|
A young Mennonite passes the memorial to Confederate President Jefferson Davis while riding |
Part of an occasional series on the changing Southern culture.
By ROGER ALFORDASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
FAIRVIEW--From across the country they come, Civil War buffs drawn by a towering monument that marks the birthplace of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Many of the same people who ride the elevator up the 351-foot-tall spire at Fairview also will visit a quaint one-room log home about 100 miles away near Hodgenville, a replica of the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born.
Having supplied native sons as presidents and soldiers to both the Union and Confederacy, Kentucky remains very much a state divided, wrestling with its regional identity perhaps more than any other.
It all comes back to the Civil War, when Kentucky was a slave state that didn't secede and was officially neutral. The symbols of that straddling are all around, with 72 Confederate memorials in Kentucky and just two to Union soldiers. And to this day, whether people consider themselves Southerners or not depends on whom you ask.
"I have no other aspirations than to live what my heritage is," said David "Butch" Chaltas, a schoolteacher in Appalachian Kentucky who portrays Gen. Robert E. Lee in Civil War re-enactments. "I feel very blessed to be a Southerner. With no animosity toward anybody, I just love our heritage."
Chaltas, commander of the Whitesburg chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans, said people who live in the mountains of Kentucky are decidedly Southern and are proud of traits like friendliness toward neighbors and hospitality to visitors, which have been passed down through generations.
"It's something that we cherish and something that we still live," he said. "If we don't live it, we've lost our identity."
Lindin Lairson, commander of Nicholasville camp of The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, said he has found that most Kentuckians identify with the South. That, he said, is based on the receptions his Boys in Blue receive during public appearances.
"We've gone into a lot of towns that are very pro-Southern," he said. "If the Confederates are there with us, we usually get boos, and cheers for them."
Lairson said that's despite the fact that far more Kentuckian soldiers joined the Union than the Confederacy during the Civil War. He said the state's loyalties changed for no reason other than geography and because of romantic notions about Southern gentility.
"There's nothing anyone can do about it, except accept the fact," he said.
University of Kentucky history professor Ronald Eller asks his students each year if they consider themselves Southerners. The results are always the same: Students from rural Kentucky communities identify with the South, urban students identify with the North.
"The larger question is why people want to perpetuate these identities in the first place."
For whatever reason, they are indeed perpetuated, said Mark Doss, superintendent of the Jefferson Davis Memorial at Fairview, which underwent a $3 million makeover completed earlier this year. The monument draws about 30,000 visitors a year.
"Every once in a while you get someone who comes in and questions why we have a monument to a traitor, but that's rare," Doss said. "I get more of the die-hard Southerners, simply because of the nature of the site."
And those "Southerners," he said, come from across the nation to visit the monument, not because it represents their political views, but because it represents a romantic notion.
"People believe in the Southern way of life," Doss said. "We're proud of our heritage. We're gentlemanly. We're much, much friendlier than other regions."
Name any state. It's represented in the registry of visitors to Jefferson Davis Memorial, the world's tallest concrete obelisk, which casts a long shadow across this tiny western Kentucky community about an hour north of Nashville, Tenn.
Doss said he has seen interest in Davis and the Confederacy grow during his 20 years on the job, based on the number of visitors to the memorial. Some of the people arrive with Confederate flags draped across the back windows of their pickup trucks.
Laura Beeler, a 32-year-old Louisville homemaker, said she doesn't consider Kentucky a Southern state, despite the jesting of her out-of-state friends who enjoy asking: "Oh, do you wear shoes down there?" She said Kentucky might best be described as a border state.
"I really consider Kentucky a Midwestern state, because the culture is a mix," she said. "It's definitely not a Southern state."
Eller said the North-South identity issue is part of the human need to "belong to something, to be part of a community. Thus, we have identities that are American, Appalachian, etc."
However, Eller said tourism promoters have latched onto the Southern identity to make money. He pointed to the Kentucky Derby, which conjures images of the Old South with its fanciful bonnets and mint juleps.
Eller said vendors in eastern Tennessee sell rebel flags and Confederate memorabilia, even though some communities in that area provided more soldiers to the Union army per capita than any other region of the country.
"Being Southern sells in a number of ways for a variety of reasons," he said. "It can mean both defending negative values such as racism, patriarchy and violence, or it can represent positive values such as family ties, sense of the past, and a strong connection to community. In my mind, that is why we cling to romantic images of North-South identity."
