• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7198 0

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.53

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.54

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.55

Across Virginia women responded to Mrs. McFarland