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Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

Ann Banks is author of the website "Confederates in My Closet" where she writes about race, history and her family. Her work has been published in the Smithsonian, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and The Nation. First Person America, her anthology of oral histories from the Federal Writers Project was published by Knopf and Norton and she co-produced a National Public Radio series on the subject.

  • Apr 2, 2022

    The Unrightable Wrong

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    Should descendants of slave-holders feel ashamed? This is the issue raised by Glen David Andrews, a Black trombonist from New Orleans.  I’d come to know Glen David when a filmmaker friend and I were considering making a documentary about him.  That project came to nothing, but I still follow him on Facebook, where he has been outspoken on many issues and not shy about schooling those he thinks need correction.

  • Dec 14, 2021

    A White Man Friendly to the Freedom of All Men

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    Reckoning with the ancestors on my father’s side of the family has been exhausting. I opened that Pandora’s Box and out flew: the colonizers, the slaveholders, the rebel generals, the high-ranking Confederate officials. I’ve mined this family history for truths that challenge the Lost Cause narrative, the pro-Confederate ideology that fuels white supremacy. The long-reaching consequences of that creed empowered the insurrectionists of Jan. 6th, 2021, so this has seemed worth doing.

    Yet after a prolonged stint of burrowing through 19th-century Alabama archives – examining census forms itemizing human property, wills bequeathing that property, descriptions of opulent slave-built mansions – I wanted a break.  I was ready to spend time with someone from my family who’d been on the right side of history, a white man “friendly to the freedom of all men,” as Frederick Douglass said of Abraham Lincoln.

  • Oct 7, 2021

    The Burden of the Pile

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    For years the papers I’d inherited gathered dust in my closet, shut away, easy to ignore. Occasionally it would cross my mind that I should take them out and go through them   – possibly sometime after I had finished alphabetizing my library, organizing my box of snapshots and culling my work files. 

  • Aug 22, 2021

    “Mild Domestic Slavery”

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    A. J. Pickett may have been an author and historian with a house in Montgomery but he was equally a slaveholder with two plantations under his control. The institution of slavery was essential to his life and to his work. By the time he was 30, my great great grandfather enslaved more than 80 men, women, and children.

  • Jul 5, 2021

    The Book and the Spoon

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    My method, if you can call something so haphazard a method, has been to start with a document from The Pile, or an artifact within the walls of my apartment, and follow it until it leads to a story. Sometimes unexpected connections reveal themselves, as between a tattered two-volume history of Alabama, published in 1851, and the “LP Walker to Eliza” silver serving spoon passed down to me. Leroy Pope Walker was the first Secretary of War of the Confederacy.  Eliza was Eliza Dickson Pickett, Leroy’s wife as well as the niece of Albert James Pickett, usually referred to as “Alabama’s first historian.” He is the author of the tattered volumes. 

  • Jun 11, 2021

    How to Change History

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    It’s more than likely that in the audience in Montgomery on the day Stephen Douglas spoke on the statehouse steps was John Wilkes Booth.   Booth would have cheered Douglas, as he put before the citizens of Montgomery the case for remaining in the Union.  The actor had arrived in town a week earlier to make his debut as a leading man, in the title role of Richard III.  

  • May 25, 2021

    My Great Grandfather, Stephen Douglas, and the Seductions of Non-intervention

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    Also among my belongings is a gold-framed tintype photo, of the kind made by itinerant photographers around the time of the Civil War.  Etsy offered one for sale recently for $18, and in the days before Etsy, when I used to frequent funky antique shops, the tintype I have is the just sort of thing I might have bought as an item of décor.  Only I inherited it. And now am I finally taking in that the man in the photo is my own great grandfather, Edwin Alexander Banks.

  • Apr 19, 2021

    The Bloody Handkerchief

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    Leroy Pope Walker first claimed my attention not from The Pile of documents in my closet but from my silverware drawer, where his name is engraved on a silver serving spoon: “L.P. Walker to Eliza.”  It kept company in the drawer with another serving spoon, this one engraved “Corinne to Eliza.”  I knew these were family names, but that was all.

  • Apr 5, 2021

    The Seductions and Confusions of Genealogical Research

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    For a long time, I thought that researching family history was a dubious pastime. Also one fraught with peril, when undertaken for the purposes of ancestor-glorification and ego-gratification.  Should you have a forebear by whom you set great store – for example, as my Aunt May did by Philip Alston, you may well learn many disreputable things about him, of which owning slaves is only one.

  • Mar 23, 2021

    A White Supremacist Reformed by History

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    I first encountered Ty Seidule when I stumbled onto a video lecture he posted in 2015, in which he asserted that slavery was not merely a cause of the Civil War, it was the cause.  While this has long been the consensus view of historians, the video garnered 30 million views and sparked such vitriolic hate mail as to warrant alerting the FBI. Why so much rage?  At the time, Seidule was a colonel in the U.S. Army and he delivered his video remarks wearing full dress blue uniform, bedecked with 30 years’ worth of medals. 

  • Mar 10, 2021

    John Brown and Frederick Douglass: Maybe the White Abolitionist Should Have Listened to the Black Abolitionist

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    In a rave review of the dramatic series The Good Lord Bird, the New York Times proclaimed in its headline “the necessity of John Brown.”   As a muse, John Brown is having a moment.  The militant white abolitionist already has a string of successes behind him, having inspired acclaimed literary works from Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter to Tony Horwitz’s Midnight Rising to James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird.

  • Feb 16, 2021

    John Brown’s Body

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    Who taught me “John Brown’s Body?”  I don’t remember but I loved to sing it.  I had no idea who John Brown was or what the song was about but I was drawn to it partly for it macabre ghoulishness – a body moldering in the grave! – and partly because it was forbidden around my house.  When my Aunt May was coming to visit – and it seemed she was always coming to visit – I was not to sing that song.  Or even to hum it.   This wasn’t the only thing I was supposed to remember when Aunt May came over.

  • Jan 25, 2021

    The Mystery of the Great Seal

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    This is the story I remember being told as a  child:  At the time of the Civil War, there was cast in solid gold a Great Seal of the Confederate States of America.  Toward the end of the war, to keep the seal from falling into the hands of Yankees, it was buried somewhere in Virginia.  Somehow its location was lost and the Great Seal has never yet been found (though many holes have been dug in search of it.)

  • Jan 13, 2021

    The Cult of the Lost Cause and the Invention of General Pickett

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    George Pickett – Major General George E. Pickett – was our family’s marquee Confederate relation, distant cousin though he was.  Every schoolchild in America has heard of him, thanks to the ill-fated infantry charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.  For a long time what I knew about him was pretty much what everyone learned in 8th grade: Pickett’s failed charge, on July 3rd, 1863, was the turning point, the moment when the Confederates started to lose. 

  • Jan 12, 2021

    How I got into This, part 2 - a personal note

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    I’m descended from Southerners only on my father’s side of the family -- though that side includes some high-profile Confederate skeletons (Gen. George Pickett, most famously.)   I don’t remember my father professing affection for the Deep South way of life – he left it for a career in the military.  The U.S. Army was the culture I grew up in.  Col. Banks didn't care if my sister and I knew all the words to “Dixie” (though we did) but we had better be able to sing “The Artillery Song” upon command.

  • Jan 11, 2021

    How I got into This

    by Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet

    For decades I harbored in the back of my office closet an archive I inherited from my father’s Alabama kin.  Wills bequeathing family oil portraits; yellowed newspaper clippings about antebellum homes-turned-museums; hand-drawn genealogical charts, held together with rusty paper clips, tracing my connection to high-profile Confederates from Gen. George Pickett to L.P. Walker, the first Secretary of War of the Confederacy. I nicknamed this trove “The Pile” and for years I kept it in quarantine.  If these bits and pieces told a story, I wasn’t ready to hear it.