The confederates in our attic
By Tess Taylor | September 21, 2015
When he stood at the bottom of the hill at Pickett’s Charge, one hundred fifty-two years ago this summer, Bennett Taylor had already been wounded twice. He’d been at war for three years. He was twenty-seven, a University of Virginia-trained lawyer, the oldest son in a family of twelve. He’d grown up at Lego, a farm on the outskirts of Charlottesville. His family’s properties were often mortgaged to the hilt, but he stood to inherit land, as well as a broken system that enslaved people. The slaves and the land were, indirectly, hand-me-downs from one of the county’s largest landowners: founding father Thomas Jefferson, Bennett’s great-great-grandfather. Bennett stood to inherit — quite literally — Jefferson’s thorniest legacy, the ugly business of slavery in his own generation ...
Bennett survived, but he did not really recover. When he made it back to Charlottesville, his cousins commented immediately on the change in him. “Bennett is an altered person, temper unbearable selfish & inert,” wrote one cousin to another. He married his longtime fiancee but had trouble holding a job. He was no saint. His hands shook from drinking, and for a while he edited a virulently racist newspaper in Charlottesville. At one point he ran for a county post, which he was said to have won by the margin of his forty-nine “former servants,” a questionable euphemism for people formerly enslaved on Jefferson, Taylor, or Randolph plantations. In a time when family connections meant everything, he eventually moved his family to Radford, Virginia, perhaps to try to get a new start. Yet he had a rough go of it, even there. I’ve heard stories about how he would be found passed out at his desk in the middle of the day, how he was prone to sudden, violent rage. My grandfather described him as “bitter.” In the post-Civil War years, there were no words (and no treatments) for PTSD. When we think about the unfinished work of reconstruction, it’s worth remembering how ill-equipped some of the Civil War’s veterans were, in that era, to reconstruct even their most basic senses of self. Bennett’s illness, violence, and alcoholism left marks on my family: they shaped the lives of my great-grandfather, my grandfather and, in some ways, of my father, too ...
n the one photo I have of Bennett, he is about forty. He looks like my father, vaguely—they have the same eyebrows—but he is also gaunt and harrowed-looking, a vaguely sorrowful figure. I claim him as family. I know his story shapes mine. But I am clear: the desire to remember his life and time—to humanize him as an ancestor and an actor in history—is different than a need to valorize his beliefs. I am also clear: Bennett’s politics inspire no nostalgic pride in me. Six generations later, people in my family talk about Bennett to imagine the strangeness of living through sea change. I know that I would not be here today if Bennett Taylor had not lived. I also cannot imagine a version of history in which he did not feel compelled to fight for the Confederacy. I see in him the trauma of fighting and losing a war, then losing his health, his mind. I can have compassion on his suffering, even while knowing that there is nothing about Bennett’s lost cause that inspires me ...
... When I think about Bennett, I don’t think about monuments or flags. Instead, I reinvest in my own responsibility to move his brokenness forward. My family—Bennett’s family—held slaves from the 1670s until the end of the Civil War. I inherit that legacy, and I feel my responsibility to it. In this year of the 150th anniversary of the end of the war, it is time to recommit ourselves to the work of freeing this country from this most painful of legacies. I think of the descendants of those “former servants.” I think of the work we, as a nation, have ahead of us. With anyone who is willing, I would like to sit down and begin a conversation about reconciliation and amends. I’d like to take up, again, the work of reconstruction, to imagine how to rebuild the country we will share for the next one hundred and fifty years together.
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/673-the-confederates-in-our-attic