Current location:	Looking Backwards Land
Current mood:	curious
Current music:	"Shenandoah", ala Looking For An Echo
Entry tags:	civil war, history, ku klux klan, race relations, shenandoah, slave patrols, slavery

Things Our Ancestors Didn't Want To Talk About
When I started doing serious research for Shenandoah again I naturally started with books I either already owned, that I was familiar with, and that were common in this area. Many of these books are old--as in late 19th century through the 1920's--but are still popular enough that they get reprinted every few years or so.

Which is nice, except they leave out quite a lot. And I'm starting to think that maybe what they leave out were things not discussed in "polite" company in those days--with the authors assuming that the people reading their books were the kind who would entertain said polite company.

I'm thinking primarily of Western Virginia's black population. The books do talk about slavery: Sometimes in a statistical way, sometimes in a "Here's what a slave's life was like in those days", occasionally saying--and I imagine this was enlightened for that time--things like "Slaves had a better life in Virginia than the Deep South, but it was still a moral wrong." (Though some don't add in the "moral wrong" part, only keeping to the initial justification.)

What I find intriguing in a frustrating sort of way, though, is that of all those books I've read so far, only one of them (a 1920's history of Rockbridge County, home of Natural Bridge and the Virginia Military Institute) has anything to say about the free black population and the pre-Civil War abolitionists in the South. It doesn't say all that much...but it's an omnibus of history in a short space so it doesn't say much in detail about anything. But even that little bit throws a spotlight on the fact that the other books don't cover these at all.

As I've mentioned here before, there were strong anti-slavery sentiments in the Appalachian South prior to Nat Turner's rebellion, but only Turner is mentioned. (And then not always.) Nor do they mention Northerners' numerous activities to stir up abolitionist sentiments in the South post-Turner.

Nor is there anything about the slave patrols, groups of whites--sometimes made up of state militia members--with official sanctions to go onto anyone's property to make sure whites and blacks alike were following the slave codes. Their methods were often vicious, and patrols might employ those methods even if no law was being broken. Many, for example, didn't like it when slaves sang or danced or played music. There are plenty of stories I've turned up of slaves being beaten (sometimes to death) over any of those activities.

There's no mention of the 1831-32 Virginia legislative debates (the ones immediately following Turner's uprising) that decided the fate of both slaves and freedmen in the state.

And even that Rockbridge history book doesn't say a word about the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan and similar groups were terribly popular in the Reconstruction era, but if those old histories are your sources you'd never know they existed at all. The earliest reference to the Klan that I found was in a history of Rockingham County from the early 1970's...and then it's little more than a passing reference. The author says something along the lines of "The Klan was around in those days, and things were bad with them, but then they were outlawed in 1871 and disbanded." This particular book has nothing at all about their resurgence in the 1920's; they grew popular again then, especially during the Depression, as numerous surviving records and photographs attest.

Ironically, one bit of history that these books do go into detail about is something that's little known today: Virginia, especially western Virginia, was strongly pro-Union so long they even planned to stay out of the Confederacy after Fort Sumter was fired on. The Shenandoah Valley was almost completely pro-Union and fought hard against a State Convention, because they feared it would help out the secessionist elements in Eastern Virginia. When the first secessionist vote came around in May of 1861, the western counties of Virginia voted almost unanimously against leaving the U.S. Enough counties voted similarly that for a few days, Virginia remained part of the Union. What finally changed their minds was Lincoln's call for troops, and orders from Washington that the Virginia militias were to prepare to march south to meet other states in combat. That unified the Secessionist elements, and the few pro-Union elements that remained were often intimidated into silence.

(Not all, though. The trans-Alleghany counties still overwhelmingly went pro-Union, and in 1863 became the state of West Virginia.)

Anyway, what all this tells me is that for whatever reason--racism or other factors or a mix thereof--the idea of race in Western Virginia was an uncomfortable one during my great- and great-great-grandparents' time. They didn't want to face up to slavery either to defend or repudiate; they didn't want to discuss the slave patrols as good or ill; they didn't even want to talk about the Klan until a time so recent that I was already alive. They'd face up to their own strengths and mistakes when it came to the Civil War...for everything but race relations. It's only been in the last thirty years that a lot of these records and reminisces have been reprinted--and for some things, like the patrols, I'm still having to dig.

Makes me wonder what today's history books might be leaving out.