Acclaimed author Ann Bausum of Wisconsin visited this deep South city last week and spoke at a couple of events about her newest book, “White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War Then Rewrote the History.”
That’s like a guy from Massachusetts coming south to Baton Rouge to coach LSU football and telling white lies about how the team would win the national championship and then shaking down the university after being fired for a payout more than $50 million.
Well, maybe it’s not exactly like that, but it was courageous of her to come into “hostile” territory for such a talk, and it was bold of retired attorney Michael Tudor, her second cousin once removed, to invite her.
I listened to her talk at last week’s Alexandria Rotary Club luncheon, and she showed a bit of the Southern charm she experienced while growing up in Lexington, Va., as the daughter of a history professor at Virginia Military Institute.
To illustrate the premise of her book, she quoted from elementary and junior high school books in Virginia in 1957 that talked about how the planters “did not know how to free their slaves and keep their plantations open,” as if there were no other alternatives as to how they could do so.
She also quoted from a seventh-grade history textbook that claimed there were “strong ties” between slaves and masters that made their mutual lives “happy and prosperous.”
A preposterous notion.
But I do have a bone to pick with Bausum about such things as statues — and presumably honorariums – relating to the Confederacy having no place in the public square. She said statues honoring the Confederacy, in general, or its soldiers and leaders, are “coded messages” reinforcing the old Jim Crow segregationist laws and saying the Civil War is not over.
One of my favorite history professors at LSU, where I majored in history, was William Cooper, who taught there for nearly five decades and specialized in the history of the American South and the Civil War era. He is considered a leading expert on the life of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
He was interviewed on “60 Minutes” several years ago, when Confederate statues were being taken down or removed across the South, including General Robert E. Lee in New Orleans.
“One of the things that bothers me most as a historian,” he said, “is what I call ‘presentism,’ judging the past by the present, figuring that we are the only moral people.” He contended that those monuments were put up by real people who had real beliefs and even if today most Americans don’t like those beliefs the monuments remain a part of history and should stay.
I’ll take it a step further, considering how some family members have been victimized by the erasure of honors for anyone associated in any way with the Confederacy.
In December of 2020, a Board of Visitors at Virginia Commonwealth University unanimously approved a resolution to remove 16 names, plaques and other symbols related to the Confederacy. The Tompkins-McCaw Library at the Medical School was renamed and a more generic title chosen: the Health Sciences Library.
In 1950 the library got its name, inspired by five physicians from the Tompkins and McCaw families. Most notable among that crew were Captain Sally Louisa Tompkins, the first commissioned officer of the Confederacy, and Dr. James Brown McCaw, who was the wartime administrator for Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital.
At an early age, Sally, my paternal grandfather’s great aunt, began nursing the sick, both slave and free, in the local community. She became a nurse and started managing the private Robertson Hospital in August 1861, shortly after the First Battle of Bull Run. By her being officially commissioned as a captain in the Confederate Army on September 9, 1861, President Davis could keep her hospital running as a military facility.
Numerous ladies from the Saint James Episcopal Church helped run what became one of the South’s biggest wartime hospitals. During the war, Robertson Hospital treated 1,334 wounded with only 73 deaths, the lowest mortality rate of any military hospital during the Civil War. Her care and treatment of the patients earned her the nickname “Angel of the Confederacy.”
Mary Chestnut, an author and Civil War diarist and frequent visitor to the hospital, called Captain Sally “our Florence Nightingale.”
Sally refused payment for her service, writing on her commission that she accepted the commission when it was offered, but “I would not allow my name to be placed upon the (payroll) of the army.”
Is this the kind of villain whose name should be eradicated from legacy or is best left for a tombstone? Thankfully, her image in a stained-glass window at Richmond’s St. James Episcopal Church has not been removed. Such an honor is not rewriting history.
For that matter, Dr. McCaw, my third great-grandfather, is far from some hateful, demonic type whose memory should be eradicated. He was featured in a Nov. 22, 2011 retrospective in the New York Times for running the Chimborazo Hospital during the Civil War in Richmond, not far from Robertson Hospital. Dr. Samuel P. Moore, the Surgeon General of the Confederacy, appointed McCaw, one of the South’s leading young physicians then, to run the facility. Lois Leveen, who penned the NYT story, said McCaw “embodied the emergence of the modern, professional doctor.”
McCaw used his organizational skills in the way he laid out the hospital complex into five divisions, each with its own surgeon-in-chief. When the number of the wounded exceeded the capacity of the 90 wards, McCaw had 100 Sibley tents pitched nearby, accommodating up to 10 patients each.
About 75,000 patients passed through Chimborazo – which was not a field hospital but a convalescent hospital – during its 3 ½ years of existence.
People have always liked to honor those who transcend themselves, especially in the darkest of times, by elevating others. Their legacies should not be buried or exiled.