James C. Giesen, "Lost (Cause) in the Woods"

In an effort to engage more explicitly with the world around us, the Agricultural History Society is developing a series of short, web-based essays that will apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. Anyone with an interest in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty at ampetty@wm.edu. Our third contribution is James C. Giesen’s “Lost (Cause) in the Woods.”

It should be cited as: James C. Giesen, "Lost (Cause) in the Woods,” The Short Rows, September 22, 2020. www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/james-c-giesen-lost-cause-in-the-woods

Lost (Cause) in the Woods

James C. Giesen

As any visitor to the AHS website knows, the fall 2020 semester has been anything but normal. I usually teach my department’s modern United States history survey in the fall, which means two classes of about 400 students each. Perhaps counterintuitively given the pandemic, this semester my class size more than doubled and Mississippi State’s basketball arena became my classroom. The gym’s capacity is 10,000, which gave the students plenty of space to spread out. I stood at midcourt and broadcast my PowerPoint slides onto the brightly lit, $1 million Jumbotron. It’s wild.

 On the first day, students filed in and could look up at a slide that had the course name and a collage of four images that I intended to set the stage for the history we were going to learn over the semester. As importantly, the images were intended to connect U.S. history since the Civil War to the students’ crazy recent months. It included a photo from 1918 of two masked people, one holding a sign that reads “Wear a mask or go to jail”; John Lewis’s Jackson, Mississippi mugshot from his time as a Freedom Rider; NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt and American flag mask; and Robert E. Lee’s towering Richmond statue, defaced, with a striking portrait of Harriet Tubman projected onto it and “BLM” shown on the general’s horse. What a summer. 

 All of these images would ring true for any student who had even partially paid attention to the world since March, but it was the Lee statue that I would turn to first when, in the days that followed, I began lecturing about Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. Indeed, this summer the Lost Cause had had its third or fourth life, depending on how you count. Often taken as natural parts of city and town landscapes, the statues memorializing Confederate dead became central to this summer’s movement to end police violence and build toward general racial equality. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd brought not just endemic state-sponsored murder into searing relief, they drew public attention to these symbols of the Confederacy around which protesters gathered. “Their killings,” wrote historian Anne E. Marshall, “provided an opening for people across the country to rethink and admit the connection between historical statues and iconography with systemic and individual racism in modern America.” When it came time in class to talk about the Lost Cause I found it refreshingly easy to draw and retain students’ attention.  

Not only were students keener to read and hear about these statues than those who had taken the class in past semesters, I found renewed interest in Confederate memory myself. While the Jim Crow South, and in particular the experiences of landless black farmers in the first-half of the twentieth century, is what drew me to be a historian in general and an agricultural historian in particular, I had not always connected the erection of Confederate statues in towns and cities with sharecropping, the boll weevil, or rural migration. But certainly they’re related. The disruptions of the New South, in particular the railroad and industrial work, brought many African Americans into towns and cities and into contact with white people who did not know them. As historians like Mark Schultz have shown, back on the farm, whites kept a closer eye on African Americans by using familial and small community connections. In the cities, all these new black faces seemed to scare whites and, in turn, hastened the codification of segregation and played a part in the rise of lynching region-wide. The monuments popping up at the same moment venerated the Confederate dead on the surface, but their presence was more about what was going on at the turn of the century, not what had happened in 1860s. 

The more I’ve thought about this moment, however, the more I’m convinced that the Lost Cause’s connection to rural and agricultural life does not end there. For the past several years I’ve begun thinking about the ways in which the Lost Cause specifically, but Confederate memory more generally, is still imprinted on the landscape of the rural South. When I researched the Alabama Wiregrass region as part of work I did on the boll weevil, I centered on what some have called the strangest statue in all of America, Enterprise’s Boll Weevil Monument. This was a statue to celebrate a victory, however, not a loss. The short version of the monument’s history is that before the boll weevil was set to invade the area, a local merchant convinced a few cotton farmers to replace that crop with peanuts. Those cotton-turned-peanut growers had a bumper year and other farmers followed suit in the following season. To draw attention to their success with peanuts, the merchant funded the erection of a new statue, set smack dab in the town’s busiest intersection, dedicated to the boll weevil. The bug was the “herald of prosperity,” the monument’s inscription read, since farmers were now making more money from peanuts than cotton. The boll weevil monument is often pointed to as one of the only agricultural monuments around.

A passing argument that I make in my book, but one that I wish now I had made more forcefully, was that for all the attention given to the boll weevil monument, its power was no match for that offered by cotton’s own public shrines. No, there was no stone obelisk sitting outside a courthouse trumpeting the flowing white plant, but cotton certainly had its own monuments: 

Everywhere one looked in the rural South there were effigies built to the tangible prosperity that cotton could bring. Enormous mansions from the ante- and postbellum periods dotted the southern countryside, serving as their own statues for the mono-crop cotton system. The big automobiles that lined downtown streets after a harvest reminded poor farmers of cotton’s possibilities. In fact, cotton was such a part of the fabric, the material conditions of rural Alabama, that any sign of wealth was a sign of cotton’s possibility.

That paragraph has stuck with me more than any other that I wrote in that book years ago. Extending our view of what constitutes any kind of monument, and thinking about how the built and natural landscapes around us embody powerful messages of historical interpretation, historians can re-think the boundaries of Confederate memory in a rural context. 

Take, for example, the case of Rose Hill Plantation, which is today Rose Hill State Park, in Union County, South Carolina. This upcountry spot was once home to South Carolina’s fiery secessionist governor William Henry Gist, his family, an overseer, and 178 slaves. In 1860, Gist sat at a desk in Rose Hill, looking out on his four thousand acres of cotton, cattle, and corn, and wrote letters to his fellow southern governors announcing that South Carolina would secede should Abraham Lincoln be elected. That moment—Gist’s promise to the rest of the South that war was almost certainly on its way—forever reshaped human and environmental lives at Rose Hill. The fifteen years that followed brought the plantation war, loss, emancipation, tenancy, and magnificent soil erosion. By the 1930s the land was so severely gutted and gullied that the federal government was trying to buy it to take it out of production. At the start of World War II, the army asked if it could use the wreck of the old house for bomber target practice. (The answer was “no.”) Today, remarkably, the house has been restored to its appearance in Gist’s heyday; the state’s historic interpretation also centers on Gist and his time in the house in the years before the Civil War. The landscape surrounding the house is no longer eroded fields, but rather the dense pines of Sumter National Forest. The environmental transformation of the land around the mansion, in a relatively short period of time, has been nothing short of extraordinary. But that’s just half the story.

In a forthcoming article for a special issue of Buildings & Landscapes dedicated to environmental history, I argue that historians have not done enough to describe the relationship between landscape change and Confederate memory. In that essay I demonstrate how the presentation of Gist’s house—the nineteenth-century mansion itself—was directly related to the environmental reality of the acreage surrounding the two-story wooden structure. The house was a dilapidated mess when the fields around it were gullied and the land was worked by poor tenant farmers. As the federally-protected trees grew around it, however, the people moved on, and the pines covered up the scars of cotton agriculture, locals began looking at the mansion with new eyes. Efforts to restore the house to its time as the seat of state and Confederate power began anew only after the forest creeped closer to the house. It is now a monument to Gist and his ideas, complete with a Confederate flag hanging from the flagpole out back. It would have been hard—maybe even impossible—to rebuild Rose Hill as a monument to a slaveholding politician if the land around it looked so clearly damaged. The agricultural and environment reality would not have let the Lost Cause thrive there. 

It’s just one example, sure, but it’s a powerful one. And I think it offers an example of how agricultural historians can insert themselves into these debates about memory, to broaden historians’ and the public’s definition of what constitutes a site of memory, or even a monument. Especially in the rural context, more insidious Lost Cause arguments can be found in the mansions, plantations, and country houses that dot the countryside than in the stone soldiers on courthouse squares. Stripped of their agricultural contexts (slave and tenant cabins and barns to be sure, but also just the cotton, tobacco, dirt, erosion, animals, trees and other environmental forces that shaped those places) the houses can be interpreted as if there were no natural consequences.  Public historians would be well served to think of these changes not only as interpretive challenges, but as the natural world at work. 

James C. Giesen is Associate Professor and Grisham Master Teacher at Mississippi State University. He is the former Executive Secretary of the Agricultural History Society.