When you tally America’s assets in 1860—the railroads, the manufacturing, the steel and iron, the cotton—all of them combined were worth less than the market value of those held in slavery. In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist lays out how “slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation.” Baptist notes how settlers headed into the newly opened Deep South with “Alabama fever”: the sense that “every white person who could get frontier land and put enslaved people to work making cotton would inevitably become rich.” Nowhere was this more true than in the Black Belt. Dallas County was the leading cotton producer in the state. In forty years, a single generation, Selma helped reshape the country: its economy, its landholdings, its textile mills, its moral debts. And by 1860, Selma not only generated the wealth extracted from the labor of those enslaved in the Black Belt fields, but also produced a great many of the weapons used to defend their right to do so. It was home to one of the largest war machines south of Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works; its factories produced munitions and its foundry made ironclad ships for the war effort.
And when the war came, Selma’s Magnolia Cadets marched out of town carrying a Confederate flag made by Elodie Todd Dawson. Yes: Todd—the half-sister of the Todd you might be thinking of. The Todds were Lexington, Kentucky, elites, a landed, wealthy, slaveholding house divided. Mary Todd had married that pensive, ambitious lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, up in Illinois; her half-sister Elodie married the handsome, fire-eating lawyer Nathaniel H.R. Dawson, down in Alabama. Nathaniel—passionate, sharp-tongued, sensitive—was a major advocate in the Alabama Secession Convention. Elodie—dark hair in ringlet curls, secessionist to the hilt—sewed the flag for Dawson’s infantry unit. They had met at the inaugural ball for Jefferson Davis, affianced in secret, and corresponded almost daily through the war.
Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest arrived in Selma at dawn on April 2, 1865, covered in blood from head to horse’s hoof. He was in retreat from a running battle through Cahaba the day before. Forrest had dispersed many of his troops to refit after the losses of the Middle Tennessee campaign in late 1864, and so it was with depleted ranks that the general, once thought invincible by the Union Army, attempted to defend Selma.
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s early life in many ways mirrored the growth of the frontier where he was raised. Born in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, on July 13, 1821, the same year as the last treaty in Andrew Jackson’s Indian Wars, he was the eldest of William and Mariam Forrest’s brood. Fanny, his twin, like two of his brothers and two more of his sisters, succumbed to typhoid. But Nathan lived. By age thirteen, three years after President Jackson’s Indian Removal Act sent the Creeks, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Cherokees west on the Trail of Tears, the family moved to a modest hill farm in northern Mississippi. By sixteen, after the death of his father, Nathan became the man of the house. There’s a story of an all-night cougar hunt to avenge his mother after she had been attacked by the cat while coming home with a basket of chickens. Forrest’s hounds trailed the cougar and treed it, then he waited for hours until daybreak to draw a bead before returning home to present the fresh-skinned pelt to his mother. When his younger siblings came of age and his mother was set to remarry, Forrest went full-time into trading. He worked at a modest livery stable and farm-supply store, and was a small-time trader in livestock and enslaved people. He had only a few months of school to his name, but his business instincts were strong, his arithmetic stronger, his ambition strongest.
Seeing his success, his uncle Jonathan took him on as a partner in his livestock trading business. Young Nathan was on the rise. But on a street corner in recently incorporated Hernando, Mississippi, in March 1845, it all changed for Forrest. Three Matlocks, brothers and planters, confronted Jonathan Forrest. He owed them money. An argument broke out. Things escalated quickly. Shouting. Shoving. Then one of the Matlocks drew a gun. Nathan stepped between them and was faster on the draw, putting a bullet in one Matlock’s shoulder, another in the arm of his brother. But his pistol held just the two bullets. Momentarily stymied, he caught a bullet in his right arm. A bystander threw him a knife, and he rushed the third Matlock. They grappled to a stalemate. But then Jonathan Forrest cried out—one of the Matlocks’ bullets had found his chest.
The wound proved fatal. Jonathan Forrest’s business was now Nathan’s. Except the business was failing. That day, just before the deadly confrontation with the Matlocks, Jonathan had mortgaged all he owned: five enslaved people, a stock of horses, cattle and sheep, a wagon and seventy-five barrels of corn. Jonathan Forrest owned no land but owed money all over town: “greater as I apprehend than I will be able to pay” to “divers other persons.” When Jonathan died on the streets of Hernando that afternoon, Nathan Bedford Forrest became the sole owner of the business and thus the holder of this debt. That the two events—the mortgage and the duel—are connected is difficult to prove, still more difficult to ignore.
But Forrest was a striver. And he’d come this far. He wanted a life better than the one into which he’d been born. The Deep South in those years was one like big boomtown. Fortunes were made and plantations carved out of the pine woods daily. Settlers came over the mountain in droves, with coffles of enslaved people clinking shackles just behind. Land grants were cheap, cotton prices were high. At that moment, in that setting, the unschooled, unrefined young man saw an inside track to wealth and prosperity. It must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it.
So the striver did what strivers do: he kept moving forward, debt be damned. A month later he bought a house—a modest but well-appointed home in downtown Hernando. Two months later, Jack Hurst writes in his biography of Forrest, he was riding up to a creek ford outside town when he saw a carriage run off the road and into some mud. Inside was Mary Ann Montgomery and her mother. Forrest knew of Mary Ann but had no standing—social or economic—to call on her. He sensed his chance. He dismounted and put his shoulder to the carriage wheel alongside the Montgomerys’ driver. Together they heaved it from the muck. Such a gallant display—especially when performed while two dandies and would-be suitors watched on horseback, afraid to ruin their calfskin boots—provided Forrest his opportunity. He asked then and there, while muddied to his waist, for permission to call on Mary Ann. He came around the next week, chased the same two young men from the Montgomerys’ porch, and proposed. Mary Ann demurred at first, but Forrest showed up to their third meeting with marriage license in hand. Mary Ann’s uncle and guardian, the Reverend Cowan, was skeptical, too. “Why, Bedford, I couldn’t consent,” he told Forrest. “You cuss and gamble, and Mary Ann is a Christian girl.” I know, Forrest replied, “and that’s just why I want her.” He proved persuasive. The two were married that May, accompanied, as the Hernando newspaper wrote, “by a good sweet morsel of cake and a bottle of the best wine.”
In 1852, the Forrests headed for Memphis, the inland capital of the slave trade. “I will pay more than any other person,” Forrest advertised, “for No. 1 NEGROES suited to the New Orleans market.” In Memphis, Forrest made his fortune, with one thousand enslaved people passing through his “negro mart” every year. Using that fortune, he equipped his own cavalry troop when the war came, and in 1862 advertised that “those who know Forrest, who are acquainted with his reckless bravery controlled by a fund of sound and logical sense” should join up. Forrest wanted soldiers seeking the opportunity to “have some fun and kill some Yankees.” Through his military maneuvers, he distinguished himself as a shrewd cavalry tactician: cunning timing at Fort Donelson, a daring rearguard action at the Battle of Shiloh, an outnumbered upset at Brice’s Cross Roads. The uneducated rube from Memphis became the highest-promoted soldier in the war.
But by April of 1865, the Battle of Selma was a last-ditch effort. It would have taken 20,000 to adequately man the ramparts in Selma. Forrest had only 4,000, mostly old men and young boys. Union general James Wilson had with him 13,000 troops, among them the def
ector who had designed Selma’s fortifications, and he also had an intercepted letter describing where and in what number Forrest’s troops were stationed. He had first sent a regiment to Tuscaloosa with instructions to torch the University of Alabama, known as the West Point of the Confederacy, then turned his heels on the smoldering campus and headed south for Selma, then one of the last standing Confederate arsenals. Wilson’s troops arrived at 4 p.m. Within half an hour, the Union flag flew above the city’s outer defenses. Two subsequent charges at the inner walls led to an hour of bloody hand-to-hand combat. By dusk, the city had fallen.
Federal forces proceeded to raze Selma. “I assumed the command of the city on Monday . . . and commenced destroying everything which could be of benefit to the enemy,” wrote Brigadier General Edward Winslow. Union troops burned Selma’s arsenal, the foundry, the ironworks, the horseshoe and shovel factories. They emptied whiskey barrels into the street. Then they headed east. Selma fallen, the Confederacy soon followed. Union troops took Richmond the same day. A week later, Lee was in the judge’s chamber of the Appomattox courthouse; then Wilson captured Jefferson Davis in eastern Georgia. The war was over.
I wandered down to the bank of the river and tossed a few stones. It wasn’t much of a battlefield and it hadn’t been much of a battle. “Defender of Selma”? The Yankees took the town in just a few hours, dumped the whiskey, destroyed everything of benefit to the enemy. But this is what Rev. Perkins was saying. Forrest lost the battle, but the war about what that loss should mean was still raging. I was coming to see that Civil War history was a stand-in for something more emotional, a way to channel anxieties about entitlement, possession, control. Down by the banks of the river, I found a pile of timbers similar to the ones used in the fortifications, as if the city stood ready to close ranks at a moment’s notice.
Having seen the actual battlefield, I crossed back over the covered bridge and got in my car. But when I reached the main road, I wasn’t ready to leave. So instead of turning right toward the exit, I headed left, deeper into the park. Back beyond a water treatment plant, I found a restaurant overlooking the river. It was raised up on flood-proof stilts, and the ramp up to the second-story dining room switched back and forth at least six times, with hardly any incline—it was like walking up a hamster wheel. I ordered a Bud Light and apologized to the bartender for tracking some mud into the room. I had been out at the battlefield, I explained. She nodded and told me that most of the fighting had actually taken place on the other side of Dallas Avenue, where the country club is now. (A country club that is still all white; not that she mentioned that.) A couple down the bar overheard our conversation and chimed in. They told me that they used to sit out on the porch of a friend’s house that overlooked the battlefield. Great parties during the annual reenactments, they said, a little wistfully. The city owns the park and has started to charge fees, thousands of dollars, to hold the reenactment. It just hasn’t been feasible in recent years, they said with a sigh. I went back to nursing my beer.
This had been my first trip to a battlefield other than Gettysburg, which is a National Military Park. To go there is to go there. There are park rangers, a visitor’s center, a massive 360-degree “cyclorama” painting of Pickett’s Charge. It’s ground hallowed by Lincoln himself. Which entails a cordoning off. Physically, obviously, but also psychically. The battlefield is not enmeshed into the fabric of daily life of Central Pennsylvania as it is in Selma, where people were, at that moment, playing rounds of golf on land where the battle was fought, or drinking whiskey gingers and complaining about the fees to reenact a battle to which they once had porch-side seats. It gets dropped so often as a cliché about the South, how the past is never past, but that’s true everywhere. What seemed more distinctive was how the past intruded into daily life here in such persistent, immediate ways.
At the time I was supporting myself by working as a landscaper. It was a small outfit, just three guys, and we did mostly home-sprinkler maintenance in the Tuscaloosa suburbs. When work was slow, our boss would find “honey-do’s”—small personal jobs—to help us hourly workers make enough for rent. He was kind like that. But every once in a while, on these jobs, the state’s fraught history would spill out like a busted pressure line.
Take one day, just a few months earlier, over in Demopolis, a few towns west of Selma. We were clearing brush and doing some upkeep on an old mausoleum. It was in the family plot of our boss’s mother’s side—“Family business,” as our boss put it, shrugging, as if he were asking us to shovel out a few yards of mulch in his backyard. Allen Glover, the man for whom the mausoleum was built, wasn’t just an ancestor, he had actually founded Demopolis in 1819, when he and his brother and the seventeen people they had enslaved came to the canebrakes of Alabama from the South Carolina low country. By the time the war came, the enslaved people on the Glover family’s 3,000-acre plantation were bundling enough cotton for the Glovers to afford their own steamboat. It was one thing to read about this history, quite another to prune the crepe myrtle that shaded the grave of the man who made that happen in Marengo County. Whether in the parks where you played baseball, or at the jobs you worked for rent money, the past was inescapable and always underfoot.
Granted, to approach this history with the binary framework provided by the Civil War can make for a simplistic morality play. One in which it’s all too easy and too obvious for a Yankee to traipse into a Southern cemetery and clutch his Northern pearls. Robert Penn Warren called this instinct the “treasury of virtue”—the white Northerner’s feeling that, by dint of our affiliation with the Union, the great, emancipating army, well, then we were (and remained) morally upstanding, unimpeachably good. It was a feeling that could render us “happy in forgetfulness,” the Civil War like an event horizon beyond which our own pasts vanish.
But what were we forgetting? What was reflected in the markers of my own family’s history that we’d rather not look at? I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, but it was my mother’s New England ancestry that loomed. And with good reason: Plymouth Rock, the gallows at Salem—these were the monuments to which we traced our roots. My mother’s line claims two passengers on the Mayflower, and we are directly descended from Rebecca Nurse (née Towne), whom you might know as Goody Nurse, the elderly midwife hanged as a witch in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Her sister, Mary Esteys, also stood trial and was sent to the gallows that year. “The Witchcraft Delusion,” my great-grandfather George writes in the genealogy he compiled, “took a heavy toll of this family.” A reference guide at the front of that genealogy also lists “Soldiers in the Indian and Colonial Wars,” “Soldiers in the Revolution” (with special emphasis on those that “Respond[ed] to Lexington Alarm”), along with those “Massacred by Indians” and those who were “Scalped but Recovered.”
I have a copy of the genealogy, which was completed and published by my grandfather. It’s a lovely, leather-bound book, the title Ancestry Of My Parents embossed in gold on the deep maroon cover. I took it down from the shelf recently and a folded piece of paper fell into my lap, a note in my mother’s handwriting. On one side she’d drawn a family tree and on the other set down some reflections—“Legacy,” she titled it. In it, she describes her father as “a man whose past engulfed and consumed him.” He was a man, my mother writes, “born to the wrong century.” In his view, the past was a better time and he looked upon it with admiration and longing.
I never met Grandpa Towne; he died before I was born. Even so, growing up I absorbed his misty-eyed reverence as if by osmosis. His was the prevailing attitude reinforced annually on Patriots Day, Independence Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving. Pilgrims, puritans—these were my people. Pious, sacrificing, persecuted people, blown across the Atlantic on the winds of the Enlightenment, fleeing from and then rebelling against tyrants to establish a new nation founded on liberty. They were people who disembarked the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock, who refused to renounce their God even as the hangman approached. People whose valor m
ade the colonies possible and whose ideals of freedom and democracy were the bedrock on which this nation was built.
That’s how the story goes, at least in the “don’t think about it too much and pass the cranberry sauce” version. Conveniently, it leaves out the fact that the first enslaved African brought to New England was brought to Salem. Or that nearly half the wealth of colonial New England was generated by enslaved people on the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Or that my ancestors who lost their scalps did so while embarked on a campaign of displacement, dispossession, and destruction of the native peoples from whom they’d stolen the land that became their city on the hill.
We don’t talk about that part so much. Still, you can catch glimpses of the other half of this story while paging through the Towne genealogy. The book is peppered with references to “freemen.” Rebecca Nurse’s life, as recounted before the magistrates in 1692, is described in terms of “purity and goodness,” while her sister Mary “recall[ed] the perfect spirit of the Prisoner at Calvary.” And Mary’s accuser, Mercy Short, claimed to be tormented by the Devil, whom she described as “a Short and a Black Man . . . not of Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour.” Free, pure, Christlike; tawny, black, the Devil—these were their notions of self and others. And it is by this formula that the early white Americans could abide the contradictions inherent in founding a nation based on principles of life and liberty on property that was stolen land. And by this formula they could justify the enslavement of others on that land.
Down Along with That Devil's Bones Page 4
