Commemorating a “Loyal Slave” In Georgia
Civic leaders in Glynn County, Georgia, are proposing a sculpture trail to commemorate that county’s history and promote tourism to the area. One of the sculptures being proposed highlights Neptune Small, an enslaved man on the Retreat Plantation. When the Civil War broke out Small’s enslaver, Henry King, brought Small with him to Confederate military lines. When King died on the battlefield, Small picked up King’s body and eventually brought it back home. The Sculptor, Kevin Pullen, explained that “What I tell people is it’s a love story. Because these two grew up together. They were love buds when they were little people. The whole slavery and Civil War piece was the backdrop for their lives. They lived on the same property, and they grew up in the same place.”
Historian James De Wolfe Perry pointed out that “As an enslaved person, [Small] had incentives other than loyalty or devotion” for returning King’s body. Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory added that “This is an interpretive weakness of the entire Lost Cause narrative that it makes little attempt to engage former slaves as to motivation and how they viewed their participation in the war.” He followed up with a blog post, commenting that “The basic outline of Pullen’s account accords with the available evidence, but to depict Small in his role as the loyal slave feeds into an insidious myth that has long been used to justify legal segregation, white supremacy, and the Lost Cause narrative of the war.”
I tend to agree with these sentiments. My initial response to this proposed sculpture is great discomfort. To me it seems to romanticize slavery and the master-slave relationship, which in Pullen’s telling of Small and King’s relationship is a “love story.” It also downplays the fact that the “loyal” Neptune Small and enslaved camp servants like him were not there voluntarily in service to the Confederate military, but due to impressment. In reality, we don’t know what Small’s motivations were for returning King’s body to Georgia. It is not a stretch to suggest, for example, that perhaps Small returned King to his old plantation in the hopes of gaining his freedom for this action. And as the article points out, the Kings did give Small an 8-acre tract of land for returning his enslaver’s body. The murky details of this story make me skeptical about the wisdom of commemorating it through a sculpture.
Cheers
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