Confederate president, traitor and cowardly cross-dresser, Jefferson Davis, having been stripped of his American citizenship and indicted for treason, lived out his final years at a seaside estate in Biloxi, Mississippi called Beauvoir (“beautiful view” in French). There, amongst the sweeping ocean views, Davis crafted “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government”, a 1,500 page memoir that is a vindication of the Confederate cause, a revisionist tale of the Civil War as a valiant Lost cause. Here, through moonlight and magnolias, the self-described “man without a country” dictated to his mistress, his implicit defense of slavery, and the postbellum Klan terrorism that disenfranchised the freed men. “Rise and Fall” eloquently and masterfully spins Southern rebellion as a patriotic struggle to defend America’s founding principles.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina blew into the Gulf Coast and devastated Beauvoir, as well as the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library, which had opened in 1998. The decimated library was razed and is now being rebuilt from the ground up. When completed later this year, it will be a massive bunker of reinforced concrete, able to withstand whatever crushing natural disaster God unleashes on it next. It will bear over its entryway the Great Seal of the Confederacy with the motto “Deo Vindice” (God will vindicate).
Paying for this abomination, is you. $15 million dollars in federal grants have gone to the neo-Confederates who maintain the property, helping them to rebuild this symbol of rebellion and propagation, this beacon of Davis’s whitewashed vision of American history, this monument to the guy caught attempting to flee from the government in a woman’s dress and petticoats.
Post Katrina FEMA relentlessly promoted its work on the Gulf Coast, boasting “preserving Mississippi’s heritage” including Beauvoir which in addition to it’s federal millions received private donations from fans of slavery, such as racist vulgarian Donald Trump, who forked over $25,000 (no doubt just currying favor with unreconstructed Southern bigots in the hope they’ll support a future casino/hellhole).
Beauvoir is overseen by the Mississippi division of the Sons of Confederacy Veterans, a organization made up of descendants of confederate soldiers. Recently, the group’s national leadership has moved to the lunatic fringe right, promoting activist “heritage defense”. Mississippi members of the SCV are seeing the group’s national charter move to Texas and many of their members unseated by a new, radical faction. The Mississippi division, which successfully lobbied the state for the production of a Beauvoir commemorative license plate, has proposed another commemorative license plate: Get this! It’s dedicated to the cretinous Tennessee hillbilly war criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Butcher of Fort Pillow, the slave trader and Confederate cavalryman who became a founding member and early grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Stay classy, racists. The library gift shop sounds fun, at least. There will be a machine that flattens souvenir pennies, replacing Lincoln with Davis, and a lot of Sambo stuff.
The Jefferson Davis Public Library is an oddity, an outcast amongst similar institutions. It is not among the 13 official presidential libraries supervised by the national archives and records administration, nor will it house Davis’s papers.
Yet America taxpayers, even black ones, still have to pay for it.