NY Times Ethics Column Discusses donating to Confederate sites

Jefferson Davis statue at free Alabama Capitol.

 

NY Times site: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/magazine/confederate-site-tourism-ethics.html

"I recently moved back home to Biloxi, Miss., and I’m wondering about visiting the lavish grounds of Beauvoir, the historical site and home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America.

I abhor everything the Confederacy stood for and was proud when Mississippi changed our state flag a few years ago to remove the Confederate emblem. I also enjoy history and historical sites, however, and Beauvoir is the biggest one in the area by far. My problem is that the site charges an admission fee. The property is owned by the Mississippi division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and while I presume some of the money would go to the upkeep of this historical site, I don’t know what they do with the rest of their money. (Their website mentions events to commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day,” Jefferson Davis’s birthday and so on.) Is it ethical to pay an admission fee and visit this historical site? — Jacob

From the Ethicist:

What can you say about the Sons of Confederate Veterans? Not long ago, the group exhumed the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and had them ceremonially reburied in Columbia, Tenn., where the S.C.V. owns and operates the National Confederate Museum, devoted to presenting “a Southern perspective of the War Between the States.” If you’re wondering about this perspective, the Mississippi division of the S.C.V. explains that “the preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”

That’s part of the standard myth of the Lost Cause, a myth that has draped itself like Spanish moss over a number of Southern sites commemorating the Confederacy. So is the notion of the kindly slave owner. It’s not particularly relevant to Beauvoir, where Davis moved only after Emancipation. But at Brierfield and at the White House of the Confederacy, Davis appears to have believed that he was a benevolent master to the Black people he considered property. The magazine Smithsonian, in a 2018 report, quotes a Beauvoir guide assuring visitors that Jefferson Davis was one of the “good slave owners,” who “took care of his slaves and treated them like family.”

Like family? It’s a curious family whose members regularly flee when they can. Among those Davis kept enslaved, William A. Jackson, a coachman, escaped Davis’s Confederate White House in 1862; two more workers, Betsey and Jim, left together early in 1864, followed, over the next several weeks, by members of the household staff: Henry, Davis’s butler, and Cornelius, another domestic servant. Many of the enslaved at Brierfield were forced to help build the defenses at Vicksburg, where at least four of them died. The odiousness of slavery is not rectified by avoiding physical abuse. Given that enslaving others is intrinsically bad — it’s odd that this should need repeating — there’s no such thing as a “good master.”

All of which is to say I share your doubts about whether the S.C.V. merits your support. For what it’s worth, though, my bet is that Beauvoir isn’t generating money for the Sons of Confederate Veterans or any of its divisions. Its tax returns over the past several years show sizable annual operating losses. “Admissions” represents less than half of its revenue; $100,000 a year comes from the Mississippi State Legislature. This is no cash cow.

And we can surely benefit by visiting and studying the homes of people who were living in serious moral error — even if the managers and the guides sometimes appear oblivious to it. Majestic places like Beauvoir were sustained by the unpaid labor of unfree workers. The name Beauvoir means “beautiful to view”; if you visit, you might remind the guides that a full appreciation of the site requires taking in the ugliness too.