I recently returned from a road trip to Virginia, ostensibly to attend the Spring meeting of the Jamestowne Society in Williamsburg; but after my fashion, exploring nooks and crannies both going and coming. The Anglicized history of the American South, having logged only 416 years, already is beginning to approach Churchill’s characterization of the Balkans; namely, “it has more history than it can consume.” But there was plenty to hold my interest beyond history: natural beauty, culture and hospitality, literary landmarks, etc. To the extent possible, I sought to avoid as much of the ugliness as I could: the region’s suburban sprawl, its mad exploitation and despoliation of natural resources, and of course, the toxic political climate. I was largely successful, I think.
Some interstate travel could not be helped. I exited I-20 on the east edge of Shreveport and did not re-enter until Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I got off again at Gadsden, and only rejoined the highway at the South Carolina border. On the return, I evaded the interstate between Chattanooga and Jackson, Mississippi. Once home, I realized that I had crossed every state of the old Confederacy with the exception of Florida. (But after all, is Florida really a Southern state? One could make a convincing case, I think, that it is not: a Retirement state, a Cuban-American state, a Spring Break state, a Mickey Mouse state, perhaps; just not necessarily a Southern one.) I dipped into Pensacola in 1980, changed planes in Miami in 1999, and again in Orlando in 2019. I am neither a fan of crowded beaches nor theme parks, so I do not anticipate returning. And, Florida is uniquely not on the way to anywhere else. So the state must remain a mystery to me; just not a very compelling one.
I also managed to avoid Atlanta proper, no mean feat that. The state of Georgia is divided into a number of distinct regions. There is Atlanta Proper, which begins at the Alabama state line. Then there is North Atlanta, which takes you almost to Chattanooga. East Atlanta stops at Athens, while South Atlanta takes you to Macon. With apologies to Augusta and Savannah, the rest of the state can be designated as the Atlanta Perimeter. All things being equal, Georgia is no prettier than Alabama or South Carolina; the difference being solely the amount of money injected into the region.
Living as I do in the Rump of Dixie, traveling back East is always a revelation, for the South is a bit deeper there. And invariably, it gets me thinking about things. A reflective Southerner will eventually come to have a love/hate relationship with the region and its founding Myth. This tension has been a staple of Southern literature since the beginning. I use the term myth in its proper sense; which is to say, not something made up, but rather the story that people tell about themselves, a narrative that gives meaning to their lives and their place in the world. In our case, there is part of the story that needs to be treasured and told and retold. But then there is another part which can only be described as a “stinking pile of horses**t” (my new favorite phrase thanks to Douglas Murray.)
My dilemma is obvious to any Southerner: What do I do with all those Confederate ancestors? I have eight of them to be exact, and that does not count the uncles and extended connections who fought for the Confederacy. Not that it matters, but none of these men were slave owners, nor were they, with one small exception, members of slave owning families. As I tell my students, History is about understanding, not the mere accumulation and sorting of facts. We must look back on the foibles of the past with at least a little humility and compassion; that is, if we have any expectations of our own posterity doing the same for us. It is with that thought in mind that I contemplated my Southern forebears.
There are some qualifiers, of course. First, being in Texas complicated things a bit; Secessionist fervor here was never at the white hot level it was in the Deep South. For example, at least one of my ancestors, arriving in Texas from the Midwest right before 1860, opted to serve in a frontier regiment, guarding against Comanches instead of having to fire upon his own kind (all Unionists back in Missouri). Also, when you enlisted made a difference. If you joined up in 1861, then you were a True Believer. If you joined after the Conscription Act of April 1862, then that means you were drafted; and that particular net was cast wide–in one case, taking in my 17-year old uncle and his 44-year old father at the same time. But I can’t excuse away all of them. Many of my ancestors and extended family were fully supportive of the foolhardy project.
The best spin that I can put on it is that they were a people defined by loyalty–but it only extended to their own folk, and by its furthest extension, their state and region. It was not a loyalty that embraced the more abstract notion of nationhood. I get the idea that even their loyalty to the Confederacy did not really extend much further than their state lines. A more brutal conclusion is that their actions amounted to treason, or at least it did back when that word had actual meaning. I can openly say that as readers of this blog are generally not SCV aficionados.
In fact, that organization (the Sons of Confederate Veterans for those north of the Mason-Dixon line) is the one heritage group that I absolutely refuse to join. I won’t do so because I do in fact honor the service of my great-great-grand- father Cowan and his immediate kin, a family not hesitant to take a contrarian stand if need be. Their Unionist stance led to a period of persecution during the war. My ancestor could not just up and join the Union army in Arkansas, as he had a wife and children at home. His brother and brother-in-law, unattached, were able to do that very thing by crossing out of the state. He ended up being drafted into the Rebel army. On his first leave, on Christmas, he loaded his family up and snuck across the border into Indian Territory during the night. His ultimate destination was the Texas frontier.
For those Confederate ancestors, let’s just say that I respect their fortitude, perseverance against all odds, and courage of their convictions, however wrongheaded. Or at least, that is how I have to sort it out in my mind. But let’s not lose sight of why their states seceded (which is a completely different question than why the nation went to war, or the evolving war aims of the North). If you want to know why the American colonies seceded from the British Empire you just have to read our Declaration of Independence. Scroll past the Enlightenment boilerplate abstractions and get to the heart of the document. Jefferson spells it out, point by point. In like measure, if you want to know why the American South seceded from the Union, just look at what they wrote at the time. It is all very straight-forward, state by state, Texas included. Or for a nice summation, read Confederate Vice-President “Alec” Stephens’ 1861 speech in Georgia. Their motivations were unambiguous.
In a famous speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the newly formed Confederacy, said that the Confederate government’s “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Emphasizing the latter point, Stephens said: “Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago.” Stephens waxed Biblical (see Psalm 118:22, Acts 4:11), saying of white supremacy and black subordination: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’ the real ‘corner-stone’ in our new edifice.” The “first builders,” of course, were the Founders, upon whose work Stephens thought the Confederacy had improved. 1
The old saying is that the victors get to write the history books. That is almost universally true…except in this case. The South may have lost the war, but they won the narrative. Steadily and purposefully, an idea began to take hold in post-bellum Dixie. It was taken up enthusiastically and nursed into fruition. This was the idea that the South seceded on high-minded Constitutional principles. Yes, it is true that America ended the war as a much different nation than as it started, for better or worse. But this frank acknowledgement of the growth of central power does not in any way retroactively ennoble Southern actions following the election of 1860. Interestingly, the South has taken this show on the road. You are just as likely, if not more so, to find a Rebel flag in Idaho as you are in Alabama.
And contemporary American populism allows me to understand the milieu of the ante-bellum South in a way never quite possible before. A dispassionate observer, looking at the trainwreck leading up to the war, must at some point, I think, ask “What were they thinking?” Indeed, what were they thinking? Rhett Butler–as much a part of our Myth as anything else–had it exactly right at the Twelve Oaks barbeque. Only a stubborn, prideful hubris could lead a people down such a foolhardy path; to believe that they could secede without consequences, and that they were endowed with the power to overcome consequences in the case they did occur. Were they ill-informed or uninformed? Yes, they were.
The antebellum South existed in an epistemic bubble, hearing only that which confirmed what they had come to believe. And they had come to believe a number of things that simply were not true. I see this all around me today, where many events are quite transparent to those with eyes to see. Yet we are told that what we saw with our own two eyes did not happen at all; in fact, it was just the opposite. Both camps are guilty, of course, but it does seem as if one side seems to be going for the bigger headlines these days. So, the immediate antebellum period was a toxic era; just like today. And so people allowed themselves to be whipped up into passionate fury by demagogues; just like today. And yet, I have to remind myself, that life went on, people fell in love, married, raised families, lived in faithfulness, worked and built lives for themselves that outlasted the ruination of their world; just like today.
Visiting the graves of a number of Civil War veterans along the way provided the context in which to consider the war’s real legacy. There were six in all: four kinsmen on my maternal side in Louisiana and Mississippi, and two Tennessee kinswomen on my dad’s side. I first visited the grave of a Dr. Griffin in Homer, a quintessentially Southern courthouse town, a bit unexpectedly so for northern Louisiana. It could have just as easily been Faulkner’s Jefferson. He was a cousin of my 3rd great-grandmother. Only a genealogist would not find it odd that I was seeking out what seems to be such a remote connection. But this entire extended clan fascinates me–so much so that the last thing I did in Tidewater Virginia was to walk about the farm purchased by our progenitor in 1658, and eleven generations later, still in the family. Dr. Griffin survived the war. Many of his kinsmen did not.
Next I visited the grave of his cousin, an up-and-coming young entrepreneur in a farming community to the east. The 1860 census indicates that he was on the cusp of making it big–and in 1860, we all know what that entails in the Southern context. This younger cousin led a delegation to the Louisiana Secession Convention. Interestingly, another kinsmen of theirs, a Judge Taliaferro of Catahoula Parish, spoke forcefully against the action; predicting war and ruin. The younger cousin would have known of their connection from the judge’s surname, of which the family was somewhat proud. Taliaferro’s voice of dissent, however, was not even allowed to be printed in the official record in this mad rush to ruination. The young cousin attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and died defending Vicksburg. In a measure of how the South, even in 1863, was gearing up for a full-scale romanticization of their story, is evidenced by the end of young Griffin’s obituary: May the soft south winds murmur sweet requiems o’er his manes, and the twilight dews fall gently like an angel’s tear-drop and moisten his tuffy bed.
I angled across the Southeastern corner of Arkansas and crossed the river at Greenwood. I like to stop there at the Live Oak Cemetery to visit the grave of William Alexander Percy. Since my last visit, vandals have stolen the brass sword from the statue of the knight he erected for his father’s monument. That is in the nature of things, I suppose. Neither pigeons nor people give much respect to the memorials of the dead, noble or otherwise. From there, I aimed towards Greenville, Mississippi which has a cafe that I wanted to try. Unfortunately, one result of the pandemic is that in many towns, only chain restaurants are open all the time; local establishments have drastically curtailed their hours in order to stay in business.
(the swordless Knight)
But no matter, I pushed on, crossing the busy interstate between Jackson and Memphis. My next stop was a small town cemetery containing the graves of twenty-five Confederate soldiers, all lined up in rows. Here are two brothers, James and Christopher, buried side by side. They were my uncles, siblings of my 3rd great-grandmother, and cousins to the Griffin men whose graves I had visited in Louisiana. These two young boys simply joined up, and found themselves a short time later in camp in Mississippi where they both died of disease, within days of one another. There were seven surviving boys in that family, all of whom served in the Confederate army. Of that number, only three returned home. Such grim statistics were not unusual.
In the Georgia geographical region known as North Atlanta, I stopped and visited the grave of my paternal Uncle Hugh, my 4th-great grandfather’s brother. The cemetery is as pretty as a picture, with a historic little whitewashed Baptist chapel across the road. This was not where he was originally buried; that being somewhere underneath the large lake you could see through the trees. When built in 1956, all known graves were removed and relocated to existing graveyards. So, the remains of Uncle Hugh, his wife, and 43 of his immediate family were relocated here at that time. The area is no longer really rural. North Atlanta traffic lies only a mile away, and the cemetery and church are surrounded by the expansive homes of the well-healed. This seems to be the nature of much of Georgia.
Uncle Hugh was the type of man that most Southerners like to think they descend from. The huge tablets marking his grave and that of his wife bespoke prosperity and respectability. But I do not descend from them, but rather his brother, a humble cobbler in Nashville. He and my 4th-great grandmother are buried in unmarked graves in the paupers section of the city cemetery there. They had four children: two daughters who never married, a son who ended up as a poor woodchopper in South Louisiana, and my 3rd great-grandmother who married a Cowan and whose life played out differently. Such are the vagaries of fortune.
After spending some time in this relocated family plot, I noticed a path leading into the woods, an invitation to see where it leads. At the top of the knoll there is a small overgrown clearing. Four t-posts and a single strand of barbed wire demarcate the boundaries of an enclosure containing approximately 25 graves, all marked by now rusty metal funeral home markers from 1956. A small monument nearby explains that these were the unknown graves removed at the time of the lake’s construction. Neglected and forgotten, at least in my mind the spot contains as much dignity as the long row of monuments of Uncle Hugh’s family, some two hundred feet away.
On the way back I particularly sought out a couple of grave sites in McNairy County, Tennessee. This is hilly country west of the Tennessee River, near the Shiloh battlefield (which, by the way, held no interest for me.) There are scenic areas here, to be sure, but it is more often characterized by a certain scruffiness. This is not the prosperous rolling meadows of central Tennessee, nor the rich agricultural breadbasket that is northwest Tennessee. It is not uncommon to see scarred landscapes of cut-over timber. On one back road near my destination I saw a small sign pointing to the boyhood home of Buford T. Puser. Those of a certain age may recognize the name.
I was searching for the burial sites of two sisters, cousins Anna and Susanna on my paternal side. Members of this family were staunchly Unionist, with Anna’s three oldest sons going north to join the Union Army. She made a number of trips across Tennessee to carry supplies to them behind the lines. Each time, she was alert to conditions and Rebel maneuvering in the country she traversed. She reported directly to Union General Lew Wallace, telling him everything she had seen. In appreciation, he bestowed upon her the title “H.R.L.T.” This stood for Honorary Lieutenant. And so, on this little knoll, deep in the Tennessee woods, her modest marker reads “Anna H.R.L.T. Plunk.” Anna’s sister Susanna died long before the war, but her husband was just as much of a Unionist as the rest. A store owner, justice of the peace and preacher, he suffered because of his outspokenness. Their story is a Southern one as well. (To be continued)
Longley, Max. “A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review of The Nation That Never Was.” Front Porch Republic, May 23, 2023. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/05/a-local-look-at-the-meanings-of-the-founding-a-review-of-the-nation-that-never-was/
Rump of Dixie, ha, Love it!