William Finch & Daffodils Pt. 2

Truth, winners and losers, historical revisionism

You’ve heard the phrase “history is written by the victors,” a quote that is often attributed to Winston Churchill even though it apparently has earlier origins. I’m not sure how accurate this notion is, especially in our modern era. The fact is, losers have a story to tell too, and what is accepted as truth can shift over time or be divided within a population (e.g., Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 US presidential election).

We’re 160 years removed from the Civil War and the causes and consequences of this conflict have been subject to debate and revision over time. One of my favorite examples of this is the The Battle of Atlanta cyclorama that is on now housed at the Atlanta History Center. The painting, 49 feet tall and 371 feet wide, wraps around the walls of a large rotunda, a circular room, providing the viewer with 360-degrees of battle action.

The painting was made in Milwaukee by German artists, and debuted in Minneapolis in 1886. True to historical fact, it depicted the Union victory in the Battle of Atlanta. However, when the painting moved south in 1892, it was altered (e.g., captured Confederate soldiers were repainted to look like fleeing Union soldiers) and was marketed as “the only Confederate victory ever painted.” Eventually, these revisions were altered back in the 1930s, and in the 1970s, Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, supported efforts to preserve the painting because it depicted a Union victory that helped free his ancestors.

One of the major myths of Lost Cause ideology, a view of the war that favors the South, is that even though the Confederacy lost the Civil War they won a moral victory. In this view, slavery is not seen as the major cause of the war and the practice of slavery is depicted as being not so bad and one that would have eventually died out without Northern intervention. One trope that supports Lost Cause ideology is that of the “loyal slave.”

I mentioned last week when I began this series William Finch & Daffodils that one of my goals is to compare the stories of two enslaved men who were said to have been sent to the Civil War to aide their Confederate enslavers: William Finch, who would sew an American flag for Union Soldiers at the end of the war, and Bill Yopp, who later in his life raised money for veterans in the Confederate Soldiers’ Home and eventually lived there himself.

I will get into more of the details of Yopp’s life next week and how they compare to Finch’s, but I wanted to share the story of The Battle of Atlanta cyclorama first because it is relevant to my reading of the historical texts. Bill Yopp’s story is shared frequently in the Atlanta newspapers between 1917 and his death in 1936, but the details are not always consistent. I’m interested in the agency Bill Yopp had in his actions and in sharing his story, and I’m also interested in the motivations journalists had for highlighting him.

So tune in again next week and until then enjoy some…

Daffodils and Deacon Blues

Writing this post today brought to mind my favorite Steely Dan song, “Deacon Blues,” which offers this refrain:

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

Here’s this week’s daffodil photo taken last March at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.

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