Review of “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy” by Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts

by Guest Fri May 11, 2018 4:13 am

Mr. Harris is an independent historian and a regular contributor to the History News Network. For more information see www.JamesThorntonHarris.com

Review of “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy” by Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts 168965-hjbsdgegg

Review of “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy” by Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts 168965-hjbsdgegg

On March 21, 1865, the recently emancipated black residents of Charleston South Carolina, staged a parade to celebrate their new freedom. The city had been taken a month earlier by Union Army troops led by a thousand soldiers from the 21st United States Colored troops. When the parade got underway, it was led by the black soldiers, marching in formation, followed by more than five thousand people.

New York Tribunereporter James Redpath, described the procession as “a celebration of their deliverance from bondage … a jubilee of freedom.” One of the most striking scenes, Redpath noted was large mule-drawn cart with a sign that said “Negroes for Sale.” Behind the auction cart marched a mock slave “coffle,” sixty men tied together by a rope. A black man playing the role of auctioneer cried out to the crowds, “How much am I offered for this good cook? Who will bid?”

Although most of the crowd laughed and jeered at the sham auction scene, Redpath observed some older women who “burst into tears as they saw this tableau, and forgetting that it was a mimic scene, shouted wildly, ‘Give me back my children! Give me back my children.”

This parade is just one of dozens of events depicted in Denmark Vesey’s Garden, Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, a new book by authors Blaine Roberts and Ethan Kytle. Both authors are history professors at California State University, Fresno and have written previously about the South. Kytle is the author ofRomantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era. Roberts’s previous book is Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South.

As the subtitle of their book indicates, this book is about slavery and memory. By focusing on Charleston, the “cradle of the confederacy,” the authors provide the reader with a year-by-year account of the rise of Jim Crow and the local effort to “whitewash” the cruel tragedy of black slavery. While a valuable addition to scholars of Southern history, the general reader will find it very interesting because of the many personal stories, black and white, the book contains.

The authors have done a good job of including black voices, which are often missing from history books describing the nineteenth century. They have tapped local archives with letters from black citizens, church sermons and the archives of the interviews of former slaves conducted by the federal Works Progress Administration.

Kytle and Roberts chronicle the fifty-year long transition, from the brief period of celebration enjoyed by the emancipated slaves, through the brief, failed attempt at Reconstruction to the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the late 1800s. They draw on a variety of sources, including newspaper reports, letters and documents from local archives and the trove of interviews of former slaves conducted by the writers in the Federal Works Progress Administration of the 1930s.

By focusing on the people of Charleston, they construct a fascinating narrative of a how the South resisted the Republican Party’s policy of Reconstruction. In a way, the book reminded me of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. By focusing on a small community and individual stories we gain insight into a complex, continent-wide catastrophe that is otherwise hard to grasp.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168965

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