by Ty Seidule
We must remember that the KKK was a white terrorist organization that intimidated and killed African Americans to prevent their participation in the democratic process and to keep them in what would become debt peonage. The KKK enforced racial control and white dominance through well-publicized violence.66 The Lost Cause and Margaret Mitchell would have us believe that the great threat to the South was the freedmen and the U.S. Army. Yet the four million recently freed ex-slaves suffered from violence far more. Thousands died trying to vote at the hands of white terror groups, not only the Klan, but also its many imitators. The Lost Cause myth propagated by Mitchell and bought by white southerners for a hundred years served as the ideological underpinning for a violently racist society.
In reality, Reconstruction, as envisioned by Congress, tried to revolutionize the South with the passage of constitutional amendments and laws meant to turn the soaring words of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into reality for all American men. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment demanded equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment created the right to vote for any man born in the United States. These laws finally defined what citizenship meant. The Reconstruction Acts tried to create a fair deal for the freedman. By no means were these compromise documents perfect. Congress created no enforcement mechanism and addressed only public laws, not private behavior, and, of course, Congress excluded women. Yet the period did see enormous political and social progress for African Americans. In fact, all southerners benefited from Reconstruction efforts to establish public schools and U.S. attempts to revive the wrecked economy.67
By 1877, the political will among northern whites to continue fighting for equal rights under the law evaporated. White southerners led by the “Redeemer” politicians and supported by vigilante groups seized power through a “bloody terrorist campaign.” Historian Michael Fellman wrote that “The white tribe was back in the saddle.”68 Reconstruction failed, but it was a real effort to make society more equal and more just. The formerly enslaved voted, served on juries, and held elected office. Public education starts during this period. Reconstruction, I now understand, was a noble but ultimately failed experiment to provide equal rights under the law. The nation would go another hundred years before it tried again to create equality, and when it did, the Reconstruction laws served as the foundation.
In Gone With the Wind, Reconstruction is evil. Mitchell writes a thumping declaration of counterrevolution. As Scarlett describes Reconstruction, “Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles.” Mitchell pushed the Lost Cause myth that African Americans should not vote or govern because they were intellectually and morally inferior, fit only to serve as low-paid laborers and domestics.69
Reading Gone With the Wind as a historian who had studied this period left me feeling bereft. The story I read so often and with such joy as an adolescent had a terrible foundation: racism. The poet Melvin Tolson, played by Denzel Washington in the 2007 movie The Great Debaters, wrote that “Gone with the Wind is such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as the truth by millions of whites and blacks alike.”70 I was one of those millions. I mainlined Gone With the Wind and overdosed on the Lost Cause.
But I also found some hope in studying the past. The Black press in 1939 understood the film and the book. The Chicago Defender published a review that accurately called out the film for glorifying slavery. In a telling phrase, the author, William Patterson, said the movie had “the smell of the slave market.”71 Of course, I never saw that review, and most Americans by the 1970s saw only the gauzy haze of nostalgia. I, for one, will never be able to see Gone With the Wind again without viewing it through the horrors of human bondage.
* * *
THE CIVIL WAR left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because the Confederates fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy. White southerners went to war to protect and expand chattel slavery but suffered a catastrophic defeat. Not only did they lose the war, but with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution they lost de jure white supremacy. Yet the former Confederates succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in changing the narrative of the Civil War. Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrote to the Pulitzer Prize–winning southern novelist Ellen Glasgow, “We Southerners had one consolation. If our fathers lost the war, you and Margaret Mitchell … have won the peace.”72
When I finally discovered the Lost Cause myth, a manufactured past, I was stunned. Why did I believe the lies for so long? It took me decades to realize the truth because I ignored the evidence right in front of me. The underlying belief system in Meet Robert E. Lee, Gone With the Wind, and Song of the South is the ideology of white supremacy. My ignorance and then guilt in buying the Lost Cause myth and the tenets of white supremacy kept me silent for years, but no longer. I’m on a campaign to uncover white supremacy and the Lost Cause in the places I’ve lived and the institutions that educated and gave me purpose. As it turns out, the lies of the Lost Cause infused every aspect of my life—and that pisses me off.
2
My Hometown: A Hidden History of Slavery, Jim Crow, and Integration
I met my future wife, Shari, while stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. To a young army captain, she seemed brilliant and exotic, an investment banker from Manhattan. Neither my southern Christian gentleman upbringing nor my army officer training had prepared me for someone from the Big City. I was smitten. She told me about how the recession had hit her boutique investment bank. She spoke a language I didn’t understand: stocks, bonds, IPOs, Series 7 qualifications, and the Hamptons.
What a different world from Fort Bragg. At zero six (6:00 a.m.) every morning, I braved the crush of cars on the All American Freeway carrying soldiers to PT at Fort Bragg. Physical training, twelve-mile ruck marches, jumping out of C-130 airplanes, preparing for war. I was a captain in the 82nd Airborne Division. A southern gentleman paratrooper sporting a maroon beret, the signature headgear of the Airborne. I was cocky as hell.
Shari understood cocky. Her father, Colonel Ed Coggins, West Point class of 1953, spent his air force career flying fighter jets, including three tours in Vietnam. If anyone is more cocky than a beret-wearing paratrooper, it’s a fighter pilot. The Coggins clan hopscotched the globe during the long Cold War. Shari attended three high schools in four years, graduating from Kaiserslautern American High School in Germany. She understood the military life because she lived it, but marrying a soldier meant moving every two years, upending her life. Plus, exchanging Manhattan for eastern North Carolina would be a tough sell. As we dated, I tried my best to interest her.
I told her about myself, early life, college, army. As she listened to my stories, she quickly understood that not only was I southern but I was aggressively southern. Shari has a sharp ear and a willingness to speak her mind. “You say you are southern, but you were born in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and, come on, that’s really not the South. Georgia, sure. Alabama, of course. Mississippi, definitely. But Northern Virginia? Alexandria? That’s not the South.”
Thus began our first argument.
“Of course, it’s southern!” I explained, red-faced. “Alexandria was Robert E. Lee’s hometown. He was raised two miles from my house, for goodness’ sake. Arlington was his home as an adult and that’s north of Alexandria.” How could she possibly argue against Robert E. Lee?
“Okay,” she said, warily. “But Alexandria is a part of Washington now, and it’s hardly a southern city.”
She gave me a nuanced and compelling argument, but I was still litigating the Civil War. My “honor” reeled from a perceived slight about my identity. If Alexandria wasn’t southern, then maybe I wasn’t southern. Shari looked at me with worry. A question about a Washington suburb triggered
an identity crisis in me. Was I sane? Why in heaven’s name would I care so much? Why indeed.
At the age of twenty-six, I was more southerner than army officer, more southerner, possibly, than American. I couldn’t imagine describing myself as anything other than a southern gentleman, except maybe a Virginia gentleman, a slightly higher caste. When my new girlfriend questioned my southernness, my identity, I sulked. I knew I was raised in the South despite Alexandria’s proximity to D.C. But as a child, and even as a young adult, I didn’t realize just how much Alexandria, at least my Alexandria, retained its white southern roots. If I had known more about the history of my city, I might have convinced my future wife. I needed her to understand that I was southern, but I now know that identity comes at a price. To be a southern gentleman for me meant embracing one view of history, a skewed one, that placed the Confederacy front and center and willfully excluded the racial history all around me.
* * *
IN ALEXANDRIA, I grew up between Quaker Lane and Braddock Road, just off King Street inside the gates of Episcopal High School, a private boys’ boarding school. We lived on campus and ate breakfast and dinner with the students. More than any other place, it created for me the ideal of the southern Christian gentleman, steeped in Confederate lore. My dad was a history teacher and coached football and track at “the High School.” Founded in 1839, Episcopal was one of the oldest high schools in Virginia, hence its moniker of the High School. The students came from wealthy families who lived farther south. I heard Episcopal called the northernmost southern school. One graduate called it “a citadel of Southern establishment patrimony.”1
Like me, Episcopal was aggressively southern with a mission to create “educated Christian gentlemen.” When I was growing up at Episcopal, the idea of a Virginia gentleman was omnipresent, the highest life-form because of the link to the pantheon of true heroes. Several of my dad’s students were direct descendants of Robert E. Lee, a fact everyone at the school knew. Lee represented the ultimate educated Christian gentleman. A hundred years after his surrender at Appomattox, the Civil War and especially reverence for all things Confederate remained part of the High School’s DNA.
From 1870 to 1981, Episcopal High School’s leader was either a Confederate veteran, a son of a veteran, or a grandson of a veteran with only one twenty-year break. The headmaster from 1870 to 1913, Minor Blackford, served in Longstreet’s Corps. When he died, the school placed a Confederate Battle Flag on his coffin. His deputy headmaster, the Confederate colonel Llewellyn Hoxton, West Point class of 1861, dedicated the Confederate memorial in Alexandria. Hoxton’s son Archibald served as headmaster for nearly thirty-five years and kept his dad’s Confederate sword hanging in his office. His son, Archibald Hoxton Jr., graduated from Episcopal in 1935 and became headmaster in 1967. I remember him well.2
In some ways, the Confederate link was more than implicit. The High School etched in marble a list of sixty-eight “old boys” who died in gray. I walked by that tablet dozens of times. Graduates who died wearing U.S. Army blue warranted no memorial. Historian Charles Reagan Wilson called Episcopal High School a “Lost Cause denominational secondary school.”3
Episcopal saw itself as part of Old Virginia. If the country was a chessboard, Virginia was the white queen, the most important state in the nation, the home of presidents. As a child, I memorized every president in order as a kind of parlor trick. My dad had given me three-inch white figurines of each president, and I could perform on command, placing them in chronological order. Asked to choose my favorites, I picked, in order, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians. (I would never pick John Adams from Massachusetts.)
I knew more Virginia trivia. The American Revolution ended with American victory at Yorktown—in Virginia. The Old Dominion hosted more Civil War battles than any other state. First again. I knew that Virginia was so far and away the best, but a Virginian would never say that. Boasting? That was for Texans. One writer described the Virginia state of mind five years before I was born as a “regal humility” or a mystique “rooted in instincts of graciousness, chivalry, generosity and a benevolent aristocratic idealism, all attributes of the plantation society.”4
The great Mississippi writer William Faulkner, who knew a thing or two about southern identity, spent a year as a writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1957. He returned to Charlottesville often to visit his daughter, who married a Virginia lawyer. Asked if he liked his stay, the Nobel laureate said, “I like Virginia and I like Virginians because Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob he has little left to meddle with you, and so it is very pleasant here.”5
White Virginians even had a creed. One I believed fervently as a child. Today, the Virginia Creed is available on coffee mugs or dish towels at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture:
To be a Virginian either by birth, marriage, adoption, or even on one’s mother’s side is an introduction to any state in the Union, a passport to any foreign country, and a benediction from above.6
Virginia was the most important state in the South, and therefore the nation, but did my future wife have a point about Alexandria? Was its proximity to the nation’s capital enough to make my hometown agnostic in the regional and cultural wars? When I first met her, I could only fulminate, but as a historian I discovered that Alexandria has a thoroughly grotesque southern story. A story that starts with the creation of Washington, D.C.
Perhaps the most famous dinner in American history settled the question of where to put the new capital of the United States of America. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton dined at Thomas Jefferson’s New York rental, 57 Maiden Lane, on June 20, 1790. Recently, the meeting became even more famous after Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton immortalized the dinner with the song “The Room Where It Happens.” The new Constitution gave Congress the power to create a new “seat of government” not to exceed ten square miles. The idea of a permanent capital didn’t appeal to all the delegates, but many remembered the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783 when a mob of soldiers descended on Philadelphia demanding back pay, forcing the Continental Congress to decamp the city. The mayor of Philadelphia refused to quash the uprising. The Constitutional Convention wanted to ensure the new government had complete control of the new city for their own safety, but where should they place the new capital?7
Like many of the nation’s problems, the politics of the capital’s location split regionally. Northerners wanted it closer to a big city like Philadelphia, and southerners wanted it in a slaveholding region. If the capital’s location was an issue, so too was the new nation’s debt. Who would pay for the obligations from the Revolutionary War or the debts incurred by the United States since 1783 or the debts of the states?
Alexander Hamilton wanted the new United States to assume all state debts, helping to create a stronger national government with the ability to borrow. Debt paid off by the federal government would also serve to stitch the states together. But there was a hitch. Many southern states, like Virginia and North Carolina, had paid off much of their debt already. If the debt was nationalized, they would pay more than their northern brothers and sisters. Madison also worried that a strong central government might not agree with their notions of property, or, as we call it today, slavery.8
The Compromise of 1790, forged at Jefferson’s dinner table, provided the answers to the capital’s location and the national debt. This pact would be the first of three great compromises spaced exactly thirty years apart that kept the United States one nation. The Virginians Madison and Jefferson agreed to Hamilton’s consolidation of state and federal debt under the new national government, while Hamilton gave Virginia extra money and agreed to a southern location for the new capital, situated between two slave states, Maryland and Virginia.9
In the summer of 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, creating the nation’s capital along the Potomac north of where it is today. Cong
ress allowed the president to select the exact location, but President George Washington demanded that the new capital include his favored city of Alexandria, only seven miles north of his Mount Vernon estate but farther south than Congress’s law allowed. Washington forced Congress’s hand, essentially coercing the new body to include Alexandria. Territory from Maryland and Virginia created a “ten miles square” capital on either side of the Potomac River.10
Yet by the Civil War, Alexandria was no longer a part of the District of Columbia and the founders carefully crafted, diamond-shaped hundred square miles now looks roughly shorn with the jagged Potomac as the western border. One later historian called the new District “mutilated” because it lost a third of its territory. The federal government, or any government, rarely gives back something it has previously taken, especially when different states initially competed to give property to create the capital. The story of how Alexandria went from a part of the District of Columbia back to Virginia reveals its racial history.11
In September 1846, white Alexandrians celebrated the results of a referendum to leave the District of Columbia and return to Virginia, a process called retrocession. After announcing the vote, 763 for retrocession and 222 against, the crowd exploded “with the loudest cheers and a salvo from the artillery.” Nothing like a cannonade to punctuate a celebration. Then “the young folks lighted torches” and carried “flags, banners, and transparencies,” while “firearms … were discharged, rockets, squips and crackers were let off, and general joy and enthusiasm prevailed.” Finally, “the crowd formed in procession” and crossed “the old line that used to divide us from Virginia” so they could fire “upon the soil of our State … a National Salute of RETROCESSION.”12 Alexandrians literally turned south, placing their current allegiance and future with the Old Dominion.