"Sunday 18th August – I arrived at Vicksburg
National Park, Mississippi on a beautiful, quiet Sunday morning. I pretty much had the place
to myself, save a few dog walkers and keen joggers.
After a short video on the siege of Vicksburg in the Visitors Centre, I grabbed
a map and drove the 16-mile auto tour around site. Both Jefferson Davis and
Abraham Lincoln saw Vicksburg as the place that would
decide the fate of the war, and it was a huge victory for the North after Grant’s
constant assault. Initially, Grant had failed to take the city by force, so
he decided to lay the town to siege. Eventually, the Confederates surrendered,
and this marked a turning point in the course of the war. The auto tour covered
the Union and Confederate lines, the trenches, and memorials to the regiments
that fought there. It was very eerie standing that on the hilltop; it was so
peaceful and quiet, the exact opposite to what it would have been like in 1864.
The sound of guns, men bellowing orders, the groans and screams of the wounded.
You can almost feel what happened here. As could be expected, there was a lot
of information on military tactics and maneuvers, and I prefer to read about the
stories of individual soldiers rather than the direction in which they were marching. For
example: there was a small house on the auto tour that was commandeered by
Union troops as a field hospital for smallpox victims. An incredible photograph
showed makeshift tents and doctors tending patients, frozen in time. I was
standing on the exact spot, and I instantly wanted to know about the soldiers
who were in that hospital, the doctors tending to the wounded, and the
homeowner who however unwillingly, allowed their house to be taken over by the
Union forces. Sadly, this was not the case.
From Vicksburg, I travelled down to Natchez in
Mississippi. On the way, I headed to Rosswood Plantation, a large home off
the beaten track. I drove up the gravel pathway to the house and wondered
whether it was open – there were no cars and it looked rather run down. I
knocked on the door and a sweet old lady named Jean answered, inviting me
warmly into her house. Her house! Jean and her
husband Walter had lived in this house for 38 years, and conduct tours on the
off chance someone visits. The house was beautiful in itself but the real joy
was talking to this lovely couple. Walter talked to me for over an hour about
the history of the house, and showed me some fascinating artefacts such as part
of a Union cannonball that was fired into the kitchen. The Wade family owned the
plantation, and Walter explained how in the 1850s, their slaves were freed and
were given the choice of travelling to Liberia at the family’s expense. 154
slaves decided to make the trip, but 105 chose to remain behind. This is an
incredible story, since it was illegal to free slaves in Mississippi at that
time. Walter also showed me an invoice from 1866 that shipped cotton from the
plantation, to New Orleans and finally to Liverpool, England. Britain depended
on the cotton trade throughout the nineteenth century, and just before the
Civil War, 90% of the cotton imported through Liverpool came from the American
South. Despite her claims of moral superiority over American slaveholders, the
cotton from their plantations directly financed the British Industrial Revolution.
Monday 19th August – MASSIVE history day!
I’m staying in a beautiful bed and breakfast right in the very heart of
Natchez. It’s a small town, with lots of antique shops, cafés and a gorgeous
view over the Mississippi river. Since this is the middle of August, it is HOT,
though. This morning I visited Melrose Plantation, under the National Park
Service. The ranger tour was great, and talked fairly about the owners and the
slaves. This plantation home was owned by the McMurrin family, but it was not a working
plantation: slaves tended fruit and vegetables to feed the family. This was
different to the other commercial plantations the family owned along the Mississippi river. The slave
cabins had been restored, and there was a lot of information on the life of a
slave, as well as a strong focus on the African American community in Natchez.
The exhibition in the cabin was good at providing context, and it briefly
touched on refugee camps during the Civil War. In the winter of 1863-4, over
four thousand African Americans died of yellow fever, a horrific disease spread
by cramped and unhygienic conditions.
Over the next few hours, I visited two more plantation
homes. In the mid c19th, Natchez had the largest concentration of millionaires
per square mile, and looking around at some of these plantations, it’s not
hard to see why. Longwood (left) was an unusually shaped house – in fact it’s the
largest octagonal home in America – and the tour was unfortunately nothing special. There were no personal stories or anecdotes rather it was a tour about the paintings and the furniture. Similarly, Rosedale Plantation is owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution and as can be expected,
the tour guide did not mention slavery once, and said little else about it after I prompted her. Both of these
homes refused to confront the legacy of slavery; neither could have operated or
even existed without slaves, and to ignore their history is insulting and
frustrating. We will never have a ‘complete’ picture of the past, but it is
wrong to solely focus on the ‘family in the big house.’ The tour at Rosedale in
particular was romanticized so much it can only be described as a retelling of
‘Gone With the Wind’, that era of nostalgia for the Southern way of life that
depicted the beautiful Southern belle surrounded by happy slaves. Urgh. 
Sticking with the theme of slavery, I drove to the
Forks of the Road National site. There isn’t much there apart from a few
interpretative boards, but it is an important place to visit. In the c19th, this was the second largest slave market in the United States. It was
incredibly moving to stand at a site in which thousands of slaves were sold along the Mississippi river. Between 1800 and
1860, over 750,000 slaves were traded from the Upper South to Mississippi,
Louisiana and Texas. The Forks consisted of several markets, including an
auction block and an inspection room where slaves were made to stand and
traders bartered over their strength and worth. Because of this arrangement, a
slave could be purchased on the same day if necessary, or bought later on in
the week. The fear of being ‘sold downriver’ led to hundreds of enslaved
Africans planning an escape route North, or sometimes practicing self-mutilation or
suicide. During the Civil War in 1863, the 58th Regiment of the U.S. Black Infantry
occupied the Forks site. It is likely that many of the soldiers had been sold
as slaves at that same spot, many years before.
The last historic house I
visited that day was the William Johnson house. Johnson was a prominent businessman in Natchez, and as a result owned several slaves. You might think this is not unusual, but Johnson had been born into slavery. What made a black man, a former slave, own another black man? Born in 1809 to a slave woman and a white slave owner, Johnson was
freed at the age of 11; the only reason why we know so much about him was that
he kept an extensive diary throughout his life. After working as an apprentice
in a barber shop, Johnson saved his wages and purchased his own barber shop in
1830. Over the next two decades, Johnson bought another two barbershops and a
bath house in Natchez. At the time, it was not illegal by state law to prevent
a free black man owning slaves, even if that person had been a slave himself.
Johnson’s diary doesn’t tell us why he owned slaves, and the National Park
Service presented interesting questions as to the social and political
implications of this situation. As an African American man, there was only so
far he could progress in society, but slave ownership was a sign of economic
and social status. Hence, he was a respected man in the community. It is believed Johnson was a fair master, but if a
slave displeased him, he punished them severely. For example, Johnson severely
whipped his slave Stephen for frequent bouts of drunkenness. In 1851, a land
prospector named Baylor Winn murdered Johnson, and despite the fact Johnson's teenaged son witnessed the attack, Winn was acquitted because a black man,
slave or free, could not testify in court against a white man. Attempts were
made to prove Winn was a mulatto, but little became of it. This was one of the
best historic sites I visited, for it presented an unusual and unique case in a
respectful and interesting light.
Tuesday 20th august – Before I left sunny
Natchez I visited Stanton Hall, perhaps the most beautiful house I visited on
my trip. In 1857, this ‘town house’ was purchased and refurbished by Edward
Stanton, who owned 7 plantation homes on the Mississippi. This set Stanton back
$83,000, an extraordinary sum; in today’s money this cost around $10 million! Stanton
died 9 months after the house was completed, but his wife lived there for a
further 30 years. Echoing the standard Natchez theme on slavery, not much was
said about the ‘servants’ but perhaps that was unsurprising since there were
pictures of people dressed as Southern belles and Confederate officers covering
the walls.
For a completely different experience, I visited the African
American Museum in the centre of Natchez. I talked to the director, a lovely engaging
man named Darryl, for nearly two hours and learned some fascinating things
about the racial status quo in Mississippi. We had a great discussion about the
legacy of slavery in the South, focusing on the tendency for plantation homes
to ignore slavery or refer to the enslaved as ‘servants.' He believed this
ignorance was the hardest thing to fight against, mainly because it is so widespread.
I told him about my experience with the tour guide in Selma, and he wasn’t
surprised – this idea of African Americans as happy servants feeds into the
nostalgia for the antebellum South, a romantic portrayal that is so far from
the truth."
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