“It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations,” he groused in Life on the Mississippi—and if you think this observation completely out of date, ask yourself: how did Colonel Sanders get to be a colonel?

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No white Southerner of my generation escaped exposure to this myth. I got the full dose in 1964, when I was nine, when my parents took us to see Gone With the Wind. It was playing at the Lowe’s Grand Theater, a gilt-edged movie palace on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street, and oh, Lawdy. The treacly passions of Scarlett and Rhett, the fabulous hoop skirts, the marble plantation halls, the whole lost-Eden aura—it was utter catnip to me, as it had been to a generation before me (white girls, that is; I don’t imagine it held many charms for African Americans). Even then, I think I smelled something phony, but it was just so pretty.

Growing up white and Southern meant not just tolerating that kind of cognitive dissonance, but cultivating it. Only in the South, I maintain, would you find a monument dedicated to a fort that has “the proud distinction of being the last Confederate fort captured by the Union” (emphasis mine). This would be Fort Tyler, near West Point, Ga., which fell into Union hands during mop-up operations four months after Sherman reached Savannah. Can you imagine the monuments the South would have built if it had won?

I was not good at tolerating cognitive dissonance. If you grow up being told, “The war was about States’ Rights, not slavery,” you can either erase the existence of several million black people from your mind or you can quietly go a little batty. I couldn’t do the first and I didn’t want to do the second; rejecting the party line altogether was the only option left, but nice Southern girls do not readily embrace heresy. What to do? Then there was the fact that my family had no stories. I have never met a native Southerner who did not know something about his family’s war history—what regiment great-great-grandpappy was in, or how great-aunt Ethel brained a Yankee with an iron poker. The authenticity of these stories wasn’t the issue; it was just that there were always stories. Except for my family, which had none.

Little did I know.

About 10 years ago, a third cousin, Corley Thompson, told me he was working on a history of the Thompson family. I thought, You’d be better off writing a history of toenail clippings—but when my copy arrived, I opened it eagerly. After making sure my husband’s and daughters’ names were spelled right (they were), I got around to the first chapter. It began with the birth of our common ancestor, Thomas Thompson, in 1829, on a farm in the area of Georgia where Henry, Fayette and Clayton counties now meet. Thomas’ father, Flanders Thompson Jr., was born in South Carolina in 1800, and had fought in the Indian Wars; his grandfather, Flanders Thompson Sr., had fought in the Revolutionary War in the Virginia Continental Line (which wintered at Valley Forge). In 1848, when he was 19, Thomas Thompson married Mary Samantha Abercrombie, who would become a noted midwife.

Corley got his information about our ancestor’s experiences in the Civil War from the files of something I’d never heard of: the Southern Claims Commission, organized after the war to hear claims for damages suffered by Southerners who could prove their loyalty to the Union. Thomas Thompson told the SCC that he enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 “only in the face of threats from local secessionists.” He was sent to Manassas sometime in the fall of 1861, after the first battle there. By January 1862, without seeing combat, he got a medical discharge and returned to Georgia. Whatever his ailment was, it was not enough to keep the conscript office away. In all, he told the SCC, he was drafted four times, deserting each time. At one point, he and seven other men attempted to cross the lines and join the Union Army. Instead, they were hunted down by dogs and taken to Charleston, S.C., to face a court-martial. They won release after authorities determined that they had deserted from the state militia, and didn’t fall under Army jurisdiction. After that, he fled to a cousin’s home in Randolph County, Ala., which was home to a number of Union loyalists.

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