Locating Slavery's Legacies @ Sewanee: The University of the South

Welcome

The Locating Slavery's Legacies database of the University of the South – more familiarly known as Sewanee – is a publicly accessible source of information about its memorials and monuments to persons who were enslavers, Confederate military veterans or civilian officials, or prominent figures in the post-Civil War Lost Cause campaign to erase slavery and its brutalities from the memories of white Americans.

This database is a production of Sewanee’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, a ten-year initiative investigating the university’s historical investment in and support of slavery and slavery’s legacies. Working with the Roberson Project, Sewanee students and members of its faculties and staff have conducted the research on these memorials and logged the information in the database.

We make this material available to inform our own community and the public at large about the University of the South’s deep historic entanglements with the leadership of the antebellum slaveocracy, the Confederacy, the post-Civil War defense of the Lost Cause, and the social and political suppression of African Americans in the century of Jim Crow injustice and segregation after emancipation. We hope the forthright presentation of this information contributes to both our own university community’s and the nation's understanding of and reckoning with American slavery’s enduring legacies.

IMAGE: Annual reunion of the University's Confederate War veterans, ca. 1902. Photo courtesy of the William R. Laurie University Archives and Special Collections, University of the South.

Slideshow of Sewanee Memorials and Memorialized People

Click on an item on the slideshow (arranged chronologically) to learn about the history and to pinpoint a memorial's campus location.