“The Penmen of the Secession”

 

About ten years ago, I was invited to participate in a cemetery tour in Auburn, Alabama, because they were desperate, and I actually learned something. I’m pretty sure I upset a lot of innocent progressives with my participation, and I probably garnered some unwanted and stinging criticism for the little local cemetery society, but at least I learned something new about the Confederacy. It was one of those things where people get to tour an old, historic cemetery at night, and actors step out from behind the markers and portray the old fossils buried below. The actors have usually spent dozens of minutes researching their roles on the internet so that they hopefully can deliver a convincing portrayal. Officially prepared scripts are common, but the actors are expected to perform by memory. Costumes are encouraged, but those are usually too difficult to obtain, and nobody can really tell much in the dark, anyway. My wife and I had taken that tour many times before, and always enjoyed it.

On the morning of the scheduled tour day, one of my relatives called to ask if I could help them out of a jam. It seemed that one of the actors selected to portray an historical Auburn icon had gotten sick, and they had exhausted all possibilities of a replacement. Like I said, they were desperate. She told me that I could use the sick actor’s script in my portrayal of William F. Samford, and I happily accepted the challenge. However, when she brought over the script, I was unimpressed. It was very factual, very detached, and very boring. So, I decided to leap onto the information superhighway and find out as much as I could on my own about Mr. William Flewellyn Samford.

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