Decorating with the Lost Cause The Civil War & Slavery in the decor of the Sewanee Inn

The Sewanee Inn, which opened in 2014, is a gracious hostelry that welcomes visitors to the campus of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Its comfortable furniture, cathedral ceiling, expensive wood paneling, and massive fireplace open on both sides: All lend the ambience of a historic and rustic mountain lodge. The Inn is a venue for conferences, colloquiums, and workshops. It is where many academic guests are taken, whether for lodging, drinks, or dinner. The Inn is the first place where many parents try to stay during Family Weekend, and students order their first legal drink. Guests play golf on the course behind the Inn. Young couples celebrate their vows in its event spaces. Little wonder it is marketed and often functions as the University's "living room."

But the Sewanee Inn also tells an incomplete and misleading story of the University of the South through its display of original historic portraits and reproductions of landscape paintings, photographs, and other artistic objects in the University's collections. [RP photo of Sewanee Inn facade.]

That story nostalgically roots the origins of the University in the ancient days of the Old South by prominently displaying the likenesses of figures who were leaders in both founding the University of the South in the late 1850s and defending the institution and practice of human bondage.

By presenting these artifacts without reference to the slavery-based social, political, and religious order that produced them and is represented in them, the Sewanee Inn becomes an unintended but de facto shrine to the “Lost Cause.”

That phrase — the Lost Cause — emerged in the decades after the Confederacy’s political, social, and military destruction. It asserts, according to Yale historian David Blight, a romanticized “interpretation of the American Civil War viewed by most historians as a myth that attempts to preserve the honor of the South by casting the Confederate defeat in the best possible light.” The Lost Cause ennobles the Confederacy by sidelining the significance of slavery to its formation and fight and making excuses for its military defeat. The Lost Cause, Blight continues, “attributes the loss to the overwhelming Union advantage in manpower and resources, nostalgically celebrates an antebellum South of supposedly benevolent slave owners and contented enslaved people, and it downplays or altogether ignores slavery as the cause of war.” [RP photo of Lobby interior]

The adherents of the Lost Cause constructed monuments and memorials and engineered educational resources to justify and celebrate the pre-Civil War social order based on chattel slavery. Celebrations of the antebellum world and its achievements — such as the founding of the University of the South after 1856 — without so much as a mention of slavery shapes cultural memory of the social order of bondage as “good” for the enslaved despite what all now agree was the injustice of slavery.

The information accompanying the artifacts arrayed on the walls of the Sewanee Inn — from the charming Audubon bird prints lining its main corridor to the framed composite of the former Confederates on its faculty that adorns the wall of the men’s restroom — are silent on their contextual origins in slavery and the Civil War. Silence, in this case, speaks loudly. Without this contextual explanation, the Sewanee Inn nostalgically romanticizes the antebellum South and downplays the role of slavery in causing both the founding of the University of the South and the Civil War. The history of the University they present is incomplete, idealized, and misleading. [RP photo of Second Founding painting]

This website — “Decorating with the Lost Cause” — draws attention to the incompleteness and fills in the blanks of the history told by the decorative portraits and other objects that adorn the Sewanee Inn.

In each virtual page of this exhibit, you will find stories of the works themselves and the context that links them. It offers a virtual tour of the main rooms in the Inn. As you explore each space, consider why all of us at Sewanee — faculty, students, staff, parents, alumni — would accept the Inn’s fragmentary story about the founders and their supporters. What narratives does the Inn conjure in our minds by its exclusion of stories, not only of Civil War and slavery, but also of courageous instances of desegregation and integration? Who benefits – and who does not – from the stories told in this way? And how can we take the initiative to tell a more complete and accurate truth? [RP photo of The Course at Sewanee]

DECORATING WITH THE LOST CAUSE

This website works in coordination with the Locating Slavery's Legacies database, which the Roberson Project has developed in partnership with instructors, archivists, and students at Sewanee and more than twenty other colleges and universities in the United States. The database is a public resource that catalogs campus memorials with roots in American slavery and its legacies. You can use that database to explore how institutions of higher education have used instruments of memory — from statues to public lecture series to endowed scholarships — to support or resist slavery's legacies of segregation and racial discrimination.

On this site, however, you can scroll down to learn in greater detail about the unintended — but unmistakable — enshrinement of slavery's legacy of the "Lost Cause" in the decor of the Sewanee Inn. All images were produced by the Roberson Project.

Part I: THE LOBBY

The Lobby is the grand welcoming space to the Sewanee Inn and displays five portraits of Episcopal bishops who led in founding the University of the South in the era before the American Civil War.

CLICK on this button to learn more about the men depicted in these portraits and their entanglements in slavery and the founding of the Confederacy.

Part II: THE VISITORS CENTER

The Visitors Center is behind the Lobby's reception desk. Here, on the rear wall, an illustrated timeline tells "A History of the University of the South," listing the formative events from the 1830s to the 2010s. But the history it presents is both selective and misleading.

CLICK here to learn more about what is missing from the Center's history of Sewanee.

Part III: THE AUDUBON GALLERY

“The Audubon Gallery” leading to the Inn's event spaces features dramatic reproductions of artist John James Audubon's magnificent bird illustrations. There is no mention that the celebrated artist (1785-1851) was an enslaver.

CLICK here to learn more about the historical context of Audubon's bird illustrations.

Part IV: IN THE MEN'S ROOM

The composite of photographs of Sewanee's 1871 faculty includes six and possibly seven veterans of the Confederate military.

CLICK to learn more about the Confederate veterans who taught Sewanee's first generation of students.

Part V: THE SECOND-FLOOR LANDING

A photographic depiction of a University ceremony features a relic of Sewanee's thick entanglements with slavery in the era of its founding.

CLICK here to learn more about the discontinued use of a cornerstone fragment in the University's Honor Code ceremony.

Part VI: THE MEZZANINE LOUNGE

In the mid-1950s, in the midst of white Southerners' massive resistance to the Civil Rights revolution and the University's own celebration of its first 100 years, Sewanee commissioned an artist to tell its earliest history in four watercolors. The artist did so without reference to the roll of slavery or slavery's legacies. Reproductions of these works are displayed in the second floor Lounge.

CLICK here to learn more about the watercolors in the Mezzanine Lounge.

ORIGINS OF THE EXHIBIT: This web exhibit dates to February and March 2024, when the undergraduate students in History 328: Slavery, Race, and the University undertook an assignment to inventory the artifacts in the Sewanee Inn that reference the pre-Civil War origins of the University of the South. The students discovered that many items reflect or cite Sewanee's roots in the antebellum period, but they do so without connecting the men depicted or scenes represented to the defense of slavery and the Confederacy. Elizabeth Baker, C’27, a student in that course, conducted extensive additional research in the summer of 2024 that is the basis of “Decorating with the Lost Cause.” The exhibit is a feature of the Locating Slavery’s Legacies database, an intercollegiate project of Sewanee’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation. Ms. Baker was assisted in adding to the LSL database by Dr. Woody Register, Director of the Roberson Project, and Dr. Anna Foy, lead administrator of the database.

For information about the work of the Roberson Project, please visit our website. A brief summary of the history of the University of the South in relation to slavery and its legacies can be found here. Additional and detailed information about the central importance of slavery to the founding of the University of the South can be accessed at our Founding Funders website.