Welcome to Working History, a podcast produced for the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org. I'm series host Beth English and today I'm speaking with Blaine Roberts and Ethan J. Kydell, both our professors of history at California State University Fresno.
Today we're discussing their co-authored book, Denmark Visis Garden, Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, published by the new press. Blaine Roberts and Ethan Kydell, welcome to Working History. Thanks for having us. Thank you.
It has my pleasure. What was your motivation for writing Denmark Visis Garden? And what gap do you see the book filling in the historical narrative? Well, our motivation really starts with some personal experiences that we had back in the mid 2000s.
Ethan and I both had our PhDs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We finished in 2004, 2005, he was 2004, I was at five. And our first jobs were in Charleston, South Carolina. So in the summer of 2005, it was time for us to go look for a place to live in Charleston.
So we left Chapel Hill for a weekend trip. I got to Charleston and had a list of apartments to look at. It turned out that the first apartment on our list was the basement of a really beautiful antebellum home. And if we've been to Charleston before, you know what we're talking about.
It's a really stunning city. So we ranked the doorbell and the homeowner welcomed us inside the basement unit and we were looking at it, walking around and just kind of making small talk as you do. Talking about and asking questions about the historical construction of the home and who the owners were before the Civil War. At one point, I said, well, how would this space that we're looking at, how would this have been used by the original owners?
And the homeowner said, well, this would have been the workspace of the servants. And I kind of instinctively replied, you know, I just got my PhD in history. I'm not quite full of research. But I kind of instinctively replied, oh, you mean the workspace of the slaves?
And then she countered, no, the servants. And she said, there's no evidence in the historical record that they weren't paid, which is a really interesting grammatical construction. And it was a definite deal. Yeah, it was a definite negative and with full of meaning, it really erased the history of the enslaved laborers who in fact worked at that home, some quick census data research revealed that there were enslaved laborers in that house.
And what we ended up realizing is that that was a really kind of interesting introduction to Charleston, specifically to how many white Charlestonians remembered and misremembered slavery in their city, the history of slavery in their city. So we ended up moving to the city. We lived there for two years. And we had a lot of experiences like that.
We went on a lot of historical tours because people left to visit the city. We would go on carriage rides and walking tours. And we kept having similar kinds of conversations where white Charlestonians were ignoring slavery or remembering it in a way that really framed it as a benevolent institution. So this was really the starting point for our interest in this subject.
Yeah, so in some ways we kind of backed into it. Unlike a lot of, I think, research topics where you either in your graduate school and you force to pick something before you run out of time or you kind of come upon a subject because you've been actively researching something that's related to it, where you're really engaged with historical, historical debates and you want to sort of figure something out. We sort of started on this project with our own personal experience and then worked backwards and started to explore the literature on this topic and ultimately decided and realized that there wasn't really a book that dug into the long history of the memory of slavery in Charleston, South Carolina or really the long history of the memory of slavery in the United States. And so that's kind of what we said about doing, but it took us a while to figure that out.
Ultimately, as we dug into this, we realized that there wasn't just that there were two traditions of memory when it comes to slavery in Charleston, what we call the whitewashed memory and the unvarnished memory of slavery. And the whitewashed memory is kind of a tradition of remembering that the Blaine is talking about and it's still very prominent in certain circles in Charleston and it's a tradition that downplays the importance of slavery to the history of Charleston, to the history of South Carolina, to the history of the United States. It's a tradition, the whitewashed a memory is a tradition that argues that slavery didn't cause the Civil War, that didn't have much to do with the Civil War. It's also a tradition that suggests that slavery was benign, maybe even a beneficial or civilizing thing for African Americans.
And this was a tradition that was forged by former slave owners and their descendants, but continued on and on and on and certainly still influenced the way slavery is talked about or not talked about in Charleston today. So we started digging into that, but what are the things we discovered is over the last 150 years since the end of the Civil War, there's also been a second tradition, what we call the unvarnished memory of slavery. This is a tradition that was forged by former slaves, their descendants and some white allies. And it argues that slavery indeed was central to the history of Charleston, the history of South Carolina, to the history of the United States.
That slavery was a brutal, inhumane institution, something rooted in violence. And that slavery in fact did cause the Civil War and that we must remember all of these things. And so ultimately as we pushed into this story, we found that there was a, for the last 150 years in Charleston, there's been a battle between these two memory traditions. And I think it's probably important for us to emphasize that it's the unvarnished memory of slavery that is actually rooted and reflected in the historical record.
We have the evidence that proves that slavery was central to the history of South Carolina and the wealth of whites, South Carolina. It does sales with the scholarship on slavery. That's right. So we always saw many listeners will know that, but it's really important to emphasize it and important to emphasize that the white watched memory really trucks a myth.
And just to kind of follow up on your question about what gap we see in this book, Philly. So as Ethan said, we really realized that there was no book that explores the long history of how slavery has been remembered. And I think another thing that kind of motivated us was to decent the memory of the Civil War a little bit. So much of the literature in terms of memory studies that focus on the South really focuses on how the war itself has been remembered.
And it's not that we're not interested in that question. How about it? We do a lot about it. But our focus is really on the memory of slavery, the institution of slavery itself.
And so that I think is what we see that as a subset. Civil War memory is always a subset of the memory of slavery. And in some ways, because a lot of the historiography of civil of memory studies in the South, at least, is focused on the 50 years after the Civil War, that question, Civil War and how it's remembered, has been the dominant sort of framework. And so we think our longer times being 150 years has provided a different angle in and you can learn different things.
You can see some important continuities to the present day, to what's going on, say historic plantations in modern historical tourism in places like Charleston, but also to the debates over how we're going to remember slavery, over how we're going to deal with conditions and federal monuments. Because we've spanned such a long period of time, we're able to make connections and to unpack the ways in which, say, current defacement and vandalism of monuments is you might think this is a brand new story, but in fact it was something that was going on over a hundred years ago in Charleston with the Calvin Moon Monument. So we can sort of tell a broader story in one that speaks not just to historical debates, but also contemporary concerns. Absolutely.
So let's walk back just slightly. And maybe you could give our readers, our listeners, just a sense in broad restrokes. What was the history of slavery in South Carolina and more specifically to Charleston? What was the economy of South Carolina like?
Where does slavery fit into it? And then more specifically to Charleston, how and why was that really a capital city of slavery in the United States in the end of the period? I'll try to do this somewhat succinctly. So South Carolina, maybe one of the distinctive things is it's founded in the late 1600s as an English colony.
And unlike other southern colonies that came forward, say, Maryland or Virginia, it was a slave society from the very beginning. That is, slaves were central to its economy from the very start. They didn't sort of back into slavery like Athens and Virginia over the course of 50 or 60 years as slaves replaced indentured servants. By the early, by the second decade of the 1700s, Charleston and South Carolina were generally already had a black majority.
And that was a black and enslaved majority. And most of those enslaved people in South Carolina were working in the rice industry. That becomes its staple crop. African slaves are working on rice plantations.
Some African slaves are actually white masters are drawing on some knowledge that African slaves have of rice cultivation that they brought with them from West Africa. But rice and then eventually Indigo become the chief crops, at least in the 1700s, eventually cotton would join up for the state of South Carolina by the 1800s. As you have the growth of King Cotton, but early on it was rice and it was this black and enslaved majority in Charleston and South Carolina that's doing the bulk of the labor. And of course, it's really grueling labor, particularly rice.
Yeah, rice was a remarkably brutal labor regime was established there in low country South Carolina. Most rice plantations were low-lying swampy areas. You'd have to be enslaved laborers would be working in humid hot summer months on their knees in disease-infested swampy areas. The mortality rates were extraordinarily high, certainly when compared to say Virginia in the 18th century, where Virginia and slave populations become self-reproducing.
That's not the case in low country South Carolina. And as a result, Charleston, very pretty soon in the 1700s, becomes the center in the United States or in the colonies that would become the United States of the transatlantic slave trade. They had to bring in more and more laborers because they couldn't survive the brutality. Yeah, so the other reason that Charleston is so important in terms of the history of slavery in the United States is that close to 50% of the slaves that were brought into what became the United States came through Charleston and the surroundings to the islands.
So that makes it just really central in terms of the history of slavery in North America. We call the city the capital of American slavery. That's right, the capital of American slavery. So not only is it this important hub for the transatlantic slave trade, it also becomes really central to the domestic slave trade within the colonies in the United States, particularly as slaves are sold into the deep south as the cotton empire spreads into the deep south.
The domestic markets in Charleston were just thriving. So that's another reason that we argue that Charleston was the capital of American slavery. And then beyond just the kind of realities and the numbers of people who came in and were sold, Charleston became the ideological epicenter really of the defense of slavery as an institution in the antebellum era. Yeah, I mean, it was, and I would say Charleston in South Carolina, we were generally, it was South Carolina states and like John Calhoun, who were leading the fight against the growing abolitionist movement in the north in the 1830s and 1840s were reframing how American slaveholders talked about slavery.
A lot of slaveholders, George Washington Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers in the revolutionary generation were somewhat embarrassed about slavery. They would talk about it as a necessary evil. Calhoun and his colleagues reframed it and argued that it was instead of positive good. It was something that helped slaveholders.
It was something that helped the enslaved. And they saw this as a sort of a campaign to convince the country that slavery should not be done away with. It's no surprise then that South Carolina and Charleston become the epicenter of the secessionist movement in the 1850s movement that ultimately breaks apart the United States and defense of slavery. And it's a surprise that Charleston is the host of the South Carolina secession convention, the first convention that takes a state out of the United States.
And then of course, Charleston is the site of the first battle of the Civil War that the shelling of Fort Sumter in April of 1861. So in an important way, it's no coincidence that the capital of American slavery became the cradle of the Confederacy. I think that's a really good way to think about it. Slavery was so central to this location that of course it became the place where the first vote for secession was registered and where the war actually began.
So what happens to Charleston in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation? Obviously, this throws the city into chaos in many ways. The labor system that had supported the state and the economy. So what happens?
What is Civil War? What is emancipation like? What happens when we start to talk about Reconstruction there? Yeah, well, so the war of course just completely decimates the city.
And in the final months of the war, the Union Army comes in. There are thousands of newly liberated slaves who were already living in the city or become into the city from the surrounding plantations on the sea islands around the city. And so the city becomes a really transformed place as the old regime literally is just crumbling in February, March and April of 1865. And it was during this period, the spring of 1865, that really the first attempts to preserve the unlearnished memory of slavery are really undertaken by newly liberated slaves.
And we end up calling this period the year of Jubilee in our book. Yeah, I mean, one of the real striking things we discovered as we dug into this story was the number of the very public celebrations, commemorations that enslaved formerly enslaved people, nearly free people were putting on in Charleston in this newly emancipated and Union occupied city, probably the one that we tend to zero in on and remember the most is what we call the slavery is dead parade, which takes place on March 21st, 1865. I remember that day because it happens to be my birthday. I'm sure of that one.
But it was a huge parade. Newspaper reports suggested between 4,000 and 10,000 people took part in it. And it was led by organized by not the Union Army, not the occupied Union for us, but by Charleston, free people. They marched all the way up and down through the city, mile and half, two mile long parade.
It features a whole bunch of remarkable tableau elements that are striking. One, of course, is a funeral procession for slavery. That's why I call it the slavery is dead parade. And that is a huge, long, big hearse that had a giant coffin on it and hanging from the coffin where it was a sign that said slavery is dead.
So they were putting on a funeral procession for the end of slavery. It also featured a mock slave auction. And that really to me is the most striking element to us is the most striking element. A mule drawn cart was carrying a mock slave auctioneer himself, a former slave, as well as four people who were supposed to be in an imitation fashion being put up for auction.
And they themselves, according to newspaper reports, had all been auctioned off at one point in their lives. And so you have this sort of bizarre scene in which this former slave is pretending to be an auctioneer. And he's calling out, you know, who will bid on this slave, who will bid $50 for this cook? And perhaps the most striking thing, at least according to newspaper reports, which is where we get our information about this from, is that the audience I'm laughing at and cheering and sort of took it as all in good fun.
But many others in the crowd, particularly free women who would watch their children be sold away, watch their spouses be sold away, started crying out, give me back my children, give me back my children were overwhelmed with emotion. And so one of the things that that underscored for us was that this year of Jubilee and these celebrations were celebrations. But they were also meant as reminders of the brutal realities of slavery. And slave people, formerly slave people did not want to let others forget the pain of bondage.
And so that was one of the striking early examples of the unvarnished memory of slavery that they wanted to put in the public sphere. And then starting the same year and for the next several decades, you know, we start to reconstruct it now. And then, you know, the Union Army is there, the federal government has a degree of power in the state and the region of the whole. And of course, African Americans, particularly assume political power in the city and the state as well.
And this is really critical for making sure that this unvarnished memory remains the public memory throughout this period. So one of the other ways in which you can see this unvarnished memory being preserved in the public sphere would be on January the 1st of the year and July the 4th every year. January the 1st, of course, was the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. And so every year in Charleston, free people would gather down at the battery, which is this area in southern Charleston, the very kind of base of the peninsula, to celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation on January the 1st.
And they would read the Emancipation over time as you get the amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments being passed and ratified. They would read those amendments out loud. They would read speeches by prominent abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, really underscoring the fact that they had not wanted to be enslaved and that Emancipation was a good thing. Same thing on July the 4th, free people in Charleston celebrated it as a day of their freedom.
That's true across the South. That's right. It's a really big celebration in Charleston. What's interesting about the 4th of July is that white seveners during these years, in the 1860s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, did not celebrate July 4th.
They really saw it as an African American holiday because African Americans were very vocal about how they did indeed embrace this day as a celebration of their freedom. So what happens during the early years of the Jim Crow South? The memory of slavery in many ways becomes a very central terrain of conflict. So what is happening there?
And then what is the result of that in terms of what the dominant narrative about slavery becomes? Well, the first thing that happens is as Reconstruction is forcibly ended through force of violence by former Confederates whose style of themselves were deemed as one who just undermined political power that African Americans had as part of the Republican Party that had controlled states like South Carolina for the better part of the 1870s. As that political power wanes, their ability, the ability of this unvarnished memory, African Americans, unvarnished memory of slavery to find a space and public phase away. It's really driven out.
There are, for instance, some of these Emancipation Day and 4th of July celebrations that happen in Charleston in public spaces like White Point Garden, this part of the battery that Wayne was talking about. By the 1880s, Charles Stonians have started, white Charles Stonians have taken back political powers, start passing measures forbidding African Americans from holding those celebrations and those public spaces, pushing them off to the peninsula and eventually entirely out of Charleston. So one thing they do is they start to shut down black demonstrations of the unvarnished memory. At the same time, they start funneling money in to different interpretations of the memory of slavery, say the Calhoun Monument.
And the city erects two massive monuments to John C. Calhoun, the great defender of slavery, one in the 1880s, a second larger one that replaces it in the 1890s. And this is part of a larger spate of confederate and pro-slavery commemoration that happens all across the country as the lost cause, the southern defense of the Civil War becomes ascended and serves as a sort of reinforcement of the Jim Crow white supremacy political campaign that's being enacted across the south at the same time. Yeah, and so you can see this happening very clearly in Charleston.
The two Calhoun monuments are a great example of it. I mean, here, white Charles Stonians have erected this person that is subsequent monument to a man who said that slavery was a positive good. And in terms of the lost cause, which Ethan just mentioned, this is the interpretation of the war, which says many things, but one of which, of course, was that the slavery did not cause the Civil War. Charles said became a real center in terms of producing that narrative.
The local newspaper and the news and courier, the editors there, two back to back editors, were very invested in pushing this narrative in the paper. And the paper had a very wide readership, not just in the city, but throughout the state. So one of the things that we read. Yeah, one of the things we argue in the book is that in a way, Charleston has been underappreciated as a place where the lost cause narrative was produced.
In addition to the news and courier, there were very active chapters of the United Confederate veterans, sons of Confederate veterans, and particularly United Daughters of the Confederacy. There were elite white Charleston women who were UDC members who were really critical, not just in the city and the state, but in the nation as a whole, in terms of pushing this lost cause narrative and making sure, for example, that textbooks that were used in Charleston and South Carolina classrooms and really classrooms across the country, that these textbooks hue the lost cause line and really kind of toad that line. And then to add to the story, what makes, I think, Charleston specifically maybe so interesting in this rise of the whitewash memory of slavery is that in the early 20th century, it refashions itself as a mecca of historical tourism. It starts calling itself America's most historic city.
It starts to be a place that markets itself as entryway back into time, a way to see the American past, but what's distinctive about it is it de-emphasizes in the narratives it provides for tourists in the sort of sites that it features. They tend to whitewash slavery to de-emphasize it, or when they do talk about it all, to talk about it is this benign or beneficial institution. So it's sort of a different way to perpetuate this whitewash memory of slavery. And to get back to your question, you were asking about how, can we see some conflict in this early period?
So the answer is yes, and I think it's important to emphasize that in the late 1800s, early 1900s, we did see some pushback in the historical record on the part of African-Americans saying this whitewash memory is offensive and we don't think that it should be the dominant memory. And really the best place to look for that is with African-American reaction to this Calhoun monument that we mentioned. The first one was erected in 1887 and then the second one in 1896. As soon as that one in 1887 was erected by a group of elite white Charles and women, African-Americans essentially undertook what we call a campaign of guerrilla vandalism against it.
They did lead to the fact that it had been erected in the center of the city, it's in Marion Square, and they threw things at it. Rocks, bricks, we even have some evidence of a young boy shooting a pistol at it. And we have from memoirs and oral histories evidence of this and people saying we did this because we felt like white Charles Stonians had erected this statue to tell us that we should still be slaced. And so there's a lot of evidence of this.
And then the women who erected that statue in 1887 decided in the mid 1890s that they wanted to replace the original one. They officially said that they had never liked the original statue on aesthetic grounds. But we have every reason to believe that one of their motivations for putting up this new statue is that they wanted to raise Calhoun higher to get him out of harm's way. Because if you look at the second statue, it is a certain talk.
It's 120 feet or something in the air. So is the other one just sort of beaten up? Could you physically see when tourists would come and go through Charleston? Would the old monument have been raggedy?
I don't think it'd be fair to say it would be raggedy. There definitely reports where Charles Stonians waking up to find it having been whitewashed with paint. And certainly the oral history, the memories of some African Americans who grew up in that period would say that they would do anything they had to do anything they could to chip it up to throw stuff at it. I don't know if that would have been visible.
Yeah, I never seen the media. It itself was fairly big. Yeah, right. But there is ample evidence that there was vandalism.
There's also ample evidence that the city officially worried about that and did all sorts of things to protect both the first and the second. We found evidence that well after the second one went up in the late 1940s, there were people who the city was worried about vandalism to it by various. They called it night prowlers. Night prowlers.
They installed kind of a defensive lighting system and a fence. And they never came out and said exactly who was vandalizing it. It's pretty clear if you look at the oral histories that were done with African Americans who lived during that period. Right.
So let's fast forward to the era of the civil rights movement kind of following on from the 1940s and into the 50s and 60s. This is a moment when that movement will be part of fundamentally altering the Jim Crow status quo. And so I think a question that is interesting to think about and maybe you could talk about this a little bit for our listeners is how the Civil War does or doesn't shift the way that slavery, the lost cause, all the things you've been talking about are remembered in Charleston in South Carolina and more widely. Sure.
And the Civil Rights Movement does have a pretty profound impact on the memory of slavery in Charleston. I mean, one of the things that happens during Jim Crow, which we just talked about, you know, we talked about how the White Watch Memory became the predominant public memory. What happens to the unvarnished memory? It's not that it went away.
It's simply that it was pushed into different venues. And so what we found over the course of our research is that you can see the unvarnished memory being preserved in families, you know, families talking about the history of slavery there of their ancestors. You could see it being preserved in churches, you know, people talking about it in their congregations. You could see it being preserved in segregated schools, which is one of the many ironies that the Jim Crow South, you know, we have white southerners here imposing this very racist, white supremacist regime and denying black southerners adequate resources in many cases for their schools.
But what happens in these schools is that you do find teachers, for example, teaching about the history of slavery. So these, this, it existed during Jim Crow, but it was really out of the public eye. So one of the many reasons that the Civil Rights Movement is important is because it changes the political landscape in a place like Charleston to allow black Charlestonians to bring these memories back out into the public again. So for example, we see an attorney, an African American attorney in the city who is a member of the NAACP writing the school board in the 50s and saying it's time for us to do more to focus on African American history in the school system, you know, this kind of thing.
Really the best place to see the changing landscape would be when the civil rights struggle really arrives in full force in the city and you see active protests and boycotts on city streets. That's when you can see civil rights protesters really turning to the memory of slavery to try to use it as a source of power in their contemporary struggle. So one great example would be in 1963, there was a really intense period of civil rights activism in the city. Lots of boycotts of downtown businesses, for example, because they weren't serving African American patrons, they were not employing African Americans.
And so protesters on the streets were singing freedom songs. And among the kind of antecedents that they were pulling from were slave spirituals. And the spirituals of course have been very big in the area, like spirituals were all about the kind of torment of bondage and finding the power and the strength to overcome slavery. So civil rights protesters here in 1963 take some of those songs and use them to inspire their contemporary struggles.
And we will overcome segregation in the same way that our ancestors overcame slavery. Yeah, and then to fast forward a little bit more by the 1970s as civil rights activism sort of starts to pay benefits politically as African Americans and what Charleston starts to have the right to vote for instance, are actively voting. And in some ways cases are electing civil rights activists to say city council, you start to see efforts to push black history, the history of slavery kind of into the public sphere to rename schools, for instance, after African American heroes from the state like Robert Smalls or Denmark VZ who becomes a sort of central and head long and a controversial figure in Charleston. There's efforts by the mid 70s.
Some argue that local schools should be named after a mother suggested statues should be directed to him and eventually the city actually commissions a painting of Denmark VZ to hang in a prominent public auditorium. This was wildly controversial because Denmark VZ was still then and remains a wildly controversial person. Probably I should tell you who he was. Yeah, let's maybe do that.
I mean, you know, in the title, why, who was he and why the title invite, you know, invoke him in the title of your book. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll say a little bit about these and then what Lainte, why we talk about him.
But one of the things our book is after all named in our fees is garden. So one of the first questions we often get is well, you know, this is a biography of this person who is this person. Right. Although in some ways we sort of discovered towards the end of writing it that he, that Denmark VZ who was the would be leader of a slave rebellion in Charleston, that he was, you know, a critical figure throughout our book, even if we didn't make him the central character in it.
So, so VZ was born a slave. He grew up a slave in Charleston, but then in a sort of remarkable turn of events right around the year 1800, VZ won a lottery, won a city lottery, won a decent amount of money and he was able to purchase his freedom using that money. He was unable to purchase the freedom of his children or his wife. And this fact frustrated him as did living under sort of the repressive white supremacist regime in Charleston.
And so by the early 1820s, he and several co-conspirators decided that they were going to lead an enormous slave insurrection. It was to take place on Bastille Day, July 14, 1822. But before it could take place, it was foiled. Local officials got word that this was underway.
It quickly rounded up VZ and co-conspirators threw him in a jail and a basement jail, tortured many of them, ultimately tried and convicted. VZ and 34 co-conspirators, all of them executed. They sent another three dozen or so slaves who were convicted expelled and sold them out of the United States, including one of VZ's sons. And then in the aftermath, Charleston leaders really sort of cracked down on the African-American population.
They tore down the African church where VZ had been a leading member and where he sort of helped to plot this would be insurrection. They tightened their supervision of slaves. The state eventually found the Citadel, a military academy designed to police the enslaved population of the city. And so it sort of sends shockwaves to the city, to the state of South Carolina, and through the larger South.
Yeah. So as he had mentioned, toward the end of the book, we kind of realized that VZ, he was almost like a ghost, haunting the city and therefore kind of haunting the pages of our manuscript. He just kept coming up. So- So it's only because he's a touchstone for Charlestonians.
Yeah. Yeah. For white Charlestonians and Black Charlestonians. Yeah.
So for white Charlestonians, I mean, he's kind of like this specter. He's like, they're really, you know, this man. You know, this man who was going to strike at the heart of their economic well-being for the Civil War, this institution that generated so much well. For Black Charlestonians, he's a real hero.
And that's why once you get African Americans regaining political power as a result of this civil rights movement, you had citizens and city council members saying we need to memorialize Denmark VZ and recognize him in public as a subordinate historical figure. So in terms of the title of the book, there are a couple of reasons that we chose to include him. One thing is he really to us embodies this unvarnished memory and slavery. Because here was someone who, the free himself was trying to plan this large scale slave insurrection to free slaves because of course it was such a brutal inhumane institution.
So he kind of literally embodies that memory for us. In terms of the word garden, one of the reasons that we chose the word garden is because this is really a very good kind of embodiment or representation of the whitewash memory and slavery. And that's for this reason, when Charleston becomes this tourism mecca in the early 20th century, local boosters start pushing the area plantations to visitors. And they say you're bummed to these sites.
But what's interesting about it is that they don't call them plantations. They market them as gardens. And in that decision is a really revealing kind of way or it's revealing because it shows us how they framed these sites. These were just sites of beauty.
Visitors were supposed to come and take in the natural wonders of looming as aliens, the hanging Spanish moss, the beautiful oak trees. So in marketing them in this way, these local boosters really erased slavery from the history of these sites. So the word garden, which we talk about in the book, is really meant to evoke that whitewash tradition. So in the title of the book, we have here these competing memories.
And then the final thing that I'll say is that very recently in the year 2014, African-American activists finally succeeded after a 20-year battle. They finally succeeded in getting a statue of Demarcavese erected in a public park. And so one of the points that we make at the end of the book as we discuss this battle and the success of getting this statue installed, we now essentially say that Demarcavese stands watch over his garden. That's very poetic in a lot of ways.
So before we wrap up, what will surprise you as you research and wrote the book? Well I suppose one thing that surprised us is, I'm going to try to say this in a politic way, early on when we were sort of thinking about this book, one of the challenges we thought about and one of the challenges that was underscored by one particular reviewer of an early book proposal that we had was that we wouldn't be able to find enough material. That we weren't going to be able to capture the African-American voice, this unvarnished memory, that there wouldn't be much evidence of it. And also that since whitewashing is really often about forgetting, not talking about memories, we would just see a sort of an empty historical record.
So effectively, there's not the makings of a book. Anyone who picks up the book that is where it is now, we'll see that we found the writing of the book. Oh yeah, there's lots. And what you don't probably know is that's the book on a diet.
We've collected thousands and thousands and thousands of words about 80,000 words from that. So we found way more than we expected to find. And we still find ourselves going, I wish we had written about that topic in that topic and the aftermath. So that I think was one sort of shocking thing that one of the things I certainly thought about when going into this book was like, maybe someone didn't write, hadn't written this book yet because there wasn't enough.
Right. And what we found was you just got to keep looking and you can find lots and lots of stuff even on the most obscure topics. Yeah. And one other thing, and this is just, I guess on a personal note, in terms of what people told us, they may not be honest or listeners, but we are very, we should have said that at front.
But a lot of people said, wow, we can't believe you are going to try to write a book together. We hope you survive this process. You're very smart. And you're very smart.
And we're happy to report. I think you're doing all right. Yeah, we're doing fine. We actually found working together in this collaborative way to be really fulfilling.
We had written our first book solo of course. So having gone through that process, which can be very isolating. This process was, I think we both thought much more enjoyable because when we would hit a dead wall or dead end, we had someone to go talk to, we could pass material off to each other and say, you know, what do you think about this? So I think that was another surprising thing for us in terms of writing this book.
Well, it's really a fantastic book and congratulations on it. And thank you for taking the time to join us on this episode of Working History. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much for the fun.
All right, my pleasure. Thanks again to Blaine Roberts and Ethan Kydoll for joining us today to discuss their most recent book, Denmark Visis Garden Slavery and Memory and the Cradle of the Confederacy. Thank you for listening to this episode of Working History produced by the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org and follow Working History on Twitter at Working History.