Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, and the Dark Side of Civil War History

Wendell Berry is descended from slaveholders, a fact he admits freely in The Hidden Wound, his moving 1970 essay on the legacy of slavery and race relations in the United States. Berry writes that his great-grandfather, though a slaveholder, "was evidently a rather mild and gentle man by nature." During the Civil War, John Johnson Berry lived on a small farm in Kentucky that seemed an altogether idyllic place. Unlike the Big Houses and plantations of the Deep South, the farm needed the labor of only a few slave hands and was small enough "where domestic violence would have been very noticeable and disruptive." But John Johnson Berry had inherited a problem. He owned a slave who, according to family tradition, "was a 'mean nigger,' too defiant and rebellious to do anything with." So one day, John Johnson Berry sold his slave to the brutal Bart Jenkins, and Jenkins, "having completed his purchase . . . knocked the man on the head while he was asleep, bound him, and led him away with a rope."¹

The scene, which hearkens to Uncle Tom's Cabin (set also in Kentucky) for its portrayal of innocence lost to violence, illustrates how the legacy of slavery in the South still haunts those who live in the shadow of its memory. John Johnson Berry, his family, and his posterity give flesh, blood, and spirit to the claim of Robert Penn Warren, who wrote in The Legacy of the Civil War that the southerner "feels trapped by history."² Not surprisingly, Wendell Berry struggles in The Hidden Wound to reconcile his identity, historical reality, and the painful knowledge of his ancestral complicity in what Ta-Nehisi Coates considers the essential fact of American history: the rape of African culture and the destruction of black bodies.³

A close reading of The Hidden Wound reveals that Berry senses the evils of slavery and its tragic legacy in America. Yet, the opening pages suggest that though Berry assents intellectually to his place in the history of slavery in the South, he also communicates a whitewashed narrative of slavery in Kentucky and a will to disbelieve that his family worked to perpetuate an inherently violent system. And the history of slavery in Kentucky, and the southernness of Kentucky, are those issues on which Kentucky's complex Civil War memory rests. "I find it impossible to believe," Berry writes, "that my great-grandfather and his household were resigned or oblivious to the pain" in the sale of the family slave. Then, as if it were a confession of imperfect faith, he adds, "I am fairly sure that it shocked and grieved them, and left them deeply disturbed." In family tradition, John Johnson Berry was a peaceable man. As a master, he was "thought too kind" to his slaves. In Berry's mind, this ancestor could hardly have known the fullness of the horror of his actions—or even the implications of the transaction—as he sold his slave. Finally, the will to disbelieve appears with almost shocking naiveté: "I think it is even possible," Berry writes, "that my great-grandfather did not understand . . . that in selling the slave he abandoned him to violence."⁴

As a man of letters, Wendell Berry occupies a moment in history that makes him the symbol of a long and complicated expression of Kentucky Civil War memory over time. In Berry's writings, one detects regret and horror for the American Civil War. Like Robert Penn Warren, who wrote of the conflict's inwardness and its tragedy, Berry displays a sensibility concerned for its great human costs. In his 2007 essay "American Imagination and the Civil War," published not long before the sesquicentennial celebration, Berry wrote that the outcome of the war, and the destruction of racial slavery in America, "should not stop us from asking, if only to keep the question open, what we gained, as a people, by the North's expensive victory. My own impression is that the net gain was more modest and more questionable than is customarily said."⁵ A close...