Is It Ever Morally Acceptable to Visit a Confederate Historical Site?

I recently moved back home to Biloxi, Miss., and I’m wondering about visiting the lavish grounds of Beauvoir, the historical site and home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America.

I abhor everything the Confederacy stood for and was proud when Mississippi changed our state flag a few years ago to remove the Confederate emblem. I also enjoy history and historical sites, however, and Beauvoir is the biggest one in the area by far. My problem is that the site charges an admission fee. The property is owned by the Mississippi division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and while I presume some of the money would go to the upkeep of this historical site, I don’t know what they do with the rest of their money. (Their website mentions events to commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day,” Jefferson Davis’s birthday and so on.) Is it ethical to pay an admission fee and visit this historical site? — Jacob

From the Ethicist:

What can you say about the Sons of Confederate Veterans? Not long ago, the group exhumed the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and had them ceremonially reburied in Columbia, Tenn., where the S.C.V. owns and operates the National Confederate Museum, devoted to presenting “a Southern perspective of the War Between the States.” If you’re wondering about this perspective, the Mississippi division of the S.C.V. explains that “the preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”

That’s part of the standard myth of the Lost Cause, a myth that has draped itself like Spanish moss over a number of Southern sites commemorating the Confederacy. So is the notion of the kindly slave owner. It’s not particularly relevant to Beauvoir, where Davis moved only after Emancipation. But at Brierfield and at the White House of the Confederacy, Davis appears to have believed that he was a benevolent master to the Black people he considered property. The magazine Smithsonian, in a 2018 report, quotes a Beauvoir guide assuring visitors that Jefferson Davis was one of the “good slave owners,” who “took care of his slaves and treated them like family.”

Like family? It’s a curious family whose members regularly flee when they can. Among those Davis kept enslaved, William A. Jackson, a coachman, escaped Davis’s Confederate White House in 1862; two more workers, Betsey and…