The South -- and its struggle to reconcile its past -- has presented the GOP candidates with a briar patch of issues to deal with during this campaign. Both McCain and Texas Gov. George W. Bush have grappled with South Carolina's fight over whether the Confederate flag should be allowed to fly over the capitol.

In addition, Bush has spoken at a college, Bob Jones University, that maintains a ban on interracial dating.

While McCain denounced Bush's appearance at Bob Jones and the university's dating policy, he has hedged on the flag issue. "As to how I view the flag, I understand both sides," McCain said a few weeks ago. "Some view it as a symbol of slavery. Others view it as a symbol of heritage.

McCain added at that time: "Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage. I have ancestors who have fought for the Confederacy, none of whom owned slaves. I believe they fought honorably."

Mark Salter, McCain's Senate chief of staff and co-author of "Faith of My Fathers," said Tuesday that no one in McCain's family had ever told him that his ancestors had owned slaves. Salter said that McCain simply assumed his family would have shared such information.

In "Faith of My Fathers," McCain brushes over much of his Mississippi heritage, dedicating about four pages to it. According to Salter, the family history was based on a haphazard mess of information contained in a box kept by McCain's younger brother, Joe.

Furthermore, in his book, the senator writes that the McCains of Teoc "never lamented the South's fall."

The writer Elizabeth Spencer, a cousin to John McCain, does mention the family's slaves in her family memoir, "Landscapes of the Heart," -- a book McCain and his co-author Slater both say they have read, though they say not closely enough to have caught her glancing references to the family's slaves.

Early in Spencer's book, she refers casually to the issue in a reference to her family's history. "All the descendents of slave-holding families I have ever known believe in the benevolence of their forebears as master," she wrote.

An entire floor in the Carrollton Merrill Museum is devoted to the McCain family's local legacy. Boxes are crammed with McCain family memories: In one small, clear, plastic box, a photo of John McCain in full Navy attire is signed "With Love to Grandmother and Aunt Catherine, Johnny." On the back of the photo is written in fading ink: "John S. McCain III, graduation from Naval Academy. Now a P.O.W. in Vietnam." McCain said he was surprised to learn of the photograph.

Also in the museum is a 1949 letter to Katie Lou McCain, a great aunt to the senator, from family friend Ella Stone, who wrote: "He [William Alexander McCain] bought a plantation on Teoc creek [sic] and named it 'Waverly.' They owned slaves and were happy in their plantation life until that terrible holocaust, the War Between the States."

At the end of the interview, McCain said he was glad to know about his family's history. "At the next opportunity, I'm going to go" visit the Merrill Museum, he said.

Though McCain may have been ignorant of his Mississippi roots, those who live in Carroll County today remember the McCain family well. Residents recall the senator's great-grandfather, John McCain Sr., who served two terms as sheriff. They remember Katie Lou McCain and Sen. John McCain's uncle, Joe, who owned Teoc until his death in 1952.

Simpson Hemphill, a longtime Carroll County resident, lives 4 miles down the road from the old McCain place. "That place was a couple of thousand acres," says Hemphill, 70, in a lyrical drawl. "They raised cotton and corn." Hemphill didn't doubt that the McCains owned slaves, "but back then that was as legal as a loaf of bread."

McCain -- an Arizonan raised all over the country, in true military brat fashion -- might be shocked if he were ever to visit Carroll County, birthplace of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. If the proverbial sleepy Southern town ever existed, Carrollton is it. The civil rights movement seemingly hasn't made it down to Carrollton, where blacks and whites still live, literally, on opposite sides of the railroad tracks. Confederate flags wave on front porches. The Arizona senator has never visited rustic Merrill Museum, built in 1834, which sits on historic Carrollton town square where a Confederate flag flies in front of the county's grand Civil War memorial.

McCain dismisses the significance of his Southern roots in the campaign, saying it would be "ridiculous" for him to campaign in South Carolina as "a good ol' boy." He's a military man, he says, and that institution is his real home, not any particular geographical location. When accused of being a carpetbagger in his first run for the House in Arizona in 1982, he noted that the longest he'd ever lived in one place was in Hanoi, when he was a prisoner of war for five-and-a-half years.

He says he has been touched by South Carolina's patriotism during this campaign. He says he feels a commonality with the residents of this state because of their love of country and their military service. But not, he says, because of his Southern roots.

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