Deep South Pt 5: From Slave Auctions to Black Slaveowners - Natchez, Mississippi

"Sunday 18^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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."

Deep South Pt 4: "The March To Freedom" - Alabama and the Civil Rights Trail

[I spent three lovely relaxing days on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, a wonderful mix of sand, sea and sun. The food was incredible – I tried oysters, crab and seafood gumbo – and in between stuffing my face with food I read some books on the beach. I never do ‘beach holidays’ so to sit and do nothing for three days was perfect. I left the coast early one morning, and after a quick stop over at a Marine centre to feed and cuddle a dolphin, I drove North to Mobile. This is quite possibly the most random holiday I have been on. The following recounts my experience on the African American Civil Rights Trail.]

“Wednesday 14^th August – I reached Mobile in the early afternoon, and plugged in the zip code address for Oakleigh House in my Sat Nav. The town looked very rough and run down, and the house was tucked away in a very small historic district behind the main road. I parked and was slightly disconcerted to see a security guard posted out front. It’s fairly rare to see that, and considering I had all my earthy possessions in the boot (or trunk) of my car I was nervous as I approached the front door. I had a private tour of the house by a girl dressed as a Southern belle – of course. It was home to the Irwin and Roper families, and during the Civil War Union soldiers marched to the threshold and threatened to burn the house down, but Margaret Irwin, who was born in England, unfurled a British flag and declared she was British, and not part of the war. The Union troops backed down and left, despite the fact that Margaret’s husband and brother were both high-ranking Confederate officials. The house was interesting, but my standard complaint with house tours – here and sometimes in the US – is the lack of context. We’re told about the furniture and the pretty paintings but what was happening outside the house and how did it affect the family and the slaves. Or, as this house liked to refer to them, servants. The terms ‘slave’ and ‘servant’ seem interchangeable, even though the meaning is very different. At the end of the tour, the guide showed me a photograph of a slave and declared “all Southerners weren’t bad, and people in Mobile treated their slaves well because they weren’t living on plantations.” This may have been true in isolated cases, but it was such a sweeping generalization with little evidence to support her argument. Apparently because the family had their photograph taken with a slave it meant they were part of the family. In Southern society, a paternalistic system existed where plantation owners would have seen their slaves as their extended family, but of course there was a racial and social divide between the two races. The guide did not or was reluctant to point this out.”

“Thursday 15^th August – Montgomery, Alabama. Today I drove into downtown Montgomery to follow the Civil Rights Trail. My first stop was the Rose Parks Library and Museum, which was split into a children’s section and the main museum. In 1955, buses across the South were segregated, and African Americans were meant to sit in the back of the bus and if it was busy, they had to vacate their seat for a white person. One evening, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white woman, and although she was by no means the first to do this, her actions ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Thousands of African Americans avoided using buses, and car-pooled with friends and work colleagues for nearly a year. The photographs of near empty buses proved a powerful moment in the Civil Rights Movement. It was amazing to stand at the site where history was made! At the ticket desk of the museum I wavered over the decision to buy a ticket for the children’s section but it was worth it. The exhibition centered on a bus that acted as a time machine. It was driven by a robot (stick with me), and an actress playing Rosa Parks guided us through key moments in African American history. It covered the origins of Jim Crow, and how the name was taken from a minstrel show; the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a landmark case that basically declared white and black people did not have the same rights; the 1850s where Harriet Tubman and Henry ‘Box’ Brown escaped slavery and demanded abolition; the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation; and 1896 for the Plessy vs Ferguson case. Homer Plessy was a black man who decided to test the 14^th amendment that said everyone was equal. He led a direct challenge against the laws of segregation by sitting in a white compartment on a train. Plessy could pass as a white man, but identified himself as black, only to be forced off the train. He took the case to court, but Federal judges ruled that conditions provided on a train (i.e., a white and a black compartment) were “separate but equal.” This infamous phrase confirmed the accepted practice, but it was a huge blow for African Americans. 

It was a really good visual display, with the bus moving side to side when you travelled ‘through time.’ Apparently the museum gets a lot of visitors from the state, as well as London and Paris! It was very enjoyable and so well presented. The main 'adult' section of the museum focused on a dramatization of Rosa Parks’ stand on the bus, and an exhibition contained documents of when she was arrested and how the Montgomery Bus Boycott evolved into an incredibly organised movement. Volunteers such as Joanne Robinson worked through the night to print 52,000 leaflets, distributing them across town to families and churches to warn them off the impending boycott. Money was raised for those who could not get to work, and just under 400 cars were purchased to transport people to and from work. The state tried to class them as taxis, as you would need a business licence to operate them but the activists cleverly painted churches on the side of the car – you could not class a church as a business. There were some excellent facts that I had never come across before.

After a brief visit to the Dexter Memorial Church where Martin Luther King preached and the Alabama State Capitol, I briefly walked around the Jefferson Davis Home (below). Davis was the President of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and he resided in Montgomery for a few months until the capital of the Confederacy moved to Virginia. The house was free to go into, and it reminded me of a typical National Trust site. The Home had preserved the furniture and had some written info on where the chairs and paintings were from. Unfortunately there weren’t a lot of interesting anecdotes, or stories. This is the main failure of many National Trust sites, and I find places less interesting when you don’t feel connected to the person that lived there. Why does it matter where the carpet is from, when you can focus on the life of Davis instead?

Returning to the African American history trail, I booked a short tour around Martin Luther King’s house. This was such a memorable experience. Before the tour of the house, the manager, Shirley Cherry, gave a short introduction to the Civil Rights Movement. She told some horrific stories of the violence suffered by both black and white activists; a school friend of hers was shot in the head for refusing to use a ‘coloured bathroom.’ 

This house (below) belonged to MLK for several years, and it was here that the KKK tried to assassinate him and his family. A bomb blew up the front of the house, shattering part of the floor and the front window. Luckily, his wife and daughter were at the back of the house and escaped unscathed. The house is also important historically because it was the place where MLK experienced his famous epiphany. One night, after several late night phone calls threatening the lives of himself and his children, MLK sat in his kitchen and contemplated giving up. He prayed, and thought he heard the voice of God urging him to “seek righteousness, seek justice, and seek truth.”  I stood in that kitchen, listening to an audio recording of MLK describing that moment, and chills ran down my spine. It was immensely powerful, especially because the tour guide knew MLK personally. At the end of the tour, I asked her what he was like. She paused, and said with a smile on her face, hearing him speak was “marvelous.” He had a great personality, and refused to talk down to anyone. Watching the pride and love in her face was a special moment for me; I had never dreamed of meeting anyone who could tell me what it was truly like to hear MLK speak.

Friday 16^th August – Today I drove to Selma to learn about the famous Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery. In 1965, Civil Rights activists marched along the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten back by the police. In outrage, another march was scheduled, and men and women, black and white, marched 54 miles to Montgomery to demand the right to vote. A short video made by students at the National Park Site focused on the events of that year, as well as the importance of voting for new generations. The video highlighted some individual stories, namely that of Viola Liuzzo. Viola was a white woman, a mother of five children, who drove down from Michigan to attend the march. As she was driving some of the marchers home, Viola was shot and killed by the KKK. 

I started chatting to Michael, the park ranger at the site and he told me some fascinating and disturbing things about Selma. The museum has had several threatening phone calls from the white community, demanding the National Park Service shut it down immediately. Michael explained that many people in Selma don’t understand the significance of the march or the Civil Rights Movement in general. This was proved by a visit to a town house in the afternoon. Sturdivant Hall is a short drive from the Selma museum, and is a beautiful example of a Greek Revival home. It was a stunning house, but the tour guide was the most interesting thing about it. I mentioned I had been to the Selma Museum and she made a comment I couldn’t ignore: “they don’t tell you everything.” Intrigued, I asked her to explain. She then launched an attack on the Civil Rights Movement, dismissing their objectives and questioning why it was necessary when Selma faired well in racial terms compared to other cities in the South. (I considered telling her about Jim Clarke, a notorious sheriff from Selma who from want of a better word, was a tyrant). The Selma museum was “propaganda rather than history” and the Movement used the killing of activist Jimmy Lee Jackson to their advantage, in her words, they wanted someone to get killed. (Jackson was actually shot whilst attempting to protect his mother and grandmother from a violent white mob.) Apparently, “things weren’t that bad in Selma.” The tour guide was young, possibly early 30s, so it’s interesting to consider her attitude. Had she grown up with these ideas or was this something she had developed on her own? She was very defensive throughout, although I didn’t push her – sometimes it’s best to let someone talk rather than interrogate someone. Regardless, it was clear she had no respect for the Civil Rights Movement and was not impressed with the memorials and museums. 

 

From Selma, I drove to a former Confederate Soldier’s Home in Marbury, about 40 minutes from Montgomery. The sites consists of two cemeteries and a museum, and is fairly unique in the US. At the turn of the twentieth century, former soldier and businessman Jefferson Manly Faulkner gave up some of his land to be used as a soldier’s home for Confederates. At its peak, 102 veterans called this place home. After the war, the Federal government only granted pensions to veterans of the Union cause, so Confederates depended on payments from the state. Homes nicknamed “Boys of ‘61” sprang up across Virginia, Louisiana and Arkansas, but the site in Marbury was thought to be more permanent. Veterans could bring their wives, and were provided with food and medical care on a daily basis. Veterans could tend to vegetable gardens, and every year in April the United Daughters of the Confederacy celebrated Confederate Memorial Day. In 1934, the last veteran died, and a few years later the state officially closed the home. Today, Marbury is the final resting place for 313 Confederate veterans and widows.

Saturday 17^th August – I left Montgomery in the early morning to arrive at Birmingham for 10am. After a confusing altercation with a parking metre, I found the Civil Rights Museum and managed to bag myself a free tour of the state park opposite. (It pays to get up early). It was a fascinating tour of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, a city well known to activists as a hot bed of racism and segregation. The tour mainly focused on the events of 1963, where MLK and Reverend Fred Shuttleworth led numerous rallys against the system. Both men organised ‘Project C’, an initiative which centered on the confrontation of racism and violence. At this time, African Americans couldn’t use public parks, or gather in any place apart from their own churches. Violence was rife, and the infamous city commissioner, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, ruled the city with an iron fist. Connor used his immense power to crush black resistance and arrest hundreds of activists and ordinary citizens. He had MLK arrested, and had the audacity to defy President Kennedy when the latter demanded to know why MLK had not been allowed a phone call. During a march in ’63, Connor ordered the fire department to hose protestors – mainly teenagers and young people – with jets of water so strong it could shave bark from the surrounding trees. One woman claimed parts of her hair have never grown back because of the force of the blast. (The infamous picture of a dog attacking a protestor happened here, and is immortalized in stone in a small memorial). Connor ensured the police dogs were trained to bite and never let go, and typically, his dog (named ‘Nigger’) was the most violent dog on the force. After a peaceful march organised by King and Shuttleworth, Connor locked children up for days in jail with little food, and when he ran out of space, he used pig stys. He often released children at 3am and told them to make their own way home; worried friends and parents often worked in shifts at street corners to pick up wandering children. The media coverage of the march shocked the nation, and when a second march was scheduled the fire department refused a direct order from Connor to use the jets of water again. 

The tour guide also focused on the bombing of 1963: four little girls were killed when a bomb blast tore through a church in the city. On the same day, two black male teenagers were also killed in separate racial incidents, one shot by a 16-year-old member of the KKK, the other by the police. (This was covered up at the time as the police didn’t want to take responsibility for this at the time of the church bombing). The tour and my subsequent visit to the museum reinforced my sense of awe at the activists’ bravery and their unwillingness to surrender their cause. This history can never be forgotten.

 

In the park there were several memorials to the Civil Rights Movement. The guide explained they are products of their time: one statue depicted the attacks on the protestors but showed the jets of water with no one operating them. The fire department didn’t want to be associated with the violence, so were conveniently removed from the park. Likewise, statues of dogs are sculpted launching out of a wall (left), but face inward towards the cetre of the park so passers by or cars cannot see them from the road. This was really interesting, and something I would have loved to study for my Masters in Public History. This level of memorialization and forgetting shows us that public memory is often abused to distort the past.

But the most interesting fact I learned? One that, if I had known, I would have shoved it in that lady’s face in Selma? In the 1930s, Hitler sent agents to the South to study the segregation laws, and used them as a base for his Nuremberg Laws. Hitler copied the South, and people still don’t think there was a problem.

Deep South Pt 3: "How to Make Sense of the Staggering Death Toll?" Destruction, Death, Disability and the Civil War

[From Savannah, I travelled North along the antebellum (pre-Civil War) trail to Madison, Georgia. So far I had been staying in creepy motels so I allowed myself a small treat by staying on a ranch for two nights, and, although expensive, it was amazing. I tried horse riding and thought I was going to fall off mid-gallop, but like a pro (ahem) I held on and tried not to scream. Or do anything to scare my horse, which was lovingly named T-bone. I then headed straight to Atlanta for a rather mixed experience.]

“Friday 9^th August – First thing I noticed about Atlanta? There are about 20 lanes on the freeway. Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but at least 6! It was so freaking busy to try to get to all the cool historic sites. After what felt like a year later, I parked and quite quickly got lost trying to find the Martin Luther King Historic Site. After walking through a slightly dodgy area I came across the visitor centre. It was small, but there was an interesting exhibition on the life of MLK and his decision to put all his energy and focus into the Civil Rights Movement. Opposite the visitors centre was the Ebenezer Baptist church, where MLK often preached. I am not religious, but his sermons (replayed on a tape recorder) reverberated powerfully around the small church. His voice still has the ability to stir your soul. Next to the church stands a Freedom Centre and the tomb of Dr King and his wife, Coretta. It was very moving to stand next to the grave of one of the most influential men in the world, someone who fought for justice and equality for all. The 'I have a dream' speech remains the most powerful speech of the c20th.

Deciding it was too unsafe to walk solo to my next destination, I drove a mile or so down the road to the Cyclorama Museum, perhaps one of the most random sites I have ever been to. It contains the largest oil painting in the world, depicting the Battle for Atlanta and General Sherman’s campaign in the South. Weighing in at 9 tons, it was absolutely huge. You sat in a small theatre that rotated 360 degrees, so you could see it from every possible angle. Very weird and wonderful.

From the Cyclorama, I drove a few miles to the Atlanta History Center. Unfortunately, I arrived around 3.30pm, so I only had two hours to see a beautiful country house and an enormous museum. For some that might be enough time but I think I set some kind of personal record for the amount of times I checked my watch. I wish I had known how good this site was going to be, as I would have spent the entire day there. So I had to prioritise: I missed out the farm house and headed straight for the country house. Built in the 1930s, it was palladian in style (based on Greek classical buildings, with a strong focus on symmetry). It was simply breathtaking. I pretty much had the place to myself, and got chatting to the guides who told me more about the history of the house and the history center itself. Perilously looking at my watch (only one hour to go!) I pegged it to the museum and made a beeline for the Civil War exhibit. Without exaggeration, I can say this is probably one of the best exhibits I have ever had the pleasure of going to, and by far the best for the Civil War. It raised a myriad of questions: when war broke out, what did it mean to be an American? A Northerner, A Southerner? Should the United States be defined by slavery, or should it spread west? Was it treason to fight against the Union? 

The exhibit cleverly set the scene: America was a “confused fledging democracy” and it was to “be shaken to its very core". I had always known how destructive the Civil War had been but never before had I realized what it meant for America as a whole. How was this new republic to survive? The exhibit explained why the War started, and briefly explained what happened and the outcome of every major battle. But what I liked about it was the emphasis on people. It had a section on the life of the soldier, Union and Confederate, as well as what life was like on the Home Front. How did families cope without their menfolk, particularly in the South? How did families mourn? There were so many times a single artefact stopped me in my tracks. The crutches of a wounded soldier. A bloodstained shirt from the Battle of Atlanta. This, more than anything, brought home the brutality of war. A bloodstained coat can tell us about the soldier, the grieving widow, his children, or the hardships and stark mortality of battle. That soldier lived, breathed, felt that coat on his skin. Did he have time to think before that bullet struck him? One soldier’s coat humanises the evil hand of war, reminds us that thousands of men and women fought, survived and died under the cruel hand of fate. 

I also came across a small sweetheart’s pin. A nurse in Albany, Georgia, was given a pin by a Confederate soldier in which he had inscribed the name ‘Lizzie.” The pin was made from the bone of his amputated leg, but the soldier died before he could tell the nurse who Lizzie was. The identity of Lizzie is still unknown. 

This is why I love history: it stirs my soul. And simultaneously breaks my heart.

At the end of the exhibition, one question surpassed all others: over 670,000 Americans died in the Civil War, more than any other war Americans have been involved in put together. The War left behind death, destruction and disability. How to make sense of the staggering death toll? 

“Such is the price we pay for human freedom?...There sleep our brothers and sons –the best we had to give; the costliest sacrifice we could offer on the altar of our country. “ Charles McKay, Northern civilian."

“Saturday 10^th August – Long day travelling south from Atlanta. Arrived in Macon around 9.30, and the town was completely dead. Pretty, but dead. Walked around for an hour or so until the historic houses started to open, and headed for Hay House. This is probably the most elegant house I’ve been in so far, very beautiful and ornate. The house tour was good apart from the glaring omission of slavery. I asked about this, and was told that “we don’t know much about the servants.” Funny how a servant and a slave are interchangeable when they both mean different things. Next door I visited the Cannonball House (so-called because it was fired upon during the Civil War). Again, there was little mention of the “servants” but I did learn some fascinating little facts – African Americans wore white when mourning, and in nineteenth century photographs boys hair was parted to the sides and girls down the middle (just in case they looked similar).

From Macon I drove south to Andersonville, a former Prisoner of War site for Union soldiers. It was originally named Camp Sumter, and since its inception it has maintained a notorious reputation. A small museum traced the history of POWs through American history, which was interesting albeit a little disjointed as the narrative kept jumping back and forth from the Civil War to Vietnam, then to Korea and present day. (Roughly 347,000 men were held as POWs throughout the Civil War, more than World War Two.) The key to the prison was on display though, a powerfully blunt reminder of the entrance to a place with so much horror and death.

Camp Sumter was built in early 1864, as Confederate officials wanted a larger space to house thousands of federal prisoners from Virginia and Georgia. In its short life, the camp confined 45,000 soldiers. Over 13,000 died from starvation, disease, overcrowding and poor sanitation. Half of all Union prisoner deaths occurred at this horrific site. From February, 400 Union soldiers arrived every day and by the end of June, 26,000 men occupied a space that was originally designed for 10,000. The Confederate army could not supply adequate food or clothing, and soldiers were expected to make their own tents out of any material they could find – trousers, a small sheet or blanket which was meant to protect them through rain or shine. Unsurprisingly, it was a “hell on earth.” When Union General Sherman came close to marching in the area, the Confederates moved the soldiers to other prisons in Georgia. The camp commandant, Captain Henry Wirz was the only man to be executed for war crimes after the Civil War had ended. He was charged with conspiring with officials “to impair and injure the health and destroy the lives…of federal prisoners.” He was hanged on 10 November 1865. A monument to him still stands in the town of Andersonville, designed by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

After the museum, an auto tour was designed to take you around the main sites of the camp and past the memorials. It was incredibly powerful to walk on the same footpath that Union soldiers would have taken, through the gates and past the watch tower into the ‘gates of hell.’ I stood there for a while, trying to imagine the sights and smells those soldiers faced, and luckily, didn’t get very far. Nothing I could imagine would come close: people complained about the stench of the prison ten miles away. At its height, 130 prisoners died every single day, at such a high rate that coffins could not be built fast enough. Bodies were instead dumped in mass graves. I stood opposite an empty field, where the prison hospital stood. Many soldiers refused to go, knowing they would never come out.

A national cemetery was established at Andersonville on 26 July 1865. During the Camp's operation, prisoner Dorence Atwater was assigned the task of recording the soldiers who died for the Confederate officials, but unbeknownst to them, Atwater kept a second copy for himself. After the War, Atwater wanted to give them a proper burial, and when he was spurned by the government, he enlisted the help of Clara Barton. Another heroine of mine, Barton founded the American Red Cross and nursed thousands of men during the War. By 1868, 800 additional Union soldiers who had died in prison camps across Georgia were laid to rest here, which brought the total to over 13,800. There are over 500 unknown soldiers buried in the cemetery, something I have always thought of as a cruel twist of fate since visiting the battlefields of France. Today, Andersonville is still an active cemetery (active in the sense that soldiers can choose to be buried there) and the roll call presently stands at 18,000.

As I walked around the cemetery, I kept remembering John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields” (which was written in 1915 during World War One). I studied it at school and the words have always stuck with me:

“In Flanders Field, the poppies blow,

between the crosses row on row,

that mark our place; and in the sky,

the larks, still bravely singing fly,

scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead.

Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

loved and were loved,

and now we lie, in Flanders Field.

Take up our quarrel with the foe,

to you, from flailing hands we throw,

the torch, be yours to hold it high,

if ye break faith with us who die.

We shall not sleep,

though poppies grow,

In Flanders field.”

A cruel place.