The book was a first edition with a good dust jacket, affordable, and by a well-known historian. Plus, I noticed a lovely inscription on its front flyleaf, so I gladly purchased C. Vann Woodward’s The Burden of Southern History.

The inscription read: Collins Denny. Jr./Monacan/ Powhatan Co./Virginia/ from/ His sister Elizabeth/ Christmas 1960.

Because of the book’s reputation and condition, I covered the dust jacket in a mylar cover to protect it, and I then began reading the scholarly Woodward.

The first essay I read was a speech given for the 125^th Anniversary of the founding of Gettysburg College and later printed in The American Scholar (1958). Reading it, I noticed marginalia from a prior reader.

The first marginalia I noticed was light pencil underlining of notable phrases or sentences. However, on page 77, the previous reader wrote his opinion in the margin, where I first saw his agreement or opposition to the essay, Equality: The Deferred Commitment.

In Woodward’s sentence concerning the Thirteenth Amendment, “A constant complaint of opponents was that the amendment would not only free the Negroes but would ‘make them our equals before the law’” he underlined those five words and wrote in the margin, “This is all right-equality is that.”

In Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, H. J. Jackson examines the history of readers marking their books and why writers and readers, such as Coleridge, left a rich source of thought in the margins of books.

She writes, “Ultimately, the future of marginalia rests with readers, and to readers I say (with William Blake) throw off the mind-forged manacles and take a pencil to your books.” Well, for years, I wore her “mind-forged manacles” and refused to make any mark in a book, except for a small tic in a margin.

However, after many discussions on the topic of readers writing in books with my Oxford friend Druin, I came to realize that he was right, and a “fine inscription,” as he said, added to a book. His patient reasoning paid off, and Jackson’s thorough treatment of the subject made Druin’s opinion even better.

Continuing to read Woodward’s speech/essay examining freedom and equality for freed slaves, I noticed more writing in the margins of my newly purchased book. The previous owner wrote in neat cursive with a pencil. And he disagreed often with what Woodward had delivered at Gettysburg College in the late 1950s, and with other essays in the book. But every argument of his was interesting, even when I disagreed with him, unlike Woodward’s.

His father, a Methodist Bishop, moved the family to Richmond, Virginia, from Tennessee after Denny, Jr. was born in 1899.  He graduated from Princeton and practiced law in Richmond. In the late 1930s, he served as the Assistant Attorney General of Virginia. He joined the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, led by Harry F. Byrd, Sr. Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, he helped form the segregationist Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties and served as its legal counsel. Prince Edward County, which closed its public schools instead of following the Supreme Court decision, hired him to represent it when challenged by the NAACP. He died in 1964.

No wonder he disagreed with Woodward, and the Prince Edward County public schools remained closed for five years instead of integrating them. Reading Internet articles about Denny, Jr., it is easy to see why he wrote what he did in the margins of his Christmas gift four years before his death. He appears to have changed very little in his attitude concerning race.

And for me, the marginalia is a reading of an opposing view to Woodward’s historical interruptions–about what it means to be Southern, and how important it is to be recorded as being on the right side of historical events.

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Cover photo courtesy of Full Stop