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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
A new exhibit at the Museum of the Confederacy tells of slaves who supported slavery. But if former Gov. Doug Wilder's dream comes true, the nation's first slavery museum will tell a different -- and harsher -- story.
May 27, 2003 | Squeezed between Jefferson Davis' neoclassical Confederate White House and the Medical College of Virginia is a modern 1970s-era building. It is largely plain but for the banners that flank the entrance: the city flag of Richmond, Va., the state flag of Virginia, three Confederate nation flags and the quintessential Confederate flag, the Southern Cross. This is the Museum of the Confederacy, and it is the last banner, in particular, that marks the site as a flashpoint in American culture.
For years, the museum has been trying to find a comfortable position on the Civil War, one that principally would be inoffensive, one that acknowledged a shortsightedness in the South's position without alienating the hard-core partisans of the Old South who have regarded the museum and Davis' home as shrines to good days gone by. But in recent months there's been a shift. A new administration planted the Southern Cross out front, and this month the museum opened a new exhibit that is already arousing volatile passions.
It's a complex exhibit and one that does not gloss over the existence of slavery. But its underlying narrative on that disgraced institution is simple: Yes, many slaves opposed slavery and fled North at the first chance, but other slaves, whose voices have been lost to history, did not. They included "some black Confederates, and not just slave laborers, but men who actually through their own free will supported the Confederate cause," says John Coski, the museum's historian.
It is the kind of observation certain to leave many people incredulous. Among them is former Gov. Doug Wilder, a Democrat who at 71 is old enough to be the grandson of slaves. When Wilder hears such sentiments -- and they are not entirely rare in modern Richmond, the capital of the Old South -- it reinforces his conviction that Virginia, and the entire nation, need a museum of American slavery to fully comprehend the institution's complexities.
"Let me tell you something," he says in a low, steady voice. "When Grant was coming toward Richmond, they [the slaves] were told that the Northerners were going to kill them all -- masters and everyone else. My grandfather became so frightened that he hid in a silo and almost suffocated to death. He was rescued by Northern troops. My point is that for them to put that on display now is counterproductive and it will hurt any reconciliation ... That's why it's so necessary for the slavery museum to exist. To tell it as it is, unbiased."
Wilder's idea, somewhere between a dream and a firm plan at this point, is to help resolve the still open wounds of slavery by confronting them head-on and at a $200 million National Slavery Museum on the banks of the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Sitting in his office at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he's a professor of public policy, Wilder talks about how he believes such a museum will do more than preserve the artifacts of the slave trade. It will show the grim facts of how slavery shaped the nation -- and how it haunts the American dream.
"The slavery museum, in brief, should be able to cause people to reassess their attitudes about human beings, particularly about human beings of color," Wilder says. "If it does not, then perhaps nothing will."
One hundred and 40 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States, and the South in particular, still struggle with slavery's vestiges. Late last year, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott was forced to step down from his post as Senate majority leader after making remarks perceived as wistful for the days of racial segregation. Georgia's new governor, Republican Sonny Perdue, was tripped up this spring by his 2002 campaign promise to bring back the state's former flag, which from 1956 until 2001 incorporated the Confederate battle emblem. In the end, Perdue reached a compromise with state legislators and agreed to let voters decide next year whether to keep the current flag or adopt a new one based on the Confederate "Stars and Bars" with the added motto In God We Trust. And last month, there were heated protests in Richmond over placing a statue of Lincoln and Lincoln's son Tad at Richmond's historic Tredegar Iron Works, where cannons for the Confederate Army were forged.
All these incidents tell a part of the same troubling story: The Civil War has long been over, but even now slavery remains a ghost that time alone has not banished from the American conscience.
Wilder recognizes some Americans may not want to unearth slavery's past. The sad truth is that the United States, to a large extent, was built by slave labor and its history as a nation was shaped by slavery. A convincing case can be made that, if not for slavery, the U.S. might not be the world power it is today. In that sense, slavery has indisputably shaped and influenced every American's life. Yet, because it affronts our sense of our country's idealistic precepts that "all men are created equal," and because it creates in both blacks and whites a deep sense of shame, we're reluctant to talk about it, let alone build a museum that commemorates the enslavement of other human beings.
Wilder envisions his National Slavery Museum examining, as he puts it, "the roots and fruits" of the slave culture, from its beginnings in the late 15th century off the African coast through modern times. It will show the history of the African slave trade, where tribes sold other tribes to European traders, but also educate visitors about the slaves' lives: their origins, their languages, their religions, their customs, as well as their contributions to American life. Wilder sees the museum as an educational center, complete with an auditorium, lecture halls, research offices, a library, exhibition space, a repository for artifacts and documents, a full-scale reproduction of a slave ship, and a bookstore. He envisions millions of tourists to Virginia and Washington making the detour to Fredericksburg.
However harmless Wilder's effort seems in the early 21st century, it is sure to provoke renewed controversy over the Civil War -- and slavery's legacy -- in a place where the dominant culture views the past through a lens of romance and denial. There's no dispute that slavery is a part of the history of the North and the South. But slavery cannot be discussed without delving into the antebellum South's role in perpetuating and expanding it westward, and the Confederacy's stalwart defense of it.
For some Southerners, especially the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose modest membership of 35,000 belies its formidable political clout, that's simply not acceptable.
"If Douglas Wilder plans on telling the whole story of slavery, then it'll be good," says Bragdon "Brag" Bowling, commander of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. "If not, it'll be more of the same: trying to demonize Southerners and leaving out Northern shipping merchants and the blacks who turned over other tribes to the Dutch and the English slaver traders. I'm concerned that the Southerner will be the bad guy in this and it was a whole lot more than that."
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