Your Heritage Will Still Remain

Racial Identity and Mississippi's Lost Cause

Michael J. Goleman

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496812056
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia della guerra civile americana

Your Heritage Will Still Remain details how Mississippians, black and white, constructed their social identity in the aftermath of the crises that transformed the state beginning with the sectional conflict and ending in the late nineteenth century. Michael J. Goleman focuses primarily on how Mississippians thought of their place: as Americans, as Confederates, or as both. In the midst of secession, white Mississippians held firm to an American identity and easily transformed it into a Confederate identity venerating their version of American heritage. After the war, black Mississippians tried to etch their place within the Union and as part of transformed American society. Yet they continually faced white supremacist hatred and backlash. During Reconstruction, radical transformations within the state forced all Mississippians to embrace, deny, or rethink their standing within the Union. Tracing the evolution of Mississippians' social identity from 1850 through the end of the century uncovers why white Mississippians felt the need to create the Lost Cause legend. With personal letters, diaries and journals, newspaper editorials, traveler's accounts, memoirs, reminiscences, and personal histories as its sources, Your Heritage Will Still Remain offers insights into the white creation of Mississippi's Lost Cause and into the battle for black social identity. It goes on to show how these cultural hallmarks continue to impact the state even now.

Notes

Introduction

1. “New Presidential Library Hopes to Paint More Complete Picture of Jefferson Davis,” http://www.mpbonline.org/news/story/new-presidential-library-hopes-paint-more-complete-picture-jefferson-davis, accessed December 29, 2009; “Work Begins on New Jefferson Davis Library,” Mobile Press-Register (Mobile), December 6, 2009; Craig Fehrman, “Jefferson Davis’ ‘Presidential’ Library,” LA Times, June 2, 2013.

2. Fehrman, “Jefferson Davis’ ‘Presidential’ Library.”

3. In recent years historians have used memory to understand the Lost Cause legend. I contend that the Lost Cause legend emerged from the social identity that southerners produced in the wake of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Mississippians used the Lost Cause to create a positive group concept that also served to encourage their posterity to maintain a white supremacist worldview. Currently, only one full-length study on Mississippi’s Lost Cause exists, Sally Leigh McWhite, “Echoes of the Lost Cause: Civil War Reverberations in Mississippi from 1865 to 2001” (PhD. diss., University of Mississippi, 2003). I have relied heavily on the following works concerning the Lost Cause: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); David R. Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, eds., Myth and Southern History: The Old South (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1974).

4. Historians have often batted around the term “identity” without providing much definition of the word. Oftentimes, historians have used identity to describe traits, characteristics, or peculiarities of a particular group or region. Psychologist Erik Erikson popularized the word “identity” and argued that identity “connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (selfsameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others.” Social scientists eventually took the term and contended that identity was primarily external, created and molded by society through social constructs and interaction. This study uses social identity theory as explained by Henri Tajfel and John Turner to understand how Mississippians constructed a national social identity. Tajfel and Turner proposed three theoretical principles on which social identity theory rests: first, “individuals strive to achieve or to maintain positive social identity”; second, “positive social identity is based to a large extent on favorable comparisons that can be made between the in-group and some relevant out-groups: the in-group must be perceived as positively differentiated or distinct from the relevant out-groups”; and, lastly, “when social identity is unsatisfactory, individuals will strive either to leave their existing group and join some more positively distinct group and/or to make their existing group more positively distinct.” The sectional conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction turned Mississippians’ world on end and caused situations where their positive group concept turned negative or unappealing. Repeatedly, Mississippians had to fashion and reshape their existing social identity to compensate for the changes occurring all around them. The Lost Cause legend and history writing is the culmination of those shifts and reversals in the creation of their social identity. For quotes, see Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: International Universities Press, 1959), 102; Henri Tajfel and John Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, eds., The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (Monterey: Brooks/ Cole, 1979), 40.

Works on southern identity include C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, updated 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960; 2008); James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); David R. Jansson, “Internal Orientalism in America: W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American Identity,” Political Geography 22 (2003): 293–316; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generations of Americans (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000); Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Carl N. Degler, “Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis: The South, the North, and the Nation,” Journal of Southern History 53 (February 1987): 3–18.

Other theoretical works on identity, identity theory, social identity, and social interaction include James E. Cote and Charles G. Levine, Identity Formation, Agency, and Culture: A Social Psychological Synthesis (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002); Sheldon Stryker and Peter J. Burke, “The Past, Present, and Future of an Identity Theory,” Social Psychology Quarterly 63 (December 2000): 284–97; Howard S. Becker and Michal M. McCalls, eds., Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Richard C. Trexler, ed., Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985); Philip Gleason, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of American History 69 (March 1983): 910–28; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973; Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

The use of “national” social identity in this work does not necessarily equate to nationalism, although it does contain components of it. Like “identity,” “nationalism” is a slippery term that scholars use with various definitions. The focus on a national social identity differs from nationalism in that it offers more fluidity and does not limit one’s sense of being as confined only to a national perspective. Regional peculiarities seep into a social identity and can incorporate desired traits that may be understood only at a local level. Nevertheless, nationalism plays a part in constructing a social identity, and this study has relied on several works to understand the construction of a national identity. See Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Peter C. Messer, Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Grant, North over South; Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s Wa...