Teaching the Civil War: Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery

Today’s Muster continues our series Teaching the Civil War. Each post in the series has examined a different method that college and K-12 teachers have used to make the Civil War era come alive in the classroom. The following post by University of Tennessee Chattanooga professors Mark Johnson and Michael Thompson explores how place-based learning at a local Confederate cemetery has helped students wrestle with questions of historical memory. 

 

Every day on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s campus, students walk by the final resting place for Confederate soldiers. Despite its proximity to the campus bookstore, the main parking garage, and many academic buildings, most students claim to have never noticed it. As students engage with course readings, class discussions, and the cemetery itself, they come to see, as historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote, that communities “exert the cultural authority, express the collective solidarity, and achieve a measure of the permanence that they often crave” through the control of public spaces.[1] With this new understanding, students become increasingly curious: how many other spaces, which may generally go unnoticed, remain, therefore, unquestioned and permanent parts of their city’s landscape?

 

History and Overview

After the Battle of Stones River, Confederates transported their wounded eastward to Chattanooga and initially interred nearly 900 casualties along the banks of the Tennessee River. After devastating flooding in 1867 a committee purchased the current cemetery site on higher ground where the deceased were relocated, including 141 buried in mass graves after their original markers had been washed away. After the battles for Chickamauga and Chattanooga, more casualties joined them. Long after the war ended, many Confederate veterans and their families chose this cemetery as their final resting place.[2] Two American soldiers also are buried on the grounds, along with a freedman named Shaderick Searcy and at least two other unnamed people of color – a “Negro Man” and a “Hospital Matron.” 

 

The grave of an unnamed Black man, most likely enslaved and claimed as Confederate by etching “CSA” on his tombstone. This photo was taken moments after Thompson removed a small Confederate flag inserted next to the grave. (photo taken by the authors)

 

Chattanooga was contested space both during and after the Civil War. Held by the Confederate and Union armies, the city and its environs are awash with reminders of the conflict and its combatants. But aside from the Chickamauga battlefield ten miles to the south in Georgia, the greatest local assemblage of Confederate memorialization and Lost Cause mythology can be found in Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery. For generations, a Confederate Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked to develop the cemetery and mold local memories and understandings of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. As burials swelled to as many as 2,500, these groups erected an obelisk, gazebo, stone wall, wrought iron Confederate flag gate, plaques, and other memorials.[3] 

Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery has proven a captivating and versatile teaching space in part due to its evolution over time and the ways it still resonates with many issues both past and present. Experiential learning and community engagement are pedagogical and institutional focal points at UTC. The authors and their history department colleagues regularly teach beyond the traditional classroom, providing students with opportunities to learn by doing, explore local histories, and bridge academic and public dialogues. In this post, the authors explain how we have utilized the cemetery as an archive of primary sources to enrich historical understanding for an array of learners, ranging from local high schoolers and First Gen Mocs to first-year history majors and students studying historical methods, enslavement, the Civil War and its memory, and the Jim Crow era.

 

University High and Teaching Historical Methods

Since Fall 2023, UTC has welcomed to campus Hamilton County Schools students enrolled in University High, an alternative program for public high school juniors and seniors. On “Focus Fridays,” UH students have actively engaged with campus life and various academic disciplines. Thompson has guided groups of UH students through a session called “Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery: Memorialization, Memory, and Myth,” which includes introductions to what historians do and what it means to think historically.

 

The students, who have pre-read a Slate interview with historian Kevin Levin about his book Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, are oriented to the cemetery’s history and most noteworthy sites before exploring the space in small groups.^[4] The participants then critically interrogate the cemetery as a site of contested historical memory, and record their observations and questions in preparation for a closing discussion. On the whole, these diverse groups of high schoolers have articulated mixed reactions, ranging from fascination and curiosity to surprise and outrage. But most have appreciated the opportunity to learn about their community and its fraught history.

 

Both authors have regularly taught the department’s introductory “Research and Writing in History,” a required methodology course for all history majors and minors at UTC as well as those training to become high school history teachers. Although most of these students come from Tennessee, only a third hail from Hamilton County and have some familiarity with local sites and histories.

 

The main focus of this course is teaching the conventions of historical thinking, researching, and writing; but we have also taken students on walking tours, to local museums, and to the Confederate Cemetery. These cemetery sessions have entailed similar learning objectives as those for UH, but have additionally asked these college students to formulate historical questions about the space, scour the cemetery for evidence, critically assess the source and reliability of that evidence, and devise research strategies to answer their queries. We have found that the cemetery’s dual nature, as not merely a repository of names and dates but also a site of symbolism and discourse that changes with the times, challenges these students to think beyond orthodox sources and methodologies.

 

Civil War Memory in the Cemetery

In Johnson’s upper-level course “The Civil War in American Memory,” students have acquainted themselves with the scholarship about public spaces, memorialization, cemeteries, and the memory and politics of the dead. Ultimately, students learn to analyze the ways in which, according to historian David Thelen, “people reshape their recollections of the past to fit their present needs,” such as, in the words of anthropologist Paul Connerton, to “legitimate a present social order,” political viewpoint, and collective identity.[5]

 

When visiting the cemetery, students have generally wanted to discuss the cemetery’s gazebo, an unidentified American soldier, the entrance gate, and the plaques. The students have found the normalness of these things to be part of their power. They note that the gazebo, in particular, seems innocent because it provides a place for mundane activities. They have added, however, that its Confederate imagery and gush, therefore, tells certain people that they do not belong.

 

Similarly, the entrance gate subtly displays the Confederate battle flag. While students have usually overlooked it prior to their study of the cemetery, they have said that they cannot help but notice it afterward. They have wondered: what other Confederate symbols surround them and have become unquestioned parts of the landscape?

 

In Fall 2024, students spent more time than usual on the soldier identified only as an “American.” In July 1999, the National Park Service found the remains on Missionary Ridge and memorialized him as an “American Soldier” from the conflict. The students consistently thought about this marker alongside Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic because the “American” identification seems like the type of reconciliation occurring, at least among white Americans, in the book. Similarly, they connect it to the reconciliation occurring in Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary. In Horwitz, Burns, and the cemetery, the 1990s come across as a decade with little conflict between white Americans. They all seem on the same side. This type of memory, students have increasingly pointed out, intentionally passes over the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1994 Murder Trial of O. J. Simpson that put race front and center in the national conversation.^[6]

 

Teaching Shaderick Searcy

The Civil War in American Memory students also have visited the cemetery in conjunction with their readings on faithful slaves and Black Confederates, so Shaderick Searcy has become the focal point of the class.

Amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cemetery offered a space for outdoor class instruction. In this image, Johnson converses with Civil War in American Memory students about the SCV and their claiming of Shaderick Searcy as a Black Confederate. (photo credit: Angela Foster)

 

In 2016, cemetery caretakers unearthed Searcy’s lost grave marker. That original gravestone clearly portrays him (spelled Shaderick Searcy) as an enslaved person who “served under masters J. D. and W. K. Searcy.” After 2016 the SCV erected a second and new marker, which gives no indication of race or enslaved status. Instead, Searcy (spelled Shadrick) has the same marker as any other private in the Confederate Army. Students have argued that the SCV effectively turned Searcy from a slave into a soldier.[7]

 

Before class, students have read excerpts from Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates, Micki McElya’s Clinging to Mammy, and a piece on African Americans who manipulated the “faithful slave” role in public performances to gain measures of economic and political power. In addition to these readings, they have studied primary sources, which include a letter from Robert Church, Jr. of Memphis to the United Confederate Veterans, a newspaper column by UCV Commander in Chief John B. Gordon about the so-called friendliness in the South between the races, and a newspaper article about Clinton Rodgers, who supposedly fought in the war as an enslaved man, supposedly went by the name “Jeff Davis,” and supposedly attended all the UCV reunions.^[8]

 

Students have recognized that Searcy, who died at 91, lived through Jim Crow and the Great Depression. Amid these difficult times, he had a stake in good relations with Chattanooga’s white population. According to news coverage of the original grave’s discovery, Searcy received a Confederate pension for his service. The students have balked at the reporter’s use of the term “soldier.”^[9] In more recent iterations of the class, students have expressed that they like to think that journalists would approach this term with more care and sensitivity in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans routinely place Confederate flags on the graves at the cemetery. By doing so, they continue to claim Shaderick Searcy, who was born enslaved, as a Confederate soldier. They also put Confederate flags on the other graves to Black Americans, including the Negro Man and the Hospital Matron. (photo taken by the authors)

 

The Cemetery Amid Black Lives Matter and Unite the Right

In 2017, after the white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Chattanooga’s mayor Andy Burke terminated the city’s trusteeship of the cemetery grounds. Burke explained, “Our action today makes it clear that the city of Chattanooga condemns white supremacy in every way, shape and form. While we honor our dead, we do not honor the principle for which they fought.”^[10] The city left stewardship of the cemetery exclusively to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Nathan Bedford Forrest Camp #3. Nonetheless, Chattanooga city streets and public spaces continue to bear the names of Confederates, like Samuel Josiah Abner Frazier, and Unionists, like Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain. Unlike the cemetery, however, Frazier Avenue, Chamberlain Avenue, and Chamberlain Field do not have Civil War imagery. By turning over the cemetery, Chattanooga ended its relationship with its most-overt medium for permanent display of Lost Cause propaganda.

 

In 2020, amid the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the cemetery became a new battleground for racist and anti-racist messaging. Thompson and his students discovered a banana peel discarded on Searcy’s grave, eliciting profound shock and disgust as the instructor removed the dehumanizing refuse and explained the bigotry of this anonymous act. Around the same time, and amid the vandalization of Confederate monuments and other symbols in cities like Charleston, Richmond, New Orleans, and Chapel Hill, “BLM” was found emblazoned on the stones for the “Negro Man” and Black hospital matron (who, like Searcy, adherents of the Lost Cause had claimed by etching “CSA” on their tombstones), and the words “Confederate,” “The Stars & Bars,” and “N.B. Forrest” were blotted out on a memorial to “Our Confederate Dead.”

The 1997 memorial to “Our Confederate Dead” blotted in protest amid the Black Lives Matter movement. (photo taken by the authors)

 

For students, it’s remarkable that the site, a cemetery filled with stone markers supposedly designed to inter people and last – presumably unchanged – forever, has its own history as it changes with new discoveries, new norms and values, and new developments in the politics of race and white supremacy in the United States.

 

Mark A. Johnson is an assistant professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932. Currently, he’s working on his forthcoming book, American Bacon: A History of a Food Phenomenon.

 

Michael Thompson is an associate professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. His current scholarly projects include a history of enslavement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Tennessee.

 

[1] W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2008), 2-3, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.utc.edu/10.4159/9780674028982-003.

[2] Zella Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Vol. 1 (The Lookout Publishing Company, 1931), 254-6, 493-512.

[3] Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County, 254-6, 493-512.

^[4] Rebecca Onion, “Dismantling the Myth of the ‘Black Confederate,’ Slate Aug. 30, 2019, https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/08/black-confederate-myth-history-book.html.

[5] David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” The Journal of American History 75, 4 (Mar. 1989): 1121, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1908632; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.

^[6] Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998); Ken Burns, Ric Burns, and WETA-TV, The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns (WETA, 2002).

[7]  “True Grave of First African-American Soldier Buried At Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery Found,” Chattanoogan.com Mar. 23, 2016, https://www.chattanoogan.com/2016/3/23/320653/True-Grave-Of-First-African-American.aspx

^[8] Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2007); Mark A. Johnson, Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles (University Press of Mississippi, 2021).

^[9] “True Grave of First African-American Soldier Buried At Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery Found,” Chattanoogan.com Mar. 23, 2016, https://www.chattanoogan.com/2016/3/23/320653/True-Grave-Of-First-African-American.aspx

^[10] Daniel Jackson, “Chattanooga Backs Away from Confederate Past,” Feb. 21, 2018, https://www.courthousenews.com/chattanooga-backs-away-from-confederate-past/