On Remembering Dixie

This book is incredible—it’s public history at its best. In it, Susan Falck traces the way that Mississppians in Natchez commemorate(d) the antebellum South from the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the Second World War. By the Great Depression, Natchez was effectively a Disneyland for Lost Cause partisans, but the production of Lost Cause memory did not happen overnight.

Susan Falck begins with a telling of the first stirrings of the Lost Cause narrative immediately after the Civil War—the story was not a romanticized one, it was a lament. “The war has destroyed everything; we’ve lost our entire way of life.” Yet, black Southerners had their own imagery, and they held enormous celebrations on Independence Day. In fact, Falck cites 8,000 to 10,000 black Southerners celebrating the holiday in 1867 in Natchez, a town of 6,000 at the time (many African-Americans came from elsewhere to celebrate, especially rural areas in the surrounding region). White Southerners, in contrast, had little to celebrate. By contrast, the situation was wholly reversed ten years later with the end of Reconstruction—now, white Southerners became dominant once more, in spite of being a minority of the town’s population. They engaged in greater activism, civic engagement (especially through various associations like the Freemasons), and more.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is that on photography. Falck demonstrates that, although Natchez is generally remembered as a white space during this period (and a deeply stratified one with poor blacks and rich whites), it was actually deeply complicated. During Reconstruction, a large black middle class—even upper class—emerged, but this history was basically burned in the 1910s. Both upper- and lower-class African-Americans were photographed and took pride in their pictures, but photographs of upper-class black Southerners were “lost” (or ignored), while images of poor black Southerners were circulated by white residents and visitors, building up a paternalist image of well-off whites aiding (perhaps “civilizing” in colonial terms?) their black neighbors. The photographs of wealthy black men and women were only “rediscovered” in the 1980s, and those who found them questioned whether they were even real because they were so unsettling to white inhabitants.

By 1915, the Lost Cause narrative had become less an object of grief and more an object of reverence—rather than mourning the loss of the Old South, white Southerners saw it as something aspirational. To reflect this, women’s organizations became increasingly active in gardening and maintaining Natchez’s historic homes, to the point that—by 1930—they were better maintained than they ever were in either the antebellum or Reconstruction periods. Moreover, white visitors came from throughout the United States to celebrate and explore the mansions (many of which were plantations) of Natchez, further solidifying the Lost Cause narrative.

The Civil War has cast a long shadow on the United States, and Falck concludes her book with a discussion of “history wars” regarding the Confederate past, especially in the wake of Charlottesville’s 2017 “Unite the Right” Rally. She argues here that this is a fundamentally contested past in Natchez—while many (white) Southerners are anxious about the possibility of tearing down Confederate statues and other sites of commemoration, others are troubled by Natchez’s past (which had a dark past far beyond the period covered in the book—it had one of the country’s largest slave auctions and was one of the wealthiest American cities before the Civil War; naturally, it was built entirely on slave labor).

Highly recommend.