There’s a long-standing equestrian tradition at Sweet Briar College, one that is touted in contemporary marketing brochures and on the college website homepage alongside its engineering program and U.S. News & World Report ranking. There’s also a long tradition of honoring the founder of the Virginia women’s college, whose family is buried under large granite and marble memorials at a site called Monument Hill. At the heart of both of these traditions is antebellum slavery. The superficially bucolic liberal arts campus, with its stables and fields, was once a thriving plantation; Sweet Briar College was established in 1901 by a daughter of the plantation’s owner, an heir to his wealth.

The memorial at the slave cemetery. Courtesy of the Sweet Briar College Cochran Library/Sweet Briar College photographers.

I was a visiting instructor of anthropology and archaeology in 2001 when the director of the riding program shared his concern about a possible graveyard on the riding grounds. The dean of students asked me to help assess the observation. Over the next year, I worked with several faculty colleagues to map the dislocated gravestones and sunken burial depressions of over 60 souls: African and Native Americans, all enslaved people and free laborers who had worked for the white family buried about a mile away. Throughout this work and in the years that followed, no below-ground burials were disturbed. The horse trails and jumps were relocated to preserve the integrity and sacredness of the site. We located a descendant, Rev. Jasper “Eddie” Fletcher, who had heard stories about his great-grandfather being enslaved on the plantation.

As the college’s horticulturalist and her team cleared the overgrown part of the graveyard, the president of the college and the board of trustees decided to commemorate the slave cemetery with a plaque. The college was reluctant to use the term “slave” or “slavery,” so the 26-word inscription avoided both terms: “Sweet Briar Plantation Burial Grounds—Sacred Resting Place of Unknown Founders Who Labored to Build What Has Become Sweet Briar College. We Are In Their Debt.” The words were etched in metal and added to a large boulder at the edge of the cemetery.

On April 24, 2003, Sweet Briar College held a memorial service to unveil the plaque. For the first time in its 102-year history, the college officially recognized its connection to an antebellum plantation and the enslavement of men, women, and children. The plaque was important, but the activities centered around it that day were what mattered: the gospel choir’s songs, the speech given by Rev. Fletcher, which exhorted individuals to pray for the unidentified souls buried in the graveyard, the college president’s pledge to “claim our past, and to acknowledge and embrace many of the unknown people who labored as slaves on the Sweet Briar Plantation,” and the discussions that occurred among townsfolk, students, faculty, and administrators as they pieced together parts of local history and the origins of the college.

Yet the initial interest in the cemetery for enslaved families faded between 2004 and 2014. The site in the forest became overgrown. Fewer and fewer visitors came.

Ironically, this decade of declining engagement by students and administrators was a critical and successful period of research into the cemetery and its stories. Faculty in the history department transcribed archival documents, a pair of geologists studied the environmental setting of the graveyard and the plantation itself, and I started a decade-long effort to study the lives of the enslaved families and trace their descendants. I worked with local historians to uncover the earliest African and Native Americans who were enslaved at Sweetbrier Plantation. I was able to share with their descendants never-before-public photographs and archival documents from the Sweet Briar library. And I realized that about a quarter of the college’s hourly labor force could trace their ancestry back to people buried in the cemetery.

The Fletcher family visits the slave cemetery during a second reunion in 2010. Courtesy of the Sweet Briar College Cochran Library/Sweet Briar College photographers.

We best remember individuals from the past when we combine memorials with rituals, like lighting a candle for a deceased relative on their birthday or bringing flowers to a loved one’s headstone. The descendants of Sweetbrier’s enslaved and free laborers know this. In 2008, two cousins hosted a large family reunion at Sweet Briar for descendants of the Black Fletchers. As people gathered around the rough-hewn fieldstones, Rev. Fletcher led them in a Christian ceremony while another relative performed a West African-inspired libation ceremony, blending two traditions, just as enslaved families had done.

The administrators of Sweet Briar College know this, too: They hold an annual procession along gravel roads up to Monument Hill where the white Fletchers are buried. When Indiana Fletcher Williams willed money and land to establish the college in honor of her deceased 16-year-old daughter Daisy, she added a handful of conditions. One instructed the college trustees to ensure that her family’s graveyard was cared for. The college took this one step further and designed “Founders’ Day,” held every October on or near the date of Indiana’s death to honor and remember the bequest.

Generations of Sweet Briar students have brought daisies to lay at Daisy’s grave while campus leaders give speeches of gratitude. Some graduates may have forgotten the details, but it is doubtful that they would forget an elaborate commemoration that included white dresses, pearls, and a long walk up a steep hill to a marble headstone. The ritual of that procession memorializes the college’s founders for perpetuity.

In 2015, the college faced the threat of closure. The initial shock and then all-out battle to “save Sweet Briar” reenergized generations of alumnae. Perhaps not surprisingly, part of the emotional connection that these women felt to their alma mater revolved around traditions. And for some, the absence of commemorations that recognized the forgotten founders of the school was a glaring absence. Accordingly, alumnae and students took the lead in crafting rituals to honor and remember the cemetery for African and Native Americans in the Founders’ Day rituals. Several versions of new traditions were attempted: a sunrise service at the graveyard, a procession the day before or after Founders’ Day to lay daisies on the graves of the enslaved individuals, and a continued focus on inviting descendants to speak at these ceremonies.

A walk to the slave cemetery, Founders Day, 2020. Courtesy of the Sweet Briar College Cochran Library/Sweet Briar College photographers.

The 2020 version of the annual Founders’ Day ceremonies was a culmination of years of experimentation. I was invited back to campus to share some of the accomplishments and contributions of the “invisible founders.” But the most powerful speech was given by Dwana Waugh, the first tenure-track African American professor at the college, who also led a procession to the historic graveyard. “On this walk, we reflected on the hands that helped to build and sustain Sweet Briar with their labor. The cemetery, which until more recently, has remained part of the college’s hidden history, is now more visible,” she reminded the college community. “This walk represents a way to acknowledge those who would have been excluded from campus life for much of Sweet Briar’s earliest years.”

Practically, cemeteries house the dead, but more powerfully, they serve as physical reminders of the contributions of our ancestors and as outdoor museums. A community chooses how to reinterpret or even deliberately forget certain events. Physical markers, such as statues or plaques, can withstand the passage of time, but without active engagement from the living, the memories they represent can fade into neglect and even be lost.

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To mention the fledgling enterprise in the presence of a white master was a ticket to torture and likely death by hanging, so everyone took precautions to swear new recruits to secrecy. With a few months, more than 60,000 enslaved people had heard about the effort, through well-wired plantation networks.
 
Then, on the night of December 27, 1831, “the business” opened. The first signal fires were lit in the hills above Montego Bay, and soon plantation houses went up in flames across the richest West Indian colony of the British empire. White Jamaica found itself contending with its biggest insurrection ever. It took five weeks for a British military crackdown to restore quiet.

The rebellion’s end would not be a lasting defeat. Much of the British public was already disgusted by slavery—the price of maintaining it seemed to be endless wars overseas—and after the Jamaica rebellion, political pressure built. Within 18 months of the first fire, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

The rebellion, after failing, had succeeded. And not just at advancing freedom. “The Christmas Uprising” in Jamaica was a groundbreaking action and a model; its enslaved leaders anticipated the methods of later revolutionary movements—from the Irish Republican Army to Gandhi’s struggle against the British, from the French underground fight against the Nazis to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The story of the Jamaican revolution suggests that methods of calculated revolutionary action transcend historical periods.

In other words, the ways of resistance are timeless. 
 
Jamaica’s enslaved population was among the most abused and powerless on the globe in 1831. Most were illiterate. Few had ever seen anything but their owner’s plantation. Their only weapons were machetes and rocks. They constantly lived on the edge of hunger and harsh punishment. Yet even in this isolated atmosphere of extreme deprivation, they developed durable strategies for a politically successful revolution.

One such strategy was nonviolence. The chief conspirator of “the business,” an enslaved Baptist deacon named Samuel Sharpe, had insisted the protest would be a peaceful sit-down strike. The plan was to simply refuse to work on the second rest day after Christmas unless masters agreed to pay striking workers half the daily wages that a free person would get for chopping sugar cane.

This simple tactic of resistance anticipated the philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi by 70 years. What Gandhi would call satyagraha, or “truth power,” forced authorities to confront and defend a central injustice, and perhaps open their own eyes to a moral blind spot. Just as Gandhi knew that British abuses would not last forever under the scrutiny of outside public opinion, Sharpe was also aware of a larger world that might sympathize with his cause.

As a traveling church deacon, he had access to the newspapers brought by cargo ships and had read about the abolitionist sentiment in Britain. His Christian beliefs were of the pacifist kind and he repeatedly told his followers not to harm anyone. Indeed, the extremely low reported death toll among whites in the uprising—just 14, when up to 500 rebels were killed or executed—speaks to the tremendous restraint and forbearance among those who had every reason to want revenge. 
 
The Jamaican revolution also employed a simple idealism—its leaders understood that, if oppressed people were going to risk their lives, they must be given a vision of a higher purpose that could be phrased in simple terms. Samuel Sharpe used the New Testament, visiting slave villages to preach verses considered too provocative by white missionaries, in particular those that emphasized freedom in Christ. Along with scripture, Sharpe (one of the few enslaved people on the island who was literate) let his followers in on a secret: The British people across the ocean were agitating to free the enslaved, and the King of England had signed a general “free paper” that was being kept under wraps by the Jamaican sugar barons.

This last part was embroidered. William IV was an ardent defender of slavery. But the enslaved people in Jamaica still revered his name and believed him to be their friend. Sharpe’s pro-liberty message was both simple and electric. Slavery was against God’s law and the King’s will.

This messianic vision of liberty, accessible to everyone, was not dissimilar to the collectivist ideals touted 40 years later by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who exulted, “In Moscow from a sea of blood and flame the constellation of the revolution will rise, high and beautiful, and will become the guiding star for the good of all liberated mankind.” Martin Luther King, Jr., an admirer of Gandhi, also advanced a message of Christian love and justice that cut across racial lines, was easy to communicate, and proved difficult to refute. 
 

In Jamaica, Sharpe, while insisting on nonviolent methods, also knew he needed a military wing. At planning meetings in fall 1831, several of Sharpe’s lieutenants agitated for a backup plan in case the strike should fail. Two of those present—Thomas Dove and Robert Gardiner—would become the fiercest fighters against the white volunteer militia once the strike had moved into a less peaceful phase. In January, they even built and staffed an impressive hilltop fortress, designed to repel incursions, called Greenwich Hill, and fought several engagements with British troops. In this, they anticipated another commonplace practice of 20th-century resistance movements: to maintain an armed underground sector operating beneath the political wing. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and Ireland’s Sinn Fein are the most well-known examples of this “arrows and olive branch” approach.

Sharpe also cultivated the enslaved “elite.” The Jamaican colonial government was surprised when it learned that the revolt’s leaders were among the most privileged of the island’s enslaved population: head drivers, head boilers, butlers, and traveling deacons like Sharpe. They were those with seemingly the least incentive to rebel because they enjoyed the most perquisites and avoided the whipping customarily dealt out to field hands. Sharpe himself told his interrogators he had always been treated kindly by his master and never beaten.

Yet the “elites” were also best positioned to recruit followers because they were trusted both by laborers on their watch and by white guardians of the sugar estates. The value of elite support is an enduring lesson of revolution. American colonial resistance to British rule was backed by Boston’s richest men. Vladimir Lenin was no peasant; he grew up in a middle-class household in Ulyanovsk, attended Kazan University and surrounded himself with fellow educated radicals.

Sharpe also used operational tactics—including small cells and safe houses—that would become de rigeur. French Resistance operatives in World War II famously kept themselves in small clusters to avoid mass arrest, and recruited only one or two people at a time, using a case officer who did not know the central command. After the war, communist insurgents used a similar strategy. But enslaved people in 1830s Jamaica had already figured it out.

Samuel Sharpe had been permitted to travel between plantations for the ostensible reason of teaching Bible lessons and leading small worship services. This he did, but he also appointed cell leaders who appointed their own small groups. Sharpe created a ritual called “taking the swear” in which new recruits would promise on the Bible to sit down after Christmas and not work. Sharpe did the first secret swearings, but from then on, his own “case officers” did the work of exponential recruitment. In this way, and within one of the most repressive societies on earth, he built a connected network of strangers that stretched 70 miles in all directions.
 
Sharpe’s development of safe houses was also ahead of its time. Every Jamaican plantation had a section the white ruling class called the Negro Village: a “main street” of individual houses occupied by enslaved people. Field hands typically occupied small huts, but those in senior labor roles tended to have frame houses. In these elite houses, Sharpe preached about the “business.” His top-level recruits used these houses for the most sensitive meetings, stockpiled weapons in them, and even created their own military-style uniforms: blue jackets with red sashes.

This was not unlike the system that Nelson Mandela would use in townships all across South Africa in the formative days of the African National Congress. He would appear at certain homes unexpectedly, a step ahead of the state police. “He put a number of questions to us and then gave us a briefing about what he had been doing outside the country and then discussed the tasks that lay ahead,” recalled one man who met Mandela secretly at a house in Durban in 1962. 
 
Finally, the Jamaican rebels were astonishingly good at the secret sharing of intelligence, and they often knew about troop movements, government decrees, and even international news before their white masters heard about it. They used a sophisticated network of deck hands, house servants, traveling Bible teachers, and cargo ship stevedores to pass along messages.

A planter on the north shore once heard a critical piece of news from Kingston before the mail arrived and surmised there must have been “some unknown mode of conveying intelligence.”

The most critical piece of information of the early uprising, however, could not have been more visible: the first signal fire lit at Kensington Estate on the night of December 27, 1831. Whether Samuel Sharpe approved of it or not, the first blaze was followed almost immediately by a chain of fires lit on neighboring plantations that turned the night sky a dazzling orange and told the entire northwestern side of the island that “the business” was coming to pass at last.

The white ruling class could not help but be intimidated to the point of total confusion.

“The whole surrounding country was completely illuminated, and presented a terrible appearance, even at noon-day,” marveled a white militiaman. “When, however, the shades of night descended, and the buildings on the side of those beautiful mountains, which form the splendid panorama around Montego Bay, were burning, the spectacle was awfully grand.”

News that such a conspiracy could have been so widespread landed with explosive force in Britain. The public became convinced that prolonging the institution of slavery would only lead to further revolts and huge transatlantic military expenses. “The slaves must be sooner or later set at freedom,” editorialized the Morning Advertiser in London, “whether it be or whether it be not for their benefit, and the sooner that proper steps are taken for this purpose, so much the better.”

Within 18 months, William IV gave his reluctant royal assent to the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Samuel Sharpe died on the gallows before he saw it come to pass. But the revolutionary methods of “the business” had been victorious against the most powerful government in the world, and more than 800,000 people were set free as a result.

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“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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“We need to forget about this so we can heal,” said an elderly white woman, as she left my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their influence on American cuisine.  Something I said, or perhaps everything I said, upset her.

My presentation covered 300 years of American history that started with the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and which still echoes in our culture today, from the myth of the “happy servant” (think Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle) to the broader marketing of black servitude (as in TV commercials for Caribbean resorts, targeted at white American travelers). I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I had not anticipated the woman’s displeasure, trying to forget is not an uncommon response to the unsettling tale of the complicated roots of our history, and particularly some of our beloved foods.

It is the story of people like Chef Hercules, our nation’s first White House chef; and Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping. It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost. But from its most famous to its anonymous practitioners, the story of Southern cuisine is inseparable from the story of American racism. It’s double-edged—full of pain—but also of pride. Reckoning with it can be cumbersome, but it’s also necessary. The stories of enslaved cooks teach us that we can love our country and also be critical of it, and find some peace along the way.

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own and whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage. In my recent study of enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence and material culture—the rooms where they once lived, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged around, the gardens they planted—and documents such as slaveholders’ letters, cookbooks, and plantation records to learn about their experiences. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nation’s cultural heritage.

In the early 17th century, tobacco farming began to spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region. Before long, plantations were founded by colonists, such as Shirley Plantation, constructed circa 1613; Berkeley Hundred, and Flowerdew Hundred, whose 1,000 acres extended along the James River. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape.

Traditions surrounding dining and maintaining a grand household were part of those norms, and the white gentry began seeking domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on plantations were indentured servants, workers who toiled without pay for a contractually agreed-upon period of time before eventually earning their freedom. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central and western Africa, to grow crops, build structures and generally remain at the beck and call of white families. Before long these enslaved cooks took the roles that had once been occupied by white indentured servants.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience.

Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white Virginians. Private moments were rare, as was rest. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the “front stage” of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslavers—and of Virginia—on their shoulders. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes. While the missus may have helped design the menu, or provided some recipes, it was the enslaved cooks who created the meals that made Virginia, and eventually the South, known for its culinary fare and hospitable nature.

These cooks knew their craft. Hercules, who cooked for George Washington, and James Hemings, an enslaved cook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, were both formally trained, albeit in different styles. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper and culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking. Hercules and Hemings were the nation’s first celebrity chefs, famous for their talents and skills.

Folklore, archaeological evidence, and a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating and normalizing the mixture of European, African, and Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, and greens. They created favorites like gumbo, an adaptation of a traditional West African stew; and jambalaya, a cousin of Jolof rice, a spicy, heavily seasoned rice dish with vegetables and meat. These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, and into the kitchens of Virginia’s elite.

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries. These were compiled by slaveholding women, whose responsibilities sat firmly in the domestic sphere, and are now housed in historical societies throughout the country. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, and roasted meats. But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. Southern food—enslaved cooks’ food—had been written into the American cultural profile.

For the women who wrote and preserved the receipt books, these recipes, the products of African foodways, were something worthy of remembering, re-creating, and establishing as Americana. So why can’t we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, and we know from court records and other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters’ food.

Depiction of Aunt Jemima, 1920, in the Saturday Evening Post. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons.

But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War, erasing the brutality and hardships of slavery from a story of Old Southern graciousness. The revisionism went full throttle during the era of Jim Crow, when new laws made segregation the norm. Post-emancipation America still relied heavily on the skills and labor of newly freed African Americans. In a highly racialized and segregated America, still grappling with its guilt over slavery, white people created a myth that these cooks were—and always had been—happy. Advertisers leaned on characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus, stereotypical black domestics, drawn from minstrel song.

While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waiters—the only jobs they could get—Aunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. You can find their faces throughout early 20th-century black Americana, and they are still on the grocery shelves today, though modified to reflect a more dignified image. 

My angry audience member was likely raised on the old enslaved-cook narrative in which these images took root, where the cook was loyal, passive, and purportedly happy—a non-threatening being whose ultimate goal was to help a white woman fulfill her own domestic vision. But to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race. It is to ignore the story of Chef Hercules, or the real story of Aunt Jemima. By forgetting enslaved cooks’ pain to soothe our own, we erase the pride and the achievements of countless brilliant cooks who nourished a nation.

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