Captured Confederates and Poet Laureates:

a Jefferson Davis Historic Site in Irwinville, Georgia

This month I’m making a 12-day drive from Florida through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. I’ll visit some historic sites with emotional significance for many Americans; Civil War and Revolutionary War museums; state parks; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to these places and the events and people they might commemorate, I’ll be looking at the signage, collecting the literature, and talking to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, mining the gift shops!

“Narrative Nation” is my place to collect some thoughts and images as I go. Ideally, some parts of these reflections will be incorporated into the book I am developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. But for now these stories are drafts to help me think about what I’m seeing and hearing.

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Friday, June 9: first day of the trip

Not long after entering Georgia on 75 North, we saw a brown marker for a “Jefferson Davis Historic Site.” This wasn’t on my itinerary, and the sign didn’t say what kind of site it would be, but something related to the president of the Confederacy sounded like the right place to begin an exploration of our national narratives. About 20 miles down a country road, we finally saw another sign, turned left at the small town of Irwinville (founded as “Irwinsville” in 1831), and drove a few more minutes to the brick entryway with a Georgia Park Systems plaque on both sides. The short driveway led to an old white house, a small outbuilding, and a large flat lawn.

We parked and were immediately welcomed by Miss Sophie running across the lawn to greet us. Sophie walked us around the property for a few minutes, wagging her tail and circling back to keep us on track. In the side yard, we looked at a statue of Jefferson Davis. Sophie led us to a shady path, but we saw the poison ivy warning sign and turned back towards the house. Signage explained that the statue and the path had been refurbished by Eagle Scout troops about fifteen years ago, projects funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Two men were trimming a tree in the side yard.

In front of the house, two historical markers explain the importance of this property. Jeff Davis was captured there on May 9, 1865, while en route to unite several Confederate armies and hold out with them until the Union was forced to concede “the Constitutional rights of the states.” This happened after “the tragic surrenders at Appomattox and Durham Station,” and Davis stopped at this house for the night without realizing two sets of Union troops were close behind.

The signs posted in 1957 by the Georgia Historical Commission emphasize the violation of Southern states’ rights. Davis is described as “the revered leader of the Lost Cause.” The narrative ends with a statement that “his hopes for a new nation, in which each state would exercise without interference its cherished ‘Constitutional rights,’ [were] forever dead.”

The term “Lost Cause” and the word “cherished” may give the impression this signage rejects Davis’ plans, and the Confederate attempt to secede overall, but reading this as a critique would miss their intended tone. The term “Lost Cause” was introduced immediately after the war by supporters of the Confederacy, and today’s readers should not consider its presence in midcentury materials a dismissal of those goals and attitudes. When these signs were created, organizations like the UDC were busily and publicly resisting the Civil Rights movement through an uptick in Confederate propaganda.

After saying goodbye to Miss Sophie, we stepped up onto the porch, passed the two requisite white rockers, and entered the small house museum. No one was inside, but in a couple of minutes one of the men who had been trimming the tree came in through the same door. John welcomed us to the museum and collected our $6 entry fee before disappearing into the back of the house.

We looked around at the displays for a while. The cases were badly in need of cleaning, sprinkled with dead gnats and ceiling particles. The explanatory signs next to each artifact included some handwritten paper chits and some copy-paper printouts held up with putty greasily seeping through to obscure the text.

One paper celebrated the Confederacy’s capture of Fort Sumter: “The Civil War begins!” Others saluted Davis’s refusal to “countenance the existence of a foreign port” in his territory and his formidable order to “bombard the place into submission.” But like the cause this place was designed to valorize, the museum had acquired a meager, desperate feel.

photos I took inside the museum June 9, 2023

John—landscaper, shopkeeper, and docent of this raggedy shrine—told us the most important item in their collection is a shell jacket with special buttons (top row center, above). He reported that this specimen is in the fourth best condition out of only nine that survived the burning of Columbus, Georgia.

Another favorite was the pair of reunion flags flanking a Confederate battle flag (second row, right). While he honored their big CSA flag as “the real thing,” that “was in a lot of battles,” John said he prefers the veterans’ reunion flags because they “show the personal side of it.” My own great-great-grandfather Perkins attended blue-gray reunions in Virginia until his death, so I get that.

Here’s what was most intriguing to me. The merchandise counter included two books of poetry by George Ray Houston, Lyrical Memories and the later collection Memories from a Poet: Poems. Houston is the poet laureate of the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and of the Yancy Independents (also SCV). The biography of several pages included at the end of each book does not mention Houston’s year of birth, and neither book provides a publication year, but Memories from a Poet: Poems includes photos from as recent as 2021.*

Houston’s poems have some range. There are love sonnets to his late wife Ginger (d. 2016); reflections on brave forest animals; and occasional poems about a local death or birthday. The majority are about the feats of Confederate heroes, the commemoration of those heroes, and some bitter reflections on the state of the nation.

The final poem from Memories, entitled “Storm in Dixie,” compares the struggles of culturally alienated Southerners today to the fate of their Confederate ancestors. In contrast to “our gray clad heroes” who gave their lives, “Today’s leaders bow in shame, / Politically correct cowards for public gain.” The “Rights,” “liberty,” and “freedom” of “patriots” are all in peril.

The 29-line poem also forecasts another civil war, a popular theme among neo-Confederates, white ethno-nationalists, and GOP insurrectionists:

Below the Mason-Dixon, east and west,

The army shall assemble in battle attire,

With gray clad heroes to inspire,

An army of patriots we shall require.

O fathers of liberty; heroes of our freedom crave,

O victorious sons of the defeated brave,

Upon liberty’s foundation we stoutly stand

Against a tool of socialist rule

And defend our God across our land,

Defender of our symbols and monuments high,

We must fight for freedom or gallantly die.

The poems aren’t good, and I can’t quite imagine the selection process for poet laureate if this is the result. But I was more surprised that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization designed to commemorate a cause that never succeeded and a nation that never truly existed, would have a poet laureate at all. Generally this honored artist-spokesperson position is connected to places—nations, states, cities—but occasionally other entities do name a laureate. Today, the die-hard SCV are defined by their resistance to the modern world’s understanding of the same spaces in which they live, physically and emotionally. Though they cannot control very much of that space anymore, save for meager strongholds such as the musty museum I visited this week, their imagined community hangs on.

W. B. Yeats, in “Lapis Lazuli,” articulates the role of art in rebuilding lost worlds. “All things fall and are built again,” he asserts while musing on a stone carving. In Yeats’ poem, it is the poets, playwrights, actors, and musicians, and also those who value them, that rebuild the “old civilizations put to the sword.” And in Anglo Saxon culture, the oral poet was not only the society’s memory keeper but also an influential maker of meaning: the scop, or shaper.

If the Confederate Sons’ shadow society is to survive, it must continually reinvent itself in the imagery of the Lost Cause while the rest of the world moves on. It is an inherently creative act, this construction of an imagined community, or nation, whose landscape is replete with monumental tragic heroes and their supporting cast. The poems of George Ray Houston, rudimentary though they are, continually repopulate that country. The production of art—here, the broad cultural narrative that a poetry collection builds—and the metacommentary on that art implied by appointing a laureate may be requisite to the continued existence of this fallen community. It’s truly pathetic.

The preservation of this “Jefferson Davis Historic Site” frames a tragic scene in the larger narrative. A poignant aspect for me was reading about the unseated Davis’ plans to hold his would-be nation-makers together long enough to negotiate the terms of their existence in the real state. I imagine his magisterial meeting with Generals Nathan B. Forrest, Kirby Smith, “Dick” Taylor, Dabney Maury, and “Prince John” Magruder. But Davis was carted off to prison instead, and the next month Smith and Magruder surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department. Magruder fled to Mexico for a couple of years. This part of their story was over.

But we can also feel a little sorry for dear old Macbeth, who was convinced of a future—for himself and for his nation—that was never going to stick; and who slaughtered innocence until it felt impossible to turn back; and who was eventually reduced to an aimless kind of self-preservation.

For mine own good,

All causes shall give way. I am in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Strange things I have in head that will to hand,

Which must be acted ere they may be scanned. (3.4.167-72)

Back out on the road headed to the highway, there are also these modern-day Macbeths, impatiently swerving out and growling past in their high rise Trumped-up 250s. Most bear the flag of their own nation. I hope they remember how the first one turned out.

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* George Ray Houston (1944-2023) died about six months after this story was posted. A brief online obituary contains some details about his life. Aside from time as a student at the University of Mississippi and stationed in the army in Germany after being drafted in 1966, he lived his entire life in Worth County, Georgia.