A picture is worth a thousand questions

History is a funny thing. It reminds us of our victories and our failures. It inspires us and it haunts us even more. My intensive research during the writing of Mothers Teach Your Children has been infinitely improved by Internet resources, and yet it has also exposed a vast reservoir of yet unknown history which I would rather have not dealt with.

I kept coming to unsolvable enigmas while embroiled in countless hours of photograph comparisons, as I made identifications of the people in this book. I would be engrossed identifying a prominent family, parents and their children, and their extended families... their associates, and my house of cards would suddenly threaten to collapse over some boy's ear. You see, people can often look like a famous person, share key distinguishing features, but then totally have the wrong ears, which in many cases was my deciding factor, in believing I had found another rare tintype of a important Victorian personality.

Ears. Big ones, little pointed ones, with long lobes, or no lobes... earlobes were huge in this tedious process. Everything in a certain visage would be right except some person's earlobes, and suddenly a potential $1000 image became a $10 one. But the farther I delved into the puzzle, the more challenging it got, because there were times I knew that, well, the person's ears had changed. And people's ears do not change that much, except over a long time they get larger. They don't ever get significantly smaller. They don't suddenly become lobeless, or grow big healthy lobes where there had been none.

Of course, little children's ears can grow quite a bit... until puberty. Women can develop small earlobes after some years of wearing heavier ear rings. Old men's ears will stretch and droop and become quite large. But for the full grown and middle aged, ears are pretty stable. So what was going on with some of these people's ears whose faces were identical but the ears did not match?

I became convinced that Victorians had access to plastic surgery, to an extent far more prevalent than one would suspect! The possibility showed up first in my study of Western outlaws. I would have photos of the same person, I was sure, yet the better known photo seemed to have had his ears trimmed. Yes, actually trimmed. Earlier photos of them, in my collection, if they were the same person, betrayed much larger, almost comically protruding ears, and much more easily recognized, which could not have been reduced by any natural means.

In Victorian times, photographers were often referred to as artists, often able to touch-up photos, eliminate backgrounds, enhance features, even change clothing on the subjects. In the early days an artist might actually paint a portrait from a poor image, then make a Daguerreotype, Ambrotype or tintype of it. Later they would create an enlargement, do the cosmetic changes, then photograph those renderings and print them as cabinet cards. Sometimes, for a fee, they would make their portraits more “flattering,” and scars or moles could be removed, and yes, ears reduced for posterity. That was one explanation.

I often delayed decisions in these cases, as I had plenty of photographs of folks whose ears had not been doctored. Everything coasted along, and then about 600 tintypes later I was forced to deal with the question. A prominent Southern family seemed to have had some of their children endure rhinoplasties!

When had plastic surgery come into practice?

Would you believe around 500 BC? A surgeon in India is thought to have pioneered the practice. It became fairly common in Europe in the 1500's for certain daring surgeons to repair noses ravaged by syphilis, which had become rampant in those days. American surgeons began to experiment with early forms of plastic surgery in the late Nineteenth Century. But European doctors had it down much earlier, and Americans who needed a tuck or a correction could attain a do-over if only they could find a way to cross the big pond.

Knowing this was a game-changer, in understanding the variables in my comparisons. And it hit me, all of those hundreds of years of sword fights and dagger injuries had made our ancestors experts at stitching, grafting if necessary, multitudes of injuries sustained in the most common type of armed conflict, long before guns put neat little holes deep inside one's enemies. Those big holes called for a whole new generation of medical innovation. And still, plastic surgery could eventually minimize bullet-made surface wounds as well.

Certainly by the 1930's criminals like John Dillinger were getting pretty sophisticated procedures done to hide their identity. Moles removed, dimples filled, ear lobes trimmed. Suddenly it was not so far-fetched for Bill Dalton to have sought a surgeon out in California who could change his appearance in the 1890's. It might explain why he went way out there for a few years, and behaved well enough to dabble in politics, before he returned home to Oklahoma re-invented, only then to succumb to his violent fate.

The anomalies in my photos just kept throwing up barriers to progress in my years of research, until I came upon an astounding possibility; that Some Victorians utilized plastic surgery to obscure their bi-racial heritage. And these surgeries had stupifying, far-reaching implications. Instantly I began to perceive why history can be so... secretive.

We know today what the people before us wanted us to know. And they hid a lot from us. They had many reasons, but human pride and avoidance of social rejection were at the heart of many deceptions. And totally clueless, we never knew or suspected any more than they wanted us to.

Victorian women had become experts at concealing pregnancy. For a century or more, men and women wore wigs as a fashion accessory. Flamboyant clothing, high heels, flashy jewelry, all “made the man.” Paintings were designed to embellish and flatter. Who knows what Martha Washington really looked like?

All of this came to the front of my brain one night, at 3:00 in the morning, and got me out of bed to face and consider it. I had been acquiring some old original tintypes of prominent families in the Confederacy, when something bizarre was becoming unavoidable: Jefferson Davis, the first and last president of the Confederate States of America was very possibly married to a woman of bi-racial ancestry.

Varina Davis, first lady of the Confederacy

Internet blogs poke at the possibilities, based on the unavoidable conclusions by more than a few people, from merely looking at Davis's beautiful, African-American looking wife. There were actually plenty of clues found within their own lives and writings, that Varina Anne Banks Howell Davis was a raisin in the sun, at least for her “Northern” attitudes and her opinions and her undiplomatic way of sharing them, which made her less than popular in the short, violent life of the Confederacy. But if she was bi-racial, (and she probably was) that would have been more than enough to feed the fires of Davis's Southern racist critics, who kept him tormented during his presidency.

A comparison to known photographs 

and a miniature painting on ivory, (top left)

Born in Natchez and raised on a Mississippi plantation, then educated in Philadelphia at a prestigious girl's school, Varina's pedigree was never-the-less short and cloudy. Much like Martha Washington, she was olive skinned, dark-haired, but she also typified all the characteristics of the most beautiful African-American stars known in Hollywood today. Huge expressive eyes, very full, even voluptuous lips, and a wide nose typical to Native Americans or Negroes, but rarely seen among Anglo/ Caucasians. Indeed, she had sometimes been compared by her detractors to the lovely “octaroons” and mulattoes famous in nearby Louisiana in her own time. But none of this speculation proved anything.

She could have been a “black Irish” girl, or her ancestry salted with a little Native American blended in somewhere. Varina gave Jefferson Davis beautiful children, but sadly only a couple of them lived long enough to marry and provide grandchildren. Several of them showed definite bi-racial characteristics early on. After the war, and two years in a federal prison, Jeff Davis spent a great deal of his post-war marriage chasing business opportunities throughout the States and in Europe, trying to rebuild the fortune he lost as titular head of the rebellion. Varina was not amused, and less amused by several scandalous relationships he pursued during their strained relationship.

Jefferson Davis was presumptuous, overbearing and annoyingly energetic, and found that the two got along better when they were apart. So he made sure they got along. Later on one of his devoted lady friends gave him a grand home upon her death, and the whole family relocated to New York. The Davises traveled extensively, and Varina and her youngest daughter, also named Varina, wrote books which were well received.

Varina was boldly transparent about her feelings about the Confederacy. She had always been outspoken, even warning that it would come to no good end. During the war, several of her slaves suspiciously managed to escape, never to be seen again. After it was over, she wrote that the right side had won, and she was glad of it. Unlike most Southerners, she seemed to celebrate Emancipation, and may even have rushed it a little with her own slaves. I would not be surprised if some of them were relatives. This may sound preposterous, but it is not. As discussed in my book, Mary Custis Lee, General Robert E. Lee's wife, had a half-sister born to an Arlington plantation slave, whom her father freed and gave a home with acreage when she got married.

As I dug into the Davis children and their possible ethnicity, the implications began to loom up in a surprising geyser of race issues.

Oldest Davis daughter, Margaret, was experimenting,

trying to find a way to wear her hair.

One of the “Southern traditions,” lost when slavery was finally ended, was the pervasive practice on large plantations of many masters providing the “seed” for the slave offspring. There may have been some practical reasons for the practice, and certainly some very selfish ones. Thomas Jefferson had done this. The Supreme Court Justice in the Republic of Texas, John Hemphill, never married but fathered his children through his slave, with whom he co-habitated for almost fifteen years. Confederate General John R. Jones had four “outside” children, one who grew up to be one of the founders of the NAACP. He astonished and incensed his community by educating and providing for them as his children, leaving his two mulatto sons everything when he died. Likewise, Mary Custis Lee's father, George Washington Custis, did the fair and proper thing, even if it embarrassed his whole family. But not all Southern men were so noble. Many more shrugged and declared ignorance... and for self-serving if not totally unjust reasons.

Scores of illegitimate mulatto children of slaveowners, if acknowledged, would thus rightfully share in the family's inheritance. The master's white children would suddenly share just a sliver in a limited pie, and in the South, those pies had already shrunk to oblivion after the war.

Maintaining “whiteness” became paramount. The mixing of race only went one way. There was whitening of Blacks, but there was no blackening of Whites. Besides there being laws in some states forbidding inter-racial marriage, and casting all citizens with even a drop of Negro blood as black, there were ancient myths and strong prejudices about race, which would destroy the lives of bi-racial persons if their mixed race genealogy was ever detected.

The metamorphosis of Margaret Davis, 

first daughter of the Confederacy.

All photos are historic sources.

Here is where my research answered my own questions in the matter. If the Davis children needed crafty cosmetics or surgery to “whiten” them, the ex-president's travels and dealings in Europe would have offered him the means and the opportunity to provide them the best in medical care. And somehow, the Davis's beautiful large-eyed, wide-nosed, black-haired children grew up to sport pointed noses, and brown hair. Their ears stayed the same.

My photographs seem to document lifelong struggles to manage their hair, lighten their complexions, do whatever it took to maintain their racial status in the apartheid South.

The Davis's second daughter Varina had 

more Caucasian characteristics. 

Image from my collection 

Starting out with very black hair, Varina seems

 to experiment with degrees of curliness. 

She ends up blonde. 

If I am correct, then the implications are legion. One important one would be that it was not racial hatred which propelled the South into the Civil War. The examples above were just a sampling of Southern romance and familial connection to Negro slaves. You do not touch or spend time or attention with something or someone you hate... much less make love with them, virtually adopt their children within the limits of the marriage laws, and even educate them in violation of the laws of the land. You do not, in some cases ignore societal stigmas, risk ostracism, and break the rules of your native culture for anyone you hate, or have contempt for, or judge as something less than human.

Artists over the decades have struggled on just how

 to portray Varina, Davis's youngest daughter, who gave him

 grandchildren... she was a blonde Arian, or mulatto, 

or Black! 

It was complicated, it was wrong, but it was far from hate. These bi-racial relationships were witnessed all over the South, and were the most honest and transparent evidence of an unspoken undercurrent, a shadow society of sorts, which had been growing for over a century.

Apartheid was inspired as much by greed, concerns about inheritance, as it was about hate or notions of racial superiority.

The quandary was well illustrated in the Texas county where I lived for almost fifty years. Sheriff Garrett Scott came home to Grimes County from the war to become a popular lawman, and was elected several times. A “reconstructed” Confederate veteran, and a son of a slave owner, he did not break ties with his former slaves, but represented their interests and pushed for reforms in Black education. He maintained a romantic interest in his former slave lover, whom he never married, but with her fathered at last one child. Eventually his open-minded ideas were challenged and the county ended up in a shooting war, assassinations of Black officials, and the ending of Black rights and enfranchisement. Scott was wounded and his brother killed, and then he was run out of the county, requiring a militia to escort him to safety. These kinds of things happened, where some White men had the courage to admit their affections and loyalties to Blacks, common to many more Whites than ever admitted, at great cost to themselves.

So after the war, some Southern men were driven as much by love, or at least duty and common decency, as others were by prejudice.

Abolition of slavery would have led to making Negroes equal citizens in many ways not considered by Abolitionists, and suddenly made them members of white families, with implied co-ownership, inheritances, and other legal rights. Southerners like Lee, Custis, and Davis hated slavery, and were knee-deep in a family nightmare, which was growing exponentially, and frantically trying to divest themselves from the “peculiar institution.” But it was a family affair. They wanted to deal with it, and while saving face, pay off some, more or less adopt others, and pick and choose who was “freed,” and who remained informally enslaved on the farm like the rest of their children!

To them it was about pride, self-determination and social acceptance, but being as fair as they could, and protecting their assets and most of all, their white children. Since there was often five to ten of those, it was definitely about ducking responsibility to a number that could double or triple that count. So they would fight a war over … yes “states rights,” which governed these kinds of family complications. And those soldiers in gray in many cases were not so much fighting for slavery, but their own parcels as described in their daddy's Will. Freedom and equal rights for enslaved people would mean financial disaster for them. They would die to protect that from happening. It was selfish, and wrong, but it sheds a different light on what has always been blamed on White “superiority” and racial hatred.

Multiple sins had been tolerated over a long period of time, until Southerners were so steeped in a quagmire of wrongs and injustices, that their only defense was the U. S. Constitution. So dependent on slave labor, so embroiled in systematic adultery, and so guilty of race persecution in order to maintain a status quo, the South found few sympathetic allies around the world. And worse, half of its own countrymen ready to force the issue, even go to war over it. The question which can never be answered, is what might have happened if the South had been allowed to deal with its family complications on its own, in its own time. Might the South have gone through a similar social reversal like that in the North, where slavery had grown into disfavor. The South was not that far behind, seeing how slavery was still the law of the land, and the slaves in the North were not officially emancipated until deep into the very war over the question. The flag of the United States had flown over legal slavery for almost one hundred years. The Confederacy lasted only four. And the war that they fought, which took so many lives, solved nothing.

In the South, there became a revealing pejorative among whites which needs addressing. About the lowest thing you could call a person, even if you loved Negroes, was a “Nigger Lover.” Somehow this was considered to be some kind of betrayal, especially among White wives who had few rights themselves. It was a term of suspicion and a dreaded threat rooted very deeply, and for most white kids, we could never imagine how deep. We just repeated it because grown-ups were so horrified by the term. White children over the years picked up on the severity of the term, but not its actual meaning. They used it often and indiscriminately, without understanding its origins.

After the Civil War, one of the biggest casualties was Southern propriety, as countless black housemaids let be known the identity of the fathers of their light-skinned children... And countless White wives faced what should have been obvious, that their husbands had been unfaithful, and fathered numerous “mulatto” children, and they were in fact, “Nigger lovers.” The very existence of this term, stupidly repeated by schoolchildren, suggests that there were significant numbers of southerners who “loved” Negroes. Enough for them to be a group derided more than Blacks themselves. Surely, for some the term was a euphemism, but there can be no doubt, a faction represented by some of the most prominent Southerners, that love was indeed... love. And love or not, this marital betrayal of White women could be traced right to the steps of Arlington-Lee mansion.

Much, much later Americans learned that even Thomas Jefferson had been a lover of a Negro. “Loving” Negroes had not been just some low-life pastime of ner' do wells, but the tradition of Southern slaveholders for hundreds of years. It had been a contemptible practice, of breaking Biblical taboos and vows of marriage, violating vulnerable Black women and denying their children their due inheritance. It was not that loving Negroes was bad, the white men obviously thought it quite acceptable, it was the conditions surrounding it, and the denial afterwards. The duress; The dehumanizing, predatory nature of the so-called loving. But these assumptions about the circumstances are merely conjecture. Looking back on it today, it was not so different from the kind of love many White women received during that same era.

Some Black women found short-term advantages to these truly sordid relationships, and many even traded love for shadow marriages which gave their children a better future. But after the War Between the States, women black and white no longer had to look the other way, or pretend ignorance, or tolerate a... “Nigger Lover.”

But there was another angle to this term. If Jefferson, Custis, Lee, and Davis and others were implicated in this insidious system, and they were, what could be said about the South but that it was run by men who made love to Negro women often, and had invented an ideal sex arrangement, (for them) and racial prejudice was far less a part of this paradigm than male dominance and gratification. It was the racial divide which provided the curtain for their sexual adventures. Then some like Jefferson and Custis came clean and actually did make a stab at doing the right thing by their bi-racial children. They were true Negro lovers.

Jefferson Davis Jr. 

Tintype from author's collection

When General Lee signed that surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, there was a crashing of the Southern culture, and it needed to crash. But immediately some Southerners began to speak of Lee as an illegitimate spokesman for the Confederacy, and they felt he had no authority to end their fight for their “way of life.” There was talk of continuing the battle of Secession, to protect their assets, even making a final stand in Texas. Many Southerners had already moved their money and slaves to Texas where they believed they were out of reach of the Yankees. They thought Texas could hold out, even go back to being a sovereign nation again. Thousands of displaced slaves were transported and congregated along the plantation regions along the Brazos River, awaiting the end of the war.

If the South had won, or at least obtained a satisfactory truce, then they would remain slaves, and their master's assets would be secure, and they could be marched back home. If the South lost, then these extended Black families, many of them blood relations of white plantation owners, had been cleverly relocated- and disoriented and without any means of travel, probably, conveniently, never to be seen again. Through emergency relocation, the problem of plantation inheritance was made to disappear. And Brazos Valley towns found themselves overrun with homeless freedmen. These thankless, heartless slave owners, who avoided monumental costs and complications and accountability by transporting their slaves across the Mississippi, were the original “Nigger lovers,” eventually considered the lowest form of White Southerner, who fathered countless bi-racial children and then exported them too far away to be reunited. When Texas Blacks hint at the perpetual injustices they have suffered since slavery times, this was the beginning of it.

It was not the supposed beatings and whippings depicted in Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was the cheatings and quippings of master Billy Bob. Robbed of their beneficial associations, denied their kinships, reduced to chattel and spoken about by insulting pejoratives, African Americans have a right to remind America what outrageous wrongs were instituted by its fathers, and perpetuated by elitist monsters for generations. And perhaps the greatest injustice was the imposing of White standards of beauty, which started with bi-racial Southerners trying to pass for something they were not.

Young Jeff appears, according to the known 

historical photographs, to have had his ears

 trimmed significantly, whereas mine suggests

 the changes were done in stages, ears first,

 then the nose was narrowed.

In a White world, Blacks were left to construct their own social structure based on whiteness. The presence of so much white blood in their demographic resulted in a regrettable hierarchy based on lightness or less-blackness; A paradigm built on shame and self-loathing. And Jefferson Davis's own children may have led the way.

All of this to say, the causes of the Civil War were very complicated and almost beyond our understanding today. My first chapters attempt to reveal some of those paradoxes which led to a terrible war, and try to help today's generation understand the reasons why our country chose reconciliation, rather than execution of the Southern rebels after the war.