BEAUVOIR - BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI

What took me to Mississippi was attending a family reunion where for the first time I met my southern kin, the descendants of my great Uncle Collins. The internet brought us together last year. I had never visited Mississippi before, nor had I ever set foot in the Deep South.


I’ve always been curious about my Mississippi grandfather and great grandfather, both named James Washington King, and great Uncle Collins, for whom my father was named and lived with at one time. A family history buff, I’ve been collecting census, marriage and death records for years, spending long hours researching in a genealogy library and on the internet, studying maps of southern Mississippi, and wondering about the Kings who moved from North Carolina to Mississippi soon after it became a state in 1817.


I arrived in Biloxi a few days before the reunion to relax and see the sites. After a morning thundershower, I spontaneously decided to visit Beauvoir, the antebellum style home of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederate States of America, where he lived from 1877-1889 and wrote his memoirs The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.

Visiting Beauvoir, a National Landmark, gave me a fascinating post-Civil War history lesson from the south’s perspective. The tour guide called it the Mount Vernon of the Confederacy and said it is dedicated to “the memory of the Confederate Cause." Despite his defeat, Davis received many visitors there after the war. He is considered a great hero in Mississippi, and the day I visited cake was served to visitors, as it was his birthday.


After Davis died, Beauvoir became a home for Confederate veterans, their wives, widows and orphans from 1903 to 1957. Approximately 1,800 residents received free room and board. I watched a video showing haunting images of veterans wearing their Confederate uniforms, some with missing arms or legs standing on crutches in front of the house. Later as I stood on the same spot, I looked up the long gray staircase wondering how those veterans managed to get up to the house.

At the top of the stairs by the main door were 5 rocking chairs on a large porch, which wrapped around the home. I sat in one, imagining myself a veteran as I rocked back and forth. A large Confederate flag draped above the porch on my left, swaying in the cool afternoon breeze. As I looked across the front lawn onto the Gulf waters across the road, I heard birds singing. It was so tranquil. In French, Beauvoir means beautiful view. Indeed, it was the ideal place for a veteran to live out his days.

While wandering around the estate, I thought about my great grandfather, who had been a soldier in the 22nd Mississippi Infantry. A Civil War doctor’s stethoscope and surgical instruments displayed in a glass case reminded me that he had been shot in his left arm at the Battle of Sugar Creek in Tennessee on Christmas Day, 1864. He refused to have it amputated despite the doctor’s warning he would die. For the rest of his life he had little use of that arm. After the war, he and Beauvoir’s disabled veterans somehow managed to cope and move forward. I wondered if he had considered living at Beauvoir, as his pension records show he had little money.

Behind the home is a cemetery where the veterans who once lived there are buried, including 12 who served in my great grandfather’s regiment. Perhaps he had known them. Nearby stands the Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier, wherein rest the remains of a 17 year soldier, whose remains had been found near Vicksburg in 1979 and transported to Beauvoir in 1981. It is dedicated to all unknown Confederate soldiers who died during the Civil War. In front of the tomb is a brass cross, symbolizing the Confederate States of America. That same cross is carved on top of my great grandfather’s tombstone.


Travel always opens new doors to me, yet this journey was very different from previous ones in which I had little or no connection to the sites. An unplanned visit to Beauvoir made the Civil War and its aftermath more tangible for me, enabling me to gain insight into the Confederacy and my family’s relation to it. The south has great reverence to their Civil War soldiers, and that event is an important part of their history. Seeing where the veterans had once lived was a sobering, humbling experience.


Raised in the north, I had very little knowledge of the south, especially its Confederate history. In addition, like so many other Americans who have been on this continent for generations most of our family stories are lost. I will never know the horrors my great grandfather saw during that war, whether he had nightmares about it, the number of friends he saw die, the Yankees he possibly killed, and what he thought about the south’s defeat. Something inexplicable had led me there and that day I felt connected to that soldier in the 22nd Mississippi Infantry who miraculously survived that war. And the following day, those with his tough southern genes were reunited.