Telfair, Worsley and Gilbert were all writing in the twentieth century, but the Lost Cause legend had emerged much earlier, and Columbus played a direct and significant role in its formation. On 12 March 1866, less than a year after Wilson’s raiders torched the city’s factories, Miss Lizzie Rutherford, her cousin Mrs Chas. J. Williams and their friends in the Soldier’s Aid Society of Columbus began what was to become a totemic institution, Confederate Memorial Day. Mrs Williams, the daughter of a factory and railroad magnate, was married to a soldier who had, as Worsley writes, ‘served bravely in the war’. She composed ‘a beautiful letter’, which she had distributed to women, newspapers and charitable organisations throughout the South. Williams proposed
to set apart a certain day to be observed from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and be handed down through time as a religious custom throughout the South, to wreath the graves of our martyred dead with flowers … Let every city, town and village join in the pleasant duty. Let all alike be remembered, from the heroes of Manassas to those who expired amid the death throes of our hallowed cause … They died for their country. Whether or not their country had or had not the right to demand that sacrifice is no longer a question for discussion. We leave that for nations to decide in the future. That it was demanded – that they fought nobly, and fell holy sacrifices upon their country’s altar, and are entitled to their country’s gratitude, none will deny.
Here was the core of Lost Cause mythology, what Blight describes as ‘deflections and evasions, careful remembering and necessary forgetting’, defined in a few sentences, as candid as they were succinct. If the true reason for the war was too painful to contemplate, then let it be dropped from discourse. Instead of asking whether all the devastation, loss and sacrifice had been justified, let them be venerated by the South’s revisionist history.
The seed sown in Columbus flourished and multiplied. By the end of the 1860s, there was barely a town which did not observe Mrs Williams’s ritual, with newly constructed memorial monuments, sometimes built in the greatly expanded cemeteries, as its focus. Similar observances began to be held in the North. Underlying them was a rhetoric of national reconciliation, of brotherhood renewed, in which Mrs Williams’s plea that the causes of the bloodshed be ‘no longer a question for discussion’ was accepted wholeheartedly. As the New York Herald put it in an editorial on Memorial Day 1877, ‘all the issues on which the war of the rebellion was fought seem dead’.
The only people written out of the script, in Columbus as elsewhere, were the former slaves. To them, in a Georgia stained by murder, exclusion, organised intimidation and a legal system of segregation that became more oppressive by the year, the issues for which the war had been fought did not seem dead at all. For black freedmen, reconciliation was possible only through submitting to white supremacy almost as completely as they had done before the torchlight parades and salutes that had heralded the war.
The Lost Cause legend did not die with the gradual entrenchment of civil rights, nor with the rise of a South where African-Americans have begun to serve as judges and elected politicians, and to gain access to business and social circles that were once impenetrably closed. In Columbus, hidden signs of a vision of the Confederacy as something heroic, a bulwark against the North’s alien values, lie as if woven into the streets. The local TV station, its logo reproduced on signs and billboards, is called WRBL – W-Rebel. It took a strike by black students in the 1980s to get the authorities at the local college (now Columbus State University) to see that to use ‘Johnny Rebel’ as the mascot for sports teams, black and white alike, and to ask them to parade before games to the strains of the Confederate anthem ‘Dixie’, was, at least for African-Americans, unacceptable.
On the shelves of the city’s bookstores I found the Lost Cause legend reproduced in an entire literary sub-genre of works such as The South Was Right, by James and Walter Kennedy, published in 2001. Railing against Northern historians’ ‘campaign of cultural genocide’, it maintains that the true story of the War Between the States is that ‘the free Southern nation was invaded, many of our people raped and murdered, private property plundered at will and their right of self-determination violently denied’.
Always lurking beneath Georgia’s surface, the strange and anachronistic wounded anger expressed by such discourse burst into the open in a protracted political struggle in the first years of the twenty-first century. In early 2001 I spent several weeks in Columbus, and daily studied the Ledger-Enquirer’s letters page. The State Assembly was debating a proposal to replace the Confederate battle flag as the official flag of the state, on the grounds that African-Americans saw it as a symbol of servitude and oppression; just as pertinently, transnational corporations which would otherwise have been investing in the state were expressing their reluctance unless the flag were changed. Not the least bizarre aspect of the debate was the fact that far from representing historical continuity, the Stars and Bars had only been readopted in 1956, as part of the state’s militant response to the US Supreme Court’s attempt to desegregate education. But to change the flag again, the Ledger-Enquirer’s incensed correspondents claimed, would be an intolerable act of vandalism.
‘The issue over the state flag is not altogether about heritage or hate or slavery. It is all about the blacks trying to force the white southerners to remove all symbols of the Confederacy from their sites, and they do not have the right to do that. If they choose to live in the South, they WILL have to look at it. Keep the flag flying!’ wrote Mr Danny Green. ‘The Confederate emblem should remain. There is [sic] no racial problems I know of. We gave blacks the right to ride in the front of the bus. Let’s not give them everything they want,’ added J.R. Stinson. A Mr Raymond King was more extreme: ‘Where does it end? It’s OK for a terrorist [sic], Jesse Jackson, to be revered as some kind of saint … but it’s not OK for us to honour our great Southern heritage. Bull! As far as I’m concerned, it’s the African-Americans that are full of hate because people like me will not bow down and give them a free ride in life.’
In 2001, the flag-reform measure passed. Almost two years later, a Republican candidate for State Governor named Sonny Perdue ended many decades of Democrat stewardship after making a pledge to restore the Confederate flag the central plank of his campaign.
I bought a copy of The South Was Right and took it home to England. It was only there, as I browsed one afternoon, that I noticed that someone had left a business card inside it, hidden between two pages. ‘National Alliance’, read a heading on the front, above a logo made up of a cross and oak leaves. ‘Towards a New Consciousness, a New Order; a New People’. Further details, complete with numbers for ‘Georgia hotlines’ and an address for a website, were printed on the reverse:
We believe that we have a responsibility for the racial quality of the coming generations of our people. That no multi-racial society is a healthy society. That if the White race is to survive we must unite our people on the basis of common blood, organize them within a progressive social order, and inspire them with a common set of ideals. That the time to begin is now.
I returned to Columbus in the autumn of 1998, two years after my first trip. This time, and for many subsequent visits, some of which lasted several weeks and others just a few days, my enquiries had a focus: the city’s most notorious series of crimes – the serial killings known as the ‘stocking stranglings’.
In the late 1970s, a time when Jimmy Carter’s arrival in the White House was being said to mark the emergence of a new, racially harmonious, post-civil rights ‘sunbelt’ South, the fabric of the city was rent by seven exceptionally horrible rapes and murders. The victims – the youngest fifty-nine, the oldest eighty-nine – were all white women who lived alone, and all were strangled, most with items of their own lingerie. All but one had lived in the neighbourhood of Wynnton, and some were members of the city’s highest social echelons. From an early stage, while he still rampaged without apparent hindrance, the Columbus authorities had been convinced that the perpetrator was black.
In the course of my research, I found myself keen to know more about the Big Eddy Club, the exclusive private social club on the banks of the Chattahoochee. The membership lists were confidential. But former staff told me that five of the women murdered by the strangler had been members or frequent visitors, together with many of the public officials