The False Cause by Adam H. Domby

Author:Adam H. Domby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: IDENTIFIER: Domby
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2019-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Fabricating false pasts to aid in selective forgetting has always been central to the creation of the Lost Cause. Alfred Blackburn, the last Class B pensioner, and his brother Wiley never mentioned their father’s identity publicly. Only in death was he revealed. According to Wiley’s death certificate, his father was their former master, Augustus Blackburn, the same man both brothers claimed they accompanied to war.136 The Blackburns carefully crafted a story that appealed to white patrons, and a white father did not work when performing as a loyal slave. The Lost Cause narrative, obsessed as it was with racial purity, had no room for recounting the widespread rape of enslaved women. Claiming to have a white father would not fit the trope that the Blackburns were playing.

At times, formerly enslaved people played a part in the erasure of the horrors of slavery, but they likely felt they had little choice. In an era when black men could be lynched for the slightest suspicion of interracial sex and miscegenation was outlawed, honesty was dangerous. Survival sometimes required ex-slaves to forget that their former enslavers were their actual blood family and reminisce instead about how they merely treated them like family. Like so much of the Lost Cause, the Blackburns’ stories were a product of the twentieth-century Jim Crow South.

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