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  • “I Know It by Heart”The Civil War in the Memories of John W. Snipes, Ralph W. Strickland, Edith Mitchell Dabbs, and Reginald Hildebrand
  • Brent Glass, Lu Ann Jones, Elizabeth Jacoway Burns, Rob Stephens, and Rachel F. Seidman

These oral history excerpts demonstrate the enduring influence the Civil War has had on southerners’ memories, family narratives, and even present-day self-perceptions. John Wesley Snipes was born into a farming family and then entered the cotton mills of Bynum, North Carolina, during the Depression. His humorous story of his childhood efforts to mimic his grandfather’s Civil War tales suggests the central role that reliving the battles played in veterans’ lives long after the fighting ended; it also shows how tales of violence, courage, victory, and defeat were passed down to the next generation and continued to shape their family stories. Ralph Strickland grew up on an Alabama farm and then worked most of his adult life on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. His tale of Sherman’s occupation of his family’s farm reminds us of the high cost that the Civil War visited on white slave owners. Whether viewed as just reward for the horrors of slavery or as an unnecessary and brutal retaliation on southern civilians, Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy clearly reveals the fuzzy boundaries between the battlefield and the home front. Women like Strickland’s grandmother, although not official combatants, suffered at the Union’s hands. Meanwhile, Strickland’s story of a slave girl hiding a dairy cow from the approaching soldiers highlights the complex relationships between slaveowners and the enslaved—or, perhaps, simply suggests that some whites preferred to tell stories of slaves expressing loyalty to their owners even after the war. Edith Dabbs’s memories highlight how the rupture of the Civil War, despite what many expected, did not “settle” the race question in America. Here, she describes her husband’s upbringing with a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans and his growing sense of outrage in the 1940s when he began to see the limits of that approach. Dabbs and her husband, both southerners, would go on to become activists in the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, Reginald Hildebrand, currently a professor of African and Afro-American Studies at UNC, was interviewed by the SOHP’s partner organization, the Marian Cheek Jackson Center [End Page 113] for Saving and Making History, for their life history project with members of the Northside community in Chapel Hill. Hildebrand describes the origination of his family name in the aftermath of the Civil War. His ancestor’s early assertion of autonomy and dignity through the selection of his name foretold countless such acts by African Americans in the long-unfolding story of their efforts to lay claim to and make real the promise of freedom.

John Wesley Snipes

September 20,1976, Chatham County, North Carolina

I fought the Civil War. My grandfather and old Mr. Isaac Morris—I. J. Morris lived just across Polkberry Creek about a mile … and in the summertime, when I was a little fellow, my grandfather about every week would go over there to old Mr. Isaac Morris’s. And I’d sit down and play in the sand, and him and Mr. Morris would go over the Civil War. I knew every word of it by heart: what they done at Gettysburg. “Well, John Joe, you remember that day we went in there? There was about fifty of us went in there and captured so-and-so?” “Oh yes, Isaac, I remember it.” Well, one day my grandmother said something to me about the Civil War. I said, “Oh yes, I was there. I know all about it.” She said, “Hush your mouth. You weren’t even born!” [Laughter] I said, “Well, I’ve heard it a thousand times from Grandpa and old Mr. Isaac Morris, a-fighting the Civil War.” I said, “I’ve heard it; I know it by heart.” [Laughter]

Well, I just heard it so much I could tell it as good as they could, just about. But they enjoyed old buddies getting together.

Ralph W. Strickland

April 18, 1980, Charlotte, North Carolina

My Grandmother Strickland, some of that...

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