Former Slaves, A Jewish Artist, and Cemeteries

Camp Slaves and the Lost Cause is chapter three in Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates. I felt sad for Levin that he lives in a world where he only sees ugliness. His treatment of ex-slaves and Moses Ezekiel is disgraceful.

Ex-Slaves

Like with some veterans today, the most vivid and meaningful time in their lives was when they served. Levin turns Confederate veteran gatherings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries into promotion events for the nebulous “lost cause”. According to Levin “former camp slaves served as living reminders of the Lost Cause’s central claim that the enslaved people had always remained loyal to their masters on the home front and in the army until the very end of the war and beyond.”

After a footnoted description of Steve Perry at a reunion here is Levin’s summary: “Perry’s flamboyant attire suggests that at some level he understood cultural and racial significance of the role he had perfected as a former camp slave”. Levin never provided any evidence of anything Perry ever said.

Moses Ezekiel

Levin spends more time on what other people said about the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery than what Ezekiel meant. To Levin it was part of the lost cause conspiracy because it showed a camp slave in uniform and a “mammy” figure. According to Levin, both of these are presented to remind everyone of the loyal slave narrative.

Cemeteries

Levin will go to any lengths to make his lost cause case. This quote is footnoted without the page number for the book Cities of the Dead by William A. Blair, so I don’t know if it is Levin or Blair.

“This reframing of the war and its outcome began almost immediately after the war with the establishment of cemeteries in communities across the former Confederacy, where the fallen could be honored.”

I have no words.

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