My home state of Mississippi is one of only four states that made Confederate Memorial Day a public holiday. In Mississippi alone, 25,000 state employees get the day off with pay, courtesy of state taxpayers. Ironically, nearly 40% of those government workers are Black. I’m pretty sure they don’t spend their day off extolling the virtues of the Confederacy.
In my hometown of Laurel, every year on the last Monday in April, the Sons of Confederate Veterans dispatch their honor guard to present arms and unfurl their Confederate flags on the courthouse square in front of the massive Confederate monument. They always gather a crowd of white supporters who don’t seem to be bothered that the Southern Poverty Law Center has linked the SCV to various hate groups.
The truth is that Confederate Memorial Day has been a symbol of white supremacy since its inception in 1868. The date became part and parcel of the Myth of the Lost Cause, a twisted take on history that purports that the Civil War was forced upon a valiant, noble people solidly united in their patriotic love of freedom—albeit not the freedom of their Black neighbors.
At its root, the Lost Cause myth with its commemorations, its fetishized Confederate flags and the 130 Confederate monuments in Mississippi alone is a century-and-a-half-long campaign of terror Southern whites have orchestrated to keep Black folks in their place. You can tell because anytime Black progress leads whites to feel threatened, these symbols evoke a renewed racist fervor. It happened during Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era, and in today’s day and age, with the white backlash to their shrinking majority and the inevitable push for diversity and inclusion. When white Mississippians get scared, we double down on our whiteness.
I was once as guilty of this as anybody else. As a child, I fell for and embraced the Southern myth wholeheartedly. It let me feel that I was special, a notch or two above an entire race of people.
There was no greater confirmation of my superiority than the magnificent Confederate monument at the Jones County courthouse in Laurel. The imposing sight consists of a grieving marble lady enshrined within a splendid eight-columned temple, guarded by a lone devoted soldier perched upon the roof, his rifle forever broken by the gale-force winds of a summer storm that raged decades prior.
This monument was my transport into a fantastical world reminiscent of gallant, ostrich-plumed colonels, their grand plantations, and the supposedly contented enslaved workers who toiled there. It symbolized a sense of white entitlement, a connection to the privileges and advantages bestowed upon those descended from the “heroes,” who had valiantly fought for the cause they deemed glorious. It was an irresistible fantasy. I was invited to step onto the grand stage of “Gone with the Wind.” I worshiped at the foot of that monument.
Yet, intertwined with this romantic allure was an undercurrent of resentment, a lingering bitterness over the fabricated past that had been unjustly stolen from me. A treacherous enemy, alternately called Yankees, the North, or the Federal Government, had absconded with my rightful inheritance. This complex mixture of pride and grievance keeps the Myth of the Lost Cause alive and well today. It’s in our blood. Southern white boys leave the womb both nostalgic and aggrieved, easy pickings for any populist politician who promises to take us back to our days of glory, i.e., white superiority.
It has taken years of study, reflection and confession to untangle the web of falsehoods that many of us white Southerners continue to weave around that pivotal period in history. The idea Southern “patriots” asserted that 700,000 soldiers willingly sacrificed their lives in defense of principles like states’ rights, government overreach, or unfair tariffs is nothing short of absurd.
The most obvious of these deceptions was that the war bore no relation to the plight of the millions of human beings held in chattel slavery throughout the South, on whose backs rested the entire Southern economy and way of life.
Learning that the war was really about slavery—with Mississippi’s secession letter even saying, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery”—was humbling. But nothing compared to another lie I had been told: that all our white ancestors stood united during the struggle for secession. Studying my own county’s obscured history knocked the legs out from under that argument. I discovered my own people were traitors to the Confederacy.
The proof was the origin story of that sacred monument I worshiped as a child. The truth is that the monument, erected in 1912, was not an act of pride, but of shame. It was a display of atonement to the rest of the South, a public apology for not siding with the Confederacy during the war. To my county’s everlasting shame, we went with the Yankees; we betrayed the very principles of whiteness that had defined the Southern cause.
At the time of the Civil War, Jones County was home to impoverished descendants of Scots and Irish who were working hardscrabble farms on the poorest soil in the state. In these piney barrens, most couldn’t afford enslaved servants, or if they could, their arrangements were nothing like the grand plantations with separate quarters for their forced labor. The enslaved, usually a woman, moved right into the white family’s cabin, and it was not uncommon for the master of the house to father a Black family right next to his white one, acknowledging them both in public and in their wills. Many Black families in Jones County still own the land that their white ancestors bequeathed to them. At that time, race and family relations were more fluid in our backwoods community than in the cultured and fertile Delta.
When talk of secession began, Jones Countians understood what the quarrel was about—it wasn’t states rights. It was about slavery, and they didn’t want any part of it. They knew it would be a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. When it came time to elect a delegate for the state convention to decide whether Mississippi should remain in the Union, the secession candidate from Jones County garnered only 89 votes. In contrast, the anti-secession candidate, John H. Powell, received 166. Sadly, Powell got swept up in the fire-eating oratory at the Jackson convention and voted to secede along with nearly everyone else. He wisely stayed away from the county for a while when he heard he was being burned in effigy.
Following that betrayal, things took a darker turn. Hundreds of men from Jones County traveled to New Orleans to join the Union Army. Many who initially fought for the Confederacy deserted and returned to support their starving families whose farms Confederate troops were plundering. The number of deserters, anti-Confederates and pro-Unionists in Jones County was so significant that they organized into an army.
By widespread consensus, they elected a Confederate deserter named Newton Knight as their leader. With the help of his Black common-law wife, Rachel, Knight’s army engaged in skirmishes with Confederate patrols, seized and redistributed their supplies, and even assassinated their officers. They safeguarded a grateful populace from the Confederacy and were so confident in their actions that they raised the Union flag over the courthouse.
To the rest of the state, Jones County was considered a breeding ground for backwoods renegade traitors who engaged in racial mixing. It was well-known that in Jones County, one could not always discern who was white or Black, or who was Black but appeared white. We even had settlements of people folks called “White Negroes.” Such ambiguity was unacceptable in a state where laws rigidly codified the distinctions between whiteness and Blackness.
After the war, the county could see in which direction the state’s political winds were blowing. White supremacy enforced through either law or violence was ascendant. Feeling an urgent need to redeem its reputation and dispel lingering doubts about Jones County’s loyalty to the recently vanquished Confederacy and the white race, the county officials opted to change the county’s name to Davis, after Jefferson Davis, and the county seat to Leesburg, after Robert E. Lee. However, this decision only led to confusion, and after a few years, the names reverted to their original Jones County designations.
At the turn of the century, the Daughters of the Confederacy, along with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, sponsored Confederate monuments throughout the South. Politicians, educators, schoolbooks and clergy fervently promoted the Myth of the Lost Cause, an effort aimed at reinforcing notions of white racial purity, nobility and supremacy. My county’s checkered history seemed to challenge these notions.
By this time, Jones County had evolved from its remote, impoverished and uncivilized Civil War-era past. It had grown wealthy, boasting more millionaires than any other town its size in the nation. Grand mansions and gothic churches that European architects designed lined the broad avenues. However, you’d touch a nerve if you asked about the genesis of this transformation. The progress we enjoyed resulted from the ingenuity, benevolence and progressive thinking of a Northern lumber baron named Gardiner (of the same family that still owns Gardiners Island off the shores of East Hampton).
The Gardiners acquired vast acreage of virgin yellow pine forests, constructed state-of-the-art mills, established rail lines and met the building needs of a rapidly growing nation. However, the Gardiners stood apart from those ruthless lumber barons who were clear-cutting the nation’s forests. Most swooped in, ravaged, pillaged and then left, but the Gardiners ravaged, pillaged and stayed, intending to turn culturally backward people into a progressive, educated, civic-minded community.
The family constructed impressive government buildings, sponsored a world-class art museum accessible to all, designed a regulation golf course with the expertise of a Scottish golfing legend and created city parks with the aid of the firm that laid out Central Park.
They organized concerts, welcomed traveling theater groups, and hosted lectures on current events. They even challenged local racial customs and laws by hiring Blacks alongside whites, sometimes even as foremen. At the same time, the governor went on record saying, “An educated n—–r is the waste of a good field hand. The Gardiner’s established top-notch schools for Black students, provided decent housing and health care for all residents, and generated prosperity for many. Nevertheless, the fact that Yankee “liberals” were governing the county did little to bolster Jones County’s white-supremacist credentials.
It was during this era that city leaders conceived the idea of erecting a Confederate monument that would surpass all others cropping up across the state. Gardiner generously donated the funds for this granite masterpiece. The irony was not lost on him, and during his dedication speech in 1912, he remarked, “You see there, a handsome monument erected with Yankee money to the Confederate dead of the Free State of Jones, which seceded from the Confederacy after the Confederacy seceded from the Union.”
Fifty years after we left the Confederacy, we wanted back in. We may have been late to the party, but I’m sure we’ll be the last to leave.
So, next year, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans wave their flags and give the rebel yell in front of the Confederate monument, somebody should remind them that the monument they hold so dear was not built out of pride for being white, but out of shame for not being white enough.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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