because of “Negro rule,” but rather because a resurgent, corrupt, and violent Democratic Party thwarted the promise of racial equality through violent campaigns to restore white supremacy.

Other historians soon followed Woodward’s lead. By the 1960s, the Lost Cause was on its way to the ash heap of history.

But academic historians could not expunge its appeal in popular culture. MGM’s blockbuster production Gone with the Wind hit the theaters in 1939, four years after Du Bois’s work. The movie continued to enjoy enormous popularity for decades after. In 1960, at age 13, I saw it for the first time at one of its many special theatrical showings. Immediately afterward, I bought the novel by Margaret Mitchell that inspired it.

Gone with the Wind won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1940.

As a teenager attracted to fantasies of a mythical past, I learned from Gone With the Wind almost all that I knew about the Civil War. The romantic haze of gracious plantations, men of honor, Southern belles, and happy, loyal slaves softly shrouded the movie’s images of degraded poor whites, uncivilized and “uppity” freedpeople, and a benevolent Ku Klux Klan.

Other Hollywood productions kept up the image. In 1948, Universal Pictures dared to produce Tap Roots, a movie based on James Street’s novel of the same name and inspired, Street claimed, by the Free State of Jones. Whereas Street’s topic was Southern Unionism, however, the film served little more than a warmed-over Gone With the Wind. It highlighted—you guessed it—men of honor, Southern belles, and happy, loyal slaves.

The ultimate distortion of Jones County’s insurrection came in a 1951 book by Ethel Knight, The Echo of the Black Horn. A descendant of the pro-Confederacy side of the Knight family, Ethel anchored the story of Newt and Rachel firmly in Lost Cause principles and the segregationist code of the 1950s South. She rendered Newt an outlaw, a murderer, and a sinner who practiced racial amalgamation. Rachel, she told readers, was sexually promiscuous and practiced witchcraft. She had charmed Newt across the color line.

Such was the story that came before my eyes in 1992 when I read Knight’s book for the first time. Fascinated, I discovered that no fully researched history of Newt, Rachel, and the Jones County insurrection had ever been published.

I began to research, propelled by key questions. I wondered what drove the Jones County insurrectionists to support the Union. Were they opposed to slavery, at least some of them? What roles did class, religion, kinship, and local events play in fomenting conflict? I expected to find women, children, and enslaved people involved in this home front war, as I had in my earlier work on the Civil War in North Carolina, and I did.

By the time I embarked on this work, Civil War historians had built on the legacy of Du Bois and Woodward to examine the myriad ways in which conflicts over slavery led directly to the Civil War. The white South, they concluded, was anything but “solid.” Dissent and outright opposition to the Confederacy erupted time and again in regions with large non-slaveholding populations.

In recent years, too, Hollywood’s treatment of the Civil War has advanced well beyond Gone with the Wind with movies like Glory, Cold Mountain, and Lincoln. Yet, popular culture has shown us little about the Southern families that rejected secession from the Union and made war on the Confederacy.

Gary Ross, director of Free State of Jones, and Victoria Bynum on the set for her cameo role in the film.

Free State of Jones adds to our knowledge of Southern dissent within evolving depictions of our nation’s bloodiest conflict. Gary Ross, the movie’s screenwriter and director, read widely and deeply about the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This movie counters Lost Cause romanticism at every turn. It replaces the “honor” of benevolent slaveholders with the righteous anger of yeoman farmers, the rustle of crinoline slips with the click of rifles cocked by farm girls, and the contented faces of loyal slaves with the wary countenances of Maroons living in swamps. All rise to claim their rights in this tale of a rich man’s war and poor man’s fight. The movie reminds us that for a majority of Southerners, the Civil War was ultimately about class survival and racial liberation.

The post With <i>Free State of Jones</i>, Hollywood’s Civil War Comes Closer to History’s appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You don’t understand. I’d never stepped on turf so soft, or a track so bouncy. When did fake grass become so luxuriantly superior to the real thing? The football field at Washington-Lee High School (home of the Generals) just down the street from me in Arlington, Va., is the softest carpet I have ever walked on. That slick, perfect pitch lures you on with its promise of a precision once unimaginable: no dirt mounds or uneven grass to affect the ball’s trajectory.

Sebastian and I relish our workouts together. We usually play soccer, then throw a football around and run a couple of laps, or up and down the bleachers. We’re in that precious window where Daddy can do no wrong. He “ooohs” and “aaahs” at my mediocre passes as if I were Tom Brady; he accords my rusty dribbling skills the kind of awe owed the likes of Lionel Messi. When we join a pick-up game with other kids and parents, Sebastian will engage in a six-year-old’s trash talk: informing everyone of how good his daddy is. Meanwhile, when we go one-on-one, in any game, I don’t necessarily let him win. I tell him I have to win while I can, because I soon won’t be able to beat him. Seabass loves that.

He craves officialdom in earnest and innocent ways. “This is the same jersey the Barcelona players wear in their games, right daddy?” he’ll ask repeatedly. “Is this the same size ball?” I remember craving that as a kid too. When I was in third grade, those of us on our school team had individual ID cards – laminated! – that we presented to the ref when we came onto the field, certifying that we were legit members of the Chihuahua Fútbol Association. My coach solemnly assured us this was a branch of FIFA, meaning that my mug (at least in my fevered imagination) was archived in some vault in Zurich.

But we certainly didn’t have fields like this in Chihuahua. My school’s soccer pitch was inclined rather steeply, and lacked grass, fake or real. In the spring months when the desert winds would pick up, our dirt field would host veritable sandstorms that turned our soccer games into a sideshow. Back then, no one, not even the most pampered pros on the planet, would have played on turf as sweet as that of the W-L Generals, because it hadn’t been perfected yet in the lab.

I try not to tell Seabass–at least not on each outing–how lucky he is to play on such a field, and about my epic ordeals playing on tilted dirt. I sound ancient and crotchety when I do so, the way grandparents do when they talk about walking miles to their schoolhouse. And my tale of woe, as is often the case with such “woe-was-I” reminiscences, is self-servingly selective–I had a pretty comfortable childhood in Mexico, pitiful sports facilities aside.

Sebastian’s own school these days is called Douglas MacArthur, which is such a relief. At least that general led U.S. troops (even if he didn’t always want to be led by a president), instead of plotting the destruction of the nation. In these parts, that’s progress. I coach his MacArthur kindergarten team. We’re called the Tigers, though in my mind a more apt tribute to the general (and to my kids’ propensity to wander off onto the adjacent playground during practice) would be to call ourselves “the insubordinates.”

I love the serendipity that comes with wandering over to our unfortunately-named public high school for a workout. We never know if we are going to be exercising on the track during an intense match between community teams, or an over-the-hill flag football exhibition, or come across small clusters of players we can join. One day we had the entire field to ourselves. And serendipity comes in all forms on the edge of the empire’s capital–Northern Virginia is an astonishingly diverse sliver of the old Confederacy, home to sizable Middle Eastern, African-American, South Asian, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, West African, Bolivian and plenty of preppy WASP communities, many of whom come to sweat and bond at the home of the Generals.

Seabass and I tend to end our workouts on our backs, lying side by side looking up at the clouds, discerning shapes from the puffy cotton–a fast-moving shark fin here, an overweight rabbit there.

“You know what, Daddy?” Sebastian asks from time to time, a lead-in to conversations that invariably land on the day’s highlights reel.

“When I was little,” he said a few weeks ago, “I used to think that Jesus came before the dinosaurs; isn’t that silly?” He then cracked himself up. “So, I thought Jesus was on the earth, then after he died, dinosaurs wandered around, and then they died and the rest of us humans showed up. That’s crazy, right Daddy?”

Inspiration often strikes in these sky-gazing chats, like our decision in May to celebrate an R2D2 Day, in honor of underappreciated heroes everywhere (“Selfless, not selfish” was the day’s motto).

But my gnawing guilt stalks these precious moments too, often when I catch a glimpse of the Washington-Lee scoreboard. Am I not a co-conspirator in the glorification of the Confederacy, just by being here? I assuage the guilt with fantasies I will never act upon, of going over in the middle of the night and spray-painting over the second name, the one of the general who killed so many American soldiers in the name of slavery. Or of becoming a community oddball who pickets Friday night games, handing out flyers on crisp fall evenings to preppy kids rooting on their Generals. But alas, back in the real world, a detached (or cowardly?) op-ed is more my style.

Honoring Robert E. Lee seems nonsensical in the 21st Century, and yet his name is still there, hyphenated and on a par with George Washington’s. And all of us on this idyllic track and field act nonchalant about it, accepting of it, even the kids of color proudly wearing their W-L jerseys. Unless, of course, they are all harboring their own unspoken fantasies about making a scene about it.

Andrés Martinez is Editorial Director of Zócalo Public Square and Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.

*Photo by Andrés Martinez.

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