On July 12, 1898 John Henry James’ body, riddled with bullets, hanged from a locust tree. The Virginia man had been in the custody of the Albemarle County sheriff, awaiting grand jury action on a rape allegation, when a mob of 150 people kidnapped and killed him.

James, the story went, sexually assaulted one Julia Hotopp. (I belabor here, in confirming your suspicion that James was Black and Hotopp white.) There were doubts surrounding Hotopp’s allegation. Still, a newspaper applauded the mob, noting that “the people of Charlottesville heartily approve the lynching.”  The grand jury, determined to have its say too, over a corpse no less, issued a posthumous indictment.

For more than a century, James was an accused rapist. He obtained a minuscule measure of justice on July 12, 2023—the 125th anniversary of his death—when Albemarle County prosecutor James Hingeley asked a circuit court to revisit the indictment, and judge Cheryl V. Higgins, at long last, dismissed it.

These officials are to be commended; criminal indictments do their best work in the universe of the living. James’ is an easy and instructive case, illustrating with blinding clarity the umbilical link between illegal lynching and state-sanctioned rape executions, two corporeal atrocities that were, infamously, pretty much reserved for Black males—boys, as well as men.

James’ exoneration is also a prophetic case. It demarcates a path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females, mostly in latter-day Confederate states, at the hands of a supremacist legal regime.

That John Henry James’ indictment came after his lynching may seem absurd—but in 1898, and for decades thereafter, such was the symbiotic common ground between the county courthouse and the lynching locale. Legal officials raced against the mob to confer upon these killings the stamp of validity, and lynching parties, enacting “lynch law,” adorned their proceedings with the rituals of the courtroom. Lynchings were extensions and expressions of the administration of justice, not estranged from it. A case in point: in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1917, a group of men known as the Shelby Avengers announced their intention to lynch a man charged with the sexual assault and murder of a white teenager, giving people ample time to reach the location where, they promised, justice would be dispensed. After the man was burned, decapitated, and dismembered, the Commercial Appeal reported, “throughout the entire proceedings there was perfect order …  and none offered violence not countenanced by the summary court.”  The newspaper also complimented the Avengers for having the forethought to appoint a treasurer to secure compensation for those participants who had absented themselves from work to search for and lynch the man. Jury duty.

This pattern persisted from the end of the Civil War until the early 20th century. Beginning around 1909, with the introduction of the electric chair, the numbers of legal executions rose, slowly replacing extralegal lynchings, at least in Virginia.  Some scholars of lynching—Fitzhugh Brundage, for example—have expressed skepticism that a rise in legal execution in the early 20th century correlated with a decline in extralegal lynching. But the historical record is replete with evidence that executions were understood to be a replacement for the mob, particularly in Virginia.

From 1880 to 1909, 27 Black men were lynched in Virginia for rape or attempted rape, while just seven were lynched in the four decades that followed. From 1908 to 1965, Virginia executed 56 men on non-lethal sexual assault charges. All of them were Black. These numbers are not anomalous: 19th-century versions of the state’s rape laws explicitly split white rape from Black rape. Before the Civil War, only “free negroes” charged with assault against white females were subject to the death penalty; the penalty for white males was limited to a 10- to 20-year prison term.  Over its entire 400-year history, the state killed just three white men for rape, all before 1868, and no white man was ever put to death for attempted rape while 36 Black men suffered that fate—one as late as 1940.

In 1921, the state’s highest court made the connection between the rise in executions and the decline in lynching explicit. In Hart v. Commonwealth, a case sanctioning the execution of a 21-year-old for attempted rape and rejecting his argument that the sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment, the Virginia court opined that “the likelihood of the resort to lynch law, unless there is a prompt conviction and a severe penalty imposed. . . is well known to exist.” (Indeed the state apparently deemed attempted rape more heinous than attempted murder—an offense for which no one in Virginia, Black or white, was executed after 1863.)

For decades to follow, Virginia’s Supreme Court—comprised entirely of white male jurists—aided and abetted what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun later described as a “machinery of death.” From 1908 to 1963, the court wrote opinions in 73 capital and non-capital cases of rape and related crimes; they reversed the sentences of approximately one-quarter of Black defendants compared to nearly two-thirds of white defendants.

Other states enforced similar laws. Louisiana also ran a two-tiered legal regime for rape prosecutions, effectively reserving its capital penalty for Black defendants charged with sexual assault on whites. Since 1900, the state has executed around 40 defendants for aggravated rape; all but two were Black. It has never executed a white man for the rape of a Black woman.  South Carolina has, since 1900, executed around 66 people for sexual crimes, of whom 61 were Black.  Florida has executed 48 men for rape and related crimes, of whom 44 were Black. And in Georgia, since 1900, 87 of the 93 men executed by the state for rape have been Black.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty for rape unconstitutional in 1977. But its decision in Coker v. Georgia hinged on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and never addressed the penalty’s longstanding racial intent and impact.  Had it done so, lower courts might have been on notice to protect against unconstitutional bias in the administration of rape laws by, for example, ensuring fair and deracialized jury selection, protecting against discriminatory prosecution, and guarding against the race tax in sentencing.

Instead, the execrable history of lynching and execution continued to infect rape prosecutions. Until DNA forensics became widely available about 20 years ago, countless innocent Black men were wrongly convicted for sexual assault.  Just 10 years ago, Black people were almost eight times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of rape. And just last year, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that Black prisoners incarcerated for sexual assault are over three times more likely to be innocent of the crime than white prisoners—and generally received far longer sentences than white exonerees.

This is not just a Virginia problem. But Virginians are grappling with this history head-on, and could lead the nation in a project of redress.  The state recently abolished the death penalty, in 2021. That year, then-governor Ralph Northam posthumously pardoned seven men who were executed after conviction on a 1951 rape charge that attracted international protest. Descendants of the Martinsville Seven, as the accused were known, had campaigned for the pardon. Northam was careful to specify that the pardon was not an exoneration; it was an acknowledgment that the men did not get a fair trial. “We all deserve a criminal justice system that is fair, equal, and gets it right,” he proclaimed.

This illustration was part of a 1951 Michigan petition mailed to then-Virginia Governor John S. Battle to save the “Martinsville Seven.” Their executions were carried out despite pleas for mercy from around the world. Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

By that measure—one none could quarrel with—there are, nationally, 1,073 rape executions that deserve posthumous redress. States could aim to correct these travesties by executive pardon, as with the Martinsville Seven, or by judicial action, as with John Henry James.  The U.S. courts might start admitting their own complicity in rushing Black men to their deaths. Localities might consider how prosecutors’ offices, like that of Albemarle County, can review historical cases to determine how many were rushed to judgment to avert mob violence, or otherwise shortchanged the process that was the defendant’s due.  They might also examine the actions of police, who often railroaded accused men by threatening to turn them over to the mob if they did not “confess.”

Manifestly, not every Black man executed for rape was innocent of the charge. But because none of these men got the due process or sentencing justice they deserved, perhaps all their cases must be re-examined. All of these men were hostages in the war for white supremacy. All of them were subjected to the meta-law of race. And all of them experienced law as a political weapon, rather than a set of neutral evidentiary rules.

State-endorsed redress and remedial measures, while inevitably insufficient, will help. They would also expiate slanders and stereotypes that, even in today’s courts and prosecutors’ offices, render the Black male “naturally” a potent threat to white females. When Dylann Roof shot down parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, his battle cry evinced the abiding nature of this group libel.  “Y’all are raping our white women, y’all are taking over the world,” he yelled, as he slaughtered.

The new sits solidly on top of the old here; race is the beginning and the end of this ongoing horror story. There is work to do, and Charlottesville prosecutors have sharpened their pencils and stretched their (and our) imaginations. The James case makes clear that the crimes of racialized justice must be lifted from the pages of books, criminology journals, and amicus briefs and placed in the public square. There, they can stimulate a community’s “ongoing commitment to . . . racial justice” and demonstrate the “importance of community remembrance projects,” as Hingeley, the prosecutor who helped clear James, observed.

The more of these historical travesties we tackle, the better off our legal system, and our nation, will be.

The post Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those who were forced into the ships of the infamous slave trade probably thought of themselves using ethnic and territorial terms that have been lost to us. But across the ocean, enslavers and local elites lumped Africans of many different backgrounds into a single category of debasement, “Negroes,” and sustained this category through laws that regulated freedom.

But the creation of racial identity through legal means took some surprising turns.

From the beginning, enslaved people and free people of African ancestry used those same laws to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. They created spaces for communities where “blackness” and freedom were not only possible, but foundational.

Although free people of color were few in number compared to enslaved people, and lived on the margins of plantation societies in many ways, the contests over their identities, status, and rights were the terrain on which race was made. Legal contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims of citizenship would be tied to racial identity.

By the early 18th century, Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (all colonies themselves, of the Spanish, British, and French Empires, respectively), had legal regimes that constituted blackness as a debased category equivalent to enslavement. But 150 years later, by the mid-19th century, the social implications of blackness in each of these regions were fundamentally different.

In Cuba in the 1850s, a free man of color could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious association that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. But, in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia, a free man of color saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned, and even re-enslaved for remaining in the state in which he was born.

In Louisiana or Virginia, when a person sought to prove in court that he was not a person of color, he would bring evidence of civic acts, because citizenship and whiteness were so closely linked in political thought and legal doctrine that a citizen must be a white man, and only a white man could be a citizen. In Cuba, similar conduct was not necessarily incompatible with blackness.

The key to understanding these divergent trajectories lies in the law of freedom. Different approaches to freedom were rooted in various legal traditions. The right to manumission, for example, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish law of slavery, and so in Cuba manumission, or release from slavery, was not tied to race, a crucial difference from both Louisiana and Virginia.

One turning point in this story was the Age of Revolution. The populations of free people of color, who claimed freedom in rising numbers, exploded in all three jurisdictions, and the example of the Haitian Revolution inspired the enslaved as it struck fear in the hearts of enslavers.

But the expansion of freedom meant different things in the Spanish empire and in the U.S. republic. Communities of people of color in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana owed their existence to legal understandings and customary practices anchored in traditions of the ancien regime. Enslaved people who managed to purchase their freedom or, more rarely, obtained manumission through other means, became members of highly stratified societies. Black freedom did not imply social equality and republican rights.

By contrast, in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, the expansion of manumission, and the increase in freedom lawsuits, were tied to questions of citizenship, and of black participation in the new political order under conditions of equality. Enslaved and free people of color alike infused these questions with a sense of urgency, as they made use of every available legal loophole to purchase or make claims for their own freedom. Their actions produced dramatic results: by the early 19th century, the proportion of free people of color in Virginia had increased significantly.

Virginia’s white citizens witnessed these trends with horror and petitioned to outlaw manumissions. It was, literally, a reactionary request: to restore the colonial law of freedom. The 1806 law requiring freed slaves to leave the state fell short of that goal, but marked the first step towards a social order in which blacks could only exist as slaves.

After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, whites’ political will to exclude free blacks intensified. Slaveholding states in the U.S. South responded to threats of rebellion, and to Northern abolitionists’ demands for immediate emancipation, with a defense of slavery as a positive good: the best possible condition for debased “Negroes.” To galvanize the support of non-slaveholding whites, Southerners cemented white solidarity by defining citizenship and voting rights along racial lines.

This movement created a paradox: egalitarian democracy would go hand-in-hand with the expansion of racist practices and ideologies. As slaveholders appealed to non-slaveholders with the promise of broad citizenship rights for all white men, free people of color became increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous to the polity. That is why colonization efforts that sought to remove free blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in 19th-century Virginia and Louisiana (which changed hands to the United States in 1803), but not in Cuba.

That is also why Virginia and Louisiana acted in the 19th century, especially in the 1850s, to end the possibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits. By 1860, free people of color in Virginia and Louisiana were increasingly forced to leave the state upon emancipation or to live under threat of prosecution. A few even chose “voluntary” re-enslavement in order to remain with their families.

Free people of color continued to claim freedom in court, and fought tenaciously for the basic rights to a homeland, to remain close to friends and kin, and to live in their communities of origin. Yet they saw their militia and schools shut down, and their churches survived only under white leadership. Increasingly contested battles in court over racial identity attested to the growing anxiety over black citizenship and the need to prove whiteness in order to claim basic rights.

By 1860, Cuba had diverged significantly from Louisiana and Virginia—not in its legal regime of slavery, but rather in its regime of race. Enslaved people in Cuba took advantage of legal reforms that were not intended for their benefit to carve out greater freedoms for themselves. But in Virginia and Louisiana, where the status of communities of color was reduced to something closer to slavery, race rather than enslavement became the true “impassable barrier,” in the words of Justice Roger B. Taney. In Cuba, where free people of color could be rights-bearing subjects, enslavement was the dividing line.

Laws regulating free people of color also served as a template for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place. Slavery laws did not translate forward in the same way that regulations based on race did. When Southerners sought to restore the antebellum order after the Civil War, they could not re-impose slavery, but they passed Black Codes whose language echoed the laws regarding free people of color almost exactly. Under the Black Codes, freedmen could enter into contracts, own property, and appear in court on their own behalf. But in myriad other ways, their lives were constricted, just as they would have been if emancipated before 1861.

In the U.S., laws limiting the immigration of free people of color from one state into the other were the first immigration restrictions. These statutes echo into the 20th century—and to the present day—in limitations on the right to immigrate into the U.S. based on racial and national identity. In Cuba, on the other hand, legal racial barriers came under increasing attack even before final emancipation in 1886. In the 1880s, limitations on interracial marriages were eliminated and racial segregation in public services and education was outlawed. These changes were an imperial imperative. As the colonial state of Spain sought to retain control over its restive colony of Cuba, it had to cultivate the political support of the free black population. By 1898, the island’s short-lived political regime of “autonomy” recognized black males as voting subjects with equal rights.

The transition from black slavery to black citizenship was neither linear nor preordained. It was as contentious and ferociously contested a process in Cuba as it was in Virginia and Louisiana. But the new struggles for standing and citizenship took place against the backdrop of significantly different legal regimes of race. From being enslaved to being a citizen, the connecting tissue before and after emancipation for black people was not “from slave to citizen,” but from black to black.

The post The ‘Ferociously Contested’ Story of How Blackness Became a Legal Identity 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.

The post The Sarcastic Civil War Diarist Who Chronicled the Confederacy’s Fall appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In that way, Newport, the explorer John Smith, and the other founders of Jamestown were radically different than their rivals in the English colonization of the New World: the Pilgrims, who landed farther north and established the Plymouth colony in 1620. The Pilgrims were religious separatists who endured (and often died) in the alien landscape because they hungered for religious liberty.

By contrast, Jamestown was set up by the Virginia Company of London strictly as a for-profit business. The corporate mission of the colonists was to find gold, as the Spanish did when they plundered the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán almost a century earlier.

When Newport, Smith, and company failed to turn up anything but iron pyrite (fool’s gold) in Virginia, the starving souls of Jamestown finally discovered America’s first profitable business—and their salvation—by cultivating tobacco on fields once farmed by Native Americans.

Thus, the American enterprise was born on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay—with the sale of a deadly and addictive drug grown with African slave labor on stolen land.

Over the next four centuries, the Chesapeake would be central to the formation of American identity—as the artery into which capitalism and democracy flowed into our nation. The Chesapeake Bay drains a 64,000-square-mile area across six states from New York to Virginia, and boasts 11,684 miles of shoreline—more than the U.S. West Coast—with its green folds and crannies sheltering 3,600 species of animals and plants. But the bay’s average depth is only 21 feet, giving its watershed the lowest water-to-land ratio of any coastal estuary in the world—an unfortunate distinction, in terms of the bay’s ability to absorb insults from the land.

The Chesapeake Bay is as shallow as it is rich with life and history, a meeting place for north and south, freshwater and saltwater, rivers and ocean, freedom and slavery. The bay was the site of the defining bloodshed of early American history, including the final battle of the Revolutionary War. And it was down the bay that the Great Liberator, Abraham Lincoln, traveled by steamboat to Richmond to conclude the Civil War and hear the songs of former slaves.

This combination of clashing ingredients is why it is important for people to learn about and protect our nation’s largest estuary. If we Americans disregard the Chesapeake Bay as simply a place to dump our pollution or dredge up crabs and oysters, we are essentially dumping on our own heritage. To respect ourselves, we need to respect the Chesapeake Bay.

The betrayal of the Chesapeake began early, with the tobacco plantations of the colonists triggering the runoff of soil that clogged streams and smothered the rocky river breeding grounds of sturgeon. Later, cities like Richmond, Baltimore, and Washington used the waterway as an open sewer.

For the last 35 years, Maryland, Virginia, and the other regional states and federal government have spent billions of dollars in a campaign to clean up the bay. The partners upgraded 107 of the region’s largest sewage treatment plants—about a quarter of the total, with Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia doing far more than Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, or West Virginia. Overall, this bay restoration effort has produced only limited progress, with the overall health of the bay receiving a grade of 48 out of 100 in 1986 and 47 in 2010, followed by a slight increase 54 in 2016, according to water quality monitoring analyzed by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

The underlying reason for the struggle in restoring the bay has its roots in the history of English colonization: a cultural assumption that we’re all here for the money, not for spiritual reasons or to integrate into the surrounding environment. It is American tradition to label the bay—and other grand bodies of water—not as ecological masterpieces that should be cherished and protected, but as natural “resources” that were made for our paychecks. The bay is where we scoop up seafood, drain farmland, empty sewer pipes, and build scenic backdrops for real estate developments.

“Save the Bay” has been the war cry of clean water activists for half a century. But the hard truth is that we can’t both save the bay and save the culture built on exploiting the bay. A classic example of this is with oysters. The shellfish were, at one time, so numerous in the Chesapeake that ships ran aground on their reefs as they sailed into the bay. Oyster harvesting was such an iconic part of Chesapeake life that the writer H.L. Mencken described the bay as “an immense protein factory” (note his language, which was all business).

Because of more than a century of rampant overharvesting, as well as more recent diseases and pollution, the oyster population is now at about one percent of historic levels. To reverse this downward trend, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley in 2009 established no-harvest zones in 24 percent of the state’s portion of the bay. (Virginia, home to southern half of the bay, used a different system, called “rotational harvest,” in which watermen are allowed to harvest oysters from protected reefs only every two or three years.) The new protected zones worked, especially in Maryland. The population of oysters in the bay doubled between 2010 and 2014. To help watermen transition from wild oyster harvesting to the more sustainable livelihood of farming oysters, the state offered watermen low-interest loans. The number of aquaculture businesses in Maryland multiplied from three in 2010 to more than 100 today.

But as soon as O’Malley left office in 2015, the seafood industry lobby captured the ear of incoming Governor Larry Hogan and argued for eliminating or shrinking the oyster sanctuaries in Maryland. The Hogan administration proposed reducing the no-harvest zones and opened up 10 “harvest reserve” areas—semi-protected zones—to dredging. “Hogan is a businessman,” Robert T. Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, told me in an interview for my book. “Maryland is a big business, and the seafood business is a big business, and you’ve got to run (the bay) like a business.”

Not many businesses can survive for long with more than 99 percent of their stock depleted. The bay badly needs a break to restock. But Brown’s opposition to any moratorium on oyster harvesting expresses the same sentiment as was voiced centuries ago by the directors of the Virginia Company, as they hounded the Jamestown settlers to do something—anything—to wring gold from the dirt. Their tobacco plantations produced a stream of pollution into the Chesapeake Bay, but worse was the stain they left on the American character.

We can overcome that mark and clean up the bay and other waterways across the country. But first, we need to rethink why we’re here in the first place.

The post How the Chesapeake Bay Formed American Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The graveyard at the small, white Presbyterian church near Meadowview holds many of my ancestors. Struck down early by tuberculosis and influenza, some died young. Others lived long lives, tilling the mountain soil they settled because it reminded them of their Irish home. I never even knew most of these people whose name I share. Yet the crumbling, lichen-covered tombs hold a piece of my heart, a parcel of my past. I look at them and know where I came from.

I returned recently after too many years of absence to attend a family reunion. There were people I wanted to see before the graveyard claimed them as well. I went for my father, who died several years ago, and to whom I owe this sweet connection. I struggled to remember names, to recognize faces that time had altered significantly. Someone spoke fondly of my mother, making me cry even though my mother has been dead ten years. I sputtered an apology for my tears and received a hug in return. Later, my gut responded with a twinge when my cousin, who’d recently moved from his house to a hilltop cabin nearby, turned to me and said, “I love these mountains. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.” A simple and unexpected declaration of love from a man of few words. A gift that will wrap me in its gentle truth for days.

Changes have come to the rural area where a scenic rails-to-trail project lures tourists on bicycles and Harleys. But peace still dwells among the hills and hollows, in the blue-green mountains that incubate a different sort of life from mine. I know the same problems exist there as in my suburban Atlanta community. No one is immune from the insidious busyness that forms the warp and woof of our days. But the pace is slower in these mountains, more tuned to the seasons-the season for making apple butter, planting crops, mowing hay-the seasons I forget as I spend my days in a windowless office.

The feel of this place pulses through my blood, and the tie that binds me to it is a silken spider thread tensile enough to bridge years of absence. The thread stretches thin as I travel the world. London. Dubai, Shanghai, Buenos Aires. I am often far away from this place where the crisp air blowing off the mountains hints at redemption. I hear of weddings and funerals for cousins I barely know, and inside I rejoice and grieve, separated by miles, connected by blood and the instinctual and primeval urge to return again and again to the place and the people from which I came.

Laura Templeton is a business professional in Atlanta, Georgia, and is pursuing a career as a writer and novelist. Her love of nature is apparent in her work, and she enjoys capturing the essence of a particular place in words.

*Photo provided by Laura Templeton.

The post Green Gem 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.

The post Washington-Lee High School (Arlington, Va.) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.