Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery
A confounding scandal has been unfolding in the history community over the past week. Brigette Jones, who developed the Journey to Jubilee Tour at the Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery back in 2018, posted on Twitter that she’d heard through the grapevine that Belle Meade is changing the tour “because it’s ‘trauma dumping’ and too ‘discussion based.’” Jones also spoke with NewsChannel 5 about the rumored changes. And NC5 got a response from Belle Meade:
The Journey to Jubilee Tour is a foundational part of the Belle Meade Historic Site experience, along with our Mansion Tour and newly launched Battle at Belle Meade Tour. Keeping in line with industry standards and best practices, Belle Meade has the responsibility of a public historical institution to ensure that all of our tours are historically accurate, engaging, and thought-provoking.
In recent years, historical institutions have grappled with how to share the voices of the previously voiceless in an accurate and authentic manner. And many of them face similar challenges: a lack of primary documentation, and institutional capacity. At Belle Meade Historic Site, years of research have produced primary documentation, oral histories from descendants, and more that have previously not been known to provide the foundation of the new Journey to Jubilee Tour. These are the stories we want to tell.
Belle Meade is dedicated to preserving the history of the original Belle Meade plantation. Like any other historical institution, we are always evaluating our content as the years pass on and new information is uncovered. Our content will continue to reflect our core values and our mission of education through immersive history.
—Victoria Sample, Director of Historic Interpretation and Education
Listen, whenever you hear an institution with a long history of wrongdoing talking about its “core values,” you should hear it for the threat it is. Anyway, a few things to note about this statement. 1. They don’t deny that the Journey to Jubilee is changing. 2. Put a pin in “all of our tours are historically accurate.” We’ll come back to that. 3. The second paragraph is amusing bullshit. So what if a lot of other institutions don’t have the documents necessary to research or the capacity to do the research to do tours like this? Belle Meade does. 4. There is no plantation home museum that can claim to give historically accurate tours and to be educating though immersive history. Whitney Plantation in Louisiana comes the closest, and even on that tour you’re not going to see white men impregnating their own enslaved daughters — even though, as William J. Anderson writes in his 1857 autobiography, the South "is undoubtedly the worst place of incest and bigamy in the world.” You won’t have to look at the faces of those enslaved daughters and feel sick about how young they are. For obvious reasons, these are not the everyday experiences of life on a plantation that tours and reenactments are going to foreground.
According to the 1860 Census, there were six white people living at Belle Meade and 136 enslaved Black people. By my math, that means that only 4 percent of the population of Belle Meade was white. Have any of us ever taken a tour at Belle Meade where 96 percent of the people we saw on the grounds were Black? No? Then strip away all the violence and the trauma and the exploitation and grief, just as neutral as possible, thinking about what Belle Meade looked like during its heyday — none of us has ever seen a historically accurate tour of Belle Meade, because we’ve never seen a historically accurate representation of who was at Belle Meade.
So this is the controversy. If most plantations do a poor job of even attempting to showcase the everyday experiences of most of the people who lived on the plantations, and Belle Meade has an outstanding tour that does just that, then why would they change the tour to make it less upsetting? Slavery is upsetting. Learning about the realities of enslavement is upsetting. If people who take the tour are upset at the end of it, the tour is better conveying the reality of life at Belle Meade than any other tour you can take at the home. Why would they change the difficult thing they do well?
Cast your mind back to the statement from Belle Meade: "The Journey to Jubilee Tour is a foundational part of the Belle Meade Historic Site experience, along with our Mansion Tour and newly launched Battle at Belle Meade Tour."
Battle at Belle Meade? There was no battle at Belle Meade. It was behind U.S. lines.
WTF?
I went to the description of this tour to find out. “Follow the footsteps of the soldiers who skirmished at Belle Meade and interact with an authentic battlefield artifact. Learn about the occupation of the mansion, the fall of Nashville to the Union, and the aftermath of the end of the War.”
Holy shit. Forget this “Battle at Belle Meade” that got downgraded to a skirmish in the copy and focus on this: “The fall of Nashville to the Union.”
OK, OK. This is alarming, but now the potential changing of the Journey to Jubilee makes sense. Belle Meade’s going back to straight-up Confederate wish fulfillment. People who want to imagine themselves Scarlett O’Hara don’t want to be troubled by the pesky realities of the levels of violence and sadism necessary for six people to rule 136 people.
“Fall of Nashville to the Union.” You mean when the United States liberated Nashville from the illegitimate government that absconded with it? You mean when the mayor went out in a horse-drawn cart (fun fact: driven by J.C. Napier’s dad) and said to the advancing U.S. forces, “OK, fine. I guess we’re American again,” with no fighting or bloodshed? You mean the resolution of white Nashville’s brief foray into treachery? That fall?
The future of Belle Meade Plaza rankles a city that cares about the past
This is the kind of nonsense the Journey to Jubilee tour was supposed to help counteract — this idea that from the Belle Meade perspective, Nashville’s reclamation by the United States was a “fall.” From the perspective of the overwhelming majority of people who lived at Belle Meade, the arrival of U.S. forces meant a reprieve from the threat of being sold downriver or having loved ones sold downriver. Even though liberation of Nashville didn’t end slavery, people at Belle Meade suddenly had more surety that they could stay with their spouses and children. You think they saw that as a bad thing? It wasn’t freedom, but it was an improvement.
If you’re in charge of crafting the narrative Belle Meade shares with the public and your take is that Belle Meade’s position on the Civil War was fear and disappointment, you’re giving so much more weight to the perspectives of the six white people who lived there than the 136 enslaved people that it’s cartoonishly racist.
Belle Meade’s gonna Belle Meade, but we don’t have to go along with racist nonsense. Belle Meade was a prison camp. The Hardings kept people captive and tortured them psychologically and physically while working them to the bone. Some of those people were their family members. And no, the Hardings weren’t uniquely terrible. But they were wrong. And anybody who is going to pay money to tour a place where people were raped and tortured and worked until they were broken so they can ooh and ahh at the beautiful house of the people responsible without having to pay any mind to the human cost of that beautiful house should be treated like the callous, gross fools they are.
The very least we can do in honor of the people who were the Harding family’s victims is to be repulsed by anyone who would visit Belle Meade in this new, old-fashioned incarnation.
