Civil War Memory

Commemorating an Important Moment in Virginia History

I am so sorry to have missed yesterday's unveiling of the Civil Rights Memorial on Richmond's Capitol Square.  The memorial honors Barbara Johns, as well as other students, who protested the physical condition of their school in Prince Edward County.  The resulting lawsuit, which was handled by Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson III eventually came to the U.S. Supreme Court with four other lawsuits as Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  As is well known this led to the landmark 1954 ruling that racially separate school systems are unconstitutional.  This is the first time that a woman or African American has been honored in an area that includes some wonderful statues to Confederate heroes and George Washington.  This is a worthy addition and one that Virginians can feel much pride in. 

Did Slavery End in 1865?

I finally decided to read Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  My reluctance was twofold: On the one hand I already have a short stack of books to read on slavery and race and didn't feel a need to add to it.  More to the point, however, I am usually quite skeptical about reading history books by journalists.  They are typically good writers, but tend to gloss over important analytical points that can only be discerned by reading through a selection of the secondary literature.  Well, the other day my wife shared a review of the book that was published in a German newspaper and my interest was piqued.  After  three days of reading this book I have to say that I am emotionally drained.  Blackmon examines the steps taken after the war in the South to control the black population, maintain white supremacy, and provide an economic boost to lumber camps, coal mines, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations.  By the turn of the century every state in the South, except Virginia, had instituted laws that allowed local and state law enforcement to lease prisoners [Blackmon argues that over 90% were black] to these companies.  Violations included vagrancy, raising one's voice in front of white women and a host of other minor offenses.  The leasing out was usually the result of the inability to pay a fine/debt and once the transaction was made company owners were given complete control of the prisoner.  Blackmon argues that upwards of 200,000 African Americans fell victim to this hideous practice.  Check out the website for the book which includes an overview of the author's argument as well as a selection of photographs from these forced labor camps.

Blackmon structures his book around the Cottenham family, beginning with Green Cottenham who was arrested in 1908 on charges of vagrancy and forced to work for a company in Birmingham, Alabama owned by U.S. Steel.  He worked in a mine called Slope No. 12 where, like many others, he died.  From there the author traces the history of the family going back to the early nineteenth century.  Along the way Blackmon does an excellent job of situating the family's story in the broader context of the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as early slave-leasing practices, which began before the war as states like Alabama focused more and more on mining and iron production.  It is hard to believe that this practice continued into the 1940s and was only stopped for fear that it would aid the Nazis in their claims of racial abuse within the United States.

An Excerpt From Virginia: History, Government, Geography

Yesterday I shared an illustration from a popular history book used here in Virginia titled, Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis B. Simkins, Spotswood H. Jones, and Sidman P. Poole.  The illustration speaks for itself, but today I found some text on slavery and race relations from the book, which serves to remind us of just how important it is that our history textbooks be based on first-rate scholarship and not fantasy.

A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes. . . The house servants became almost as much a part of the planter’s family circle as its white members. . . The Negroes were always present at family weddings. They were allowed to look on at dances and other entertainments . . . A strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other. . . The slave system demanded that the master care for the slave in childhood, in sickness, and in old age. The regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous.  Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked. . . But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.

One of my readers commented on the previous post that he was assigned this book in 1980.  Now that is incredibly disturbing.

I Sense a Pattern Here

This is a perfect follow-up to my earlier post on Rickey Pittman's childrens book about Jim Limber. I've suggested numerous times that the proposed statue commemorating Jefferson Davis and Jim Limber fits into a broader push on the part of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other heritage groups to minimize the place of slavery within the antebellum South as well as the history of the Confederacy specifically.  Of course, the view that slaveholding was benign and best understood as paternalistic has a long and disturbing history in this country. 

This morning a friend emailed an image taken from a textbook titled Virginia: History, Government, Geography (Scribners, 1966) and written by Francis Butler Simkins.  Simkins was a well-known Southern Historian who taught at Longwood College and who authored a well-received biography of Ben Tillman, which was published in 1944 by the University of South Carolina Press.  The individual who emailed the image noted that Simkins's narrative betrays a strong pro-slavery bias, but speculates that, given his scholarship, revisions were made by the Virginia Textbook Commission and that Simkins allowed his name to continue to be used for the publication.  As for the image used for the chapter on slavery, I don't think I need to explain what is problematic about it.  There is a rich history behind the Davis-Limber statue and it fits neatly into our broader assumptions concerning race relations in the South and throughout the United States at different times.  In the same way that the illustration misrepresents the realities of slaveholding, can't we also suggest that a statue depicting Davis holding hands with Limber misrepresents how blacks lived under the various Davis rooftops? 

We must be very critical when it comes to the messages that our public spaces convey about our history.  We no longer live at a time when one racial group has a monopoly on the shape of public spaces as a way to maintain control of both history and government.  Let's take advantage of that fact.

Jim Limber for Kids

There is nothing more disturbing for an educator than to come across children's books whose authors have little qualification as historians or who have an implicit agenda to get across. Such is the case with Rickey Pittman's book, Jim Limber Davis: A Black Orphan in the Confederate White House.  Here is the jacket description:

The true story of the adopted black child of Jefferson Davis. Jim Limber Davis was rescued from an abusive guardian by Varina Davis when he was only five years old. Jefferson and Varina Davis welcomed him into their home, the Confederate White House, as one of the family, and Jim lived with them until the fall of the Confederacy. When Union soldiers invaded Richmond, Virginia, they captured Jefferson Davis. Later, they kidnapped Jim Limber in Georgia and spread cruel rumors that he was Jefferson Davis's slave. This true story provides a glimpse of how Jim was accepted as one of the Davis's children and reveals their family's love and compassion for him.

As John Coski noted in his short essay there is a great deal that we do not know about this story.  Pittman seems comfortable giving Limber the Davis name, though there are no records to demonstrate that Limber was officially adopted.  With any other publisher I would be disappointed, but in this case we are dealing with Pelican, which is one of the most unreliable and agenda-driven publishers out there.  The author's personal website can be found here.  He is an active member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Camp Thomas McGuire in West Monroe, Louisiana.

Pittman also provides an online study guide to accompany this book.  Students can play games that Limber would have played or inquire into his whereabouts as did Jefferson Davis after the war.  Students can draw a picture of the Confederate White House where Limber lived, though I wonder if the family's slaves are expected to be included in such a drawing.  Even better are the statistics on free blacks that Pittman compiled from James and Walter Kennedy's books, The South Was Right and Myths of American Slavery. 

This is a disturbing book that is based on an overly simplistic view of slavery, free blacks, and Jefferson Davis's own personal history as a slaveowner and leader of a nation whose stated goal was the preservation of slavery.  The current push to commemorate this story in marble is based on little more than the outline of this story and it should concern all of us who hope to continue to expand and deepen our understanding of this crucial moment in America's past.

John Coski on Jefferson Davis and Jim Limber

Richard Williams recently posted a short article by historian John Coski on the relationship between Jim Limber and the Davis family, which appeared in the winter issue of the Museum of the Confederacy's newsletter.  While Coski does point to mutual bonds of affection between Jim Limber and the Davis family, he also suggests that there are many questions that cannot be answered.  This, of course, could change in the future.  While Coski does not address the debate surrounding the proposed statue of Limber and Davis, his analysis does bring the question of whether such a statue is justified based on the available evidence into sharp relief.  Is the Sons of Confederate Veterans justified in proposing a statue based on such limited evidence?  If so, why?  What precedent would this set in terms of the way we go about commemorating and remembering other moments in American history in our public spaces?  Finally, I hope Mr. Williams is not operating under the assumption that Coski's essay ought to be interpreted as tacit support for this proposed statue.  If anything the essay highlights the wide gulf between what serious historians can legitimately conclude about this relationship and the message that a marble statue will no doubt communicate.  You will find Coski's essay below.

Using Ken Burns's "The Civil War" in the Classroom

This talk was presented today in Philadelphia at the 2008 Meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians.  The panel was titled, "Gearing Up For the Civil War Sesquicentennial in the High School Classroom" and included, James Percoco, Ronald Maggiano, and Andy Slap. 

When it aired in 1989 Ken Burns’s epic documentary about America’s Civil War garnered the largest audience in PBS history. Viewers who had little interest or knowledge of the Civil War were attracted to the powerful images and sounds as well as the narration by David McCullough and commentary by Shelby Foote - the combination of which served to introduce a heroic and tragic story to a national audience. While historians have spent considerable time analyzing Burns’s documentary as historical interpretation, little attention has been given to the ways in which the film can be utilized in history courses on the high school level.¹  All too often the film is used as a launching pad to other classroom activities or simply shown with little student preparation; such an approach renders students as passive observers rather than engaging them in trying to better understand the choices that went into the film’s script along with how the various elements come together to tell a coherent story.²   More importantly, students fail to see the film itself as a product of long-standing assumptions about the war that are embedded in our popular imagination and often guarded as sacred.  The beginning of the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011 will provide a unique opportunity to introduce questions of memory and interpretation in our high school history classes.  In the time that I have today I would like to talk briefly about how I engage my students with questions of memory and interpretation through a careful viewing of Burns’s The Civil War. 

Jefferson Davis and Jim Limber: A Response to Richard Williams

Fellow Civil War blogger and author, Richard Williams, seems bewildered by some of the responses to the proposed statue of Jefferson Davis and Jim Limber by the SCV in Richmond.  [Read the Richmond.com article here.] It's impossible to know which academics he is referring to, but no doubt he read my earlier post on the subject, which included a number of objections.  Williams's objections are all over the place and for the most part make little sense.  First, let's dispense with his whining about the legality of the Lincoln-Tad statue.  Williams is indeed correct in pointing out that the organization responsible for the statue is having some difficulties with the IRS and have recently lost their status as a tax-exempt organization.  I'm not sure why this is important, but let's admit it and move on.

Second, Williams refers to the Museum of the Confederacy's year-long program to commemorate the life of Jefferson Davis.  No doubt, the MOC should be engaged in such programs and I only wish that other organizations were able to muster the resources and interest to mark the bicentennial of Davis's birth.  That said, it is not the case that the MOC is "celebrating" Davis's life as Williams points out.  Anyone who visits the MOC knows all too well that their mission is to present exhibits and public presentations which reflect the best in Civil War scholarship.  Their line-up for a recent symposium on Davis's life included, William Cooper, Joan Cashin, William C. Davis, and Donald Collins.  I've read all of their books on Davis and Mrs. Davis and I can state with confidence that they are not engaged in celebrating.  Again, it is hard to know what this has to do with a proposed monument to Davis at Tredegar.  Finally, Williams suggests that Gary Casteel, who has been hired to sculpt the statue, is a sufficient reason to approve the final product.  Williams is "confident [that Casteel] will produce a beautiful and historically accurate statue.

Not once does Williams comment on the design.  I have absolutely no problem with another statue of Davis in Richmond; the question, however, is whether this particular design, which acknowledges Davis's relationship with Jim Limber, is appropriate.  [Background on this story can be found here.]  I am willing to grant that everything in that story is true, though Davis scholars have noted that some of the details are sketchy. 

The question that I would like Williams to address is whether he believes that a statue depicting Davis holding hands with his adopted black child reflects his broader views on race.  I understand that race relations were incredibly complex in the antebellum and wartime South, and it is important to understand the context and background for this particular decision on the part of the Davis family.  I wonder, however, whether this is the best way to proceed since so little has been written about this incident.  What do you think Mr. Williams?  More to the point: What message does Williams believe that visitors with little background in American history will walk away with?  Does Williams and the SCV believe that this statue reflects Davis's overall beliefs about race?  Will visitors know that Davis was a large slaveowner, president of a government whose expressed purpose was the preservation of slavery, and that he remained committed to a racial hierarchy to the end of his life?  Does the SCV plan to include some kind of plaque that will assist visitors in their attempt to understand this statue?

As I stated in the earlier post, it is easy to see what is behind this particular statue.  The SCV is engaged in a conscious effort to distort the history of the South and the Confederacy to a point where issues of slavery and race are moved to the background.  Their world is inhabited by friendly slaveowners and loyal black slaves and soldiers.  This self-gratifying view of the past comes at a heavy price, however. 

One wonders what Jim Limber or one of Davis's own slaves would think of such a statue.  Unfortunately, in the hazy world of the SCV such questions have little weight.

Jim Webb Is No Historian (but so what)

The Politico has a feature on Senator Jim Webb's Confederate Heritage roots that is worth reading.  I guess this is what happens when you become a potential vice-presidential candidate.  There is nothing particularly new in terms of the views expressed or for those who are familiar with Webb's heritage studies.  We learn that Webb admires Robert E. Lee and has some choice words for those who would besmirch his good name:

The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday’s America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.... The greatest disservice on this count has been the attempt by these revisionist politicians and academics to defame the entire Confederate Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the Confederacy.

And it wouldn't be complete without the standard account justifying secession:

The states that had joined the Union after the Revolution considered themselves independent political entities, much like the countries of Europe do today.... The 10th Amendment to the Constitution reserved to the states all rights not specially granted to the federal government, and in their view the states had thus retained their right to dissolve the federal relationship

Yada, Yada, Yada, Yada... O.K...I get it.  There is nothing surprising about such views as they are the standard stock phrases that emanate from certain quarters.  The website also tried to make political hay out of a 1990 speech that Webb presented at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.  Again, there is nothing surprising in it:

And so I am here, with you today, to remember. And to honor an army that rose like a sudden wind out of the little towns and scattered farms of a yet unconquered wilderness. That drew 750,000 soldiers from a population base of only five million-less than the current population of Virginia alone. That fought with squirrel rifles and cold steel against a much larger and more modern force. That saw 60 percent of its soldiers become casualties, some 256,000 of them dead. That gave every ounce of courage and loyalty to a leadership it trusted and respected, and then laid down its arms in an instant when that leadership decided that enough was enough. That returned to a devastated land and a military occupation. That endured the bitter humiliation of Reconstruction and an economic alienation from the rest of this nation which continued for fully a century, affecting white and black alike.

Open up Webb's high school history text and I guarantee that you will find a sentence that reflects his referencing of Reconstruction as "bitter humiliation".  As in the case with his earlier comments they are standard stock.  It's ashame that Webb reduces further inquiry as stemming from nefarious motives.  I assume Webb is an intelligent man; what does he see when he looks closely at the Confederate Memorial's friezes?  Is this really just a monument to the common Confederate soldier? Is there really nothing more to think about given that it was Woodrow Wilson who addressed the audience at the unveiling of the monument in 1914 and who ordered federal office buildings to segregate employees along racial lines.

We could allow Politico to suck us into a silly debate about Webb's views on history, but I am not going to make too much about the fact that he is not a historian and has little to teach me about how we as Americans remember the past.  To tell you the truth, I am much more interested in his proposed legislation that would offer full college tuition to those military personnel who serve three years and which is being resisted by the Bush administration and other Republicans in Congress. 

Declension Narratives in Civil War History

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, that one of my favorite blogs is Tim Burke's Easily Distracted.  The other day he posted some interesting thoughts about declension narratives in history, their attractiveness, and potential shortcomings:

I seriously hate declension narratives. Anything that starts out with, “Once upon a time, there was a golden age, and then the barbarians came and wrecked it all…” gets me going for my guns. Even when it’s a reasonable enough story, because now and again there’s something to claims of degeneration, failure and loss. The problem is that even the reasonable arguments drift quickly into the borderlands of exaggeration and from there often just go ahead and boldly march into being a big lie.

As I read through the post it hit me that Civil War/Southern History is rife with declension narratives; in fact, it could be argued that much of our popular memory of the antebellum South and of the war itself falls within its parameters.  Arguably, one can find the most egregious examples of declension within traditional interpretations of the antebellum South whose greatest expression can be found in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.  Stories of peaceful southern farms and happy slaves overseen by paternalistic slaveowners continue to dominate our collective memory of the antebellum South as well as a perspective on the war itself that is celebratory rather than skeptical; we don't treat the experiences of WWI soldiers as we do our Civil War soldiers.  The Civil War is best understood, as the argument goes, as standing on the precipice of modernism with the final year of the war in Virginia set aside as an indication of what is to come in the modern era.  We can also see declension at work along the fault line of those who view Lee as part of the last generation of heroic warriors as opposed to a modern general.  In both cases there is an implicit assumption of loss and decline that is salient.  Burke concludes with the following:

I think this is a generic kind of fallacy that slips into declensionist stories, and not just conservative ones, a misrembering and compression of the details and messiness of history as we have lived it. I’m not going to be so much of a prig for accuracy as to argue that fantasies about the past don’t sometimes have a constructive, healthy relationship to transformations of the present. The general problem with delusions about decline, however, is that they mislead us into thinking that we are trying to restore some past covenant or arrangement when what we are really trying to do is create something that has yet to exist. On that confusion, both bad and good projects often run aground, but not before they do a lot of collateral damage in the process.

Burke is correct in pointing out that narratives of decline and loss tend to be based on an overly simplistic reading of the past; in short, these stories seem to be more about our own needs rather than an honest attempt at coming to some kind of historical understanding.  For example, check out Brian Lamb's interview with Thomas DiLorenzo this past Sunday on Q&A.  It is almost impossible not to emphasize DiLorenzo's own misgivings about the current size of the federal government and his contention that it is overly intrusive as factors in explaining his understanding of Lincoln and the history of the government during the course of the war.  Listening to him make claims about antebellum politics it is apparent that he has not read critical studies by Michael Holt, William Gienapp, and William Cooper.  The declensionist streak in DiLorenzo's work sets up an antebellum political world that never existed, but ultimately makes it possible to point the finger at one moment, even one individual, who pushed over the first domino and set the ball of corruption in motion. 

Although the oversimplication of the past is something to be concerned about, the declensionist pull does the most damage in its tendency to push the past further away thus rendering it more difficult to identify with.  After all, if there was indeed a fall from grace the people who lived long ago must be of a different kind altogether.  As a result, our response tends to be veneration rather than understanding and this is where, as I see it, the "collateral damage" sets in.  The worst damage is done by those who see themselves in this lost age when a careful reading of the relevant evidence suggests otherwise.  Burke may be correct that "fantasies about the past" can lead to transformation in the present.  Within the context of the Civil War, however, most of those fantasies are wrapped around myths about slavery and race and have a tendency to alienate entire groups and reinforce political fault lines rather than serve a common good.