Driving South

By Michael

During the first four days of the trip, as we made our way from New York to Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina, I was struck by two things. The first was how much I like driving on old highways. Not that the interstates are bad: they are an easy and efficient way to cover a lot of miles quickly. But the highways from the 1920s – what we now think of as back roads – have character. Driving along one of these old roads, you can get a real feel for the country in all its variety

The first part of our trip was on the usual series of interstates, as we went through New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, around the District of Columbia, and into Virginia. But then, once we cleared Fredericksburg, Virginia (and a rather large traffic jam – who knows why so many people were trying to get to Fredericksburg), we spent most of the next three days on country roads. In Virginia, we took Route 20, also known as Constitution Highway. In North Carolina, we took Route 15, also known as Tobacco Road. In South Carolina, we took a variety of back roads, 501 to 57 to 41 to 17. Along the way, we passed beautiful rolling hills, tony horse farms, old woods, corn fields, tobacco farms, small towns, and not-so-small towns. The drive through Virginia’s piedmont was the most beautiful. The drive through South Carolina’s Lowcountry (before we got to the coast) was the most interesting, as we went through a number of towns that seemed to have been largely bypassed by much of America’s post-war prosperity.

The second thing that struck me about our drive into the South was the constant specter of slavery. We hadn’t planned it this way, but our first several stops were steeped in the history of slavery. Our first two stops -- Mount Vernon and Monticello -- were the plantation homes of two great slave-holding founding fathers. At both, slavery was acknowledged, but the acknowledgment always seemed begrudging to me – as if they were noting slavery only because pointy-headed academics from the northeast were making them. Washington and Jefferson, of course, are paradoxes: great men who made tremendous contributions to our country, but who also actively participated in our country’s great shame. Celebrating them at the plantations where they enslaved other human beings only emphasized that paradox. It was most striking to me at Monticello -- in part because I had been to Mount Vernon many times before, in part because Jefferson wrote so much about “liberty” and “freedom,” in part because Monticello was in many ways a celebration of the show house that Jefferson’s slaves built and rebuilt for him over the span of many decades, and in part because of Jefferson’s long-term relationship with Sally Hemings (mentioned only in passing by the official materials at Monticello and still actively disputed by members of Jefferson’s family).

One of our next stops, a South Carolina rice plantation owned by two of the most venerable families in the state, was much less restored and much less developed than Mount Vernon and Monticello – but to me it virtually reeked of slavery. Perhaps it was the heat, but I could almost feel the ghosts of the slaves who turned rice into “Carolina Gold.” And then, deeper south, we visited the Exchange Building in Charleston, which was a center of the slave trade (a huge portion of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States came through Charleston’s port). I’m sure my perspective is stereotypically “northern,” but I was continually struck by the fact that slavery was acknowledged as a historical fact, but not as a moral abomination. It was an interesting and eye-opening tour of America’s history.