When Lost Causers Drink from the Devil’s Punchbowl They Are All Wet

When I am online writing about the treatment of African Americans during Reconstruction, I often encounter Lost Cause advocates who respond to documentation about Klan violence by asking “What about the Devil’s Punch Bowl?” A weird question in itself, it gets weirder when you realize the source of this question. It lies deep in the Occult.

The most recent time I had someone raise this was just today. Karl Burkhalter responded to testimony I posted from the 1870s by an African American woman who had been targeted by the Klan with this:

Karl is a persistent presence on Civil War social media. He puts up laughing emogis under history posts of white supremacist murders of African Americans. He raises the Devil’s Punchbowl in response to newspaper articles on the Civil War. He protests against attempts to remove Confederate statues. He says that “civilized Blacks rode with the Original Klan.”

I first encountered The Devil’s Punchbowl nonsense in 2016 and I am fairly shocked to see it still making the rounds today. Karl is not the only one talking about the Punchbowl, but he raises it so often that you would have to assume that he knows its source is fake.

The Devil’s Punchbowl is real in one sense. It is a geological fact. There is a site near Natchez, Mississippi called the Devil’s Punchbowl. What is not real is the claim repeated by Karl that “20,000” former slaved were killed there, or allowed to die there, by Union troops.

Karl is a purveyor of a conspiracy theory that Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was intent on freeing the slaves so that he could murder them! Karl wrote today in response to a question from my reader Tedra Powers Ulmer:

You would rather dismiss me than face the truth, Stanton’s policy was Hitler’s model for the Final Solution! It is as wrong to blame Union Soldiers for the Eugenics Programs as it is to blame Conferdates for Slavery. I am willing to return to the Comprise Historians reached during the Centennial. But if these Lincoln Worship pseudo-historians continue to justify Cultural Cleansing because of Slavery, I am going to ressurect Stanton’s Genocide Policy. [The unique spellings are Karl’s own.]

It is clear why Karl wants the the story of the Devil’s Punchbowl to be real. It supports his view that Emancipation was the real crime against humanity.

So where does the story come from?

A while back in 2014, WJTV, a local TV station in Jackson, Mississippi, had a regular feature called “Mystery Monday” on its news show. This was the sort of crappy non-news segment bordering on a ghost story. The show used as its source a woman named Paula Westbrook, who works for the Delta Paranormal Project. Yes, that’s right. The story comes from a “researcher” who relies on ghosts as her sources.

The Jackson Free Press profiled Paula Westbrook. It said that she coordinates the Southern Paranormal and Anomaly Research Society, a society for ghost hunters. She supports herself through her Ghost Hunting Academy and her work at K-Mart.

To get a sense of where Westbrook gets her evidence from, here is her description of her historical research at Beauvoir, the home of Jefferson Davis, the deposed Confederate president. She says:

“Many people lived and died on this property. To many of these people, this was their last home. And their spirits still roam this property today, as with any hospital or retirement home.”

“Apparitions, as solid as you and I, of Jefferson Davis have been seen. Many have thought he was a reenactor only to find out that there were no reenactors there. Many brides have captured a picture of Winnie Davis standing in the window of her room. She usually shows up right before a wedding. She was the only child of the Davis’ to live on the property. She never married and died in her 30’s.”

Karl does not link to the original TV report that started the whole Devil’s Punchbowl lie. Like other Lost Causers, he cites an online publication called “Black Main Street.” This site has a truncated version of the story without any source citations whatsoever.

Historian Jim Wiggins of the nearby Copiah-Lincoln Community College, says of WJTV’s Devil’s Punchbowl story “as journalism, whether “soft” or “hard,” this is a disgrace.” But for Lost Causers, Ghost Stories are all that they have to grab on to.

The fact that Karl’s story doesn’t hold punch, does not mean that freed slaves were always treated well after they escaped to Union lines. Several years ago I wrote about Camp Nelson Kentucky where there were dozens of deaths of freed slaves due to neglect and an expulsion order from the Union commander. Historian Jim Downs has documented deaths of freedpeople from hunger and disease as tens of thousands fled towards Union lines as troops unprepared to cope with refugees in 1862-1865.

There is even a scholarly book that discusses the lives of Black refugees in Natchez, Professor Ron Davis’ 1994 The Black Experience in Natchez. It discusses deaths at the Under-the-Stairs refugee camp (NOT Devil’s Punchbowl) from disease. Two thousand of the refugees may have died there, according to one estimate. They were not murdered by the Union Army. In fact many of the soldiers in the occupation force were black and many were related to the refugees. Nor were they starved by the army. Adult refugees received a ration from the army of “10 ounces of pork or bacon a week, 1 pound of cornmeal five times a week, 1 pound of flour or soft bread — or 12 ounces of hard bread — twice a week, portions of sugar, vinegar, candles, soap, salt, potatoes, and rye coffee. Children under 14 were issued one half the adult rations.”  But they did die from the rapid spread of disease that rural refugees often encounter when they are grouped together

But scholarship is not what a man like Karl Burkhalter is after. Only a grand conspiracy that anticipates Hitler and the Final Solution will do, even if it comes out of the fertile imagination of a real life Ghost Buster.

 

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