Debating the Past in America's Largest Slave Port

Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy

Historians and preservationists sometimes call Charleston, South Carolina, “the Cradle of the Confederacy.” As colonial America’s foremost southern port, the majority of Africans imported for the slave trade entered through Charleston. South Carolina’s resolution to secede from the Union passed in Charleston, making this city the beginning of the Civil War. And Fort Sumter sits on an island in the harbor just off Charleston’s shores.

Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, a spouse team specializing in 19th Century American history, tackle here an unusually specialized subject: how one city has struggled, since 1865, to remember its past. Focusing on Charleston, a remarkably well-preserved city which has maintained much of its antebellum charm, allows the authors to focus very narrowly. But one needn’t read very long to realize, this book is still about the present.

Both before the war and after, Charleston was a majority-Black city. The Citadel, which remains one of America’s leading military colleges, was originally founded in Charleston to provide a reliable cadet corps in case of slave uprisings, like Denmark Vesey’s thwarted 1822 rebellion. Charleston held its last public slave auction just weeks before Union forces overran the city, so confident did city fathers remain in their city’s durable forced-labor economy.

When Union forces first occupied Charleston, Black residents celebrated; our authors describe parades, street festivals, and Union soldiers greeted as liberators. Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, was first celebrated to mark the occasion when liberated slaves decorated the graves at a former POW camp outside the city. For twelve years, Charleston served as liberated Black America’s unofficial capital and cultural touchstone.

Then Reconstruction ended, and Union forces went home.

Kytle and Roberts describe an intricate, years-long PR campaign to manage how Charlestonians remembered the war and the slave era. While former slaves remembered brutality, isolation, and fear, they mostly weren’t literate, leaving oral histories behind. Literate whites, controlling the newspapers and other printing, cultivated an image of paternalistic slaveholders and jolly slaves. Most relevant to today, they also nurtured the myth that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.

The city landscape became the most active battlefield for city memory. What city leaders chose to memorialize became part of Charleston’s identity. “Philanthropic” organizations, including white churches, erected multiple memorials to prominent slaveholders, including former Vice President and pro-slavery firebrand John C. Calhoun. Sites associated with Black history, like Denmark Vesey’s house, got demolished. In essence, the history worth saving became the history worth having.

Ethan J. Kytle (left) and Blain Roberts

Remarkably, this isn’t only about racial politics. Women took point in funding and building the Calhoun memorial, including replacing it when the first memorial looked comical. Our authors make a throwaway comment that really grabbed my attention: women took this lead because Southern society considered women innately apolitical. Thus an explicitly political statement became somehow innocent by being feminized. Neo-Confederates used gender politics to disguise their ugly racial politics.

Again, Kytle and Roberts consider this a throwaway statement, in the midst of a larger discussion of public appearances. But for me, it became the emblem of how intricately micromanaged the effort remains to normalize racism, excuse slavery, and make the Confederacy somehow heroic. At a time when women couldn’t vote or own property, their very presence served to exonerate racist patriarchy from its most violent outburst in American history.

This isn’t a history of a place, a city. It’s a history of history, of the ways residents have struggled for how to remember their past. As George Orwell observed seventy years ago, forces who control the past control the present: we define our current identity by the stories we tell about what we’ve done and who we’ve celebrated in days gone by. Though certain events clearly happened, how we define those events, and the people behind them, defines us.

Our authors describe this 150-year battle in plain English, fortified with maps, black-and-white photos, and other visual aids for non-specialist audiences. They have a panoply of sources, which treat liberated slaves’ oral history as seriously as literate whites’ massive documentation. Where we don’t have hard-and-fast facts on historical events, such as freed slaves’ elaborate but unprinted dance celebrations, they offer informed speculation backed with sources.

Kytle and Roberts write about one violently contested American city. But like the best literature, this book is also undeniably about us. History, for them, isn’t an inert list of facts, but a debate which the living still engage. And they invite us to see that debate, often concealed, made plain. What they reveal says everything about us.