This Republic of Suffering (33 page)

Trowbridge's sense that federal burial efforts should include the Confederate dead placed him in a minority, especially as Congress and the North assumed an increasingly radical position in regard to Reconstruction. In early 1868 the
New York Times
documented a dispute among three northern politicians on the question of the rebel dead. Governor Reuben Fenton of New York had counseled humanity in the treatment of slain Confederates and had in vain urged their inclusion in the Antietam Cemetery dedicated in 1867 and in the national reburial program more generally. But Governor John White Geary of Pennsylvania, who had fought for the Union and whose soldier son had died in his arms, and Pennsylvania's Radical Republican congressman John Covode, who lost two sons in the war, embraced no such generosity, insisting on the “personal guilt of the individual soldiers of the rebel army.” Quartermaster General Meigs, responsible for executing federal policy on graves and interments, was himself bitterly angry at what he believed to have been the “murder” of his son John, who was shot in 1864 after he surrendered to Confederate soldiers in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Most veterans were more forgiving of their former enemies, recognizing the ties of duty that bind any soldier. But they had just waged a long and destructive struggle against these rebellious southerners; it seemed unimaginable that those who had tried to destroy the Union should be accorded the same respect as those who had saved it.
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This differential treatment of the dead had powerful, and seemingly unanticipated, effects. Southern civilians, largely women, mobilized private means to accomplish what federal resources would not. Their efforts to claim and honor the Confederate dead—and the organizations they spawned—became a means of keeping sectionalist identity and energy not just alive but strong. It did not pass unnoticed in the impoverished postwar South that during the five years that followed Appomattox, more than $4 million of public funds would be expended exclusively on dead northerners.

The April 1866 joint congressional resolution proposing the national cemetery system provoked an outraged response from white Virginians. Northerners were wrong, the
Richmond Examiner
proclaimed, to think that the Confederate was “the less a hero because he failed.” Calling upon Richmond's churchwomen to assume responsibility for Virginia's fallen, the paper underscored the irony of defining southerners as outside a nation with which they had been forcibly reunited. If the Confederate soldier “does not fall into the category of the ‘Nation's Dead' he is
ours
—and shame be to us if we do not care for his ashes.”
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On May 3, 1866, a group of Richmond women responding to the
Examiner
's call gathered to found the Hollywood Memorial Association of the Ladies of Richmond, recognizing both the obligation and the challenge before them. As Mrs. William McFarland, newly installed association president, acknowledged, the former Confederate capital was “begirt with an army of Confederate dead.” Thousands of men lay in neglected graves in Hollywood Cemetery or in Oakwood, its counterpart on the eastern edge of the city, conveniently close to the site where Chimborazo, the South's largest military hospital, had stood. Tens of thousands more lay scattered on the many battlefields that surrounded the city. Mrs. McFarland believed that these soldiers belonged not just to Richmond but to the South, and it was to the Women of the South that she directed her appeal. In “dying,” she proclaimed, Confederates “left us the guardianship of their graves.” Every southerner, she insisted, held an obligation to the fallen, out of gratitude for their “noble deeds,” as much as in sorrow at their loss. And every southerner was connected to these men, for although Confederate families suffered differing “degrees of affliction and bereavement, none are without sorrow and grief.”
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The association began repair of the eleven thousand soldiers' graves dug at Hollywood during the war. Nearly all needed remounding and returfing, and few had adequate markers. The ladies worried too about the bodies scattered through the countryside, which they believed should be gathered, like the Union dead, into hallowed and protected ground. With the help of farmers from battle sites on the outskirts of the city, the association arranged for the transfer of hundreds of bodies to new graves in the Richmond cemetery during the summer and fall of 1866.

Across town the Ladies Memorial Association for the Confederate Dead of Oakwood, led by an executive council representing seven different Christian denominations, determined to mark and turf the sixteen thousand graves in its care. In early June the association received proposals for headboards, at costs ranging from forty cents to a dollar each. By mid-month they had submitted an order for an initial thousand. By summer 1867 the committee on head-boards reported that the work was accomplished. In the course of the year a Hebrew Ladies Memorial Association was established as well, its members dedicated to caring for the graves of thirty Jewish Confederates buried in the soldiers' section of the city's Hebrew Cemetery.
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The ladies of Richmond supported their efforts through private donations, through contributions from the legislatures of other former Confederate states whose soldiers lay on Virginia soil, and through fund-raising activities that involved the broader community—and all its religious denominations—in the care of the dead. In the spring of 1867 the Hollywood Association sponsored a two-week-long bazaar that included the sale of such items as inkstands carved from the bones of horses killed in the war and the raffling of Stonewall Jackson's coat buttons. But commercialization had its limits; both the Hollywood and Oakwood associations “respectfully declined” the offer of a Mr. Webb to produce a memorial soap to be sold on their behalf.
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The honoring of Confederate dead in the months after Appomattox quite naturally included decoration of graves with seasonal flowers. By the following spring these tributes had become more formal, often involving some combination of prayers, music, and oratory. Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy, who had hailed its birth in “Ethnogenesis,” now marked its demise in a eulogy to the dead that was sung to accompany the decoration of graves in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery in 1867. “There is no holier spot of ground,” he affirmed,

Than where defeated valor lies;

By mourning beauty crowned.

Different locations across the South scheduled the ritual for different days: May 10, the anniversary of Jackson's death; or April 26, the day Johnston surrendered to Sherman and the war truly ended; or May 30 or 31, when flowers promised to be abundantly available; or June 3, Jefferson Davis's birthday. Northerners, too, frequently chose a spring day for formal commemoration of the dead, and in 1868 General John Logan, commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a general order designating May 30 for the purpose of “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” The South, charged in Logan's order with “rebellious tyranny,” continued its separate observances until after the First World War. Even today many southern states recognize Confederate Memorial Day on a different date from the nationwide holiday. More than two dozen cities and towns North and South claim to have invented Decoration Day, as Memorial Day was originally called, but these observances seem instead to have grown up largely independently and, for at least a half century after the Civil War, to have continued to reflect persisting sectional divisions among both the living and the dead.
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The northern reburial movement was an official, even a professional effort, removed by both geography and bureaucracy from the lives of most northern citizens; it was the work—and expense—of the Quartermaster Corps, the U.S. Army, and the federal government. In the South care for the Confederate dead was of necessity the work of the people, at least the white people; it became a grass-roots undertaking that mobilized the white South in ways that extended well beyond the immediate purposes of bereavement and commemoration.

Winchester, in the northernmost part of Virginia, had been a site of almost unrelieved military activity, including three major Battles of Winchester, one each in 1862, 1863, and 1864; the town was said to have changed hands more than seventy times in the course of the war. The dead surrounded Winchester as they did Richmond, and women organized similarly to honor them. Fanny Downing, who assumed the presidency of the Ladies Association for the Fitting Up of Stonewall Jackson Cemetery, issued an “Address to the Women of the South” that echoed Richmond's Mrs. William McFarland. “Let us remember,” her broadside cried, “that we belong to that sex which was last at the cross, first at the grave…Let us go now, hand in hand, to the graves of our country's sons, and as we go let our energies be aroused and our hearts be thrilled by this thought:
It is the least thing we can do for our soldiers.
”
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“Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia—Decorating the Graves of the Rebel Soldiers.”
Harper's Weekly,
August 17, 1867
.

Downing invoked the long tradition of female responsibility for mourning, but her profession of allegiance to a country that had supposedly surrendered its existence suggested a second motivation for women's leadership of the southern reburial effort. To respectfully bury one's neighbors and kin was a personal and private act; to honor those who had risen up in rebellion against the national government was unavoidably public and political. Yet women were regarded in mid-nineteenth-century America as apolitical in their very essence; their aggressions and transgressions could be—and largely had been—ignored during the war. Even amid the escalating conflicts of Reconstruction, their gender would provide them with wide leeway as they enacted a role they had played since they took Jesus from the Cross. Mrs. Charles J. Williams, secretary of the Georgia Ladies Memorial Association, clearly understood the nature of this gendered claim. “Legislative enactment may not be made to do honor to [Confederate] memories,” as it had to those of the Union dead, “but the veriest radical that ever traced his genealogy back to the deck of the Mayflower, could not refuse us the simple privilege of paying honor to those who died defending the life, honor and happiness of the Southern women.” But the “simple privilege” of memorializing the Confederate dead—like so many women's actions during the war itself—was in fact highly political; honoring the slain offered women a claim to both prominence and power in the new postwar South. Ensuring the immortality of the fallen and of their memory became a means of perpetuating southern resistance to northern domination and to the reconstruction of southern society.
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On October 25, 1866, a crowd five thousand strong gathered to dedicate Winchester's Stonewall Cemetery, graveyard for 2,494 Confederate soldiers who had been collected from a radius of fifteen miles around the town. Eight hundred twenty-nine of these bodies remained unknown and were buried together in a common mound surrounded by 1,679 named graves. General Turner Ashby, a dashing cavalry commander and local hero who had been killed in 1862, served as the ranking officer among the dead, as well as a focus of the day's ceremonies. His old mammy was recruited to lay a wreath on his grave in a pointed celebration of the world for which the Confederacy had fought. The American flag flying in the adjoining national cemetery, where five thousand Union soldiers had already been interred, provoked a “good deal of rancor” from the crowd, and the members of the U.S. Burial Corps, caring for the Federal dead, were jeered and insulted. Twenty-five hundred Confederates on one side; five thousand Yankees on the other: perhaps this was the Fourth Battle of Winchester, the one in which the soldiers were already dead.
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Women founded memorial associations almost everywhere there were concentrations of Confederate bodies. In Nashville an association of women purchased land in an existing cemetery to establish a Confederate Circle into which fifteen hundred bodies from nearby battlefields were moved. In Vicksburg the Ladies Confederate Cemetery Association oversaw the reinterment of sixteen hundred soldiers from the Vicksburg campaign at “Soldier's Rest,” within an existing city cemetery. The Confederate Memorial Association of Chattanooga, under the leadership of Mrs. J. B. Cooke, acquired a site in 1867 in which to reinter Confederates from the surrounding area. In Atlanta, Mary Cobb Johnson “personally superintended” the removal of the dead from a radius of ten miles around the city. In some trenches she found as many as ninety bodies, wrapped in blankets, their hands folded across their chests, their hats over their faces. In Marietta the Georgia Memorial Association added bodies gathered from the battlefields around Chickamauga and Ringgold to a wartime cemetery for a total of three thousand Confederate graves. A local Unionist had suggested burying Yankees and Confederates together in the national cemetery established at Marietta, but women of the area were horrified and insisted that the Confederate dead be “protected from a promiscuous mingling with the remains of their enemies.” In all of these cemeteries soldiers were grouped by state, in lasting tribute to the principles for which the conflict had been fought.
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