Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

by Tony Horwitz

Frederick was sent to board with a rural pastor, the first of six clergymen who would oversee his peripatetic education.

Fred also found a guiding philosophy in the works of Thomas Carlyle, whom he considered “the greatest genius in the world.” Two of the Scottish thinker’s precepts had particular influence on him. Carlyle wrote that conviction “is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct,” and in choosing a life of service to others, “do the Duty which lies nearest thee.”

“but am a moderate Free Soiler.” This aligned him with Abraham Lincoln and others who sought to limit slavery’s extension rather than seek its immediate end. “On the whole, I guess I represent pretty fairly the average sentiment of good thinking men on our side.”

In 1861, when Virginia dissolved its ties to the US and joined the Confederacy, delegates from the state’s west gathered at Independence Hall in Wheeling to discuss separating from Virginia. Two years later, West Virginia formally joined the Union as the thirty-fifth state, its seal proclaiming in Latin, “Mountaineers Are Always Free.” This withdrawal from Virginia proved to be the only lasting secession to occur in the Civil War era.

“What does a hillbilly girl say during sex?” he asked me. The other men groaned. “‘Get off me, Uncle Bill, you’re crushing my Marlboro!’”

Writing in later life to his Yale friend Charles Brace, a man of deep Christian faith, Olmsted recalled his own dalliance with belief in the 1840s, when many of their peers attended revivals and were spiritually reborn. “I repent of nothing more thoroughly than my own sin in superstitious meandering.”

“The know-nothingness in this country just seems to be getting stronger,” he said. “People are proud of their ignorance, and when you challenge it, they fall back on conspiracy theories and fake facts.” He gestured at his man cave filled with fossils he’d painstakingly collected. “It’s like centuries of science never happened.” —

This condemnation spoke to a long-standing grievance of slavery’s foes: the stifling of discourse about the South’s “peculiar institution.” The silencing included a gag on anti-slavery petitions in Congress and the seizure of abolitionist publications mailed to the South. To critics, this censorship showed that the “Slave Power” not only subjugated Africans. It suppressed the fundamental American freedoms of speech and belief.

In a sense, writing by candlelight on the Cumberland, Olmsted encapsulated the impasse that would lead to secession and civil war. He realized that he’d underestimated the extremist resolve of the South’s leading men, and that they in turn misjudged the motives and determination of Northerners like himself. Nashville effectively extinguished Olmsted’s faith that middle ground could be found, or that Southerners had the “justice” and “good sense” to recognize the evils of slavery and gradually work toward ending them. “They do not seem to have a fundamental sense of right,” he wrote.

Many still don’t

Allison subscribed to what became known as the South’s “mud-sill” theory, which posited that humans were meant to occupy different stations, worker bees at the bottom (or mudsill) supporting a few at the top who advanced civilization and held all the wealth, “wisdom & power,” Olmsted wrote.

Olmsted also sensed a dangerous insecurity underlying the South’s violent code of honor. Slavery accustomed whites to deference, “uncontrolled authority,” and vigilance against any hint of insubordination. They were “always in readiness to chastise, to strike down, to slay, upon what they shall individually judge to be sufficient provocation.”

Many still have that tendency

In politics, as in personal affairs, slaveholders lashed out at any challenge to their power and property. The South’s truculent ruling class also relished displays of martial spirit and prowess.

The white supremacy people continue to do this in 2019.

Wincing in pain as he eased out of the booth, Hooker crushed my hand again and quoted Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. “Real courage,” he said, isn’t a man with a gun in his hand. “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin and you see it through no matter what.”

To me, that is selfish idiocy

Gone was the dispassionate observer of a year

earlier, seeking “matter of fact matter” about the South. He now branded slavery “shamefully cruel, selfish and wicked,” and an institution that “manacles” not only slaves but also “the noble form” of democracy. “It is our duty, as it is every man’s in the world, to oppose Slavery, to weaken it, to destroy it.”

poplars. Next appeared magnolias and Spanish moss “in such masses as to gray the forest green,” he wrote. “Then cypress swamps, the live oak and the palmetto along the shore, preluding but little the roses, jessamines, and golden oranges.” Olmsted had entered the deep, Deep South, luxuriant even in December, when snow was starting to fall in his native New England.

For slaves condemned to a life of bondage, Christian belief could be a salve and source of hope, if only for release in the hereafter. But slaveholders often deployed religion as a tool of social control, tailoring prayers and sermons to stress the duty to obey one’s master. Christianizing slaves also served Southern propagandists who claimed that bondage uplifted African “savages” and liberated them from spiritual darkness.

Religion as a weapon of control

Almost no evidence remained of Nottoway’s forty-two slave cabins and the exceptionally grueling labor that made possible the excessive wealth on display. Slaves on cane plantations cleared swamps, dug drainage ditches, and hoed weeds through the broiling summer—prelude to the backbreaking labor in “grinding season,” when planters rushed to harvest and process their crop before the first frost.

Being a slave was the worst

slave weddings had no legal standing, only the promise of union “until death or distance do you part.”

When freedom came, ex-slaves searching for long-lost kin often found that their wives had started new families with other men, out of necessity, on the orders of a master, or because they never expected to see their former partner again. This legacy made Nottoway all the more grotesque, because the mansion was now a premier wedding venue, touted as the South’s largest antebellum mansion. “Every Castle Needs a Queen,” one of Nottaway’s brochures stated.

An old symbol of the Slavocracy now being used for weddings. The false romance of Gone With the Wind for a South which existed only in stories.

“Slavery didn’t really end with the Civil War,” said one of the men, Ulysses Douglas. His grandparents stayed on the plantation, as sharecroppers, using scrip or credit to buy tools and other essentials from the owner’s store. “By the end of the year, folks always owed more than they made from their share of the crop. So they worked for no money, just debt.”

Reconstruction was all about reconstructing white supremacy and slavery de facto if not de jur

“In the internet era, a lot of people are just a mouse click away from discovering they’re black.” Medley laughed, adding a quote attributed to Huey Long: “You could feed all the pure whites and pure blacks in Louisiana with a cup of beans and half a cup of rice.”

All of which made me revisit the extraordinary welcome I’d felt at Franklin Avenue Baptist. Given the history here, the racism Andrews had experienced, and the post-Katrina tensions over gentrification, why the warm embrace of a white stranger, and the offer of a ride, which I doubted would happen to a black man wandering the city’s white-flight suburbs?

I have experienced the same. However I did help black neighbors when they had a flat providing them with water and a jack in my driveway.

By this point in my own travels, I was becoming numb to the extravagant wealth on show at plantations like those lining the River Road. Andrew wasn’t overawed, either. The oak alleys and white-columned mansions conformed to his film image of the Old South—as did the whips and chains we saw at Whitney. But he confessed to being stunned by the brute scale and systemization of the slave regime. “I somehow hadn’t grasped that these were gulags,” he said as we passed the estate of a planter who had amassed one hundred thousand acres of cane, four sugar mills, and more than 750 slaves. “Stalin would have felt right at home here.”

Yes the old South was a police state with millions toiling in forced labor camps. Like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

Olmsted likened this regime to the harsh disciplining of seamen. “The lash is constantly held over them as the remedy for all wrong-doing.” Overseers also spoke like “ship-masters and officers,” telling Olmsted how it was necessary to “break the negroes in” and teach “them their place.” The difference, of course, was that seamen signed up and received pay, rather than being involuntarily “enlisted for their lives in the service of their masters.”

Olmsted, in essence, foresaw postwar Reconstruction and the undermining of it by white terror, resistance, and the faltering will and effort of a war-weary North. What he couldn’t anticipate was that Calhoun’s estate, where he saw the evils of slavery most vividly, would become a pivotal battleground in the long, violent, and unfinished struggle to overturn the legacy of slavery.

As Olmsted had predicted, defeated whites resisted postwar occupation at every turn, by every means, including voter fraud, Ku Klux Klan terror, and coups against the shaky Republican government in New Orleans. But the bloodiest clash in Louisiana—indeed, in the entire Reconstruction South—occurred in 1873 at the heart of “Calhoun’s Negro Quarter of Colfax.”

In all, the one-day killing at Colfax constituted the worst single slaughter in the South during the bloody decade following the Civil War, a period in which more than two thousand blacks were murdered in Louisiana alone. President Grant, who had seen his share of carnage, termed Colfax “a butchery” inflicted on “citizens” in an unlawful act to seize power by force of arms. The “miscreants” responsible should not go “unwhipped of justice.”

Three were found guilty but their convictions were overturned. Appeal to the Supreme Court resulted in a death blow to the legal basis and dwindling powers of Reconstruction. Justices ruled that enforcement of civil and voting rights, in cases of individual or mob action like Colfax, was a state rather than a federal matter. This effectively stripped blacks of protection against terror.

This pattern of whites murdering blacks then gettin acquitted in trials continued well into the 20th Century.

“The spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law.”

ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF THE HEROES, STEPHEN DECATUR PARISH, JAMES WEST HADNOT, SIDNEY HARRIS, WHO FELL IN THE COLFAX RIOT FIGHTING FOR WHITE SUPREMACY APRIL 13, 1873

Actual inscription on a monument to the Colfax Massacre.

This is only the branch of a Dogwood tree; An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY . . . . The negro, now, by eternal grace, Must learn to stay in the negro’s place. In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free, Let the WHITE SUPREME forever be.

Once I surrendered to Houston’s diffusion, the city became much more agreeable. It had a sultry, good-times undertone of Cajun and Creole, topped with a soupçon of just about every other culture on the planet. As Houstonians were quick to point out, their city was the most ethnically diverse in the nation.

It is an amazing city

I stopped there for a cold drink and asked the man at the counter what people here did. “Meth,” he replied. “And Oxy.”

So funny!!! Probably too true.

There were echoes in this of Olmsted’s opus, The Cotton Kingdom, which took its title from the infamous boast of a South Carolina senator and planter three years before the Civil War. Defending slavery, James Henry Hammond mocked Northerners as “our factors,” or brokers, in a cotton trade that was indispensable to the national and global economy. “No, you dare not make war on cotton,” he defiantly proclaimed. “No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.” At Spindletop, ground zero of the Texas oil industry, and close to the world’s largest concentration of refineries, it was easy to regard oil as an unassailable monarch, too. But even in Texas, oil’s century-long reign was under challenge from the state’s many wind farms and from growing environmental concerns. Rhea acknowledged that the end might be coming.

Leaving Crockett, I felt as Olmsted had after his testy encounter with slave masters in Nashville. “Very melancholy” and pessimistically wondering “what is to become of us . . . this great country & this cursedly little people.”

“I love my Hispanic heritage, I love America, and I’m a proud Texan,” she said. “Why choose just the one identity? Let’s not put people in separate boxes, like they did here when I was coming up.”

Why indeed!!

In other slave states, runaways typically headed north in search of freedom; in Texas they ran south toward Mexico. Also, those of Mexican descent in Texas “consort freely with the negroes, making no distinction from pride of race,” Olmsted wrote. “Most of them regard slavery with abhorrence.”

Also, those of Mexican descent in Texas “consort freely with the negroes, making no distinction from pride of race,” Olmsted wrote. “Most of them regard slavery with abhorrence.”

“The first German settlers we saw, we knew at once,” Olmsted wrote. Their log cabins and timber-frame homes were simple but very well kept, as were their tidy and “judiciously cultivated” fields. These plots included rectangles of the South’s great staple, sown and picked by German men, women, and children.

Paid labor can produce cotton profitably. Even in 1850.

“Patient, industrious and persevering,” the Germans “contrast remarkably with the American Southerners,” building wealth through steady labor and enterprise rather than seeking quick riches from speculative adventure. Moreover, though new to the frontier, Germans were forging genuine communities with schools and civic groups devoted to horticulture, music, mechanics, and political debate.

Riotte and his ilk viewed society “as a congregation of men; whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion.” Americans, by contrast, “look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all the rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole. . . . We idealize the community—you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate?” Riotte closed by praising Olmsted’s writing on the South but expressed doubt that it would diminish the Slave Power. “I don’t know of any historical record of an Aristocracy giving up their privileges, except in the case of revolutionary pressure.”

On the main street, there was also a striking homage to the town’s “Founding Freethinkers (Deutsche Freidenker).” The plaque, set in a large stone, said that freethinkers “advocated reason and democracy over religious and political autocracy,” believed in “equal rights for all persons,” and opposed slavery and the Confederacy, a stance that “cost many their freedom and lives.”

But those who remained held to their beliefs, and joined other Hill Country Germans in strong opposition to Texas’s secession from the Union. When war came, they formed secret, armed groups to avoid service in Confederate units and, if possible, give aid to Union forces.

Of course the southern police state reacted as expected

The anti-Confederate underground the Degeners joined, behind Southern lines, so alarmed Texas authorities that in 1862 they declared martial law in the Hill Country. Soldiers were dispatched to “remove” all “disloyal persons,” register white males above the age of sixteen, and to force “aliens” to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. Those who refused were summarily hanged.

Many in the Hill Country had done so from the start of the conflict. At Comfort’s small museum and archives, Brenda Seidensticker showed me documents that made the 1860s Hill Country sound like occupied France during World War II. There were resisters, active collaborators, and those caught between, serving as Confederate teamsters, mail carriers, or in militias, if only to avoid persecution and spare their families harm.

Degener and other mourners also marked the grave with a simple obelisk—the first Civil War monument in Texas, and the first in the former Confederacy erected at the burial site of Union remains. Etched on the stone were the names of those gefallen (killed) at the Nueces, or gefangen genommenund ermordet (captured and murdered) afterward. The roster of dead included Pablo Diaz, a Mexican captured by Indians who had been rescued and adopted by German settlers in Sisterdale. Even more striking was the terse inscription honoring the fallen: Treue der Union, a proud statement of loyalty to the Northern cause, in the heartland of a just-defeated and embittered Confederate state.

Also, my wife was a horse lover, and through her I’d met a number of equestrians—on crutches, in casts and neck braces, or with limbs bristling with metal pins.

Too funny!!!

Olmsted further approved of Woodland’s views regarding “Indian character.” The scout complained that writers always misrepresented natives by rendering their speech in a phony, “highfalutin way.” He then told of translating for a lieutenant “talking up in the clouds,” until he was interrupted by an Apache elder who asked that the officer plainly state his business, rather than spouting nonsense as if to babies.

“Immigrants built this country and have always done the hard work and suffering,” John said. This made him bristle at the loud campaign talk about building a border wall. “Our families did what they had to, to survive. Same with people now, and you’re not going to stop them.”