David NeSmith, a 61-year-old self-described “Southern boy” and volunteer docent at the Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site in Irwinville, Georgia, told me that he doesn’t believe in hyphenated identities. “I don’t like it when people call themselves Irish-Americans or African-Americans,” he said. “We should all just be Americans.”
Without skipping a beat and with no hint of irony, NeSmith then began to wax poetic about his passion for “holding on to our Southern heritage.” He is particularly proud of a red baseball cap he owns that reads “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.” And then there’s the fact that he and his wife Janice are active volunteers at a county-funded historic site dedicated to the memory of the capture of the president of the Confederate States of America by federal troops.
Most Americans think the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Army commander Ulysses S. Grant. But the real ending to the brutal sectional conflict came a month later on May 10, when two Union Army regiments tracked down an unrepentant and delusional Jefferson Davis, who was headed to Texas—with his family and a dwindling coterie in tow—in the hopes of retaking up arms.
Davis was captured in a pre-dawn raid near a creek by a hillside covered with tall yellow pine trees in Southern Georgia, roughly 85 miles from the Florida border. Two Union soldiers wound up dead from friendly fire, but once surrounded, Davis’ posse didn’t discharge a single shot. Perhaps the most salient and dramatic aspect of the capture, though, was the unfounded rumor that surfaced afterward: that Davis had been caught in women’s clothes. Northern cartoonists had a field day. A Harper’s Weekly illustration pictured Davis in a hoop skirt and bonnet, carrying a hatbox labeled “C. S.” for Confederate States.
For all the ink spilled about the American Civil War over the past six generations, too little has focused on the psychic toll of defeat, including the attendant fears of the loss of manhood that bedevil the losers of any armed conflict. After the war, Southern whites found themselves disconsolate and disoriented. Not only did they have to grieve the loss of loved ones; they were also forced to contend with the humiliating everyday realities brought on by profound economic, political, and social change. Post-war consolation came in the form of remembering the dead, making sense of defeat, and reconstituting their identities.
I came to Irwinville because I wanted to ponder the loss that lies at the core of Southern white identity. Defeat is a subject that Americans, who fancy themselves a nation of winners, don’t like to grapple with. But it’s impossible to understand the South without understanding both the pain of historic loss as well as the fear of more loss to come. To reach the Jefferson Davis Historic Memorial Site I drove 120 miles on a raw autumn morning along the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway from the Alabama border through peanut farms, cotton fields, and pecan orchards, before taking a left on Jeff Davis Park Drive 13 miles east of Interstate 75.
The story goes that after witnessing Davis’ arrest, the landowner vowed to place the grounds permanently in the “hands of the Southern people.” I was the sole guest on the Friday afternoon I visited. The ranger was taking care of some business upstate in Athens and had left David and Janice NeSmith in charge. A sign on the front door notified visitors that the site would close early that day in advance of a high school football state championship game between the Clinch County Panthers and the Irwin County Indians in nearby Ocilla.
The monument itself—a bronze bust of Davis atop an uninspired granite shaft placed on the exact spot of his capture—left me cold. But the NeSmiths welcomed me warmly and were happy to chat about high school football, their upcoming 43rd wedding anniversary, the hazards of driving on red dirt roads in the rain, and the curious mix of insecurity, grievance, and resistance that whites from here call Southern pride.
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Confederate soldiers who marched off to war in 1861 weren’t moved to action by deep loyalty to a brand new nation. Rather, it was their attachment to their individual states and local communities that sent them into battle. As historian W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the Southin 1941, “the armies had brought men together from four quarters, molding them to a common purpose for four years, teaching them more and more to say and think the same things, giving them common memories—memories transcending all that had gone before and sealed with the great seal of pain and hunger and sweat—binding man more closely to man, class more closely to class.” It was only after the war that the concept of the South took hold and the idea of Southern pride blossomed, and nobody remembered that they had initially gone to fight for Alabama or Virginia or South Carolina.
Because Southern identity emerged from the Civil War, the memory of the Confederacy remained essential, particularly initially, to its survival. “The Lost Cause” was the name given to the interpretation of the war that sprung from writings and activities that perpetuated that memory. In hindsight, the war took on a nobility and aura of glory it never had in real life.
The Confederate memorial movement—first at gravesites and then later in public squares—was the most broad-based cultural expression of the Lost Cause. For a half-century throughout the South, communities erected monuments that not only helped them make sense of the past, but established a forward-thinking Southern mythology based on the belief that their honor would be vindicated.
On April 6, 1910, the town of Monticello in central Georgia unveiled a 32-foot stone obelisk flanked by two Confederate soldiers, one a fresh-faced young private, the other an officer with a Van Dyke beard. Today, the monument’s two plaques are virtually incomprehensible—if not a little crazy sounding. On the monument’s south side, the inscription reads: “Crowns of roses fade. Crowns of thorns endure. Cavalries of crucifixions take deepest hold of humanity. The triumphs of might are transient. They pass and are forgotten. The sufferings of right are graven deepest on the chronicle of nations.”
On the north side of the plaque is inscribed a more prosaic but no less illuminating message: “To the Confederate soldiers of Jasper County, the record of whose sublime self-sacrifice and undying devotion to duty, in the service of their country, is the proud heritage of a loyal posterity. ‘In legend and lay, our heroes in gray, will forever live over again for us.’” I’m sure I’m not the only unsuspecting visitor who immediately wondered what “country” the inscription was referring to. I was so befuddled that I took a photo of the plaque with my phone and immediately sent it to a historian friend. Not only was he not certain of the answer, but he told me to Google the name Enoch M. Banks, a search that revealed the story of a poor academic at the University of Florida who was fired from his job in 1911 for arguing that the South “was relatively in the wrong” in the secession crisis. I left Monticello more confused than when I had arrived.
Believe it or not, the answer to the question at hand goes a long way in explaining why proud Southerner David NeSmith doesn’t see the irony in his complaining about hyphenated Americans.
From the beginning of their rebellion, leaders of the Confederacy compared their struggle to the American fight against British tyranny. Jefferson Davis insisted that the South’s withdrawal from the Union wasn’t a rejection as much as a recommitment to the principles upon which the United States was founded. As historian Reid Mitchell has argued, the Confederates “regarded themselves as the true Americans.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, once the war was over, white Southerners found it relatively easy to reconcile their Confederate and American identities. It turns out that a nationalism put together on the fly can be relatively easily dismantled. Plenty of bitterness did remain, however. It was directed not at the United States, but against the North, which many Southerners believed had usurped the national government and wielded its power to humiliate them. Defeat had left white Southerners with something of a collective chip on their shoulders.
As such, subsequent generations were more than eager to prove their honor and valor to their condescending Yankee brethren. The Spanish-American War provided the first significant opportunity in 1898. With the nation caught up in a wave of patriotism, Southern soldiers thought it acceptable again to don the blue uniform. The Atlanta Constitution reported that former Confederate soldiers were “profoundly loyal to the Stars and Stripes and are eager to exhibit their fidelity upon the field of battle.” The many veterans who were too old to fight encouraged young men to enlist. By the end of the conflict, Southerners had proven their loyalty to the Union while celebrating the memory of the Confederacy. The war had helped confirm, wrote Louisiana State University historian Gaines M. Foster, that the Confederate tradition “blended readily and smoothly with American nationalism and mission.”
By the time the townsfolk of Monticello, Georgia filled their square in the spring of 1910 to proudly inaugurate their new Confederate memorial, Southern whites were fully back in the American fold while remaining unapologetic in their defense of their region’s right to secede. And while they didn’t bemoan the end of slavery, Southern whites remained intent on restoring white supremacy. By 1914, all Southern states had passed segregation laws, and nothing represented the triumph of white supremacy more than the formal, legal establishment of two separate and unequal societies. The post-Civil War white South had finally invented a new social system—and regional tradition—in response to abolishment of slavery. If that weren’t enough, in November 1912, Southern-born Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States. White Southerners viewed his election not only as a kind of vindication, but evidence that their region once again ruled the Union.
Segregation laws were, of course, designed to control and contain African Americans. But they had the simultaneous effect of reining in whites. The Civil War and subsequent Northern occupation had already left white Southerners defensive of any real or perceived intrusion from outsiders. Now, the emergence of Jim Crow further fueled the climate of strict social conformity. The South, W.J. Cash argued, adhered to what he called “the savage ideal,” “whereunder dissent and variety are completely suppressed, and men become, in all their attitudes, professions and actions, virtual replicas of each other.”
But presumably all this conformity paid some sort of psychic dividends. While Northern whites had to fight for jobs and jockey for social position in polyglot cities, Southern whites—no matter how poor—could comfort themselves with the illusion that the subjugation of blacks gave all whites equal standing.
In 1928, Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips concluded that despite the South’s vast diversity, the shared essence of the region was a “persistent defensive self-containment” and a “common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” That, he wrote, was “the cardinal test of a Southerner.”
But the Civil Rights Movement, which gained momentum in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, began to threaten the certainty of that rule. So deeply identified was the South with segregation that observers wondered whether the end of segregation would spell the end of the South as a distinctive region. Despite the long road toward civil rights still ahead, in his 1957 book, Epitaph for Dixie, Arkansas journalist Harry S. Ashmore was certain that nothing could “turn back the forces that are reshaping the Southern region in the nation’s image.” A year later, another Arkansan, historian C. Vann Woodward, warned, “The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is any longer any point in calling himself a Southerner.” Now that such things as the poll tax, the white primary, and the Jim Crow railway car were beginning to vanish, white Southerners, he wrote, “were suddenly aware of the vacant place they have left in the landscape and of the habit of depending on them in final resort as landmarks of our regional identification.”
At the same time, the South was losing another mark of regional distinction. In 1938, on the occasion of the release of a federal economic study, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” Over the next four decades, however, the regional poverty rate converged so considerably with the national norm that by the 1970s, the place that once seemed—in the words of Southern literary historian Fred Dobson—“poor, violent, pessimistic, tragic, and mysterious” had suddenly transformed into a place some were calling “successful, optimistic, prosperous, and bland.” In 1977, the personification of a kinder and gentler South, Jimmy Carter, became president of the United States.
A year later, Mississippi-born novelist Walker Percy gave a lecture at the University of Georgia in which he concluded that Carter’s election was part and parcel of a larger phenomenon: “The South had entered the mainstream of American life for the first time in perhaps 150 years.” Not only did he find this transformation plain “boring,” but he feared the South would become a “quaint corner” of a suburbanized coast to coast Sunbelt whose spiritual heartland would lie somewhere between Dallas and Los Angeles. Alas, he figured, progress has its costs.
So, once again, the white South feared it would lose whatever it was that made it unique. Indeed, as University of Richmond historian Edward Ayers has written, “From its very beginning, people have believed that the South, defined against an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, more real, more unified and distinct, was not only disappearing but also declining.”
One bulwark against that decline is a hugely popular business that gives Southerners the feeling that the region’s homespun past is still present: the Cracker Barrel chain. Founded in 1969 as a combined restaurant and gift shop styled as an old-fashioned country general store, Cracker Barrel first positioned itself next to Interstate highway exits in the Southeast before going national in the 1980s. Today the publicly traded corporate eatery serves traditional “down home” Southern comfort food in 42 states, and each restaurant features a front porch lined with wooden rocking chairs and a stone fireplace with a shotgun and a deer head above the mantel. Clearly, you don’t have to be Southern to soak up its nostalgia.
In 1966, the Birmingham, Alabama-based publisher of an 80-year-old agriculture journal launched a lifestyle magazine called Southern Living. Filled with recipes, interior design ideas, and regional travel tips, Southern Living became, according to National Public Radio commentator Diane Roberts, the “lifestyle Bible” of the white South’s “genuine and aspiring upper middle class.” By 1985, when it sold to Time, Inc. for $498 million, it had become the most successful regional magazine of its kind.
But clearly not everyone can afford to entertain that version of Southern culture. One of the biggest effects the end of segregation had on Southern whites was the highlighting of the inequality that had always existed among them. “The fiction that all whites are equal as long as blacks were suppressed was shot to hell,” historian James C. Cobb told me. Cobb, a distinguished University of Georgia professor emeritus who literally wrote the book on Southern identity, invited me to spend a warm late summer day with him in Athens, Georgia talking about Southern history.
During a drive through town, a walk on campus, and hours in his small office where he has a black velvet painting of Elvis Presley behind his desk, Cobb explained to me that the Confederate battle flag is often the last bastion for poor whites looking for a way to assert some status. “You’re not going to find too many middle-class white Southerners waving rebel flags these days,” he said. “You just don’t feel the need to assert your whiteness when you own a rambling McMansion.” On the other hand, if you’re poor, white, and feeling anxious about your place in the world, “waving the rebel flag is a statement about being white when you think being white is the only thing you’ve got.”
He talked at length about the persistence of white Southern identity in a globalized world. Here, he says, like in so many places around the globe, folks are trying to retain some local distinctiveness in the face of a homogenizing planet. Like so many latter-generation ethnic Americans who fear the prospect of full assimilation, large numbers of Southerners have refused to disappear into a homogenized, placeless, post-ethnic whiteness.
Nowadays they are doing so by repackaging Southernness and selling it in the marketplace. And the very act of commodifying culture, Cobb says, automatically makes it a little performative.
As if to prove a point, Cobb invited me to a brunch hosted by Lee Epting, this college town’s premier caterer, a man one local paper has called part set designer and part historian. The brunch was held in a circa-1800 plantation house Epting had transported from South Carolina and then furnished with antiques. The food that morning—which included grits, fried chicken, and biscuits and gravy—was fabulous. But as Epting likes to say, a good party is full of stories. As the token Yankee—the modern definition of which I learned that day means “not a Southerner”—I got an extra serving of stories. Epting walked me through the house explaining the provenance of this or that artifact and identifying the faces in the family photos he had on the walls. But my host saved the best for last. Just before I was about to leave for another meeting on campus, Epting took me outside to show me an old fashioned three-hole outhouse. He said he had gotten a call a few years ago from a man who wanted to sell him a house he swore William Tecumseh Sherman had slept in during his infamous march to the sea. While the house turned out to be built after the Civil War, Epting says he then stumbled across a nearby outhouse, which, he claims, was actually built in 1842. He snapped it up and quickly brought it back to Athens. Now he has the pleasure of telling his most gullible out-of-town guests that this is where General Sherman shat.
