Mr. Cotton is a historian whose ancestors owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. His house is decorated like a shrine to the rebellion. He has Confederate flags and Treasury notes alongside portraits of Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader. He also has racist iconography amid the clutter: a book of sheet music titled “Pickaninny Rag” with a caricature of a black boy on the cover; a CD of a white comedian who performs in blackface.

As we sit down for the interview, we ask him to spell his name. “C-O-T-T-O-N,” he says, then adds, matter-of-factly, “Cotton, just like you pick.”

Mr. Cotton lives near Brierfield, Jefferson Davis’s former estate. He also went to a school named for the Confederacy’s only president. Like many pro-Confederates in the South, Mr. Cotton plays down the role of slavery in the Civil War. He believes it had more to do with the North trying to control, and eventually invade, the South than anything else.

“He’s one of my heroes, and nobody will ever take that away from me,” he says of Davis. “You can take his statues down if you want to. They can destroy what they can, but they’ll never destroy the legend of the man.”