Rewriting the Story of Oxmoor

Thomas Walker Bullitt, the son of Mildred Ann Bullitt and William Christian Bullitt, and the grandson of Alexander Scott Bullitt, wrote his memoir in the final years of life. His recollections were published as My Life at Oxmoor: Life on a Farm in Kentucky before the War in 1911, a year after Thomas Walker Bullitt's death. 

Bullitt's memoir was packed with Lost Cause rhetoric and a glorification of enslavement—insisting that Black people held in captivity were "happy" or "ready to serve" while on the plantation. He saw the Antebellum era of the American South as a "lost paradise," one that brought "civilization" to Black and Indigenous peoples through dehumanization and the constant threat of violence. 

Bullitt's romanticization of slavery damages the historical record, and to the lives and legacies of the people he and his family enslaved. However, Bullitt wasn't alone in his revisionist history: memoirs like My Life at Oxmoor were common among other enslavers, Confederate veterans, and their families. In many cases, these groups gained real political power decades after the end of the Civil War. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected hundreds of Confederate statues in the 1910s to help "preserve the legacy" of their Confederate brothers, fathers, and grandfathers. Groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their spin-off group, the Children of the Confederacy, infected the public memory of the Civil War with sanitized, falsified delusions about the American South, arguing that slavery was passive, nonviolent, or "beneficial" to those trapped in bondage. 

In reality, continuing to engage in enslavement and colonization were active choices on the part of white Kentuckians. Enslavement at the Oxmoor and Cottonwood plantations was met with constant resistance from the people who were enslaved, including running from their captors, organizing rebellions with fellow enslaved people, and burning the means of their enslaver’s wealth.