(Un)furl that banner: the response of white southerners to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965.

BY THE LATE 1950s THE AMERICAN SOUTH HAD REACHED ANOTHER crossroads in its eventful history. De jure segregation, a cornerstone of southern life in the first half of the twentieth century, was under attack. Powerful instruments of change such as economic modernization, federal intervention, and a burgeoning black-led civil rights movement had begun to weaken the grip that segregation exerted on the lives of local people. In recent years some historians have added the agency of white southerners to the list of factors involved in the destruction of Jim Crow. Important interest groups in white society, these scholars argue, reached the conclusion that "massive resistance" to the U.S. Supreme Court's integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education was counterproductive. Growing numbers of businessmen, parents, religious leaders, and politicians believed that the violence and intimidation accompanying opposition to court-ordered school desegregation were corrosive of regional stability and economic development. At the very least some white southerners were willing to accept token or gradual integration as the price of progress. (1)

The starting point for this essay is that more research must be done on southern whites before we are in a position to evaluate precisely the extent of, and reasons for, local white input into the demise of segregation. Historians have devoted a good deal of energy to probing the activities of the civil rights movement, particularly at the state and community levels. As a result of this work, few members of the academy would deny that the movement played the principal role in destroying the Jim Crow system--both by destabilizing segregation at the grass roots and by prompting federal intervention to guarantee equal rights under the law. To recognize the movement as the primary agent for change, however, is not necessarily to come to a full understanding of why most southern whites eventually accepted that segregation would have to go. After all, at the end of the 1950s there was nothing inevitable about the end of Jim Crow. Significant numbers of die-hard segregationists, particularly in the old plantation districts of the upper and lower South, were determined to maintain the practice, even in the wake of federal intervention during the 1957 Little Rock crisis and the first wave of student sit-ins in 1960. Had these people succeeded in monopolizing white opinion in the region, two key consequences would have ensued. First, the movement would have triggered an even more violent response from southern whites than it actually did. Second, local whites would never have complied with the federal civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. With whites forming the majority of the South's population and with Washington's readiness and capacity to exert its power in the region perennially limited, even grudging acquiescence to this legislation was a critical precondition for the success of the movement. Put another way, to explain why the civil rights movement was ultimately so successful in the 1960s, we need a deeper understanding of the motives and actions of white southerners. (2)

The Civil War Centennial provides a useful window into the mind-set of the white South during the watershed years of the civil rights movement, 1961 to 1965. (3) As C. Vann Woodward once observed, the legitimacy of the racial order in the 1950s "rested upon historical assumptions that constituted a veritable credo of the region." (4) What some scholars call "historical memory" was thus a fundamental prop of an oppressive social system that was grounded as solidly in culture as it was in politics and economic relationships. (5) Southern whites responded negatively to Brown for many reasons, but among them was their familiarity with a distinctive historical narrative that had coalesced around the turn of the century. Their sense of racial superiority and personal identity owed much to their understanding of the region's past. Although most of them were patriotic Americans who rejected the unreconstructed Confederate view that southern defeat had been an unmitigated disaster, they shared with many northern whites the orthodox nationalist line on the Civil War era. This interpretation, as David W. Blight has shown, had reached maturity during the uneven sectional reconciliation process of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Family and community lore, history textbooks, and numerous forms of popular culture taught white southerners that slavery was a benign institution, that secession had been a last resort occasioned by fanatical abolitionist attacks on southern constitutional rights, and that Confederates had struggled bravely for four years to sustain those rights but finally had been beaten by a materially superior foe. Defeat, most of them were willing to admit, had been a blessing in disguise because it had paved the way for American unity. However, there was almost unanimous agreement among southern and northern whites alike that Reconstruction, with the postbellum imposition of carpetbagger and African American rule, had been a nightmarish period, characterized by corruption and humiliation. Reconstruction was the work of vindictive Radical Republicans, whose only aim was to punish a brave people for striving to maintain their liberties. (6)

A black countermemory did exist. It stressed the evils of slavery, the attainment of emancipation, black military support for the Union, and the benefits that Reconstruction had offered the freedpeople. One of the many problems confronting African Americans in the 1950s was that reconciliation between whites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line had done much to purge this alternative narrative from the popular consciousness. When northern and southern whites thought about the Civil War in the mid-twentieth century, they participated unwittingly in a mutual act of historical amnesia. What had once been viewed as a revolt against the government of the United States was now regarded in a cozy, consensual light as a tragic Brothers' War that at least had achieved positive results in terms of national development. (7)

It was in this context that Congress decided to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Civil War with an extended commemoration between 1961 and 1965. The initial impetus for a national commission to oversee the centenary came from organizations representing professional historians, southern businessmen, and the growing ranks of amateur Civil War enthusiasts--groups such as the Civil War Centennial Association of New York, the All-South Centennial Congress, and the District of Columbia Civil War Round Table. A recognition that America's bloodiest conflict might have important educative functions during the Cold War and an awareness of the economic significance of the domestic heritage industry ensured that calls for a properly funded commemoration of the centennial found a ready response from politicians on Capitol Hill. During the summer of 1957, legislation to set up the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission (CWCC) was passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The commission, a federally funded agency within the Department of the Interior, was authorized to plan and coordinate commemorative events in collaboration with the National Park Service, private patriotic groups, and similar state-level bodies. Although ultimate sovereignty rested with the twenty-five-man, all-white, and mostly nonsouthern full commission appointed largely by the president and Congress, the day-to-day running of the agency lay in the hands of its chair, an executive director, a seven-member executive commission, and a small Washington-based staff. A large National Advisory Council and an annual National Assembly also played a significant role in the unit's operations. By the spring of 1958, the CWCC had appointed its two leading officials. The chair was a retired military officer, Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, a man of decidedly conservative political views, who was the grandson of the Union army's commanding lieutenant general. The critical job of executive director went to Karl S. Betts, a Kansas-born and media-savvy Republican businessman, who was one of the driving forces behind the District of Columbia Round Table. (8)

Given the hazy and broadly consensual nature of white public opinion on the Civil War, Washington's decision to sponsor an official commemoration made a good deal of sense. What better way to inculcate civic values and patriotic commitment in the ongoing straggle against communism than to remind Americans of the bravery of their forebears? Although southern symbols such as the Confederate battle flag were prominent iconographic features of massive resistance, right-wing publicists for that cause, like Richmond News Leader editor James J. Kilpatrick, had avoided the Civil War in their search for historical justification of their response. (9) The main reason for this strategic decision was that there was no prospect of a second secession in the wake of Brown. In the unlikely event that southern whites' determination to sustain Jim Crow led them down this road, they would have been confronted by the reality of central power. As Alabama governor James E. Folsom succinctly put it, what could southern segregationists do "now that the Feds have the nuclear bomb?" While President Eisenhower's reluctant decision to send U.S. paratroops to Little Rock in September 1957 underlined Folsom's point about the futility of state resistance, many southern whites found their fears of social change assuaged by the administration's otherwise evident willingness to countenance gradual and token desegregation. The real test of white opinion in the region, however, was yet to come. (10)

In 1960 the direct-action phase of the civil rights movement--the decisive assault on Jim Crow that culminated in the successful Birmingham and Selma campaigns--gave rise to a resurgence of massive resistance centered primarily in the Deep South. The Civil War Centennial coincided almost exactly with these developments. This investigation into the evolving southern white response to the centennial reveals not only the enduring capacity of historical memory to mobilize local whites in defense of the existing racial order, but also--and perhaps more surprisingly--the weakness of the southern past as a force for stasis in the 1960s. Certain memories of the Confederate struggle did help to sustain the rearguard action to preserve segregation. Ultimately, they were no match for the powerful processes of change at work in the region.

Initially, the response to the approach of the centennial in the South was mixed. Government officials and agencies in several states welcomed the prospect of tourists flocking to the region to learn more about the Civil War. In this respect Virginia was in the vanguard of the drive to prepare for 1961. The state possessed more battlefield sites and memorials than any other, and its travel council was quick to observe that local hotels and motels had plenty of spare capacity. Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr., a segregationist Democrat who eventually recognized that token school integration was the price of order and prosperity, took the lead in backing the centennial at the National Governors' Conference in Florida in May 1958. He pledged his support on the patriotic basis that the commemoration would, in the words of Major General Grant, enable Americans to "work more cordially together to keep America American, and to resist the so specious and plausible efforts of its enemies, whether avowed or hidden, to subvert the basic tenets and principles of our Constitution and the institutions we inherited from those great men of 1861 to 1865." (11) At first politicians in some states evinced rather less enthusiasm for the centennial than Almond. In Tennessee, for example, one of the leading proponents of a state centennial agency reported in March 1959 that the necessary legislation was "still in the works, and so far as I can learn there is no particular opposition to it. On the other hand, nobody seems particularly interested in it, and I have fears that it may fall by the wayside while the legislators are debating some of the more controversial subjects." The creation of a Texas state commission was delayed by opposition from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), who objected to the use of the term Civil War (because it denied the existence of a distinctively southern nation) and feared that the commemoration was just an excuse to celebrate the North's victory over the South. Persistent lobbying, however, by southern centennial enthusiasts and the CWCC proved strong enough to overcome apathy and resistance. By January 1960 every southern state had followed Virginia's example in setting up a public agency to coordinate local events. (12)

Mississippi's Commission on the War Between the States typified these state-level bodies. It comprised a broad coalition of government departments and interested civic organizations, including the UDC, the SCV, the Civil War Round Table, the Mississippi Park Commission, the Mississippi Automobile Club, the Garden Clubs of Mississippi, the Mississippi Manufacturers' Association, the Mississippi Agricultural and Industrial Board, and the state historical society. (13) Several state legislatures also voted substantial funding for these new agencies in eager anticipation of the financial rewards likely to accrue from the forthcoming heritage bonanza. Virginia headed the list of appropriations at $1.75 million, while Mississippi granted $200,000 to its commission. (14) In a representative outburst of boosterism, the latter's 1960 publicity booklet denied that the centennial was a "commercial venture," yet it went on to depict the enormous economic strides made by the people of Mississippi since the Civil War and located the commemoration firmly in the context of the state's ongoing efforts to promote business and industry. Jackson, for example, was described as a prosperous, up-and-coming place with a boundless future, "as the city and Mississippi move confidently into the sixties." (15)

Once established, the various state centennial commissions began preparations within the broad organizational and ideological framework laid down by the CWCC. Among their most important tasks was to generate support from businessmen, particularly those involved in the media and in the developing tourist industry. Lyon G. Tyler, an official of the Virginia commission and a direct descendant of U.S. president John Tyler, met with a range of interested parties to stress the significance of forthcoming events. "The Centennial," he told the Virginia Broadcasters' Association in June 1960, "is an opportunity for profit ... for this will be the biggest tourist attraction in our history. The Centennial will cover the whole State and it will last almost five years. We can expect reams of free publicity because 60% of the Civil War happened in this State." (16) No less important was the campaign to stir up popular interest. The southern commissions generated their own literature that outlined the importance of the centennial to the inhabitants of their states and proffered detailed advice on how to orchestrate local commemorative events. Virginians were encouraged to rededicate Confederate monuments with appropriate ceremonies, to collect Civil War documents such as soldiers' letters and diaries for preservation, to sponsor essay contests in local schools, and to set up Civil War museums in their communities. (17)

These promotional efforts gelled neatly with a federal agenda rooted in the Cold War. Georgia's centennial manual, for example, was outspoken in its attempt to characterize the Civil War as the wellspring of American hegemony in the twentieth century. "This nation started from scratch," boasted the booklet, "and now is the most successful in the history of the world. The Centennial gives us an opportunity to discern from our history what made us the most powerful and united on the face of the earth." Some anxious conservatives were attracted by the prospect of using the Civil War experience to instill American values into the citizenry. Alluding to the recent demise of the U.S.-backed Kishi administration in Japan, Lyon Tyler articulated his conviction that Americans could only fight the Cold War effectively if they renewed their faith in democracy. There could be no better way to promote this renewal, he suggested to the Virginia Broadcasters' Association, than to educate people about the elevated character of men like Robert E. Lee, "a man largely without hate, without fear and without pride, greed or selfish ambition." Continued Tyler, "The enemy is working while we are still groping for our National Purpose[,] ... for the faith to sustain us." Tyler's fellow Virginian, J. Lindsay Almond, articulated the same theme when urging commemoration of the centennial to Governor Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas in January 1959. "It is well for us," Almond wrote, "to pay tribute on the highest plane to the valiant men of a hundred years ago who gave themselves for the high principles in which they believed. This American spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice must endure in our people today if this nation is to successfully resist the perils of these times." (18)

As Lyon Tyler's laudatory remarks about Robert E. Lee indicated, the willingness of white southern leaders to embrace a linkage between the Civil War and the Cold War did not mean that they had any intention of surrendering their regional heritage--there was not even a suggestion of criticism of Confederate leaders--to the search for national strength and purpose. Apart from some neopopulists like Alabama's James "Big Jim" Folsom, few local politicians were willing to criticize the southern past in the service of the present. Moderate segregationists operating in the business-progressive tradition of southern politics proved just as inclined as massive resisters to emphasize their Confederate credentials, even if, like Governor James P. Coleman of Mississippi, they often tried to give the Civil War experience a twist of their own. (19)

By late 1958 Coleman's administration was floundering. The governor had avoided the worst excesses of massive resistance and was regarded with deep suspicion at home for his allegiance to the increasingly liberal, national Democratic Party. In November Coleman delivered a speech to the Jackson Civil War Round Table that he repeated subsequently for television viewers. He stressed his own Confederate lineage and his awareness of the close connection between nineteenth-and twentieth-century struggles. Explaining that he had known many Confederate veterans personally, the governor insisted, "I yield to no man in my respect and profound admiration for the unexcelled bravery and the world renowned gallantry of the Confederate soldier." Yet, he continued, the war had been a tragedy for the state, its enormous cost in human, economic, and political terms difficult to quantify. As a result of the South's defeat, he said:

   the Negro became not only a supreme economic problem in Mississippi, but he
   also was catapulted into the forefront of all political controversies.
   There he remains today because of a United States Supreme Court decision
   rendered in 1954 which good lawyers consider legally unsound and which
   Mississippi is wholly unwilling to accept because of its unsoundness. Of
   course, the 1954 decision itself is one of the long line of direct
   consequences of the Civil War. One step led to the next, and one thing
   brought on another. (20)

Somewhat at odds with the aims of die-hard segregationists, Coleman's central objective in this speech was to hold up the appalling costs of the Civil War as an argument for avoiding rash actions in the present. Yet his readiness to connect the southern past with opposition to Brown indicated that the upcoming centennial was likely to be a politically charged event. At no stage of the organizing process was there any hint that the forthcoming commemoration might involve blacks as well as whites. Although promotional literature did make the occasional nod toward the conventional wisdom that most slaves had remained loyal to their masters, it was generally assumed that the Confederate experience had impinged primarily on whites and that therefore whites would be the only southerners involved in commemorating the Civil War. When setting up a centennial body in Savannah in June 1960, for example, the chairman of the Georgia commission advised municipal and county officers to secure representation from "all existing white PTAs." Mary Givens Bryan, the state archivist and a prominent member of the same commission, underlined the restricted nature of the commemoration by telling Governor S. Ernest Vandiver, "Never in the history of our country have people been so interested in history and records as they are today. It is NECESSARY TO PRESERVE OUR VALUABLE RECORDS TO PROVE WE ARE WHITE." Manifestly, as the southern writer Walker Percy observed, African Americans would be the "ghost at the feast." (21)

The national commission positively encouraged the trend toward racial exclusivity. Its principal officers, Grant and Betts, held conservative views on racial issues and were entirely at ease in the company of white centennial promoters in the South, like their fellow commission member William M. Tuck, a resolute supporter of massive resistance from Southside Virginia, and Colonel Allen P. "Ned" Julian, the director of the Atlanta Historical Society and a member of the Georgia commission's Pageants and Reenactments committee. In July 1958 Julian told Betts of his outrage that Rufus E. Clement, a black educator, had been placed on the national commission's advisory council and that Emory University historian Bell I. Wiley, "a known integrationist," was a member of the CWCC itself. The colonel, whose sensitivity to Jim Crow mores may have been intensified by the fact that he was not a native southerner, warned sarcastically that "if the integrationists and the Negrophiles have already seized so dominant a place in the Commission that we are faced with a centennial observance of Reconstruction, too, let us, at least, keep it in its proper chronological sequence; to do otherwise will damage irreparably the whole, splendidly-conceived program." (22)

Julian's fears were groundless. In addition to being ideologically predisposed toward such white southern concerns, Betts and Grant understood their debt to the powerful southern Democrats in Congress who played a crucial role in preserving the commission's $100,000 appropriation in 1958. Moreover, the national commission's preference for a decentralized commemoration of the Civil War, when combined with the normal workings of the federal system, placed southern whites in command of the state agencies with which the CWCC had to deal. Inevitably, many of these officials were outspoken segregationists. Charged with fostering national unity, the CWCC had no desire to alienate some of its most important collaborators. Predictably, therefore, it made little effort to promote black participation in the centennial, North or South, and quickly poured cold water on the idea of an event to mark the anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. When asked by a journalist if any commemoration of emancipation was planned, Betts responded lamely:

   We're not emphasizing Emancipation. You see, there's a bigger theme--the
   beginning of a new America. There was an entire regiment of Negroes about
   to be formed to serve in the Confederate Army just before the war ended.
   The story of the devotion and loyalty of Southern Negroes is one of the
   outstanding things of the Civil War. A lot of fine Negro people loved life
   as it was in the old South. (23)

During the late 1950s a handful of whites living in the South did express disquiet about the upcoming centennial. Most of these voices belonged to patriotic Americans who were concerned that, no matter how good the intentions, any ceremonial recognition of the Civil War was bound to exacerbate sectional divisions? As the anniversary of secession approached, however, large numbers of whites looked forward to the chance to celebrate, not simply commemorate, the historical moment when the South had cut loose from the national polity.

Fervent grassroots participation in festivities designed to observe the anniversary of secession at the beginning of 1961 indicated widespread popular support among southern whites for the centennial during its early months. Montgomery, Alabama, the first capital of the Confederacy, was one of several southern communities to plan an extensive set of activities that winter. The highlight was a spectacular week-long pageant, "The Man and the Hour," to celebrate both the founding of the Confederate government and the inauguration of President Jefferson Davis. Seeking to generate a large hometown cast and to guarantee packed houses at the municipal coliseum, the pageant's organizers and supporters enthusiastically promoted the centennial to white residents. Thus encouraged by right-wing governor John M. Patterson, the chamber of commerce, downtown businesses, and the local press and churches, Montgomerians rushed to enlist in the southern cause almost as keenly as they had done a hundred years earlier. Men joined "Confederate Colonel" chapters, donned gray uniforms, and grew beards and mustaches. (Most were recruited at the workplace: As early as the second week of January, chapters had been formed in several offices of the state government as well as the Alabama Power Company.) White children learned about the so-called War Between the States from teachers who came to school dressed in nineteenth-century clothing. Girls and boys in grades one to six were granted permission by school authorities to wear Civil War-era costumes each Thursday. Local white women seemed especially eager to embrace the centennial. They welcomed the opportunity to form "Confederate Belle" chapters, centered in the workplace and in their own civic groups; they collected period items for an Old South exhibition at the city's Museum of Fine Arts; they participated in a "Belle of the Confederacy" beauty contest, which was won by "a pretty secretary for the State of Alabama"; and they enthusiastically dressed up in Gone With the Wind finery in anticipation of the forthcoming Centennial Ball. White women were also instrumental in drumming up wider interest in the Montgomery festivities by taking part in full-costume Confederate motorcades that toured outlying towns such as Wetumpka and Dadeville. (25)

High attendance rates for the secession pageant and other centennial events attested to the extent to which Civil War fever had gripped Montgomery's white community. An estimated 50,000 people watched the pageant in mid-February, while at least 5,000 attended the Centennial Ball. Thousands of people welcomed the arrival of a surrogate Jefferson Davis on February 17, joined the governors of Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi (all clad in wartime garb) in a downtown parade the following day, and bought copies of the local newspaper's best-selling "Confederate Centennial Edition." Commentators marveled at the unity evinced by these activities. Indeed, it might not be stretching a point to suggest that the white community's participation in the early weeks of the centennial exceeded its cohesion during the bus boycott of 1955-56, when local housewives had annoyed the city commission by driving their black domestics to work. (26)

Of course, evidence that a cross-section of Alabama whites was excited about taking part in festivities to mark the birth of the Confederacy tells us very little about what such involvement actually meant to participants--beyond the obvious fact that it offered individuals a change from the daily routine of household chores, volunteer work, or paid employment in the public and private sectors. Certainly it cannot be assumed that the rush to dress up like Rhett Butler or Scarlett O'Hara indicated a general desire on the part of white Montgomerians to re-fight the Civil War. At least one speaker during the observances to mark secession emphasized the need for national unity at a time of acute international tension--a message that one presumes was not lost on the city's red-blooded patriots. (27)

This said, it would have been difficult for anyone residing in one of the remaining hubs of massive resistance to overlook the connection between celebrations of the Confederacy and the contemporary threat to segregation. Although the first wave of student sit-ins had yielded limited results by the beginning of 1961, several high-profile events that winter demonstrated not only that the forces of social change were still active but that resistance in some southern states was beginning to weaken. Of particular concern to bitter-enders was the fact that Georgia appeared ready to allow African Americans into its university system and that court-ordered school integration continued to occur across the South. It did not take a great leap of the imagination for Montgomery whites to link their own situation to that of their ancestors. As one contributor to the local newspaper wrote during the centennial festivities:

      Today the South is facing many of the same problems it faced in 1861.
   Federal dictatorship is literally being stuffed down our throats.
   Integration is now a major issue, not just a rumor. The battle is not
   solely one of segregation versus integration, any more than the Civil War
   was one of slavery versus freedom of slaves.

      Then, it was the right of the people to withdraw from a partnership
   which had become unsatisfactory because one faction sought to impose
   beliefs upon the other. Today it is a matter of democracy versus autocracy,
   the majority versus nine Supreme Court Justices.

      The South as a whole has been politically blacklisted. We the people of
   a democracy should stand up and fight as our forefathers did so we can lick
   this ever present battle with the federal government as it continues to
   usurp rights delegated to the states. (28)

Alabama circuit judge Walter B. Jones, a thorn in the side of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the mid-1950s, made a similar point while reflecting approvingly on the recent centennial events. Buoyed by his own role as Howell Cobb in the Jefferson Davis inauguration pageant, Jones argued that Montgomery's centennial program had given whites in the state "a deeper appreciation of the things that the Confederacy fought for, and helped them to realize that unrestrained federal power is destroying this nation; it was especially helpful to young students in our elementary and high schools and colleges." (29)

The capacity of the centennial to reflect and generate a distinctively southern "memory" somewhat at odds with the consensual, nationalistic aims of the CWCC was evident throughout the South during the spring of 1961, as die-hard segregationists strove to draw parallels between past and present straggles. In Mississippi a Jackson newspaper editor greeted his city's commemoration of secession with the contention that "local self-government in the form of States' Rights definitely is a burning issue today." Mississippi's governor, Ross R. Barnett, a strident defender of Jim Crow, made clear his views at a business conference in Florida by first extolling the separation of the races and then insisting, "If the rights of a sovereign state are taken away, they will be replaced by a totalitarian government--a police state." (30) Shortly after this speech, Barnett led Jackson's secession day parade, riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Hundreds of white Mississippians, dressed in Confederate uniforms and organized into militia-style units of "Mississippi Greys," followed in procession behind a huge Rebel flag owned by the state university. These efforts to recapture the spirit of the Confederacy coincided with the first stirrings of an indigenous civil rights movement in Jackson. Black students protesting the incarceration of nine sit-in demonstrators were harried by police dogs and tear-gassed on the same day as the secession parade. (31)

The outpouring of southern white enthusiasm for the region's Confederate heritage not only undermined the CWCC's plans for a series of somber commemorative events but also threatened to expose the racial fault line within the superficially consensual interpretation of the Civil War espoused by the commission. That divide was uncovered publicly for the first time in March 1961 when the CWCC made the decision to hold its annual meeting that April in Charleston, to concur with a reenactment of the attack on Fort Sumter organized by South Carolina's "Confederate War" centennial agency. Unfortunately for the commission, which was already complicit in what was seen by many observers as the white South's early co-optation of the centennial, New Jersey's delegation to the national gathering included an African American woman named Madaline A. Williams. When it became clear that Williams, a native Georgian and a Democratic officeholder, would not be accommodated in Charleston's segregated Francis Marion Hotel and that the CWCC would not insist on challenging local customs, the centennial quickly became front-page news across the country. A number of northern state commissions, including New Jersey and New York, vowed to boycott the Charleston meeting if integrated facilities were not provided. At first the CWCC's executive committee, dominated by Grant, Betts, and Tuck, insisted that there would be no alteration to the arrangements. Strong pressure from some of the northern commissions and alarmed NAACP officials, however, embarrassed the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, into insisting on a change of policy. Moderates on the commission such as Bell Wiley realized the urgency of the situation and, with the help of White House aides Harris Wofford and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., engineered a compromise whereby the national meeting was transferred to the federal government's desegregated Charleston Naval Station. (32)

Ironically, in view of the fact that the CWCC's Charleston meeting was designed to promote the centennial as a totem of American unity, the Fort Sumter fiasco exacerbated sectional tensions at a time when African Americans and their white allies were already castigating the South for its allegedly dysfunctional opposition to racial equality. Predictably, segregationists choked on such criticism. One Charleston newspaper was particularly incensed by the support that Walter H. Jones, a candidate in the New Jersey gubernatorial election, gave to the calls for a boycott of the meeting. "We smell an old political trick," contended a March 14 editorial. "When politicians have little else to talk about, they invent an issue, preferably concerning something a long way off. Mr. Jones is running against Southern customs." In truth, South Carolina officials were no less aroused than their northern counterparts. Governor Ernest F. Hollings, a pro-segregation Democrat sensitive to criticism of his qualified support for Kennedy in the recent election, used the controversy to reassert his conservative credentials. As well as questioning the president's authority to "dictate" integration at Charleston hotels, he denounced the northerners for trying to make "political capital" out of the crisis and for attempting to impose "the customs of New Jersey on the customs of South Carolina." The self-styled "Mr. Confederacy," John A. May, a state legislator who headed South Carolina's centennial commission, agreed, adding that his agency would "uphold the customs and laws of our state. (33) When the CWCC meeting finally got underway at the naval station, Ashley Halsey, a Charleston-born journalist, joined the chorus of white southern outrage by using his speech at a luncheon organized by May's agency to savage the New Jersey delegation for hypocrisy and political intentions--a move that briefly ignited the whole crisis once again. (34)

The Charleston controversy brought into relief the size of the task facing civil rights activists at the beginning of the 1960s. The Deep South's response to outside criticism of de jure segregation, no matter how minor, was fierce, portending the likely extent of resistance to more serious assaults. It is tempting, moreover, to suggest that the eventual compromise merely served to reveal the conservative nature of the Kennedy administration's civil rights objectives. Moving the national commission's meeting to a desegregated facility sent out positive signals to African Americans, but it hardly amounted to a decisive attack on segregation. The self-confessed southern liberal Bell Wiley, however, rejected this line of reasoning, arguing instead that the president's action would promote orderly change in the South. Hotels in the region, he argued, would "see the point." Other important meetings could be switched to integrated federal facilities if local businessmen continued to insist on maintaining the status quo: "This will mean loss of money to the hotels. It will, in my opinion, help break down the barriers of segregation!" (35)

Sharing Wiley's view in the spring of 1961 that some southerners were acting "as if they had not come back into the Union" was Ralph McGill, one of the region's most influential journalists. In common with a number of anticommunist moderates, McGill was genuinely alarmed by the escalation of sectional tension and quasi-Confederate activity during the early months of the centennial. In an impassioned outburst in the Atlanta Constitution on April 8, he expressed his support for a dignified commemoration of the Civil War as the conflict that had ended slavery and confirmed America's existence as "a union in fact beyond the power of legalistic, hair-splitting sophistry to destroy." Yet, he wrote:

   what we have now are increasing numbers of persons wandering about the
   South wearing sleazy imitations of Confederate uniforms, growing beards,
   stirring up old hatreds, making ancient wounds bleed again, reviving Ku
   Klux Klans, working themselves into immature fits of emotionalism,
   recreating old battles, and otherwise doing a great disservice to the
   memory of those who fought and died in the war of 1861-65.

Highlighting the plasticity of white southern historical memory and explicitly criticizing South Carolina's defense of segregation in Charleston, McGill explained that the war had not been "an all-white affair"--that black regiments had fought on both sides and that "the South acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the thousands of slaves who, during the four years of war, behaved with such understanding and good will that they left legends yet handed down in some families." Fanaticism, McGill reminded his readers, had brought on the Civil War: "Getting on board with extremists is something like boarding an aircraft. One cannot get off until it lands." (36)

By the summer of 1961 the centennial was in crisis, largely due to the storm of negative publicity generated by the Fort Sumter episode. This storm was fueled in part by a newfound determination of African Americans to contest what they saw as white southerners' attempts to dominate the centennial. The segregation crisis at Charleston alerted several important groups and individuals in the civil rights movement to the attendant dangers. Joining the NAACP in its condemnation of recent events was Lawrence D. Reddick, a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., who told a gathering of teachers in New York in April that the ongoing festivities sustained historical myths about the southern past and thereby hampered efforts to promote social change in the region. Confederate symbols, he urged, should be collected and burned, and President Kennedy should issue what Reddick called "a positive statement on the centennial celebration...." The veteran labor leader A. Philip Randolph concurred. "There is no doubt," he commented, "that this whole Civil War Centennial commemoration is a stupendous brain-washing exercise to make the Civil War leaders of the South on a par with the Civil War leaders of the North, and to strike a blow against men of color and human dignity." (37)

With white liberals increasingly sympathetic to this reading of developments, an embattled Karl Betts was soon complaining to his superior that the CWCC had its "hands full selling the American public on keeping them united in the aims and purposes of the Centennial." (38) Additional troubles were to follow. The next month large crowds flocked to a reenactment of the first battle of Bull Run, a financially troubled event staged at Manassas National Battlefield Park. Taking place over two days under a burning sun, with Virginia's Governor Almond in attendance, the sham battle proved to be another public relations disaster for the CWCC because of its commercial excesses. Behind the paying spectators packed into the grandstands lay a large clump of tents in which a wide variety of food, drink, ices, and souvenirs were on sale--all on a field that had been drenched with the blood of brave Americans. Any profits, commented one official, would be used to fund a Civil War Hall of Fame: "no museum filled with weapons and artifacts, but something as alive and modern as Disneyland." It was little wonder, perhaps, that the event was described variously as "puerile," "ludicrous," and (by one letter writer to the New York Times) a "grisly pantomime." The dubious spectacle may have been a great success with the spectators (most of whom, to judge by their cheers when the Yankees were put to flight, were white southerners), but the centennial's credibility as an exercise in cultural nationalism had been further undermined. (39)

The white South paid some of the price for the centennial's downturn. Southern tourism, for example, received unanticipated bad press. Holiday magazine, a mouthpiece for the nation's travel industry that had been carrying expensive centennial advertisements from the southern state commissions, warned its readers "that for the next few years the traveler, especially in the South, is likely to encounter certain sights and sounds and excitements which may give him cause for wonder and alarm." (40) Segregationists then lost one of their most reliable friends on the federal commission when Bell Wiley and others engineered Betts's dismissal at a stormy meeting of the full commission. The executive director, wrote Wiley privately, "was busted for ineptness, maladroitness, clumsiness, and general incompetence. If he had half vision in one eye, he could have seen many months ago what was going to happen. But as is often the case with little people suddenly put on a big stage, he soon began to think he was the show." A disgusted Grant, Betts's closest ally on the commission, consequently resigned for what were declared publicly to be personal reasons. (41)

The departure of the CWCC's principal officers resulted in a power vacuum that was not filled until late 1961, when President Kennedy appointed the distinguished California-based historian, Allan Nevins, to head the centennial agency, with a young southern-born academic, James I. Robertson Jr., as his hands-on deputy. Plans to mark the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and Nevins's inaugural statement that the commission would "allow the just pride of no national group to be belittled or besmirched" heralded a more inclusive and sober approach--one that seemed less likely to give carte blanche to the activities of mock Confederates. (42)

Notwithstanding the portents of change in Washington, some hard-line politicians in the Deep South adhered to their conviction that their states and political careers could only benefit from an excess of Confederate theater. Foremost among these advocates was Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi, an unreconstructed segregationist who welcomed delegates of the Confederate States Civil War Centennial Conference (a loose regional grouping of the southern centennial agencies) to Jackson on November 3, 1961. In his opening address Barnett articulated his belief that the centennial represented an opportunity not only to emphasize the resourcefulness, steadfastness, and courage of Civil War-era southerners, but also to "focus a respectful attention upon the progress of the Southern States of the present." After joking that all save "freedom riders" were encouraged to come south for the centennial, he came to the crux of his remarks. "Among the cherished traditions which Southern men and women have always supported," said Barnett, "is local control of local affairs. Our forefathers knew and Southerners today know that no matter how wise and well meaning the National Government might be it can not administer local and State affairs as wisely and as well as those Americans on the scene, living with the problems." The delegates, he concluded, would surely agree "that the fate of this nation may well depend on the determination and the fortitude with which Southern men and women resist this trend toward centralization." (43)

While there was more froth than substance to the centennial antics of most white southern politicians in the early 1960s, Barnett was earnest in his conviction that the region's past could be used to rally popular opposition to federally sponsored integration. The consequences of his quasi-Confederate stance and the potential for a direct linkage between centennial observances and white supremacist violence were clearly revealed during the rioting that occurred on the campus of the University of Mississippi in late September 1962. Determined to be seen preventing James Meredith, the maverick black civil rights campaigner, from entering Ole Miss, the governor had ordered public officials to carry out state laws even at the risk of incarceration by federal authorities--an action that caused Governor John Patterson of Alabama to counsel the White House against responding with troops. "We stand united in this fight," warned Patterson, "and will continue to resist all unlawful encroachments by the federal government." (44)

Throughout the night of September 30, 1962, and for most of the following day, angry whites, stirred by Barnett's defiance and their own revulsion at integration, wreaked havoc on the university campus at Oxford while federal marshals (subsequently reinforced by regular army troops) struggled to maintain order. The southern journalist Fred Powledge watched as a retired army general, Edwin A. Walker, tried to galvanize the mob by clambering onto a Confederate war memorial and shouting encouragement. Powledge saw at least one Confederate battle flag in evidence as segregationists jeered the troops, shouting "Yankee go home" and "Why don't you go to Cuba?" By the time the dust settled in Oxford, two people were dead and 160 U.S. marshals had been injured. (45)

White residents of Jackson had also been outraged by the developments at Ole Miss. On the day before the campus riot, demonstrators thronged the streets of the capital to exhibit their solidarity with the governor. Many of them waved Confederate banners or sported Confederate uniforms. Doubtless these were members of Mississippi Grey units, who had purchased their cotton tunics, hats, and trousers for $21.50 during the previous year's centennial observances. Official figures indicated that there were over 3,200 members of the state's centennial militia by 1962. Evidently some of these men stood ready to defend the cause of the white South against the forces of integration and Kennedy's "Bayonet Democracy." (46)

Barnett's shrill yet ultimately fruitless attempt to prevent the integration of the state university rendered the Ole Miss crisis the high tide of quasi-Confederate resistance during the early 1960s--the Pickett's Charge of the centennial years. By late 1962, however, any possibility that the centennial would become a major weapon in the cultural armory of bitter-enders had evaporated. Southern state commissions had begun to worry about a decline in public enthusiasm for the commemoration and struggled to find ways of reviving grassroots interest. After a less than successful reenactment of Antietam in September 1962, sham battles fell into disfavor, leaving state agencies and communities to encourage more sober (and cheaper) ceremonies. As many as 80,000 people may have attended one of the most ambitious events of the second half of the centennial: the extended program that took place at Vicksburg in late June and early July 1963. Even here, however, the organizers passed up the opportunity to replay the famous siege in favor of a "serious commemoration," involving church and memorial services, a historical seminar, a ball, a parade, and fireworks. Areas that had not been centers of significant military activity during the 1860s often lacked the will to hold any events, though in counties where civic leaders and organizations retained an interest in the Civil War, smaller-scale tributes such as essay contests, local parades, and the placement of historical markers did continue. A desire to commemorate the Civil War therefore persisted, but the centennial itself had lost whatever power it had possessed to generate unifying white racial and regional pride. (47)

It is not immediately apparent why this was the case. In some parts of the Deep South, especially rural areas, the segregationist defense of southern customs grew stronger as pressure from the civil rights movement intensified. Why, then, at a time when the potent combination of black assertiveness and federal power seriously threatened Jim Crow, did local southern whites not embrace the centennial in even larger numbers than they had done at the outset?

There are three main answers to this question. The first is that direct analogies to the experience of the Confederacy became less useful to segregationists with the passage of time. By the end of 1962 there were simply fewer and fewer southern victories to celebrate. A hundred years earlier the Confederacy had been on the defensive, its chances of winning independence reduced by the day, as northern mobilization gathered pace and southern manpower was cut down by disease and Yankee bullets. Even the most talented entrepreneur would have found it difficult to generate widespread enthusiasm for a reenactment of those campaigns and actions that had led to the slow constriction of the southern nation: Tullahoma, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Atlanta, Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and the siege of Petersburg. In this sense white southerners' disillusionment with the centennial paralleled the dispiriting progress of the Civil War itself.

Deliberate efforts by the national commission to take the political heat out of centennial observances constituted a second reason for waning popular enthusiasm for the Confederate past. The replacement of Grant and Betts with two accomplished professional historians in November 1961 was the most obvious signal of a major policy shift on the part of the federal agency. Instead of encouraging Americans to view the centennial as a spectator sport, the new CWCC chiefs, Allan Nevins and James Robertson, urged them to treat it as a more high-toned, academic, and inclusive exercise. This approach was most apparent in the commission's attempts to encourage the publication of the papers of Ulysses S. Grant and Jefferson Davis and to initiate a series of scholarly works on various aspects of the war, including volumes on the roles of African Americans and women. To some extent these activities may have run counter to the original goal of fostering grassroots participation in the Civil War Centennial. An embittered Karl Betts sneered that a good proportion of the CWCC's budget would be spent "in paying fees to historians to write about the Civil War" and that only "a fraction of 1% of the American people" would participate actively in the centennial. His comments were not without substance, but the strategy of Nevins and Robertson did at least have the advantage of lessening the possibility for divisive political conflict. (48)

In this respect the response of the region's state commissions to the new approach was critical. Staffed by white southerners with very definite ideas about the legitimacy of the Confederate cause, these agencies possessed the ability to provide further embarrassment to the federal government should they decide to air their sectional grievances in public. In the wake of the changes in CWCC personnel, southern states were particularly worried that national officials might try to use the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as a prelude to major civil fights initiatives. This was because movement leaders had begun to intensify their pressure on Washington, and black historians were urging African Americans to contest the white South's apparent domination of the centennial. (49) A more radical shift in the CWCC's priorities certainly seemed imminent to apprehensive southern state commissioners.

Their immediate concern was the plan for a public ceremony to mark the issuing of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, scheduled to take place at the Lincoln Memorial on September 22. (50) Southern whites mobilized quickly to stymie any attempt on the part of the federal authorities to turn this event into a civil rights extravaganza. At a meeting of the Confederate States Centennial Conference early in the new year, delegates resolved that:

   we believe it would be a mistake for the National Civil War Commission to
   engage in any activity, or to promote in any way any program that could, or
   would, be considered by any section of our nation as propaganda for any
   cause that would tend to offend the people of any section of our nation,
   whether North or South, and to reopen the wounds of war. We are therefore
   of the opinion that the National Commission should strictly confine its
   activities and programs to such as tend to further the real purpose of this
   Centennial Commemoration. (51)

Although the national commission tried to calm southern white fears at the planning stage by providing for only token black representation at the Lincoln Memorial and by envisaging the whole ceremony as a celebration of Cold War freedoms, the implicit threat of a withdrawal of southern support for official centennial observances remained. James Robertson, the CWCC's executive director, then supplied further balm by insisting that the only way to guarantee the South's grudging acceptance of the emancipation program was to restrict the commission's involvement. His plan was to go south and personally ask for the support of John May, the staunch segregationist who chaired the Confederate States Conference. "Our southern friends are waiting warily and watching with skepticism whatever course of action we pursue," Robertson wrote nervously to Nevins on February 12. "We must move with tact, impartiality and understanding; if we do not, I know for a fact that the eleven Southern states will withdraw all alliance with us. This could prove fatal once the Southern congressmen flex their muscles." (52)

Robertson conferred with May in Columbia, South Carolina, at the end of February. They agreed that the emancipation event not be a full-blown project of the federal agency but should instead be co-sponsored by the CWCC and several other organizations, including the District of Columbia Centennial Commission and the Lincoln Group of Washington, D.C. Perhaps swayed by Robertson's protestations of loyalty to the South, May reported that his visitor was "in accord with our thinking in that he strongly believes the centennial should be a commemoration of the true events of history and no political issues should be brought into it in any way." (53)

Although protests from civil rights activists prompted the last-minute inclusion of an African American speaker, jurist Thurgood Marshall, the emancipation ceremony in Washington proved to be sufficiently low-key and apolitical to satisfy those southern whites who bothered to show up. (54) Once the danger point of the emancipation ceremony had passed, relations between the CWCC and the Confederate States Conference improved. May and his colleagues were realistic enough to know that a depoliticized centennial was the best they could hope for in the tense racial climate of the mid-1960s. As long as the CWCC declined to make political capital out of the anniversary of emancipation, southern agencies seemed prepared to follow the new lead set by the national commission. Significantly, as southern elites began to prize economic development over Jim Crow in the 1960s, local centennial officials appeared willing to comply with the CWCC's now adamant insistence that its events be integrated. For example, when Robertson made the CWCC's position on biracial participation clear prior to the commemoration of the Union triumph at Vicksburg in July 1963, Mayor John D. Holland (who was chairman of the Mississippi commission) bowed quietly to Robertson's wishes. (55)

The Vicksburg mayor's acquiescence suggests the third and most important answer to the question of why the centennial soon lost its power to mobilize southern whites to resistance on the basis of the Confederate past: namely, the fact that in the middle of the twentieth century most southern whites lacked the desire to push sectional tensions to the breaking point. To some extent this was a consequence of the massive growth in federal power since the Second World War. The southern governors who dressed up in Confederate uniforms during early 1961 knew perfectly well that as the final resort the federal government would use troops to enforce the law of the land--hence the governors' failure to offer practical support to Ross Barnett during the showdown at Ole Miss. (56) But it was not simply a question of power (or, for that matter, federal largesse) that discouraged renewed sectionalism. Popular support for the centennial waned quickly because most white southerners, regardless of their views on the merits of segregation, viewed themselves as loyal Americans in the fight against communism. As Fred Powledge had observed, even the howling mob at Ole Miss had been frustrated that the federal troops sent to Oxford had not gone to Cuba--to the real enemy--instead. Clearly sectional antagonism did increase during the early 1960s under the press of events, and, as the Meredith crisis revealed, patriotism was not necessarily incompatible with a determination to defend Jim Crow. Yet the very fact that some influential southern conservatives strove to channel centennial emotions into the fight against communism is a sure sign that Confederate theater was of limited utility to political elites in the region.

One of the best instances of a well-known southern politician working toward the consensual goals of the national Civil War Centennial Commission was a speech delivered by U.S. senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the "Confederate Day" ceremonies in Vicksburg on August 19, 1962. Instead of blasting the federal government for its attacks on Jim Crow as one might have expected, Thurmond, though no friend of integration, used the occasion to teach a contemporary military lesson. The Confederate defenders at Vicksburg, he argued, suffered defeat because they had failed to come to terms with the unorthodox campaign tactics of the enemy. This mistake, concluded the senator, had important lessons for Cold War America. "The communist offensive," he insisted:

   is a war of maneuver. It is a war in which we are now engaged. While we
   must, of course, be prepared for any type of war, even to the extent of
   being prepared for a nuclear exchange if necessary; at the same time we
   must concentrate on the type of war which is now occurring. Unless we stem
   and reverse the tide of the cold war, we may well find ourselves encircled
   and left with no alternative but to make a final desperate stand, which,
   like that of the besieged Confederates within Vicksburg, was limited from
   the outset to at best a temporary postponement of ultimate defeat. (57)

Attempts by influential conservatives like Thurmond to use the centennial as a weapon in the global struggle against communism reflected and molded a steely grassroots Americanism that found concrete form not in a serious Confederate revival but in a surge of support for the kind of superpatriotic, states' rights Republicanism that enabled Barry Goldwater to carry five Deep South states in the 1964 presidential election. Although Republican party-builders in the region were not averse to using Confederate symbols to promote their cause, their activities can hardly be described as backward-looking. Indeed, by promoting the development of a genuine two-party system in the region, those activities were essentially modernizing. The Cold War conservatism of Strom Thurmond (himself a supporter of Goldwater's candidacy) certainly embraced opposition to civil rights legislation, but its underlying thrust was national in the sense that its hostility to communism and devotion to a particular definition of American freedom transcended an attachment to section. (58)

In the spring of 1961 African American leaders had worded seriously about the danger of a neo-Confederate resurgence linked to the centennial. By the end of 1962 those fears had largely evaporated. In the Deep South, however, where bitter-enders were still holding out in the face of widespread civil rights activism, segregationists did not abandon completely their attempts to make political capital out of the centennial events. This persistence was revealed most clearly by George C. Wallace's decision to attend the commemoration for the one hundredth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in July 1963.

The newly inaugurated governor of Alabama had a clear idea about the central place of the Civil War not only in the history of the American South but also in the contemporary politics of the region. His own great-grandfather had been wounded at Lookout Mountain in 1863, and Wallace had fond boyhood memories of listening to the reminiscences of Confederate veterans. From personal experience he understood the close correlation between the Confederate past and the modern racial order. Moreover, after his gubernatorial defeat in 1958 at the hands of the demagogic John Patterson, he knew the power of white supremacist appeals to sway the voters. Wallace had been elected governor in 1962 as a committed defender of segregation and was inaugurated in the midst of Rebel yells on the same site where Jefferson Davis had accepted the presidency of the Confederate States of America. Wallace thus recognized the potency of Civil War symbols. One of his first acts as governor was to rename the Alabama Highway Patrol the "Alabama State Troopers" and to command the placement of a Confederate battle flag on the bumper of each car. In the days leading up to his stage-managed resistance to court-ordered integration of the state university, he quoted Alabama's fire-eating secessionist, William Lowndes Yancey, and had the battle flag flown over the state capitol in order to intimidate Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who flew to Montgomery in a vain effort to defuse the impending crisis at Tuscaloosa. (59)

Within weeks of his "stand at the schoolhouse door," Wallace journeyed to Gettysburg, where a Pennsylvania agency had organized a grand commemoration of the famous battle. On July 1 he placed a wreath on the monument to the Alabamians who had fallen on the field, and he then predicted "that descendants of both sides of the Civil War will soon be united in a common fight to end the growing power of a central government." Later in the day he joined other state governors in a solemn ceremony at the Eternal Light Peace Memorial. Rebel yells could be heard as he stepped forward to lay his own floral tribute. "This is a solemn occasion," he told watching newsmen. "We stand with the descendants of brave men who fought for the North and South, and we will stand for defense of the Constitution [of the United States]." (60)

On one level Wallace's appearance at the Gettysburg commemoration struck a jarring note. His public attack on the federal government (which was inseparable from his support for racial segregation) conflicted with the increasingly popular, emancipationist interpretation of the Civil War propounded at the Gettysburg ceremonies by Theodore Hesburgh, chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and Governor Richard Hughes of New Jersey, among others. Yet Wallace was contemptuous of such liberals. He had gone to Gettysburg in part to strengthen his southern base with a popular show of reverence for the defenders of the Lost Cause. The governor, however, was no ordinary southern politician. In contrast to Ross Barnett, whose defiance during the Ole Miss crisis had underscored a narrow, sectional appeal, Wallace harbored national ambitions. He understood that white southerners were not the only Americans fearful of black assertiveness and big government. As his remarks at Gettysburg indicated, he aimed to recreate himself as a credible national politician--one who could transcend his regional base by appealing to the inchoate fears of many northern as well as southern whites. What America needed, he told reporters in Pennsylvania, was "a Southern president in the White House." The following year Wallace attempted to transform pretension into reality by entering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. He performed surprisingly well, winning sizable shares of the vote in primary elections in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland on a platform that merged none-too-subtle racism with appeals to old-time religion and his familiar attacks on centralized government. (61)

Wallace's efforts to reach out to conservatives across the United States may have met with some success in 1964, but his enthusiasm for Confederate symbols was not shared by all southern whites, let alone northerners. Even though he used the centennial as an excuse for flying the battle flag atop the capitol in Montgomery, his action proved to be especially controversial at a time when the Rebel banner was much in evidence as the segregationists' most recognizable emblem of defiance. Significant numbers of local people complained about the governor's apparent lack of national patriotism. One Baptist minister from Birmingham, for example, described himself as an opponent of integration but averred that his grandfather had fought for the Confederacy and had died a bitter old man. "There is no place today for any display that will. arouse bitterness, old hatreds," he wrote. "We are Americans first, Alabamans second, and rebels in the past!" A female correspondent of the Montgomery Advertiser concurred. Her late grandfather, another Confederate veteran, had "tucked away the Confederate flag" and proudly adopted the Stars and Stripes after losing two sons in World War I. "He was a gentleman of the old school," she added boldly, "and would be dismayed at the disgraceful use of the Confederate flag by men who flaunt it for political expediency and the ignorant element joined unfortunately by gullible children who follow them blindly." The most outspoken criticism came from another Alabama woman who denounced the governor's policy as "childish, impudent, and utterly stupid." Southerners, she insisted, had no alternative but to accept that, in the wake of the recent Civil Rights Act, "changes in the `Southern Way of Life' are going to be made. PLEASE GOD, CAN'T WE ACCEPT THESE INESCAPABLE CHANGES WITH SOME SHRED OF DIGNIT??" (62)

After Gettysburg there were no major centennial opportunities for southern politicians like Wallace to grasp. Commemorative events were few and far between in 1964, a year in which southern whites were more concerned with dealing with the advance of federal civil rights legislation than with recalling the death throes of the southern nation. At its annual meeting early in the year, the Confederate States Centennial Conference opposed any attempt to inject "political issues" (a euphemism for civil rights) into commemorative events. At the same time, it eschewed controversial sectional appeals and adhered closely to the official centennial line by stressing that the Civil War had "reunited our country into a strong Nation." (63) The southern delegates were probably gratified that the CWCC was scheduled to hold its annual conference in Atlanta later in the year. Initially, Bell Wiley had feared a repeat of the Fort Sumter disaster, but a relieved James Robertson discovered no opposition to the commission's requirement that the venue be an integrated one. (64)

There was little enthusiasm for what was virtually the last act of the centennial, a dull ceremony to mark the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, held under appropriately leaden skies at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1965. If this quiet finale was partly a result of the declining interest in the centennial that had been apparent throughout much of the South since late 1962, it was also a product of the Virginia commission's conscious decision to play down the centenary of Lee's defeat. James Geary, a leading member of the state agency, had hoped to organize a grand pageant with a colorful flag display, but others on the commission saw no reason to commemorate the final destruction of the Confederacy with anything other than a simple ceremony. One member, Geary reported, even opined that "he would rather see the place draped in crepe." Nevertheless, several thousand people, many of them battle reenactors dressed in period costume, attended the observances at Appomattox, which occurred less than a month after the introduction of a comprehensive voting rights bill into Congress. Some of the spectators burst into applause when the U.S. Marine Band broke into "Dixie," but the general air of the proceedings was more respectful than defiant. (65)

In the aftermath of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's dramatic Selma campaign, southern newspapers greeted the close of the centennial with mixed emotions. Perhaps the most pointed reflections were found in the Birmingham News, an increasingly outspoken foe of George Wallace:

      Four years ago we began a Civil War Centennial memorialization. It
   foundered and we have not heard much about it in some time. Perhaps it was
   just as well. The time during which the centennial observance fell has been
   a troubled time, and the trouble is not over yet.

      Today we think back in a quiet tribute to the courage and sacrifices of
   those who fell during the terrible four years, men in blue as well as gray.
   The Union was preserved. Though southern advocacy lingers, surely none can
   regret the victory did assure the Union, without any right of secession.
   Had that not been the outcome, we would not be strong enough today to stand
   for our own and the freedom of others throughout the world. (66)

This reassertion of the nationalist line on the Civil War by one of Alabama's most influential newspapers spoke volumes. While the centennial had evoked bitter memories of the past, it seemed evident by its close that the vast majority of white southerners were not prepared to allow those memories to thwart the progress of either the region or the wider nation.

A study of local responses to the centennial can only tell us so much about the state of white opinion during the early 1960s. The last years of Jim Crow were characterized in several parts of the South by sustained and sometimes lethal violence directed against civil rights workers. Confederate symbols, especially the battle flag, continued to be used in the struggle against racial equality long after the centennial had been forgotten. However, this investigation suggests that there were limits to southern white resistance in the 1960s. The sobering fact of wartime defeat and its widespread acceptance had been part of the region's collective consciousness since the late nineteenth century. (67) Both imposed constraints on the appeal of the centennial to segregationists and on the strength of opposition to desegregation. New South boosterism also acted as a deterrent to unbridled sectionalism, as political elites and pragmatic businessmen urged local people to pursue the goal of economic growth--a glittering prize that seemed increasingly incompatible with a dogged attachment to Jim Crow. Deep-rooted American patriotism, which was intense during the early 1960s, constituted another brake on unrestrained sectional passions, even though the close relationship between southern anticommunism and opposition to integration ensured that patriotism as such was never a reliable guarantee against unlawful behavior.

During the early 1960s growing numbers of southern whites became reconciled to the demise of de jure segregation. They did so not because of any sea change in historical memory occasioned by the centennial but as a result of pressure emanating from the civil rights movement. Two weeks before the closing ceremony at Appomattox, the Birmingham News had responded to the fallout from the Selma campaign by criticizing Alabama's political leaders for endangering the state's future. Although this action prompted a number of hostile responses in the paper's letter columns, several readers admitted that the days of Jim Crow were numbered. "We have listened so often to Gov. Wallace make alibis and proclaim `segregation forever,"' wrote one of them, "that many of us apparently believe that it can last forever and that it is our inherited right to deny the Negro his right to vote. I have lived in Alabama all my life, and I love the South; but I feel I live in America--not the Confederacy. If it is wrong to discriminate in America, it is wrong in Alabama." While this statement may be regarded as a harbinger of social change, there were still limits on the degree to which national pride could liberate the mind of the white southerner in the 1960s. "I say we should stop feeling sorry for ourselves and start cleaning up our own backyard," continued the correspondent. "Then we can watch New York and Chicago squirm when the riots start again this summer." (68) All across the Southland many a gray ghost of the Confederacy must have nodded silently in agreement.

(1) Studies highlighting the significance of southern white attitudes during the early 1960s include Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge and London, 1982); David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore and London, 1994); and Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, eds., The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville and London, 1998). I wish to thank Richard Carwardine, Andrea Greengrass, Patrick Renshaw, Hugh Wilford, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History for their helpful comments on a draft of this article.

(2) Among the most influential state and community studies of the civil rights movement are William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York and Oxford, 1980); David R. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980 (New York and other cities, 1985); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago, 1994); Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995); Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995); and Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill and London, 1997).

(3) There is no full-length account of the Civil War Centennial. Interpretive overviews are provided by Robert G. Hartje, Bicentennial USA: Pathways to Celebration (Nashville, 1973), 60-93; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 590-610; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992), 206-26; Robert Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma: The Impact of the Civil War Centennial on the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States, 1961-65," in Brian Ward and Tony Badger, eds., The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (Basingstoke, Eng., and London, 1996; Washington Square, N.Y., 1996), 131-46; and Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming/The Russians Are Coming/Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (New York and Oxford, 1998), 119-37.

(4) C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge and London, 1986), 61.

(5) On historical memory see, for example, Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory; Bodnar, Remaking America; and Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1999). Recent studies of southern memory include W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill and London, 2000); and David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge, 2002).

(6) David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2001). Although the rise of revisionist and Beardian interpretations in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered weaknesses in the nationalist orthodoxy, the failure of both these schools of thought to deal effectively with the racial dimensions of the conflict ensured that ordinary white Americans thought about slavery, the war, and Reconstruction in 1960 as they had in 1900. The New Deal period and the subsequent global struggle against fascism and communism did alert a new generation of scholars to the enormity of the moral crusade against racial inequality in the mid-nineteenth century, hut it would take the civil rights struggle of the modern era to give such work significant purchase among ordinary people. Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (Princeton, 1954); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 224-39, 348-60.

(7) On the black countermemory see Blight, Race and Reunion, 300-337; and Blight, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Straggle for American Historical Memory," in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Mealley, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York and Oxford, 1994), 45-71.

(8) On the origins of the CWCC see Victor Gondos Jr., "Karl S. Betts and the Civil War Centennial Commission," Military Affairs, 27 (Summer 1963), 49-70, esp. 52-57. The agency's Cold War origins are emphasized in Fried, Russians Are Coming! 123. See also Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 592-93.

(9) Joseph J. Thorndike, "`The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation': James J. Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign against Brown," in Lassiter and Lewis, eds., Moderates' Dilemma, 51-71.

(10) On the waning of massive resistance in the late 1950s see Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950's (Baton Rouge, 1969), 320-39; Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), 179-283; Tony Badger, "Fatalism, Not Gradualism: The Crisis of Southern Liberalism, 1945-65," in Ward and Badger, eds., Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, 86 (quotation).

(11) Virginia Travel Council, "Fact Sheet on Virginia's Travel Economy," [1958], Folder on "Travel--Virginia Travel Council," Box 104, General Subject File 1957-1966, Records of the Civil War Centennial Commission, in Records of the National Park Service, Record Group 79 (National Archives, College Park, Md.), hereinafter cited as RG 79; J. Lindsay Almond, "Remarks on the Civil War Centennial at the National Governors' Conference, May 1958," Folder on "Mayors' Conference," Box 86, Subject File, RG 79. Almond's shift away from massive resistance is charted in James W. Ely Jr., The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance (Knoxville, 1976), 122-43.

(12) Stanley F. Horn to Gilbert E. Govan, March 4, 1959, Stanley F. Horn Papers (Tennessee Historical Society Collections, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tenn.), microfilm #1115, reel 5, frame 620 (quotation); Karl S. Betts to Ulysses S. Grant III, October 30, 1958, Box 2, Reading File 1958-66, RG 79; 100 Years After [the CWCC's monthly newsletter], 3 (January 1960), [1].

(13) Charlotte Capers to J. Lindsay Almond, February 12, 1959, Folder on "Mississippi Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 3, Records of the Virginia Civil War Centennial Commission (Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va.), hereinafter cited as VaCWCC.

(14) Frank E. Everett Jr. to Karl S. Betts, May 30, 1960, Folder on "Betts, Karl S.," Box 708, Series 789, Records of the Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States, Record Group 19 (Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss.), hereinafter cited as Miss. Comm. Records. Dan Wakefield, in "Civil War Centennial: Bull Run with Popcorn," The Nation, 190 (January 30, 1960), 95, erred when he stated that Mississippi had appropriated $500,000.

(15) Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States, Mississippi in the War Between the States: A Booklet of Facts for the Information of Mississippians in Connection with the Observance of the Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Jackson, Miss., 1960), 3 (first quotation), 14 (second quotation).

(16) Lyon G. Tyler, "Remarks to the Virginia Broadcasters' Association," June 30, 1960, Folder on "Virginia Association of Broadcasters," Box 1, VaCWCC. Tyler's illustrious pedigree is revealed in Mrs. W. N. Gemmill Jr. to Suzie Hawkins, February 5, 1962, Folder on "Operations, Grass Roots Ideas," Box 1, VaCWCC.

(17) Virginia Civil War Centennial Commission, "Suggestions for Local Committees: The Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965," Folder on "Grassroots Organization," Box 1, VaCWCC.

(18) Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission, Civil War Centennial: Manual for Georgians [Atlanta, 1960], 13, in Folder on "Georgia Civil War Centennial Committee," Box 3, VaCWCC; Tyler, "Remarks to the Virginia Broadcasters' Association"; J. Lindsay Almond to Orval Faubus, January 26, 1959, Folder on "Mississippi Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 3, VaCWCC.

(19) "The American Civil War is ended, long live America," announced Folsom, in characteristically irreverent fashion during his 1962 gubernatorial campaign. Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, Big Mules and Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama (Athens, Ga., 1985), 231. Business-progressives ready to link themselves to the Confederate past when it suited them included Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield, who greeted the English actress Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) with "an armful of red roses" when she arrived in his city for a gala showing of Gone With the Wind in March 1961, and North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Raleigh's "Confederate Festival" the following month. See Atlanta Constitution, March 10, 1961, p. 1; and Terry Sanford to Stanley R. Smith, April 22, 1961, Folder on "Confederate States CWCCs: Mississippi CWCC, 1960-64," Box 1, RCB 7548, Records of the Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission, Record Group 079-01-001 (Georgia State Archives, Atlanta, Ga.), hereinafter cited as GaCWCC.

(20) James P. Coleman, The Effect of the Civil War on Mississippi, 1865-1958: An Address Delivered by Governor J. P. Coleman Before the Jackson Civil War Round Table, November 21, 1958. Repeated on WLBT-Television, November 25, 1958 (n.p., n.d.), 1 (first quotation), 6 (second quotation), in Folder on "Mississippi Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 3, VaCWCC. On Coleman's political problems see Dewey W. Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington, Ky., 1988), 132.

(21) Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States, Civil War and Ante-Bellum History in Mississippi (n.p., n.d.), 11, in Folder on "Mississippi Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 3, VaCWCC; Peter Zack Geer to H. Lee Fulton Jr., June 8, 1960, Folder on "Chatham County, Savannah CWCC," Box 2, GaCWCC, RG 079-01-001; Mary Givens Bryan to S. Ernest Vandiver, January 26, 1959, GaCWCC, RG 079-02-004; Walker Percy, "Red, White, and BlueGray" (1961), in Patrick Samway, ed., Signposts in a Strange Land (New York, 1991), 82.

(22) Karl S. Betts to William M. Tuck, October 6, 1958, Box 4, Reading File, RG 79; Allen P. Julian to Betts, July 10, 1958, Box 6, Reading File, RG 79 (quotations). Julian's reference to Bell Wiley may have been criticism of the role that Wiley had played in trying to integrate the annual conference of the Southern Historical Association in 1949. See John Herbert Roper, "Strange Careers Indeed!" in Roper, ed., C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Athens, Ga., and London, 1997), 170.

(23) Karl S. Betts to William M. Tuck, August 22, 1958, Box 4, Reading File, RG 79; Betts to Ulysses S. Grant III, September 22, 1958, Box 2, Reading File, RG 79; Wakefield, "Civil War Centennial," 97 (quotation). Grant's racial conservatism had come to light in 1949 when he was criticized by the radical journalist I. F. Stone for helping real estate interests perpetuate segregation ordinances in Washington, D.C. See Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 592.

(24) See, for example, Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Woolley to Ulysses S. Grant III, March 11, 1958, and Peyton Anderson to Grant, August 4, 1958, both in Folder on "Complaints re Committee," Box 6, Subject File, RG 79.

(25) Montgomery Advertiser, January 8, 1961, pp. 1B, 4B (first and second quotations), January 11, 1961, p. 6A (third and fourth quotations), January 15, 1961, p. 4D, January 18, 1961, p. 6A, January 22, 1961, p. 5B, January 29, 1961, pp. 1A, 1B, and February 8, 1961, p. 1A (fifth quotation).

(26) Ibid., February 18, 1961, pp. 1A, 7A, February 19, 1961 [the centennial edition], pp. IA, 2A, 5C, February 20, 1961, p. 2A, and February 27, 1961, p. 4A; David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), 55.

(27) Montgomery Advertiser, February 13, 1961, p. 1A.

(28) Ibid., January 29, 1961, pp. 1A, 2A, and February 3, 1961, p. 3C (quotation).

(29) Ibid., February 27, 1961, p. 4A. On Jones's role as a persecutor of the Alabama NAACP see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York and other cities, 1995), 92-93.

(30) Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 26, 1961, p. 2E (first quotation), and March 27, 1961, p. 2 (second quotation).

(31) Ibid., March 29, 1961, pp. 1, 12. There is a brief reference to the March 1961 civil fights demonstrations in John R. Salter Jr., Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism (Hicksville, N.Y., 1979; reprint, Malabar, Fla., 1987), 7-8.

(32) For an overview of events at Charleston see Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma," 137-39. The critical role played by Bell Wiley and the White House aides in fashioning the naval station compromise is detailed in Wiley to Seale Johnson, March 26, 1961, and Wiley to Charles O'Neill, March 30, 1961, both in Box 62, Series 2, Bell I. Wiley Papers (Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.); and Donald Flamm to Robert M. Meyner, April 9, 1961, Box 7, Records of the New Jersey Civil War Centennial Commission (New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, N.J.). The final report of the national CWCC in 1966 admitted that the Fort Sumter controversy had "aroused angry sectional discord, plunged the National Commission into the racial tensions of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, and inflicted heavy damage on both the Commission and the Centennial." It described the decision to choose a segregated hotel for the annual meeting as "an egregious error." CWCC, "Report of the Civil War Centennial Commission," [1966], Box 25, Subject File, RG 79.

(33) Charleston News and Courier, March 14, 1961, p. 8A (first quotation), and March 15, 1961, p. 1A (third, fourth, and sixth quotations); Columbia State, March 25, 1961, p. 1A (second quotation); Brett Bursey, "The Day the Flag Went Up," Point, 10 (Fall 1999), available online at http://www.scpronet.com/point/9909/p04.html (accessed August 27, 2002)--a hard copy is available in Folder on "Flag, Confederate, Controversy," Vertical File, Modern Political Collections (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.) (fifth quotation).

(34) Columbia State, April 12, 1961, p. 2A; New York Times, April 12, 1961, pp. 1, 36; Atlanta Constitution, April 12, 1961, p.17; Boston Globe, April 13, 1961, pp. 1, 45.

(35) Bell I. Wiley to Charles O'Neill, March 30, 1961, Box 62, Series 2, Wiley Papers.

(36) Bell I. Wiley to John Harrison, April 10, 1961, Box 62, Series 2, Wiley Papers (first quotation); Atlanta Constitution, April 8, 1961, p. 1 (subsequent quotations).

(37) New York Times, April 23, 1961, sec. 1, p. 74 (first quotation); A. Philip Randolph to Howard N. Meyer, July 13, 1961, Bayard Rustin Papers (microfilm; Frederick, Md., 1988), reel 2, frame 106 (second quotation).

(38) Karl S. Betts to Ulysses S. Grant III, June 5, 1961, Box 9, Reading File, RG 79.

(39) Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma," 132; New York Times, July 23, 1961, sec. 1, pp. 1, 44, July 24, 1961, p. 8 (first quotation), and July 29, 1961, p. 18 (fourth quotation); New York Herald Tribune, July 22, 1961 (second quotation), and Jamestown (N.Y.) Sun, July 29, 1961 (third quotation), both in Scrapbooks and Clippings, Box 1, Records of the New York Civil War Centennial Commission, A208-78 (New York State Archives, Albany, N.Y.).

(40) Holiday quoted in Columbia Record, June 30, 1961, p. 4A.

(41) Transcript of CWCC executive committee special meeting, Folder on "August 30, 1961--Agenda & Minutes (full)," Box 57, Subject File, RG 79; Bell I. Wiley to "Dear Johnny," September 11, 1961, Box 64, Series 2, Wiley Papers. Grant's anger was palpable not only in his remarks at the meeting but also in a letter to well-known Civil War historian Bruce Catton, September 8, 1961, Box 8, Reading File, RG 79. After Grant reviewed the circumstances behind what he regarded as Betts's unfair dismissal, he told Catton that he had resigned because his wife's infirmity did not permit him to continue, "subject to such arbitrary and inconsiderate demands on my time...."

(42) New York Times, December 5, 1961, p. 31. Even though the activities of the civil rights movement and the departure of Betts and Grant led the CWCC to consider a serious commemoration of emancipation, one of the agency's leading policymakers warned of the potential for controversy. Any such event, he said, "would require sensitive and judicious action. In 1962 and 1963 this will be no less imperative[,] for the Proclamation's Centennial may be highly charged and potentially explosive." Edmund G. Gass to Fred Schwengel, October 5, 1961 (memorandum), Box 10, Reading File, RG 79. Gass was a white Tennessean.

(43) Ross R. Barnett, speech to Confederate States Civil War Centennial Conference, November 3, 1961, Folder on "Confederate States Centennial Conference (11 States)," Box 107, Subject File, RG 79.

(44) Montgomery Advertiser, September 28, 1962, p. 1A (quotation). A full and dramatic account of the events at Ole Miss can be found in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York and other cities, 1988), 662-72.

(45) Atlanta Journal, October 1, 1962, p. 1; Branch, Parting the Waters, 668-69.

(46) Jackson Clarion-Ledger, October 2, 1962, p. 6 (quotation); Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States, Join the Mississippi Greys: A Guide for the Organization of Units of Mississippi's Centennial Military Force in Memoriam (h.p., n.d.), Folder on "Mississippi State Commission," Box 117, Subject File, RG 79; Report of the Mississippi Commission on the War between the States (Jackson, Miss., 1962), 10, Box 117, Subject File, RG 79.

(47) For evidence that the centennial was beginning to decline in popularity by the fall of 1962 see Sidney T. Roebuck to James J. Geary, November 1, 1962, Folder on "Conf. States Centennial Conf.--Admin.," Box 2, VaCWCC; and James I. Robertson to Roebuck, November 7, 1962, Folder on "Mississippi State Commission," Box 117, Subject File, RG 79. Even in Virginia, where local support for the centennial was probably greatest, a statewide survey in late 1962 noted that interest in the commemoration was patchy: "General apathy and lack of public interest was reported by several [county] committees, but the majority reported interest continuing." "Analysis of Replies to Local Committee Questionnaire," Geary to members of VaCWCC Executive Committee, December 26, 1962, Folder on "National Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 2, VaCWCC. On the Vicksburg commemoration see "Summary of Vicksburg Centennial," Folder on "Holland, John D.--Chairman," Box 713, Series 639, Miss. Comm. Records. On the activities of highly motivated groups such as the Civil War Round Tables and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the later stages of the centennial see, for example, Alabama Civil War Centennial Commission, "Newsletter," July 25, 1963, Folder on "Alabama Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 3, VaCWCC; and the collection of Richmond Civil War Round Table newsletters in Folder on "Civil War Round Table of Richmond," Box 43, Subject File, RG 79.

(48) Karl S. Betts to Sidney T. Roebuck, February 27, 1962, Folder on "Betts, Karl S.," Box 708, Series 639, Miss. Comm. Records (quotation). Whereas the northern state commissions played a key role in generating enthusiasm for an edition of the Grant papers, the CWCC initially found its efforts on behalf of the Davis enterprise thwarted by the lack of support from Virginia's Lee-centric centennial commission. James I. Robertson to James J. Geary, October 21, 1962, Box 12, Reading File, RG 79. The project finally got off the ground with the help of a grant of $20,000 from four regional power companies. Albert B. Moore to Robertson, February 28, 1964, Folder on "Alabama Civil War Centennial Commission--1961 ," Box 107, Subject File, RG 79. Paul W. Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965) was the first contribution to the CWCC's Impact of the Civil War series. Leon Litwack was slated to write the study on African Americans; the volume on women was published shortly after the centennial ended. See CWCC, "The Impact Series" (publicity leaflet), Records of the Tennessee Civil War Centennial Commission (Tennessee State Library and Archives), microfilm, reel 3, frames 1526-28; and Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New York, 1966).

(49) On black efforts to contest the centennial see Robert Cook, "African Americans and the Centennial of the Civil War," in Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish, eds., The Enduring Significance of the Civil War (Baton Rouge, forthcoming).

(50) On white southern concerns see Adam G. Adams to James J. Geary, January 11, 1962, Frank E. Smith to Sidney T. Roebuck, January 15, 1962, and Roebuck to John A. May, January 22, 1962, all in Folder on "Conf. States Centennial Conf.--Admin.," Box 2, VaCWCC.

(51) "Resolution of the Confederate States Centennial Conference," January 31, 1962, in Folder on "Conf. States Centennial Conf.--Admin.," Box 2, VaCWCC.

(52) James I. Robertson to Allan Nevins, February 12, 1962, Box 11, Reading File, RG 79. In spite of being an opponent of die-hard segregationists, Robertson's empathy for blacks was, perhaps understandably, no greater than that of most white southern moderates. See, for example, his angry response to black press criticism of the CWCC's handling of the emancipation ceremony in Robertson to John A. May, September 25, 1962, Box 11, Reading File, RG 79. The same conclusion might be inferred from his lukewarm response to a suggestion from Nevins and Bell Wiley that he should deal with the theme of black Union troops in an official booklet he was preparing: "I plan to add a paragraph or two about them in `The Common Soldiers' section. In the full complexity of the war, the contributions of Negroes was [sic] relatively minor. But I agree that, for safety['s] sake, we had best call attention to their deeds." Robertson to Wiley, August 15, 1963, Box 13, Reading File, RG 79.

(53) John A. May to James J. Geary, February 26, 1962, Folder on "Conf. States Centennial Conf.--Admin.," Box 2, VaCWCC. Robertson frequently made a point of emphasizing his southern lineage to assuage the fears of southern centennial officials about the emancipation event; see, for example, Robertson to Stanley R. Smith, February 9, 1962, Box 11, Reading File, RG 79. On Robertson's determination to mollify the southerners by downplaying controversial historical issues, see, for example, his assurance to James J. Geary of the Virginia commission that there would be "no panel or formal discussion ... on the role of the abolitionists" and "no panel or formal discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation" at the CWCC's national meeting in Boston in 1963. Robertson to Geary, December 3, 1962, Folder on "National Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 2, VaCWCC.

(54) For an account of the 1962 emancipation ceremony in Washington see Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma," 141-42; and James J. Geary to members of the Virginia Civil War Centennial Commission Executive Committee, September 24, 1962, Folder on "National Civil War Centennial Commission," Box 2, VaCWCC.

(55) Jacoway and Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation, 1-14; James I. Robertson to Allan Nevins, June 18, June 26, July 8, and August 5, 1963, Box 12, Reading File, RG 79.

(56) For southern governors' reaction to the Ole Miss crisis see Atlanta Journal, October 1, 1962, pp. 4-5.

(57) Strom Thurmond, Address at Vicksburg National Military Park, August 19, 1962, Folder on "Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States--1962," Box 117, Subject File, RG 79.

(58) On Goldwater's 1964 campaign in the Deep South see Bernard Cosman, Five States for Goldwater: Continuity and Change in Southern Presidential Voting Patterns (University, Ala., 1966), 59-91. The Confederate battle flag was featured prominently on the letterhead of the Mississippi Republican State Central Committee in the early 1960s. Karl A. Lamb, "Under One Roof: Barry Goldwater's Campaign Staff," in Bernard Cosman and Robert J. Huckshorn, eds., Republican Politics: The 1964 Campaign and Its Aftermath for the Party (New York, Washington, and London, 1968), 15.

(59) Carter, Politics of Rage, 42-44, 95-96, 105-9, 113, 118-23, 125, 144; E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama (New York and Oxford, 1993).

(60) Montgomery Advertiser, July 2, 1963, pp. 1-2 (quotations); Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma," 143.

(61) Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma," 143-44; Montgomery Advertiser, July 2, 1963, p. 1 (quotation); Carter, Politics of Rage, 202-15.

(62) George C. Wallace to Mary M. Hyland, January 9, 1965, Raymond T. De Armond to Wallace, January 30, 1964, and Mona Smith Boner to Wallace, March 16, 1965, all in Folder 16, Administration Files, Alabama, Governor (1963-1967: Wallace), SG22387 (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Ala.); Montgomery Advertiser, February 13, 1964, p. 4.

(63) Confederate States Centennial Conference, Meeting of February 29-March 1, 1964, Folder on "Confederate States Centennial Conference (11 States)," Box 107, Subject File, RG 79.

(64) James I. Robertson to Allan Nevins, April 30, 1963, Box 12, Reading File, RG 79; Robertson to Bell Wiley, May 9, 1963, Box 13, Reading File, RG 79; Robertson to Nevins, May 4, 1964, Box 13, Reading File, RG 79.

(65) James J. Geary to Kermit Hunter, January 14, 1964, Folder on "Appomattox Centennial Plans," Box 2, VaCWCC (quotation); Cook, "From Shiloh to Selma," 145. Geary told Senator Harry F. Byrd that the Virginia commission had opted for "a simple, dignified ceremony" at Appomattox, with the central theme of "the courage, conviction and devotion of the American fighting man on both sides of the struggle that ended there." Continued Geary, "If we can control the program and hold it to this theme, then the more attention it gets nationally, I believe, the better it will be from our Virginia standpoint." Geary to Byrd, January 31, 1964, Folder on "Appomattox Centennial Plans," Box 2, VaCWCC.

(66) Birmingham News, April 9, 1965, p. 10.

(67) On this theme see Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford, 1987).

(68) Birmingham News, March 28, 1965, p. 1, April 6, 1965, p. 8, and April 7, 1965, p. 10 (quotations).

MR. COOK is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.