Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865–1941 by Susan T. Falck (review)

Susan T. Falck's Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865–1941 creatively uses a variety of sources, such as newspapers, letters, photographs, and interviews, to analyze the various strands of historical memory that developed in Natchez, Mississippi, after the Civil War. Before the war, Natchez was a wealthy town that boasted a number of fine residences, many of which have survived to the present day. This concentration of antebellum homes has made Natchez a tourist destination since the 1930s, when the community's annual Pilgrimage, or tour of homes, and its accompanying pageant began. Given its dedication to heritage tourism, Natchez provides an especially interesting case study to complement broader works such as David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

The first chapter of Remembering Dixie focuses on how the people of Natchez experienced the Civil War and Reconstruction. The next two chapters analyze black and white efforts to remember these events. Falck finds that Natchez's black population, rather than its white one, initiated the process of memorialization. Despite this early start, the black community, which was split along class lines, failed to sustain an emancipationist tradition. On the one hand, those who had been enslaved before the war, many of whom were Union veterans, were strong supporters of efforts to celebrate emancipation. On the other hand, mixed-race people, who were the progeny of slave-owning fathers and slave mothers, as well as those black people who had been free before the war, opted for more conservative memorialization efforts that avoided offending their white patrons and distanced themselves from the poor freedpeople. As the dominance of this black and mixed-race conservative group waxed, so the emancipation tradition waned. White memorialization was thoroughly Lost Cause in its inclinations and began to manifest after the demise of Reconstruction. White men first reclaimed public commemoration through Natchez's militia and fraternal organizations. Once white dominance had been reestablished, Natchez's Confederate Memorial Association was formed in 1887, and, in time, control of this organization and its responsibilities were largely ceded to the town's white women.

Chapter 4 analyzes postwar photographs to gain a sense of how white and black people remembered their past and viewed their present. One collection of over sixty thousand photographs shot in the 1870s and 1880s shows the pride and hope of some members of Natchez's black population, while a second batch of pictures created in the 1890s and 1900s suggests that some of Natchez's white residents felt a nostalgia for Old South race relations.

Chapters 5 and 6 move the book forward chronologically to the 1930s, when the Natchez Pilgrimage began. Women's organizations, namely the Natchez Garden Club and later the Pilgrimage Garden Club, were the key movers in the movement to restore and showcase Natchez's antebellum homes. These white women marketed Natchez as the place "'Where the Old South Still Lives'" and successfully sold their whitewashed version of the antebellum South to Depression-era consumers (p. 3). In time, an intense rivalry emerged between the town's two garden clubs over who would control and profit from the town's cultural heritage, which led to the creation of two separate Pilgrimages. Eventually their feud brought them to court and ultimately to a reunited Pilgrimage in 1947.

The book's epilogue jumps from the 1940s to the recent past and focuses on current controversies surrounding historical memory in Natchez, such as the content of home tours, the presentation of the Pilgrimage's pageant, and the future of Confederate monuments. One of the particularly interesting features of this book is its guide to historic Natchez homes. This section, which follows Falck's epilogue, provides short historical sketches...