Joseph, the brother of Jefferson Davis, was of a very different stripe. He sold the family plantation at Davis Bend to Benjamin Montgomery, a freedman, allowing him and his family to have full reign of the former plantation, which they turned into a profitable farm. Sadly, the sale was later challenged in Mississippi courts by Joseph's children after his death, and ultimately nullified. I picked up this book while I was reading Eric Foner's book on Reconstruction. Well worth reading, especially from a Reconstruction point of view.
It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer. Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions. I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters. Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs. Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77. I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not. Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi
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