Locating Slavery's Legacies @ Sewanee: The University of the South

In the mid-1950s, the Associated Alumni of the University of the South commissioned Richard Brough, professor of art at the University of Alabama for nearly forty years (1948-1987), to paint a series of watercolors in honor of Sewanee's centennial in 1958. The resulting images mark four dramatic scenes from Sewanee's founding era and now hang in the lounge on the second floor of the Sewanee Inn. 

Brough’s artistic contributions to the university, produced amid white southerners’ massive resistance to the Civil Rights movement, reinforced the Lost Cause version of the University’s founding. He depicts the University’s origins in the late 1850s as Sewanee’s white community wished them to be remembered in 1958: as expressions of religious devotion and piety, sincere visions of an Episcopal church university tragically victimized, in the words of its Vice-Chancellor, Edward McCrady, by “the devastating War Between the States [that] erupted in full fury and literally laid everything to waste.” McCrady's reference to the "War Between the States," and not the "Civil War," was Lost Cause dogma.

With similar effects, Brough’s watercolors depicted the founding events without reference to slavery, the defense and promotion of which was central to the underlying religious, social, and political motivations for launching the University of the South. Three of the events depict ceremonies of religious devotion, and the fourth — “Picking the Site” — emphasizes the far-seeing Christian visionaries who founded Sewanee. The Lost Cause tenet that slavery was peripheral to Southern civilization before emancipation underlies all of the images.

Use the following links to proceed to the Decorating with the Lost Cause introduction.