Black History - White Historians

This prayer is far from a bit of historic arcana. Books by J. William Jones are still being reccommended for children. christianbooks.com carries one work of J. William Jones, Christ in the Camp, as a text.

Your older students will be inspired by this eyewitness account of the spiritual battle waged for men's souls during the American Civil War. Through letters and memoirs, Confederate army chaplain Jones chronicles heroic ministry on the frontlines; worship and revival services in the camps; and the witness of Christian generals like Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart.

Jones' influence in Virginia, Georgia and the South more generally was significant.

John William Jones was born 25 September 1836 in Louisa County, Virginia, to Francis Willian Jones and Ann Pendleton Ashby Jones. Jones attended the University of Virginia, graduating in 1859, then attended the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina. Ordained in 1860, he returned to Louisa County to preach at Little River Baptist Church. When the Civil War began, he enlisted as a private in the 13th Virginia Regiment, then became regimental chaplain, then a missionary chaplain to the army. Jones conducted revivals in the army throughout the war. After the Civil War ended, he preached at the Baptist Church in Lexington, Virginia, and was chaplain at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). He served churches in Ashland, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as well as serving as chaplain at the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina. He was the secretary of the Southern Historical Society from 1875 to 1887, and he edited and wrote several works on the war and on Robert E. Lee. Jones was chaplain-general of the United Confederate Veterans from 1890 to 1909. Jones married Judith Page Helm in December 1860, and they had five children. Jones died in Columbus, Georgia, 17 March 1909.

Last week on Slantblog, F.T. Rea wrote History vs. Heritage With Malice Toward None.

In 1961, my seventh grade history book, which was the official history of Virginia for use in public schools -- as decreed by the General Assembly -- had this to say about slavery at the end of its Chapter 29:

"...Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those whom they worked. They were not so unhappy as some Northerners thought they were, nor were they so happy as some Southerners claimed. The Negroes had their problems and their troubles. But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to those arguments."

That sounded awfully familiar in a flashback kind of way. Some of the material currently found on West Virginia's web site is not very different from Rea's childhood textbook.

West Virginia

The mission of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History is to identify, preserve, protect, promote, and present the ideas, arts, and artifacts of West Virginia's heritage, building pride in our past accomplishments and confidence in our future.

Here's part of that West Virginia heritage.

Booker T. Washington's West Virginia Boyhood
By Louis R. Harlan
Volume 32, Number 2 (January 1971), pp. 63-85

The slaves on the Burroughs' farm near Hale's Ford, Franklin County, Virginia, learned that they were free in the spring of 1865, but the slave cook Jane, her mulatto children John and Booker, and her black child Amanda, were still milling about the Burroughs' place three months later, searching for aims of their own to replace the purposes given to their lives by the master and mistress.
...

The danger of a black man transgressing the racial codes of the whites was certainly one of the lessons of this incident. But another lesson was a class one, that the white paternalist was the black man's only friend, albeit never a perfect one and in this case an ineffectual one.
...

How much Booker and his family understood of these economic forces that doomed Malden is uncertain. They may have had some knowledge of the salt works from other slaves, for Franklin County had long been a source of supply of hired-out slaves. In 1839, for example, the Lewis and Shrewsbury salt furnace at Kanawha Salines issued a pass to nine slaves of Asa Holland of Hale's Ford to visit home. Holland lived just down the road from the Burroughs' place, and just across the road was Bowker Preston, who owned seven slaves employed at the Salines at the time of his death in 1851. It may even have been that Wash Ferguson had spent the war there as a salt packer, first as a slave and then as a wageworker.

Georgia acknowledges the controversy over textbooks.
http://www.georgiaen...

Georgia also has a page on E. Merton Coulter

Ellis Merton Coulter, a University of Georgia professor and historian of the South,
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries

E. Merton Coulter helped shape the southern public's interpretation of its heritage in general and Georgia's in particular. He taught at the state's flagship university in Athens from 1919 to 1958 (serving as chair of the history department from 1940 until retirement), edited the Georgia Historical Quarterly for fifty years, and produced 26 books, 10 edited volumes, more than 100 articles, and numerous book reviews and newspaper columns. He was also a founding member of the Southern Historical Association, serving as its first president in 1934 and nurturing it throughout its early years.

Writing with purpose and teaching with passion, Coulter emerged as a leader of that generation of white southern historians who viewed the South's past with pride and defended its racist policies and practices. He framed his literary corpus to praise the Old South, glorify Confederate heroes, vilify northerners, and denigrate southern blacks.

History of Georgia
Generations of Georgia whites gained their distinctive perspective on their state's past and its present condition from his college textbook A Short History of Georgia (1933; revised 1947, 1960) and his junior high school text History of Georgia (1954). Published in the same year as the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating public school integration, Coulter's junior high text taught children that slavery greatly benefited southern blacks, and emancipation negatively altered their condition. "People in the South did not believe the Negroes ... would know how to vote," Coulter wrote. Because former slaves often "sold their votes to dishonest people who wanted to win elections," Coulter assured Georgia's youth that the white people of their state determined that blacks should not participate in elections and "worked out a special plan" that kept "most of the Negroes from voting." Similar themes permeated Coulter's other works. To him the term Georgians applied to whites only; the state's black inhabitants constituted a subservient, inferior, and threatening element.

Hopefully, these references give an idea of what generations of Southerners have been taught about our history.  I want to thank F.T. Rea for his diary as motivating me to take the time to look at some of this material more carefully. There's no shortage of ideas in the body of Southern tuition that don't hold up under careful inspection, and I hope to write about them in subsequent diaries.

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