This Republic of Suffering [115]
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.51
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.”52
“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