Where These Memories Grow

History, Memory, and Southern Identity

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780807848869, 9780807825723
• eBook ISBN: 9781469624327
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Southerners are known for their strong sense of history. But the kinds of memories southerners have valued--and the ways in which they have preserved, transmitted, and revitalized those memories--have been as varied as the region's inhabitants themselves.

This collection presents fresh and innovative perspectives on how southerners across two centuries and from Texas to North Carolina have interpreted their past. Thirteen contributors explore the workings of historical memory among groups as diverse as white artisans in early-nineteenth-century Georgia, African American authors in the late nineteenth century, and Louisiana Cajuns in the twentieth century. In the process, they offer critical insights for understanding the many communities that make up the American South.

As ongoing controversies over the Confederate flag, the Alamo, and depictions of slavery at historic sites demonstrate, southern history retains the power to stir debate. By placing these and other conflicts over the recalled past into historical context, this collection will deepen our understanding of the continuing significance of history and memory for southern regional identity.

Contributors:
Bruce E. Baker
Catherine W. Bishir
David W. Blight
Holly Beachley Brear
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Kathleen Clark
Michele Gillespie
John Howard
Gregg D. Kimball
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp
C. Brenden Martin
Anne Sarah Rubin
Stephanie E. Yuhl

part one

Varieties of Memory in the Old South

Although any chronological starting point in a discussion of historical memory in the American South is to some extent arbitrary, the post–Revolutionary South is a defensible beginning. The American Revolution self-evidently was a defining moment in American history; out of it emerged both the enduring institutions that have given shape to American life and the historical narratives that have informed Americans’ sense of themselves as a distinct people. The Revolution was the touchstone for much of the nation’s public life until at least the Civil War. It also elevated awareness of regional distinctions and prompted curiosity about the historical origins of those distinctions. This interest found expression in history writing and the founding of antiquarian societies and museums across the South. Curiosity about the past, of course, was not limited to such elite activities. Indeed, the two essays in this section underscore that all southerners, black and white, had a stake in coming to terms with the Revolutionary past.

The focus of Michele Gillespie’s essay is on historical memory and class identity in Georgia during the early republic. Until recently, historians interested in class typically defined it in terms of such purportedly objective measures as income or job classification. Now many scholars insist that class, like gender and race, is a contingent and subjective category. As an act of social imagination, class identity comes into being when individuals perceive that they share distinct economic concerns or status aspirations. Collective memories often provide essential components of such anxieties and hopes. In early nineteenth-century France, for example, tradesmen had an acute sense of their status, which was bound up in their notions of the historical privileges and rights of their predecessors. When workers in Lyon or Paris imagined themselves as united by grievances or aspirations, they did so not only because they shared similar relationships to the means of production but also because they shared a similar understanding of how history had shaped their opportunities. These notions about class identity often become woven into narratives about historically significant events.¹

Understandings of the past, Gillespie stresses, informed the class identities of white southerners in the early republic. She reconstructs the struggles of Georgia artisans to assert political rights and to claim status by “remembering” their contributions to the founding of the American republic. By invoking their role in the American Revolution in print and in public ceremonies, artisans staked their claim to a place in what Mary Ryan has described as the young nation’s “heterogeneous but associated democracy.” The civic rituals of the early nineteenth century promoted a vision of society composed of “people in association,” not isolated individuals or undifferentiated masses.² Thus, when artisans claimed a place in public life, they did so collectively. The remembered past provided them with a precedent for collective political mobilization at a time when they were otherwise a disparate group. At least in the short term, the artisans successfully staked their claim to a place in the public realm. But as Gillespie explains, their unity waned as their identification with the American Revolution and artisanal traditions subsided in the early nineteenth century. More than just an important contribution to southern labor history, Gillespie’s essay also is a model study of how the conjunction of class identity and historical memory can have important and tangible social and political consequences.

The implications of the American Revolution also are at the center of Gregg Kimball’s essay on black Virginians in the early republic. Recently, historians have revealed the diverse ways that southern blacks preserved a sense of their African heritage and identity. Scholars also have traced how African Americans asserted their claim to the rights secured by the Revolution. By deftly tapping scant and scattered sources, Kimball reveals the complex interplay between these various impulses. According to Kimball, blacks in Virginia felt the tug of their identities as Africans, Americans, and Virginians. Poised between two worlds, black Virginians simultaneously sought the rights and privileges enjoyed by whites while continuing to identify with African American cultural traditions. Many blacks, he insists, explicitly asserted their African identity even while they also claimed, to the extent that they could in a slave society, the natural rights that they believed they had helped secure in the American Revolution. What emerges from Kimball’s subtle account is a complex and contradictory African American memory in which understandings of the past urged on blacks’ common pursuit of freedom and dignity but in different directions. For some, the memory of Africa led them to Liberia. For more, memory and hope drew them to Canada. And for others, Kimball explains, memory led to a complex affiliation with white patrons. We are mistaken if we presume that blacks’ historical memory made easier the decisions of African Americans who confronted often painful choices and limited options. But for a people caught in the thralldom of American slavery, historical memory helped them to understand their circumstances and to imagine what had preceded and what might follow their captivity.

NOTES

1. William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The role of the “working class” in the Russian Revolution is a case in point of the weaving together of class identity and memory. Only through the act of interpretation did the Russian Revolution become a “workers’ revolution.” For the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers, the legitimacy of the revolution rested on explaining the event as the will of the working class. Thus, the Soviet government labored diligently to weave notions of class and workers into the revolutionary narrative. In response, many participants in the confusing events of the revolution came to interpret their memories in a manner consistent with the Bolshevik narrative. In this process, understandings of the event, of class identity, and of collective memory became almost inseparable. Participation in the revolution attested to one’s proletarian credentials, which, in turn, established the working-class origins of the event itself. Frederick Corney, “Writing October: History, Memory, Identity, and the Construction of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1927” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997), esp. chap. 6; Stephen Kotkin, “One Hand Clapping: Russian Workers and 1917,” Labor History 32 (Fall 1991): 618–19.

2. On mid-nineteenth-century street parades as “performances of people in association,” see Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 58–93.

Memory and the Making of a Southern Citizenry

Georgia Artisans in the Early Republic

Michele Gillespie

White artisans in the slaveholding towns of Savannah and Augusta proudly boasted that tradesmen and mechanics like themselves, from carpenters and tailors to silversmiths and carriage makers, had helped secure Americans’ independence from England and shaped the political contours of the new republic. This “remembering” of past deeds, which took place at mechanics’ meetings, celebrations, and parades throughout the 1790s, served a critical function for free white men who worked with their hands in a slave society that revolved around unfree labor and the authority of a planter elite. Georgia artisans pressed their communities to recall artisans’ pivotal role in the patriots’ struggle and then used that memory to establish a unique identity for themselves as artisan-citizens in a slaveholders’ world. Promoting the historical memory of the American Revolution allowed artisans in Georgia not only to lay claim to the past but also to reshape the present.¹

How Georgia artisans used memory is interesting in and of itself, especially since artisans generally have been ignored in the history of the South, but their actions at the close of the eighteenth century were not unique. Their construction of a class consciousness and a community identity based on the past was part of a larger movement among American artisans in the 1790s. What does make these Georgia artisans unique was their willingness, unlike most artisans elsewhere in the nation, to part with this identity by the 1820s. This break from broader national developments among workers was significant. Understanding why artisans in Georgia separated from the national norm helps explain not only what made southern social relations distinct at the beginning of the antebellum era but also why the South in subsequent decades could build such a powerful regional identity in the face of mounting political challenges from the North. In this sense, memory became a critical tool among artisans in particular and southerners in general as competing groups and regions clashed over the definition of “the nation” in the early republic. These clashes would culminate in civil war a half century later.²

It is not surprising that many artisans in Georgia during the 1790s shared the same set of beliefs as their brethren to the north. Most artisans in Savannah, a key distribution center in the Atlantic economy for rice, hides, lumber, tobacco, and cotton, and in Augusta, a busy trade center for upcountry tobacco and cotton, were not native Georgians. They hailed from cities, towns, and villages on both sides of the Atlantic. On completing their apprenticeships elsewhere, they went to Georgia to seek their fortune, often with little more than the tools of their trade. Although some artisans simply sought steady work as journeymen, the majority hoped in time to own their own shops and call themselves master craftsmen. Some hoped for even more. Short-term events like the Savannah fire of 1796, which created a desperate need for carpenters and other artisans in the building trades, and long-term developments, especially the spread of short-staple cotton in the upcountry, that generated a rising demand for artisan goods and services, made such ambitions, which included landholding and slaveholding, tenable between 1790 and 1820.³

Despite widening opportunities for social mobility in the slaveholding South, migrant artisans understood that to ensure their inclusion in this world, they needed to convince fellow white southerners of their social and political worth. Although Georgians had been sympathetic to white artisans’ unique circumstances as skilled free laborers in a slave labor economy, going so far as to eliminate property-holding qualifications for mechanic voters in the state constitution of 1777, artisans in Georgia, unlike artisans in many other colonies, had no sustained political organization or identity during the Revolutionary era.⁴ In the 1790s, however, they crafted a strong political voice for themselves by invoking a collective memory about the important role of artisan patriots in the American Revolution. Ironically, these same men came to discard this newly established identity despite its important links to a glorious past and the moral authority it gave them in the present. Their artisan consciousness, reinforced in their mechanic organizations and activities during the 1790s, had put artisan leaders into public office. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, expanding economic opportunities along with their newly won political power allowed them to leap into the ranks of the planter class. As landholders and slaveholders, they quickly cast aside their identity as artisan patriots in the process.

Prior to this transformation, Georgia artisans had embraced the same political ideology as their skilled brothers in more northern urban settings like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. This shared artisan republicanism gave political and social meaning to post–Revolutionary artisan experience and helped earn them respect as artisan-citizens.⁵ Like most Americans in the wake of the Revolution, mechanics believed that republican thought rested on a set of political conceptions considered vital to the welfare of the new republic. Citizens must participate in politics, work to preserve the commonwealth, subordinate private ends on behalf of the public good, and establish their independence from the political desires of others. But artisans more than any other social class in the early republic pushed these key republican beliefs further by criticizing increasingly inegalitarian social relations brought on by the market revolution. Artisan republica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: No Deed but Memory
• Part One. Varieties of Memory in the Old South
• Part Two. Finding Meaning in History during the Confederacy and Reconstruction
• Part Three. The Past in the New South
• Part Four. Memory and Place in the Modern South
• Epilogue: Southerners Don’t Lie; They Just Remember Big
• Contributors
• Index