The National Park Service has also commissioned a study to explore creating official commemorative sites—and two places that are likely high on the list are Beaufort, South Carolina, and Natchez, Mississippi. That study is currently in its “final review” phase within the agency and is expected to come out in the next few months, probably right after the November elections. Reflecting the most recent historiographical thinking on Reconstruction, the long-awaited study will no doubt also emphasize the controversial era’s role as the essential precursor of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s.

In April, the nonprofit Historic Columbia and the University of South Carolina History Center sponsored a symposium in Columbia, South Carolina: “The Reconstruction Era: History and Public Memory.” The event featured Michael Allen, the Park Service’s community-partnership specialist for Reconstruction (also the longtime education specialist at the Fort Sumter National Monument and the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site); as well as two of the historians the National Park Service retained to recommend Reconstruction-era historic sites, Northwestern University’s Kate Masur and the University of California at Davis’s Gregory Downs, who together co-edited The World the Civil War Made and who have both contributed to The Atlantic on the topic. At the symposium, the potential sites at Beaufort and Natchez dominated the discussion. The stakes are high for both cities because the exposure they could derive from a national park, designated sites, or trails readily translates into revenue for area restaurants and hotels, which in turn translates into tax revenue for the host cities.

But this is a tale of two cities, and the Reconstruction commemoration road ahead looks considerably smoother in Natchez, where the voters just elected their third African American mayor, Darryl Grennell (the first was Robert Wood in 1869; the second was Philip West in 2004). In Beaufort, on the other hand, the city council is all white and has been for two decades. Yet it is likely that the historians’ study will show that Beaufort’s Reconstruction provenance is by most measures far stronger than Natchez’s, or indeed than of any other potential site. But in Beaufort, historic designations for Reconstruction are already steeped in controversy and political challenges.

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In the heart of Beaufort’s spectacular 304-acre historic district is the “Henry McKee House.” This gracious two-story residence with the slave “cottage” still out back is where Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was born into slavery (under McKee, whom historians also believe was probably Smalls’s father) and where, after the Civil War, Smalls returned—to purchase McKee’s house and cottage at a tax sale. During the early stages of the war, Smalls had been among a group of abolitionists who met with Abraham Lincoln to persuade the president to allow African Americans to fight as full-fledged members of the U.S. Army and Navy.

Smalls himself became a Union war hero. And after the war, Smalls continued to advocate for blacks in the military. Back in Beaufort, he also founded a school, a church, and a newspaper for the black community. Perhaps more significantly, Smalls represented Beaufort in the South Carolina State Legislature for five years, in the South Carolina State Senate for four years, and then in the U.S. House of Representatives for seven years. A modest National Historic Landmark plaque is affixed to the wall outside of Smalls’s house, but it says nothing about why the house is historic or who Smalls was—nothing about the slave who fought for emancipation, returned home to buy his former master’s house, and then became the region’s most extraordinary figure.

In 1993, U.S. Representative James Clyburn became South Carolina’s first African American member of the House since Reconstruction. The previous African American to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Congress was Smalls, who left the post in 1887. Clyburn, who has been virtually alone among South Carolina’s elected officials in carrying the Reconstruction torch, was the keynote speaker at the symposium in Columbia, where he recalled Smalls’s then-groundbreaking congressional proposals for free public education and government support for the disabled and elderly. Clyburn also referred to Smalls as “the most consequential figure in the Reconstruction era.” Smalls’s life would seem to justify the claim.