Swept Under the Rug: Bringing to Light Slavery through the Sons of Southern Universities

Part of the curriculum for the Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Mississippi is that the student culminates their three prior years of training into a thesis-like
paper called a capstone. When my time came, the course would be taught by my then mentor/advisor Dr. Anne Twitty. One afternoon, we were debating on which way to take my
research for her course. I wanted to expand upon the research of slavery, but I could not settle on a topic. One of the last that I had written was one I thought held little weight. The proposal was to study slaveholding elites from my home county of Desoto prior to the war, who attended the University of Mississippi, and look at how the decision to secede from the Union in order to maintain their status altered their financial well-being. Something about this idea caught her attention and we decided to see if any data could be found.
Given that no antebellum homes stand in the county today, I assumed that the Desoto County of the Antebellum Era would not be home to many slave-holding elites. I was quickly proven wrong. So wrong that I had to alter the criteria to include those families who had sons fighting for the confederacy. Eventually, I settled on the Holmes, Raines, Johnsons, and Olivers. The entirety of my day for several months was dedicated to finding information about these enslavers and the people they enslaved. Finding information on the families was easy, however, their slaves were a different matter. In this session, I will explore how this was these challenges were the product of generations of white southerners who swept the institution of slavery under the rug.