Is It Ever Morally Acceptable to Visit a Confederate Historical Site?

20.07.2023 - 12:47 / nytimes.com

— Jacob

What can you say about the Sons of Confederate Veterans? Not long ago, the group exhumed the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and had them ceremonially reburied in Columbia, Tenn., where the S.C.V. owns and operates the National Confederate Museum, devoted to presenting “a Southern perspective of the War Between the States.” If you’re wondering about this perspective, the Mississippi division of the S.C.V. explains that “the preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”

That’s part of the standard myth of the Lost Cause, a myth that has draped itself like Spanish moss over a number of Southern sites commemorating the Confederacy. So is the notion of the kindly slave owner. It’s not particularly relevant to Beauvoir, where Davis moved only after Emancipation. But at Brierfield and at the White House of the Confederacy, Davis appears to have believed that he was a benevolent master to the Black people he considered property. The magazine Smithsonian, in a 2018 report, quotes a Beauvoir guide assuring visitors that Jefferson Davis was one of the “good slave owners,” who “took care of his slaves and treated them like family.”

Like family? It’s a curious family whose members regularly flee when they can. Among those Davis kept enslaved, William A. Jackson, a coachman, escaped Davis’s Confederate White House in 1862; two more workers, Betsey and Jim, left together early in 1864, followed, over the next several weeks, by members of the household staff: Henry, Davis’s butler, and Cornelius, another domestic servant. Many of the enslaved at Brierfield were forced to help build the defenses at Vicksburg, where at least four of them died. The odiousness of slavery is not rectified by avoiding physical abuse. Given that enslaving others is intrinsically bad — it’s odd that this should need repeating — there’s no such thing as a “good master.”

All of which is to say I share your doubts about whether the S.C.V. merits your support. For what it’s worth, though, my bet is that Beauvoir isn’t generating money for the Sons of Confederate Veterans or any of its divisions. Its tax returns over the past several years show sizable annual operating losses. “Admissions” represents less than half of its revenue; $100,000 a year comes from the Mississippi State Legislature. This is no cash cow.

And we can surely benefit by visiting and studying the homes of people who were living in serious moral error — even if the managers and the guides sometimes appear oblivious to it. Majestic places like Beauvoir were sustained by the unpaid labor of unfree workers. The name Beauvoir