The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

By 1887 Confederate veterans were dying in clusters, more every day. That’s the year the first effort to build a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Memphis began, formalized into an association in 1891. Down in Mississippi, politicians took away the Black right to vote but added payments to Confederate veterans and their widows. The pervasive idea of the Lost Cause reframed the Civil War to be about states’ rights and not slavery. It turned the Confederate soldiers from traitors into American patriots defending the original ideals of the nation. This mythology took root as those old soldiers began dying in droves, another one every day, and their sons and daughters tried to sort out what their beloved parents had done in their lives and what they had done it for.