Remembering Dixie

Nearly seventy years after the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi, sold itself to Depression-era tourists as a place “Where the Old South Still Lives.” Tourists flocked to view the town’s decaying antebellum mansions, hoop-skirted hostesses, and a pageant saturated in sentimental Lost Cause imagery. Organized by the town’s female garden club, the Pilgrimage created a popular culture experience that appealed to 1930s tourists. This book traces how the selective white historical memories of a small southern community originated from the hardships of the Civil War, changed over time, and culminated in a successful heritage tourism enterprise still in business today. Simultaneously, this study examines the ways in which Natchez African Americans contested this selective narrative to create a short lived but distinctive post-emancipation identity. This book demonstrates that southern memory making was never monolithic or static but was continuously shaped and reshaped by the unique dynamics of a community’s class, gender, racial, and social complexities. In the course of revealing how historical memory evolved in Natchez, this book contributes new insights on the periodization of Lost Cause ideology and the gendering of historical memory. Covering the period from the tumultuous early post-Civil War years through the economic hardships of the Great Depression, Remembering Dixie reveals that historical memory is often a contested process. Perhaps most importantly, this study helps to reclaim some of the earliest post-emancipation black memories that were nearly erased when white males reclaimed political power in the late 1870s.