Before Freedom Came And After – The Museum of the Confederacy Part 4 of 4

Towards the end of his article, Kimball quotes James Horton�s and Spencer Crew�s commentary on a survey of African-American interpretation in museums,[8] in which they state, �A temporary exhibit may not have a long-term effect on museum exhibition policy.� Kimball then concludes:

The accompanying Before Freedom Came book does not avoid the horrors of slavery. Charles Joyner�s chapter �The World of the Plantation Slaves,� amply documents the sexual abuse of slaves, but fails to use the term �rape.� Joyner does have a paragraph where he suggests that some slaves �may have given their sexual favors more or less willingly,� but is a slave really able to give consent to an owner that can whip the slave with impunity? This is what slavery was about: after you were worked sun up to sundown, were whipped and subject to abuses, mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives were raped, and the slaves were powerless to do anything about it. Drew Gilpin Faust, now Harvard University president, surprisingly asserts in the collection that paternalistic ideas of slavery �ensnared white southerners in a web of duty and imbued slaves with a doctrine of rights.�[9] Dismaying also is that Eugene Genovese, despite his extensive contributions to Southern Partisan magazine and his other writings and support of neo-Confederate ideology, was referred to as a credible scholar.[10] Finally a continuing irritation in this book, and in much of writing about slave owners, is the reference to some slave owners being kind. Kind or good masters are those who let their slaves go free such as George Corbin who denounced the injustice of slavery and set 22 of his slaves free, otherwise some masters are just crueler than others.[11]� Overall, however, the book largely recounts the horrors of slavery, and details things like the selling of slaves separating families and other atrocities of Antebellum slavery. Yet, despite these elements, one gaping omission is discussion of slave mortality. Such documentation would make it clear how severe slavery was, and that in some cases it was a charnel house of death. In addition, neither the Museum of the Confederacy exhibit nor the book explicitly connected slavery to the establishment of, and rationale for, the Confederacy. Being that the White House of the Confederacy was the residence of Jefferson Davis it might have been useful to have something about the short lifespan of Davis�s slaves on his Mississippi plantation and Davis� vigorous efforts to defend slavery and prevent the United States from acting against the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Robert E. Lee only comes up once in Before Freedom Came, in reference to a picture of one of his slaves formally dressed in a uniform and holding an accordion; there is nothing in the book about Lee whipping his slaves, nor that he rented out his slaves, was a strong supporter of slavery, and a white supremacist (see part 2 of this essay).[12] On the topic of the relation of other leading Confederate figures to slavery, Before Freedom Came is silent. The fact that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave dealer might have been mentioned. Vice-President of the Confederacy Alexander H. Stephens� infamous �Cornerstone� speech stating that the Confederacy was based on the principal of white supremacy could have been incorporated, as could some of the Declaration of Causes or Resolutions of the seceding states such as this extract from the Declaration of Texas:

Before Freedom Came was, after all, displayed at the Museum of the Confederacy. Slavery may be somewhat condemned by the exhibition, but the Confederacy escapes unscathed. Indeed, the exhibition�s primary focus on the survival of African customs among African American slaves necessarily means not having a primary focus on the horrors of slavery. These are put in the �background� as Kimball stated. An Associated Press story made clear that the theme of the exhibit is that it was all good in the end: �The Human Spirit Triumphs Over Slavery.�[14]