Searching For The Oak
I had a bit of a disappointment as our journey to the Emancipation Oak was unsuccessful. The Emancipation Oak is the site of one of the most inspiring stories in American history. On January 1, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect and there was a big celebration observed by then, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in command of the First South Carolina Volunteers. You can read about it here.
It was not that the GPS led us astray exactly. The Emancipation Oak is on the grounds of a Navy Hospital. The petty officer at the gate told us we could not go in without a DOD ID.
Studying the map it looked like the base was just in the way of the path so we drove around a little and then made another inquiry at the gate. This time we got a Marine, who perhaps not coincidentally was black. He told us that actually there will be a grand ceremony in a month when the Oak will be open to the public. I noted another car had stopped with a lady looking confusedly at a map. She was also there for the Oak.
Public History Gets An Update
This is all related to the National Park Service recognizing Reconstruction. This area (Charleston, Beaufort, Hilton Head, etc.) probably has the most interesting Reconstruction story. It had some of the plantations that produced the most wealth- first from rice and then from cotton. South Carolina, home of John Calhoun, produced some of the most impassioned defenses of slavery and led the way in secession, which made what happened next kind of ironic.
Beaufort and Hilton Head were captured and occupied by Union forces early, making it the earliest experiment in Reconstruction and one that promised great hope as many of the tillers of the soil went from being owned themselves to owning the land that they worked. It also was the area where hope stayed alive the longest according to the tour we had of the Penn School.
Regardless, this all gets me reflecting on historiography, which is not something sensible people think about much. It is actually the interpretation of Reconstruction more than the argument about the cause of the Late Unpleasantness that is at the heart of the historic reckoning, long deferred, America is having with the original sin of slavery.
It would seem that when Thomas Jefferson wrote the first of the self-evident truths as being "all men are created equal", which give them the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the men who signed that should have gone home and liberated all the enslaved people that they purportedly owned. Well, they didn't do that, but from our modern viewpoint, there is at least some evidence that they felt bad about the clear inconsistency.
John Calhoun and the paternalistic ideology that he embraced and helped form, two generations later, would seek to resolve the inconsistency by simply declaring that the Declaration of Independence was wrong. The lofty Calhoun monument (raised to a great height because blacks kept defacing it according to tour guide Franklin Williams) highlights the Constitution. Maybe to give the whole picture it could have added "Declaration not so much".
If slavery was the original sin, then the war was the sacrifice that might have expiated it and that was the hope that informed Reconstruction, but it was not to be. They did try, but after Reconstruction was abandoned, came Jim Crow, which is when many of those monuments went up. The one to Calhoun dates to 1896.
And here is where the historiography comes in. Historiography is essentially the history of history. The historiography around the Civil War and Reconstruction is probably the area where different narratives cause people to be disconcerted the most. Generally, people will learn a narrative from their schooling and pop culture and the like and will more or less stick with it and shake their heads at the people who hold other narratives. Sometimes there is a conversion experience, where they suddenly realize that the narrative they learned is what "they want you to think" and now they have the real story.
The Lost Casue version of Reconstruction is one of redemption of the South from the rule of carpetbaggers and scaliwags who manipulated those freed from slavery for their own selfish gains. People being people, there must have been some of that going on. I remember learning about carpetbaggers and scaliwags in grammar school. But it was an odd story, because it didn't seem to have any good guys. That's because in the version devised around the turn of the century, the good guys wore white robes.
McLeod Plantation
At any rate at the McLeod Plantation, not only the history, but also the historiography was addressed. Much of the narrative focused on the enslaved people who lived there who outnumbered the white owning family by 15 to 1 and the different sorts of terror that invoked on both sides. Much of the story comes from archeology including bricks with the imprints of tiny fingers.
The main house had had a porch added in the twenties because for a while it marketed itself as a tourist attraction for the moonlight magnolia version of antebellum South Carolina.
What is interesting is the way in which stories evolve as different questions are asked of different sources. It is not that Lost Cause is entirely false, although it does lean on a lot of post Civil War rationalizations. It is just that those historians didn't care much about what it was like to be enslaved. They more or less accepted the master class version that they treated their work force better than other master classes.
W.E.B DuBois challenged the Lost Cause reading of Reconstruction in the 1930s. That got scholars going so that by the sixties neo-abolitionists were going strong, changing college curricula which worked its way into high schools and now half a century later is finally seen in public history.
Live In Fame Or Go Down In Flames
Which made me wonder about the future of the Mighty Eighth Museum. It was like walking into an episode of 12 O'Clock high.
The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum preserves for all Americans, the stories of courage, character, and patriotism embodied by the men and women of the 8th Air Force from WW II to the present. The Museum treasures and uses its unique collections and resources to teach values to the Nation's future generations.It does that really well and I loved it. And I don't want it to change. But I predict that it will. There is nothing there about what it was like to be on the ground as the Mighty Eighth was dropping explosives, some of which remain unexploded to this day.
When my generation passes, I suspect that the museum management will be pressured to expand their perspective a bit. I guess I won't see it. In the meantime, I'm thankful that we grew up under an umbrella of air supremacy. The United States Air Force, which the Eighth help birth, has an extraordinary record. The last time a US service member on the ground was killed by enemy air action was in 1953.
Marching Through Georgia
Anyway now we are in a campground in Georgia. There is an American flag and below it is a Confederate flag and below that the Gadsen flag.
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Peter J. Reilly is touring the South with Evie Pless.
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