Bob Tompkins, in his October 28 column “Pushback for a charming author,” offers a rebuttal to my recent remarks to members of the Rotary Club in Alexandria. During that speech, I discussed the history of the Lost Cause, a post-Civil War campaign of misinformation that supported white supremacy and continues to distort Americans’ understanding of our history. (See my related book, White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History.)
In his column, Mr. Tompkins shared the story of two ancestors who administered medical facilities in Virginia where they cared for wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Mr. Tompkins’s pride in the professionalism of these ancestors is understandable, as is his disappointment in the 2020 decision to remove their surnames from the health sciences library at Virginia Commonwealth University because their work had supported the Confederacy and, by association, the preservation of slavery.
The link between the Confederacy and slavery is not a matter of opinion. It is a point of fact, as the breakaway nation’s leaders repeatedly made clear at the time. For example, Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, stated plainly in 1861 that slavery was justified because “the negro is not equal to the white man” and that slavery was the “natural and normal condition” for black people.
The founding constitution of the Confederacy made the same point by expressly condoning the institution of slavery. Left unsaid was the link obvious to all at the time: slavery was the underpinning for the wealth of the South’s leading citizens. Its preservation assured the maintenance of their prosperity and way of life. This ruling class bet their fortunes and the future of the South on this cause. And they lost. But rather than accept responsibility for the South’s devastation, including the decimation of its youth, many of the war’s instigators spent the rest of their lives constructing falsehoods that glorified this lost cause and misrepresented the nature of slavery.
Is it any wonder that people who look beyond these fabrications and gaze accurately at the past are concerned by celebrations of the Confederacy and, by extension, its foundational principle of slavery? This is not “presentism.” Plenty of people, including those living in the South, spoke out against slavery before, during, and after the Civil War. Those who pushed for secession and war understood the moral dilemma slavery posed. Yet they still supported it.
Stories like those shared by Mr. Tompkins remind us of the range of Confederate commemoration that has been woven into our landscapes. His example also highlights the complexity of evaluating its merits. After looking further into the circumstances of the library renaming I can sympathize with Mr. Tompkins’s perspective. Other relatives with no apparent ties to the Confederacy were similarly honored in 1950 during the original naming, and they have lost this distinction. At least one of his Confederacy-tied relatives also served the naming institution in ways unrelated to the Civil War. Did the state of Virginia overreact in this instance? Mr. Tompkins may have a case.
Most Confederate commemoration has a simpler story: it emerged beginning in the late nineteenth-century during the rise of Jim Crow as a way to support the return of white supremacy to the South. Many of these tributes were intentionally placed at city halls and courthouses across the region to intimidate Black residents who had no choice but to walk past statues honoring those who had fought to enslave their ancestors. The message of continued subservience was unmistakable.
This is the reality we must consider when we debate the fate of Confederate commemoration. Yes, it is true these memorials pay tribute to individuals who acted loyally and even heroically during the war, but that does not erase the fact that they did so on behalf of a rebellious government determined to enslave fellow human beings even if it meant killing their former fellow Americans.
Within this framework of understanding, there is a continuum of possibility for the fate of Confederate commemoration, from the elimination of all such memorials, to their exclusion from civic settings, to their relocation to such spaces as battlefields, museums, and cemeteries. Discussions of such matters have unfolded across the South and beyond during the past decade. Some commemorations have come down, including, perhaps mistakenly, those tied to the ancestors of Mr. Tompkins, but the vast majority remain.
I am no stranger to these debates, having been raised in Virginia in a family with southern roots during an era when the Lost Cause drove the content of my history books. My mother, Dolores Brister Bausum, grew up in Pineville, the daughter of Elaine Holmes Brister. All of us are descendants of Winn Parish residents who fought on opposing sides during the Civil War. It was my great pleasure to return to central Louisiana at the invitation of Rotary and renew my connections to a place that has held such significance for our family.
During my visit, I was reminded that my grandmother was the first woman elected to the Pineville School Board. Soon afterwards, the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Ed decision, which rejected the legality of segregation in public schools, placed her at odds with her male colleagues on the board. My grandmother did her homework, visited the schools for local Black children, and identified ways in which their treatment was unequal. She did so knowing her support of the Supreme Court ruling would be unpopular and likely cost her her seat on the school board (it did), but she persisted.
In that same spirit, I similarly persist to make the case that we are best-served as a nation when we acknowledge past injustices and take steps to remedy them, even when it means removing tributes long held dear by many among us. Such reflections are one of the ways I honor my ancestors. I invite others to do the same.
Signed,
The Charming Author, Ann Bausum