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Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

Bibliographic Citation, Emmett opposing South's use of "Dixie"

This story was first reported in Thomas Cooper De Leon, BELLES, BEAUX, AND BRAINS OF THE '60s (G.W. Dillingham Company, 1909), 359. It has since been repeated in both popular and scholarly works.

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Dan Emmett, Dixie, and the Mythology of the Lost Cause In 2017, as a national debate raged about whether monuments to the Confederacy were racist and should be taken down, a local fan of Dan Emmett tried to convince me that Mount Vernon’s commemoration of Emmett and "Dixie" had nothing to do with the ongoing controversy. Local memorials to Emmett, she insisted, had absolutely nothing in common with monuments to the Confederacy. As proof, she pointed out that Emmett had sided with the Union during the Civil War and that he had been dismayed when his song was enthusiastically embraced by the South.

Her facts weren't wrong. Dan Emmett did support the Union during the Civil War (although he would have preferred saving the union without having to resort to ending slavery) and he did object to the how the South used "Dixie" during the war. Indeed, he supposedly told friends in 1861 that if he had known “to what use they were going to put my song, I’d be damned if I would have written it.”

But this story is incomplete and misleading. It freezes Emmett’s relationship with the Confederacy in the 1860s, at a time when neither were fans of the other. During the Civil War, in fact, southerners were dismayed by the idea that their beloved song might have been written by a northerner. But in the decades after the Civil War, white southerners came not only to accept Emmett’s authorship of "Dixie," but even to celebrate it. Emmett for his part came to cherish the support he received from the South, and especially from the Confederate heritage organizations that by the 1890s had made Emmett and his song part of their mythic narrative of the “Lost Cause.”

The Lost Cause, to paraphrase historian Adam Domby, was a historical narrative invented by white Southerners in the aftermath of their defeat. Its fabricated history about the antebellum South and the Civil War provided ideological justification for white supremacy in the post-Civil War era. Proponents of the Lost Cause ideology insisted the Civil War had been about defending states’ rights, not about slavery. They argued that slavery had been a benevolent practice and that slaves had been happy. In their eyes, Confederate soldiers were not traitors, but brave defenders of American principles of freedom and liberty.

While scholars have expended a lot of ink writing about the development and impact of the Lost Cause ideology, none have explored the ways in which Emmett became part of the story. But "Dixie" was perfect for those promoting the Lost Cause narrative. For one thing, it offered a romanticized version of slavery with its picture of a black man longing to return to his cherished home on a plantation. As importantly, "Dixie" had been an anthem for the Confederacy; the song inspired their brave soldiers and nurtured a sense of southern nationalism. An 1895 article in the Montgomery, Alabama Advertiser referred to the song as the South’s “Marseillaise." It was, the newspaper, enthusiastically recalled, “our martial song, exciting our men to deeds of bravery in times of war, and echoing throbbing chords of patriotism in times of peace.”

Perhaps most importantly, "Dixie" and Emmett offered proponents of the Lost Cause a powerful symbol of their hopes for national reconciliation on white southern terms. Confederate boosters wanted to shape the ways in which Americans in both the North and the South understood the war. It was important to them that northerners acknowledge that southerners had fought bravely, that the war had been fought for liberty rather than to defend slavery, and that, ultimately, southern whites were the rightful rulers of the South. A “critical element” of reconciliation, historian Karen Cox notes, “was to cement a sectional relationship based on the commonly held values of Anglo-Saxonism.” The fact that "Dixie"—a song that portrayed slaves as content with their lot and that had inspired Confederate troops—had been written by a northerner became increasingly important to white southerners at the start of the twentieth century. It suggested that white northerners shared the white South’s vision of itself. So where white Southerners had once claimed "Dixie" as a southern song, by the turn of the century they instead described it as a national song, one that showed national unity rather than sectional divisions. Not surprisingly, southern newspapers eagerly reprinted a 1915 Cleveland Plain Dealer article that described "Dixie" as “the song that was adopted as the national song of the south and the inspiring strains of which were ever after heard in the battle lines of the declining nation; the song that was sung with equal popularity north of the Mason & Dixon line and in later years became like a forging link in the new unity of north and south.”

So it should come as no surprise that Confederate heritage organizations proved some of Dan Emmett’s biggest supporters and promoters. When Emmett toured the South in 1895 with Al. G. Field, his rendition of "Dixie" brought down the house and earned him rapturous praise, especially when Emmett went out of his way to signal his embrace for the southern perspective on the war. While he had always been a Union man, he told a Montgomery, Alabama audience, “I love the southern people, I admire them for the way they fought for a cause they believed to be right.” Little wonder that Montgomery Advertiser article called “Uncle Dan Emmett” a “renowned man in the South” whose name was immortal and who deserved a monument be erected to his memory.

The Confederate Veteran began running stories on Emmett within months of its founding in April 1893. Founder S. A. Cunningham travelled to Ohio to visit Emmett in 1894, returning with a copy of what was supposedly an original version of "Dixie." When he published it in the journal for the first time in its December 1894 issue, Cunningham described it as “the greatest treat ever yet given to the public through the Veteran." The journal facilitated Emmett’s sale of autographed prints of "Dixie" for 25 cents. In 1897, after Emmett appealed to Confederate Veteran readers for funds (writing that he was living in poverty and was living "in hope of my Southern brethren doing something for me”), Cunningham organized a fundraising drive and urged other Confederate groups—like the newly formed United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Children of the Confederacy—to raise money for the elderly man. One member of the UDC responded by writing a public plea in an Alabama newspaper. The composer of "Dixie" should not have to live in poverty as long as any descendants of Confederate soldiers still lived, she insisted. Emmett's song had “inspired our heroes of the Confederacy,” and the South now had a debt to repay. “Aid him now,” she implored “Do not wait to erect to him a national monument.” At least $160 dollars—or the equivalent of about $5800 today—was sent to Emmett as a result of these campaigns.

The idea of building a memorial to Emmett would not have long to wait. Within five years of Emmett’s death, Confederate Veteran editor S.A. Cunningham, Walker Kennedy, the editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Al. G. Field, had appointed themselves as a committee to raise funds to build a monument to Emmett somewhere in the South; apparently, Memphis and Richmond both wanted the honor of housing the memorial. While that effort came to naught, a monument to Emmett would be erected in Fletcher, North Carolina in 1927, part of a project by the Calvary Episcopal Church to install monuments to notable people in southern history. A year later, a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a plaque in Montgomery, Alabama that recognized Emmett and orchestrator H.F. Arnold for writing and arranging the music that was performed at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration.

These efforts to commemorate Emmett and "Dixie" as part of a Confederate memory project would reach all the way to Mount Vernon and would have a profound impact on the town's memorial landscape. The first recognition of Emmett in Mount Vernon that reached beyond his gravesite at the cemetery resulted from a campaign by the Ohio Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who decided at their annual convention in 1930 that it was up to them to ensure that Dan Emmett not be forgotten. A year later, they gifted the city of Mount Vernon a commemorative tablet mounted on a large boulder to "be placed in a suitable location with due ceremony." They were thrilled that the mayor and local residents were so supportive of their plans, evidence of "wonderful civic spirit," in the words of the chairwoman Ouida LaRue of the Daniel Emmett Memorial Committee. The placement of the memorial also excited LaRue and the UDC. They secured permission to place it outside the city’s Memorial building, which LaRue described as "quite the show place of the city and on a beautiful main street and a coast to coast highway." The boulder remained in that prominent downtown location for 75 years before being moved to another site in town. "In remembrance of Daniel Decatur Emmett," its tablet reads, “Composer of ‘Dixie’ Whose Melody Inspired and Encouraged the Southern People and Now Thrills the Hearts of a Reunited Nation.” The program for the dedication ceremony was a major town affair: the high school band played, the mayor formally accepted the gift, speeches were made, and, of course, the audience sang "Dixie."

Yet this Confederate memory campaign had not reached its apex. That would have to wait until 1935, when Kentuckian Mary Darby Fitzhugh came to Mount Vernon with a singular mission: to erect a national memorial to Emmett and the song, "Dixie."