How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

The average sentence at Angola is eighty-seven years.

“Picking cotton,” he responded, without any hesitation. “Man…it’s like knowing your history, knowing what our folks went through, and all of a sudden, having one of these cotton sacks in your hand.” He cupped his hand and then closed his fingers around the bag we were both imagining in his grasp. His knuckles were dark and cracked, and when he reopened his hand he rubbed the inside of his palm with his thumb. “I think that’s the biggest challenge more than anything else,” he continued. “Not the work but just the mindset of being there and knowing you’re kind of reliving history, in a sense. I’m going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn’t have to go through it, and here it is all over again.”

Of the roughly 30,000 soldiers buried at Blandford, only about 2,200 are identified.

Martha started talking to me about how preservation was different from celebration, an idea that made sense to me in the abstract.

It was a view common of those in Lee’s world. He, and his fellow enslavers, had no control over it. Everyone, including the enslaved, were simply meant to wait for divine intervention.

During the war, Lee was, like his contemporaries, disturbed by the sight of Black soldiers in Union ranks. White soldiers under his command ruthlessly executed Black soldiers who attempted to surrender during the infamous Battle of the Crater—the first time Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had faced large numbers of Black troops. The Battle of the Crater is helpful not only in contextualizing Lee but in contextualizing the cemetery itself.

the Blandford Church is on the Crater battlefield.”

The use of Black soldiers was a threat to the entire social order the South had been predicated on.

The Confederate government put in place policies that officially considered Black soldiers slaves participating in an insurrection, and thus subject to re-enslavement or execution. Their white officers, as enablers of the insurrection, could also be executed.

this opposition springs from no feelings of enmity, but from a deep seated conviction that at present the negroes have neither the intelligence nor other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.”

People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War.

Smithsonian’s investigation found that in total, the state had spent approximately $9 million in today’s dollars. Much of that funding goes directly to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which received over $1.6 million in funds for Confederate cemeteries from the State of Virginia between 1996 and 2018. Cemeteries filled with Black and formerly enslaved people have never received commensurate financial support. The Virginia legislature passed the Historical African American Cemeteries and Graves Act in 2017, to demonstrate its commitment to making amends for this injustice, but at the time of the Smithsonian investigation less than a thousand dollars had been used.

There was history, but also silence.

In front of the gazebo were two flags, one Confederate, one US, standing side by side as if seven hundred thousand people hadn’t been killed under the weight of the epic conflagration between them.

mellifluous

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—that comment, spoken at the start of Gramling’s speech, had been strikingly honest and deeply revealing. I was struck by the cavalier framing Gramling used.

Wow. That feels SO relevant today.

The Lost Cause is a movement that gained traction in the late nineteenth century that attempted to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family, honor, and heritage rather than what it was, a traitorous effort to extend and expand the bondage of Black people.

The creation of any monument sends a message, whether intentional or not.

These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities.

We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember, with equal admiration, those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery, and those who fought for liberty and justice. I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.

ahistorical

The myth of Black Confederate soldiers emerged in the 1970s, pushed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This story was a response to changing public perceptions of the Civil War in the years after the civil rights movement—away from Lost Cause mythology and toward recognition that slavery was central to this conflict.

Leadership found themselves in a position in which they could choose to perpetuate slavery or give everything they had to win the war and secure independence—a choice many Confederate leaders were unwilling to accept. Robert M. T. Hunter, a senator from Virginia, is reported to have said, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” Another Confederate leader, General Howell Cobb, was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the war, just weeks before Lee would surrender at Appomattox, the Confederacy did approve legislation that would allow Black people to fight for the Confederacy. But by then it was far too late. The war had effectively already been lost.

One of the most egregious features of the Lost Cause is the dramatic about-face that occurred after the war. When the war ended, the leaders of the Confederacy attempted to walk back or completely deny the centrality of slavery to the formation of the Confederacy. In 1881, two decades after his farewell speech to Congress, Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and that there would have been a civil war even if no American ever owned a slave.

There is no shortage of documentation demonstrating that the Southern states seceded and began sowing the seeds of war in order to defend slavery. To look at primary source documents and convince yourself that the central cause of the war was anything other than slavery requires a remarkable contortion of history.

a bondage worse than death.”

key to understanding the UDC’s collective founding project. Members did not simply want to erect monuments for the fallen; they wanted to rewrite the public narrative.