Alex’s grandparents live in Madisonville, Kentucky, a modest grid of 18th century buildings housing under-visited businesses and strips of teeming fast-food restaurants. Papa, a former anesthesiologist with the Air Force, and Gramma, the sweetest, most honest woman alive, live in a 60s split-level brick home a mile from the center of town. We spent a weekend with them on our way from Memphis to Indiana in the middle of the summer. Gramma fed us eight-layer bars and Papa told us stories about his parents, friends from the service, and even one about the time Alex stayed with them for a weekend and refused to pick up his toys.
In the morning, we drove 45 minutes south to Pembroke, Kentucky, a hamlet even smaller than Madisonville, to see the Jefferson Davis memorial. A 351-foot obelisk of pure Kentucky limestone stands among a brood of spindling trees on the same land where the Confederacy’s biggest hope was born. We rode the elevator to the top, a narrow platform with barred windows and views of the emerald Kentucky countryside.
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Just a few hundred miles to the East, in a similar patch of Kentucky sawmill grass, is where Abraham Lincoln was born.
A couple joined us to the top and then down to the base. Papa talked with the man, wearing a tanned, chocolate brown cowboy hat and silver belt buckle. His wife, a spirited, stout woman, whose few remaining teeth matched her husband’s hat, told us they were Civil War re-enactors and first-rate historians.
“We wear the traditional hoop skirts and everything,” said said in a stilted twang. “Some of those dresses cost nearly $500!”
Their authentic rifles cost nearly three times that amount, and thousands of proud Kentuckians come every year to watch the South rise and fall again.
As she waddled alongside us, she said her teenaged daughter had just gotten in trouble in school for “correcting the teacher” while discussing the Civil War. The historian thought it important we know the teacher was black.
Like fracking, abortion, and whether or not our president is really an American, the Civil War remains an issue that divides this country nearly 150 years later. There are legions of disappointed, disheartened people, embarrassed about the day Lee folded and determined that antebellum will rule once more. Like the historians, they claim it has more to do with land and pride than race or slavery, but everything in this country is always about race and slavery.
In reality, Davis was a reluctant hero, disinclined to secede, and possessed little desire to be president over the Confederate nation were they to win. The puppet in president’s clothing, and when the South crumbled, the one to blame.
We walked through the small museum in the building next to the monument, detailing Jefferson’s life, beginning with his Kentucky roots and upbringing in Louisiana and Mississippi, moving through his marriages, and on to his military career. It displayed cases of his letters, photographs of his family, and the side of him lost under scrutiny and opposition. Jefferson Davis was the brain child behind public services we still employ today, including ensuring veterans receive compensation after their service. It was his idea to construct the nation’s capital, but it doesn’t matter. Most people will always, and only, remember him as the guy who let down the South.
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