Grief Debate

Chapter Title: MOURNING AND CELEBRATION IN THE WAKE OF WAR, 1865–1869 Book Title: Remembering the Civil War

Book Subtitle: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation

Book Author(s): Caroline E. Janney

Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469607078_janney.7

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73

3 MOURNING AND CELEBRATION

IN THE WAKE OF WAR

1865–1869

On the morning of June 11, 1865, several Union officers accompanied by

a large party of civilians climbed aboard a train in Washington bound

for the old battlefield at Manassas. It was far different from the affair for

which crowds had gathered in 1861 to witness the first great battle of the

war. Now, four years later, these officers and civilians had come to dedicate

two monuments, one on the field of the first battle of Bull Run and another

on the field where the second battle was fought. Planned and erected only

the previous week by troops from the 22nd Corps stationed at nearby Fair-

fax Courthouse, the monuments were unimposing, plain structures of red

sandstone. But the dedications that day reflected the tone and message of

more elaborate monument dedications that would follow in the months

and years to come.1

Here on the field of the war’s first battle and the first monument dedica-

tion after the war, Union soldiers and Washington’s elite sang out in praise

of Union victory. Echoing the sermons preached in the wake of Lincoln’s

assassination, the Reverend John Pierpont’s hymn pointed to slavery as

the cause of both the war and the president’s death, rejoiced that Union

soldiers had secured freedom, and condemned the rebel dead.2 Just as

would be the case at countless other Union monument and cemetery dedi-

cations, there was no hint of the reconciliationist tone that would become

so frequent on battlefields in the coming decades. Instead, on the field

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74 / Mourning and Celebration

where U.S. forces had twice been defeated by rebel armies, Union veterans

and civilians reclaimed the space. They left no doubt that they were the

victors, commemorating in stone the Union soldiers who had so bravely

ensured that slavery would never again tear the nation asunder.

A week later, rumors began to circulate that local rebels had defaced

the monument. While some northern papers expressed hope that it was

not true, they noted there was strong reason to believe the reports. “The

temper of people in that part of Virginia is not a whit more loyal than it

was six months ago,” observed the New York Times.3 The story was soon

contradicted, and Union soldiers were glad to learn that the original story

was untrue. Had it not been, they warned in no uncertain terms, “some of

our soldiers would have taken terrible revenge for such an insult.”4

But what would have happened if Union soldiers had embarked on a

vengeful retaliation? Would sectional conflict have flared up again? In the

first years after Appomattox, Unionists continued to confront the dilemma

of whether reunion necessitated gestures of reconciliation. Was punish-

ment a necessary precursor to a reunited nation? Would more deaths,

those of the Lincoln conspirators or leaders such as Jefferson Davis, be

required to make sure the rebellion was thoroughly suppressed? What

should or could be done to stifle the Confederate sentiment that appeared

to linger on even after defeat?

As army and government leaders wrestled with these issues, mourn-

Members of the 22nd Corps built and dedicated one of the first postwar memorials

on the battlefield at Bull Run during the summer of 1865. (Library of Congress)

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Mourning and Celebration / 75

ing and death continued to shape sectional animosities and memories

of the war. Unionists might not agree on how to proceed with binding

up the nation’s wounds, but they did adamantly refuse to allow former

rebels within the confines of the new “national” cemeteries. These sanc-

tified places would be reserved for loyal Americans who had been true to

the Union cause. Former Confederates responded in kind. Humiliated by

the continued presence of Union troops, infuriated by the end of slavery,

angered by the neglect of Confederate graves, and emboldened by lenient

federal policies intended to nurture national healing, former Confederates

audaciously defended the sacrifice of their soldiers in cities of the dead. At

cemetery dedications and Memorial Day services, they found a viable and

tenacious way in which to maintain their continued defiance, create an

identity separate from that of the North, and cultivate the Lost Cause.

African Americans’ earliest memories of the war were shaped by a

more complicated relationship between mourning and celebration. Black

Americans north and south, too, mourned the loss of their soldiers at

cemetery dedications and Union Memorial Days. Yet Emancipation Day,

Juneteenth, Evacuation Day, and July Fourth ceremonies proved to be

more festive occasions. In elaborate parades and public celebrations, they

honored USCT soldiers and provided opportunities for all African Ameri-

cans to rejoice in emancipation and the promise of equal citizenship.

Whether solemn observances at cemeteries or grand processions marking

the end of slavery, between 1865 and 1869 it became readily apparent that

no single vision of the war could encompass the range of meanings and

understandings such a vast American public found in the conflict.

HONORING THE UNION DEAD

As the soldiers of the U.S. Army mustered out during the summer of 1865,

most marched home to a hero’s welcome. From major cities to the small-

est village, joyous citizens received their victorious men with celebrations

at the local train depot, feted them with fine dinners, and cheered them in

parades.5 For nearly 360,000 Union families, however, this would be im-

possible, their sons, brothers, husbands, and other loved ones having lost

their lives in the four bloody years of fighting. The bodies of most of these

men had not been returned home, nor did they reside in the newly created

national cemeteries such as those in Gettysburg and Arlington; instead,

they remained in unidentified mass graves on southern battlefields.6

Fearing that the temporary headboards offering some identification

might soon be lost to weather and outraged by reports of Union grave

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76 / Mourning and Celebration

desecration by recalcitrant rebels, the northern public clamored for more

honorable and more respectable sepulchers for these saviors of the Union.

In early June 1865, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs issued

orders sending Capt. James M. Moore, an assistant quartermaster, to the

battlefields of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania to reinter and remark the

graves of those killed in the previous year’s battles. Bearing twenty wagon

loads of coffins, Captain Moore’s crew, including soldiers of the USCT not

yet mustered out of service, tended to more than 1,500 Union graves.

Over the course of three weeks, the men re-sodded the existing graves,

painted headboards, and laid out two cemeteries enclosed by fences for

those whose remains had not been properly interred at the time of battle.

Similar efforts prevailed in the western theater, where Chaplain William

Earnshaw commenced identifying and reinterring soldiers’ remains near

Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the Stones River National Cemetery. But just

as had been the case in Virginia, there was no effort to systematically col-

lect all the Union dead and inter them in one or more central cemeteries.

That would have to wait.7

Indicative of how salient the prisoner of war issue remained, how-

ever, was the immediate effort to tend to graves at the Confederacy’s most

notorious prison. In early July, Moore was relieved of his work in Vir-

ginia and sent to Andersonville. Between February 1864 and the end of

the war, some 45,000 Union prisoners of war had suffered under especially

brutal conditions in the Georgia sun, at least 13,363 of them paying with

their lives. The shocking images of the skeletal survivors and stories of

the unfathomable conditions sent northerners into a near frenzied state.

With the war over, they beseeched the government to honor these noble

heroes. Working (often acrimoniously) alongside the former Union nurse

Clara Barton, who now ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, Moore’s team of

clerks, painters, letterers, and carpenters coped with the same unbearably

stifling heat that had claimed the lives of so many prisoners. Within weeks

they had established a fifty-acre cemetery that closely resembled that in

Gettysburg, composed of subdivided sections, walks, a board fence, and

a flagstaff in the center. On August 17, even as the prison’s commandant,

Henry Wirz, stood trial, the graves were formally dedicated as a national

cemetery. The prison, however, had been untouched. It would be left as “a

monument to the inhumanity unparalleled in the annals of war.”8

Just as Union troops moved to provide respectable resting places

for individual soldiers in the aftermath of war, they also continued to

erect monuments to their fallen brethren on battlefields. In Manassas,

Chambersburg, and elsewhere that summer, orators paid tribute to the

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Mourning and Celebration / 77

sacrifices and heroics of U.S. soldiers, and many heralded the war’s two re-

sults: preservation of the Union and the end of slavery.9 Dedicating the sol-

diers’ monument in Gettysburg on July 4, 1865, Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard,

who had commanded the 11th Corps during the battle and was now com-

missioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, reminded the somber crowd that the

memorial they were dedicating was raised to the American soldier and his

“unceasing herald of labor, suffering, union, liberty, and sacrifice.” “The

maimed bodies, the multitude of graves, the historic fields, the monumen-

tal stones like this we are laying to-day,” he noted, “are only meager memo-

rials of the soldiers’ work.” Invoking Abraham Lincoln’s dedication of the

cemetery in November 1863, Howard intoned that these men had not died

in vain. Instead, their sacrifices had brought about African Americans’

concept of what Lincoln had called for, a “new birth of freedom.”10 The

monument would serve as a perpetual reminder that the preservation of

the Union and universal freedom could not be disentangled from the sol-

diers’ sacrifice.11

Speakers were more diverse when it came to dealing with former rebels.

Some seemed to call for speedy reconciliation. In remarks read at the

Gettysburg monument dedication, President Andrew Johnson (perhaps

not surprisingly) believed that white southerners would soon exhibit “such

loyalty and patriotism as were never seen nor felt [in the South] before.”12

Others unabashedly condemned the rebel cause. A hymn penned by the

Reverend John Pierpont and sung at the Bull Run monument dedica-

tion in June had exhorted that northerners were content to let both “rebel

bones and memories rot.” 13

Regardless of their position on the former rebels, Unionists would not

let the remains of their loyal soldiers molder unacknowledged. In the

spring of 1866, Congress finally provided the financial support for gather-

ing all the remains of Union soldiers still reposing in the former Confeder-

acy. This massive reinterment project would send crews across the South

to scout for grave sites and organize cemeteries for Union soldiers simi-

lar to those that had been created during the war in Gettysburg, Arling-

ton, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Stones River.14 As early as February, offi-

cers and work crews began arriving in Richmond to gather the remains

of northern prisoners who had been buried at Hollywood and Oakwood

Cemeteries and at Belle Isle. These cemeteries would be premised first and

foremost on the Union, and unlike Gettysburg and Antietam (which had

been organized initially by several northern states), they would explicitly

not be arranged by state. Instead, like Gen. George H. Thomas after the

battle of Chattanooga, the Union Burial Corps elected to “mix them all up,”

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78 / Mourning and Celebration

no doubt “sick of state’s rights.” 15 The corps laid out the grounds so that

each grave was of equal importance and provided individual headstones

for all remains. By 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been reinterred in

seventy-four national cemeteries.16

These national cemeteries were not to be for white soldiers alone. In

a radical departure from the antebellum period in which racially inte-

grated cemeteries were rare, the burial corps routinely included black sol-

diers in the memorial grounds.17 The cemetery in City Point, Virginia, con-

tained more than 1,300 USCT burials, that in Arlington had more than 400

USCT soldiers (as well as the remains of 3,235 refugee runaway slaves or

“contrabands”), and even Gettysburg served as the final resting place for

one black soldier, Henry Gooden.18 At some of the national cemeteries,

USCT veterans were buried in separate portions of the field, but at others

they mingled freely in death with white soldiers as they had not in life.19

If national cemeteries failed to discriminate between white and black,

the divide between blue and gray remained. There appears to have been

virtually no dissent within the U.S. Army ranks to interring only loyal sol-

diers; northerners clearly understood that providing proper burials im-

plied bestowing honor on the dead. If the Union dead served as reminders

of the nation’s sacrifice and suffering, how could loyal Americans right-

fully include the Confederate dead among their ranks?20 Many likely

agreed with a Union woman visiting the national cemetery at Arlington in

1866 who hoped that “no rebel will ever set his accursed foot within those

sacred precincts.”21 National cemeteries were sacred ground for the loyal,

Union dead alone.22

Even as some Unionists continued to push for Lincoln’s and later John-

son’s vision of reconciliation, in the immediate aftermath of war white

northerners, southern Unionists, and African Americans were hardly will-

ing to praise Confederate soldiers’ bravery and courage as they stood at the

graves of those whom the rebels had slain. Reconciliation would not emerge

from mutual respect and mourning for slain soldiers. On the contrary, sec-

tionalism would thrive in the cities of the dead for decades to come.

DEATH SENTENCE

Three days after the Fourth of July, photographers captured one of the

last stark images of the war: four limp bodies of the Lincoln assassina-

tion conspirators dangling from the ropes in the Old Arsenal Penitentiary.

Included among them was Mary Surratt, the first white woman ever exe-

cuted by the United States. Many were shocked by such a sight, but others

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Mourning and Celebration / 79

praised the president for meting out severe punishments. “President John-

son is moving in the right direction now,” observed Tennessee governor

William “Parson” Brownlow’s Knoxville newspaper. Finally, the president

was “carrying out his maxim that ‘traitors must be punished and treason

made odious.’ ” “He hung four rebels in one day in Washington,” proclaimed

the paper, “and among them Madam Surratt, a female rebel.” Although the

press did not indicate as much, it is not hard to imagine that Surratt was a

surrogate for all the rebel women who had so defiantly snubbed, spit upon,

and otherwise harassed Union troops during the war.23

Next to Lincoln’s murder, the subject of prisoners of war elicited the

most rancorous responses among Unionists. Tales of Confederate atroci-

ties toward Union prisoners had filtered north throughout the war, but

those that enraged people the most were the tales from Andersonville.

With the war over, they now clamored for punishment against those who

had perpetuated the inhumanity. In May, Union forces arrested Capt.

Henry Wirz, commandant of the camp. For three months he stood trial

facing the testimony of more than 160 witnesses, most of whom were

The dangling bodies of four of the Lincoln conspirators, including Mary Surratt,

served as a powerful warning to the defeated South in July 1865. (Library of Congress)

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80 / Mourning and Celebration

former Union prisoners. As the trial lingered on, Wirz’s health deterio-

rated to the point that he was barely able to rise from the couch where he

rested. He elicited no sympathy, and, not surprisingly, was found guilty

and sentenced to hang. As they had done during the war, U.S. officials

attempted to connect Davis to the prison camp atrocities, offering Wirz

amnesty in exchange for testimony incriminating the former Confederate

president. He refused, vowing that Davis “had no connection with me as

to what was done at Andersonville.”24 On November 10, northern spec-

tators gathered around the same scaffold that had claimed the lives of

Booth’s conspirators just a few months prior. Amid cries of “remember

Andersonville,” Wirz met his death before an exultant crowd. And just like

the conspirators, his postmortem image circulated throughout the North

as proof of his demise.

Almost as reprehensible to northern sensibilities as the slaying of their

president and the atrocities committed against prisoners of war were the

brutalities of rebel guerrilla forces. Nearly all of those who remained in the

field after Lee and Johnston’s surrenders were granted paroles, including

John S. Mosby’s Virginia partisans and Jeff Thompson’s men in Arkansas.

Those captured before the surrenders or considered to be the most notori-

ous characters, however, faced formal legal proceedings. Henry Magruder,

of John Hunt Morgan’s command in Kentucky, was hanged in Louisville

in late October. One of the most notorious guerrillas was Champ Ferguson,

a Kentucky native whose most atrocious killing occurred in Saltville, Vir-

ginia, in October 1864, when his band scoured the field after the battle and

executed wounded Union soldiers. They killed both blacks and whites, but

appeared to especially target African American soldiers. He was captured

in May and his trial received nearly as much national attention as had

Wirz’s. Found guilty and sentenced to die in Nashville, Ferguson climbed

the gallows on October 20 as more than 300 residents and members of the

16th USCT watched. Asked if he had any final words, Ferguson remained

defiant and recalcitrant to the end. He nodded toward his coffin and pro-

claimed, “When I am dead I want my body placed in this box, delivered to

my wife . . . in White County and be buried in pure, Rebel soil.” His was a

path far removed from that which his eastern compatriot, John S. Mosby,

would take decades after the war.25

These death sentences had not quelled the calls for Jefferson Davis’s

execution. The Reverend Mr. Burton of Hartford had been especially suc-

cessful in swelling his summertime congregation through his powerful

sermons calling for the execution of Davis and “all his principal men.”

Speaking to a packed sanctuary in late August, Burton argued that the hot

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Mourning and Celebration / 81

passions of April had cooled and northerners overwhelmingly harbored

neither hate nor malice toward the defeated South. But Davis must still

hang. “They would release him if they could,” he observed, “if they could

forget the dead . . . if their bells of victory were not drowned by their bells

of mourning; if they could forget their country.” Northerners could not

forget; Davis could not be spared. Davis’s conviction and execution, Bur-

ton argued, “will do more for the stability of the country, and for the cause

of public order, than almost any dozen great acts of the last for years.”26

By late summer, Burton, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, and others

had become convinced that Union victory could be fully realized only

if southern leaders such as Davis were punished for their crimes.27 The

memory of the Union dead, as Burton observed, was far too powerful to

allow northerners to forget.

But as had been the case since the war, not all Unionists felt so vehe-

mently and instead pushed for a speedy reconciliation free of harsh or

punitive measures. Prominent abolitionist the Reverend Henry Ward

Beecher, remained firm in the convictions he had expressed since Appo-

mattox that Davis need not hang. Ample blood had already been shed, he

believed, and the nation was strong enough to forego any manifestation

of revenge or retaliation.28 Gerritt Smith, an abolitionist who had been

instrumental in John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, likewise advo-

cated a mild policy toward white southerners. While he believed the South

guilty of treason, he maintained that the United States had acknowledged

the Confederacy as a de facto government and thus the rules of war ap-

plied. White southerners were a defeated foe, not traitors to be hanged.

Moreover, he argued, the North had been equally complicit in the horrific

system of slavery, so why should the South alone be punished?29 At least

some northern Democrats warned that Republican fanaticism calling for

more contrition on the part of white southerners threatened perpetual

war.30 The Old Guard, a Democratic, fiercely white-supremacist monthly

magazine published in New York, observed that with the rebellion ended,

the southern states would naturally gravitate to their old positions in the

Union. “No armies are needed,” the magazine noted, “no efforts what-

ever; the secession ordinances repealed and re-union is complete, if no

obstacles are placed in the way. President Johnson has only to appoint fed-

eral officers in the South, and the Union is restored.”31 In late June, even

the Republican-leaning New York Times concurred that punishment was

not necessary. Rather, the paper attributed the “progress of pacification” in

the South to Grant’s “great magnanimity” at Appomattox, Sherman’s simi-

lar terms at Durham Station, the generosity of the president’s amnesty,

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82 / Mourning and Celebration

and most important, to “the liberal and fraternal spirit in which the North

. . . has stretched wide open its arms to greet again the repentant South.”32

Others joined politicians and activists in their calls for a lenient peace

and a speedy reconciliation. Businessmen such as John Travers of New

York hoped to renew amicable relations with the South. Writing to an

antebellum business partner in Virginia, Travers supposed that “time will

obliterate all feeling of dislike caused by the ungenerous unnecessary war”

and hoped that they might renew their associations as smoothly as pos-

sible.33 In December 1865, John W. Garrett, president of the Baltimore &

Ohio Railroad, called for building a railroad through the Shenandoah Val-

ley. Not only would the railroad help Virginia recover quickly from the war,

but it would also “accomplish much in the restoration of kindly feelings . . .

assure mutual interest . . . [and] aid in binding in iron bands those great

commonwealths to the union of our fathers.”34 Families divided by war

also sought to navigate the postwar world of reunion and some measure

of reconciliation, as was the case with the Ellets of Washington, D.C., and

the Cabells of Virginia. Despite protestations from her paternal uncle, a

Unionist, that it was too soon to forgive her Confederate relatives for the

past four years, Mary Ellet headed to Virginia in late July determined to

renew relations with her mother’s family. Apparently her trip did serve to

bridge the internecine division, as she quickly began a flirtation with her

cousin, William Daniel Cabell of Lynchburg, which resulted in marriage

two years later.35

In the immediate postwar years, northerners sometimes used the terms

“reunion” and “reconciliation” interchangeably. But many took great effort

to distinguish between the two. Rebuking an address by Massachusetts

senator Charles Sumner that questioned white southern loyalty in Janu-

ary 1866, the moderate Republican senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania

observed that unlike the radical senator from Massachusetts, he was for

“reconciliation.” While the nation might have been reunited at Appomat-

tox, Cowan desired a “Union by consent, not by force.” “I would like to

make friends of all the people with whom we have been at enmity hereto-

fore.” Parading the exceptional cases of white southern ill-behavior before

the country, he insisted, would only excite angry passions more than they

already were.36 President Johnson agreed. The war had accomplished the

goal of reunion, he noted, but its aftermath proved “the auspicious time

to commence the work of reconciliation,” to meet former Confederates

“in the spirit of charity and forgiveness, and to conquer them even more

effectually by the magnanimity of the nation than by the force of arms.”37

Intending to reunite the nation as peacefully and smoothly as possible,

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Mourning and Celebration / 83

Unionists, whether Republican or Democrat, radical or moderate, could

hardly believe how their reconciliationist efforts served instead to em-

bolden former rebels in their spirited defense of the Lost Cause.

LOYALTY IS ONLY LIP DEEP

Less than three weeks after Lincoln’s remains were entombed in Spring-

field, President Johnson began to retreat from his bombastic vows to pun-

ish the rebels. With Congress adjourned until December, he initiated his

own conciliatory vision of a restored Union. On May 29, he issued two

proclamations detailing how the remaining seven states without recon-

struction governments could return to the Union. He offered amnesty and

pardons with the restoration of all property rights (excepting slaves) to

participants of the rebellion so long as they took an oath pledging loyalty

to the Union and endorsed emancipation. Fourteen classes of people were

exempt from the pardon, most important among them Confederate offi-

cials, those who had broken prior amnesty oaths, those who had attended

West Point or Annapolis, and those who owned taxable property worth

more than $20,000. Of special note was the exemption of persons “who

had mistreated prisoners of war or were under arrest for other military

crimes,” which included the Lincoln assassination conspirators, Davis, and

others already in custody. Those individuals would have to apply person-

ally to the president for pardon.38

Why this seemingly sudden shift to moderation by Johnson? A com-

bination of personal grievances and political ambitions probably sparked

the change. As the most powerful man in the nation he now had the south-

ern elite, a group whom he had always envied, groveling at his feet. John-

son relished former slaveholders beseeching him for amnesty and par-

ticularly enjoyed the pleas from attractive southern wives who appeared

sufficiently contrite. Simultaneously, he worried that emancipation would

unleash anarchy in the South, and he fervently believed that only planters

could maintain control over the black population. If barred from a politi-

cal role in southern society, the region’s antebellum leaders would be un-

able to exert such influence. Perhaps most important, the support of white

southerners necessary for his own reelection as president shaped John-

son’s response. Heeding the advice of Secretary of State Seward, Johnson

came to believe that lenient terms toward the rebels might help create an

alliance among conservatives and moderates that could thwart the Radi-

cal Republicans in the next presidential election.39

A convention of former slaves meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, in mid-

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84 / Mourning and Celebration

August knew better. In an address to the loyal citizens of the United States,

the freedmen recounted the myriad of ways in which they had aided the

Union war effort. They had flocked to Union lines, served as scouts and

spies, dug trenches, driven teams, aided escaped prisoners of war, and

fought under the star-spangled banner at Fort Wagner, Milliken’s Bend,

and Petersburg. But now the war was over, and yet their former masters—

former foes—appeared to be regaining power. “Four-fifths of our enemies

are pardoned or amnestied, and the other fifth are being pardoned,” they

observed. Rather than protecting the civil rights of African Americans

who had been devoted to the Union cause, Johnson had left the former

slaves “entirely at the mercy of these subjugated but unconverted rebels.”

“We know these men—know them well,” they wrote, “and we assure you

that, with the majority of them, loyalty is only lip-deep, and that their

professions of loyalty are used as a cover to the cherished design of getting

restored to their former relations with the Federal Government.”40 These

freedmen understood perhaps better than white northerners the depth

of Confederates’ attachment to their defunct nation and the political and

social ramifications likely to follow such a deep-seated devotion.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1865, white southerners began to

exhibit a combination of stoic resolve, self-pity, and defiance.41 The self-

pity was most evident in southern whites’ insistence that they were the

true victims of war. In letters and diaries, former Confederates lamented

all that they had lost and blamed the North’s hard-war policies for inflict-

ing such unnecessary and brutal damage to the region. Richmond’s Lucy

Fletcher, for one, seethed at the presence of “the people who for 4 years

have been slaying our brethren, and desolating our land, burning and rav-

aging our homes insulting and robbing our defenceless women and grey

haired men.”42 Even Robert E. Lee, still facing an indictment for treason,

believed that northern officers and their soldiers had wantonly destroyed

civilian property and inflicted unnecessary suffering on noncombatants.43

Beyond Union occupation, the aspect of defeat white southerners found

most demeaning was the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves. Not only

did white southerners have to rebuild their economic system, but they also

faced complex psychological challenges in a world without the scaffold-

ing of slavery to ensure their social hierarchies. Throughout the summer,

former slaveholders found themselves awash in a mixture of self-pity and

anger as their slaves left.44 In the pages of her diary, teenager Sallie Strick-

ler of Madison County, Virginia, simultaneously defended slavery, reeled

in anger at the Union “liberators,” and questioned her identity in a post-

emancipation South. “It grinds me sorely to think of our being compelled

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Mourning and Celebration / 85

to give up our best-beloved institution,” she wrote in May. “I truly believe

that African slavery is right. I love it & all the South loves it. It suits us & I

do not see how we can do without it.” But like countless others, what vexed

her most was the way slavery had ended. “It humiliates me, more than lan-

guage can tell, to think of our being forced, ay forced, to give up what we

love. So well! And that by Yankees!”45 Robert Garlick Hill Kean agreed.

“The abolition of slavery immediately, and by military order, is the most

marked feature of this conquest of the South,” he concluded in early June.

“Manumission after this fashion will be regarded hereafter,” Kean pre-

dicted, “as the greatest social crime ever committed on the earth.”46 Even

a nonslaveholder described emancipation as “d—d robbery and nothin’

else.”47

Ironically, the protection of slavery had prompted the southern states to

leave the Union, and thus emancipation had made reunion possible. Yet as

would become increasingly clear throughout Reconstruction, emancipa-

tion and the accompanying racial uncertainty complicated reconciliation

more than any other issue.

One aspect of the new status of black men that especially galled white

southerners was the presence of black occupying troops. Fear of slave in-

surrections had been a constant part of southern life as long as most could

remember. Now, black men sanctioned by the federal government carried

guns and occupied southern cities. White southerners feared they would

incite the 4 million freedpeople to unleash a race war throughout the re-

gion. All this reminded white southerners of the extent of their defeat and

served as a powerful symbol of the magnitude of social disruption engen-

dered by the war, simultaneously enraging and horrifying them. Former

Confederates hurled insults at black troops, violently attacked them, and

accused them of plundering their homes. In Texas and Louisiana at least

a few whites disguised themselves as USCT troops and committed crimes

against other whites. Humiliation combined with an intense racism fueled

a bitter resentment toward both freedmen and Yankees that would prove

to be an incredibly daunting obstacle to reconciliation.48

Despite the presence of both white and black Union troops, white

southerners remained determined to restore as much of the antebellum

social and political order as possible. Encouraged by Johnson’s lenient

amnesty policies and fierce stance against black civil and political rights,

white southerners quickly crafted the so-called black codes. Enacted by

states throughout the region during the summer and fall of 1865, the laws

masqueraded as attempts to define the rights and responsibilities of freed-

men. In reality, the statutes sought to stabilize the black labor force and

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86 / Mourning and Celebration

define the relationship between southern whites and blacks (for instance,

in their restrictions against black men testifying against whites in court

or prohibitions of interracial marriage).49 Black codes were an attempt

to restore the antebellum status quo as much as possible. But they were

equally part of the larger pattern of Confederate defiance that reverber-

ated throughout the region in the immediate postwar period. Just as white

southerners continued to sing anti-Union ditties, wear their rebel gray

(sans insignia), and defy occupying troops, they implemented black codes

in defiance of Union victory.

In letters, diaries, and newspapers throughout the summer and fall of

1865, Confederate civilians and soldiers widely admitted that they were

“subjugated,” “whipped,” and “conquered.” Even northern observers re-

peatedly remarked on the use of these phrases by former rebels.50 But to

acknowledge being whipped was hardly an admission of guilt or rejection

of the cause for which they had fought. Instead, these statements served

two purposes. First, such rhetoric was part of a strategy of acquiescence

that white southerners hoped would convince the North that they had

no intention of furthering the conflict and therefore should be treated

with leniency.51 Second, building on Lee’s farewell address to his troops

at Appomattox, former rebels’ insistence that they had been “whipped”

implied that they not been defeated so much as overwhelmed by superior

numbers and resources. “Heroically the South struggled against adverse

fate,” Texan Sallie McNeill concluded, “and endured all ills, ’till exhausted

and ‘overpowered’ by numbers, she surrendered her gallant little army,

and the Confederacy was no more.”52 Such an explanation offered an ex-

cuse for battlefield defeat while maintaining the heroism of Confederate

soldiers. In fact, it implied that Confederate soldiers were even more val-

iant and laudable than their foes because they had waged a battle they

were likely to lose from the beginning.

Tantamount to this rejection of shame were two other budding ele-

ments of the Lost Cause, each inextricably wrapped up with the other and

each offering a defense of the Confederacy that would become cardinal

tenets of the white southern apologia in the postwar era. First, despite

their calls for an independent slaveholding republic in 1861, most defeated

Confederates immediately and instantly rallied to deny that the South had

seceded to protect slavery. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens,

who had insisted in 1861 that slavery was the “cornerstone” of the new na-

tion, quickly changed positions. “The slavery question had but little influ-

ence with the masses,” he wrote in June 1865 from his prison cell at Fort

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Mourning and Celebration / 87

Warren. “Many even of the large slave-holders, to my personal knowledge,

were willing from the first years of the war to give up that institution for

peace on recognition of the doctrine of ultimate Sovereignty of the sepa-

rate States.” Second, it was not slavery that drove white southerners to

secede, Stephens claimed; rather, their motive had been “to maintain and

perpetuate the principles of the Constitution, even out of the Union when

they could no longer maintain them in it.”53 In Richmond, another former

rebel informed northern reporter John Richard Dennett that few in the

South had owned slaves and therefore slavery could hardly have been the

cause for the conflict. Instead, it had been the unjust tyranny of the North

that had brought on the war. “The North has repeatedly violated the con-

stitutional guaranties of slavery. Yes, sir, we had a most perfect right to

secede, and we have been slaughtered by the thousands for attempting to

exercise it. And yet it is the fashion to call us traitors.” Hardly apologetic

or submissive, he paused to add that “the people of the South are not going

to stand that.”54

Like countless other Confederates, these men espoused two of the most

important ideologies of the Lost Cause: slavery was not the source of the

conflict, and secession had been a constitutional right. Arguing that the

Union had been a compact from which the states were free to withdraw,

white southerners maintained that they were not traitors.55 This would be

crucial in determining how Confederates elected to remember the war:

free from the label of treason, they felt entitled to honor their cause and the

sacrifice of their soldiers as honorable, worthy, just, and purely American.

EMANCIPATION DAYS

On January 1, 1866, Emancipation Day celebrations unfolded through-

out the nation as they had since 1863. Near Fort Monroe, where Jefferson

Davis remained imprisoned, thousands of African Americans gathered

at the schoolhouse for a procession composed of local organizations,

men, women, and children. Banners with inscriptions such as “Abraham

Lincoln, The Liberator and Friend of Our Race,” were festooned in red,

white, and blue along the schoolhouse walls as the crowd listened atten-

tively to the various speakers. In Petersburg, several thousand freedmen

and -women joined in a procession that extended for a nearly a mile before

the crowd gathered for songs and general jubilation. In Richmond, 4,000

African Americans assembled at a local church where the 24th Massachu-

setts supplied the music. The services opened with the singing of a poem:

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88 / Mourning and Celebration

Oh! Praise and tanks, the Lord he come

To get the people free,

And massa tink it day of doom

And we of jubilee.

In stark comparison to the observances for Union soldiers that northern-

ers had observed in Gettysburg and Manassas the previous year, Emanci-

pation Days tended to be cheerful occasions described by many as a day

of jubilee. As one northern reporter observed, “Freedmen joyously spent

the day and . . . the emancipation era was in all the region felicitously and

auspiciously inaugurated.”56

Even with the festive nature of the day, there remained a serious tone

of the work yet to be accomplished. The Richmond orator reminded his

audience that when the war began, the federal government had not in-

tended to free them. Instead, emancipation had served as a strategy to

secure the perpetuity of the Constitution. Nevertheless, they were free and

must now strive to harness that freedom through hard work, education,

and faith. Most important, they must work to secure suffrage. Speaking to

the overflowing crowd at Quinn’s Chapel in Chicago, the Reverend R. De-

Baptist sounded a similar tone. He, too, reminded his congregation that

emancipation had not come easily. For years, abolitionists such as William

Lloyd Garrison had battled not only slavery but also the northern public.

Eventually, the North had changed courses during the war, the battle had

been fought, and slavery was forever abolished. But like others, DeBaptist

reminded his audience that the struggle was not over. The black race was

the only one that had remained true to the country during the war; every

other race had traitors. Rebellion was not dead, it was only vanquished

and ready to rise again. It was for the safety of the Union, he argued, that

the black man be given the franchise.57

New Year’s Day was not the only occasion on which newly freedmen

and -women celebrated emancipation. Just as former Confederates would

select different days to observe Memorial Day, African Americans and

their abolitionist allies elected to hold their celebrations on days mean-

ingful to them. Those in East Texas celebrated Juneteenth to honor the

day they first learned of their freedom on June 19, 1865, more than two

months after Appomattox.58 In Des Moines, Iowa, black residents com-

memorated August 1, combining their antebellum celebrations of the 1834

abolition of slavery in the British West Indies with U.S. emancipation.59

African Americans in Washington, D.C., selected April 19, the anniversary

of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, for their commemo-

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Mourning and Celebration / 89

ration. Banners and flags adorned the Capitol and other public buildings

that bright spring day as cannons roared in merriment. According to one

observer, every black resident of the city had flocked to the streets to watch

the procession led by black soldiers, marching with silken sashes, glit-

tering bayonets, and their battle-torn regimental colors. Behind them,

wrote one witness to the affair, “thousands of contrabands” marched, “re-

deemed by the blood of their brothers—this is the procession of the eman-

cipated race.” “What a sight for Washington!” she exclaimed. “There is

not a city in the South where such a demonstration could be a greater tri-

umph.”60 When the procession paused in front of the White House, Presi-

dent Johnson offered a short address in which he claimed to be one of the

best friends of the black man (less than a month after vetoing the Civil

Rights Act).61 But his attempts to excite the distrust of African Americans

against Congress were not lost on the crowd. Instead, they listened quietly

and then resumed their march to the Capitol. There, the long procession of

black veterans gave three cheers for the House of Representatives followed

by three cheers for the Senate. Such shouts, observed one reporter, “went

up as only emancipated men can give.” “That was the reply of the colored

people to the President,” he continued. “They know their friends, and they

know their enemies.”62

Among more hostile enemies, Emancipation celebrations in the South

jeopardized the safety of African Americans. Such was the case on a simi-

lar occasion, the Evacuation Day ceremony sponsored by Richmond’s

black residents on April 3, 1866, to mark the fall of the Confederate capi-

tal. Much like Emancipation Days, the event was to include a parade of

ex-slaves taking to the streets to celebrate their newfound freedom. When

white residents learned of the planned festivities, they reacted viscerally,

vowing to “prevent any demonstration by the negroes.” One Richmond

newspaper editor proclaimed that April 3 was no time for merriment but

rather “a day of gloom and calamity to be remembered with a shudder of

horror by all who saw it, whether it be the Federal soldier, or the resident,

whether white or black.” Although the city’s black residents published a

notice stating that they did not intend to celebrate the failure of the Con-

federacy but to commemorate their liberation, their efforts did not prevent

violence. Just days before the ceremony, an unknown (but presumably

white) person burned the Second African Baptist Church, a freedman’s

school, and the meeting location for those planning the event.63

Despite the church razing and rumors that effigies of Jefferson Davis

and Robert E. Lee were to be burned (as had been done in Norfolk in

1863), and despite threats by whites that they would rather “wade through

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90 / Mourning and Celebration

blood” before allowing the celebration, the festivities took place with only

one minor incident and no bloodshed. Gathering at the fairgrounds to

the northwest of the city, approximately 1,000 to 1,500 black men, many

dressed in uniform and carrying muskets, marched while several hundred

more rode horses down the city’s streets. As the procession wound down

Broad Street to Capitol Square, a crowd of 15,000 spectators cheered them

along. White Richmonders did little to stop the event but warned that

black people who had abandoned their work “to engage in the jubilee”

would “not be employed again by their old masters.”64

Some white northerners defended the Evacuation Day ceremony as the

right of loyal men and women. White southerners would have to bear “with

the best grace they can” such celebrations, noted the New York Times. “The

future will necessarily be full of painful reminiscences of their gigantic

crime in the rebellion,” observed the paper, but quickly added, “We do not

see that they have any right whatever to take offense at the negroes’ cele-

bration of their day of freedom.”65 The Boston Advertiser concurred, argu-

ing that the celebration was the privilege of those who sought to mark “the

downfall of treason and the establishment of the constitution.”66

Less than a week later, on April 9, black residents from southern Vir-

ginia assembled to celebrate the surrender of Lee’s army. Along the North

Carolina border, freedmen and -women in Mecklenburg County took to

the streets that day, pointing out that “if Lee had never been beaten . . . the

[emancipation] proclamation would have been to no avail.”67 In Hamp-

ton, black veterans played a central role in the day’s festivities, march-

ing through the streets shouldering the guns they had carried in battle.

Seething with anger, someone attacked the procession, and later that

night white mobs scoured the town. “Are we to be forbidden to hold na-

tional celebrations in our own country, lest we offend the enemy?” asked

an indignant Republican newspaper.68 Like Emancipation and Evacua-

tion Days, Surrender Day ceremonies marked a pivotal moment in the

process of claiming freedom and the full meaning of citizenship.69

Though they might differ by date or name, emancipation celebrations

offered a wide variety of speeches, sermons, and testimonies. Almost uni-

versally, however, they featured the reading of the Emancipation Procla-

mation. Every year, those who gathered listened to the pronouncement of

slavery’s end in the Confederate states—and the exclusion of emancipa-

tion in the Border States and Union-occupied portions of the South. De-

spite this constant reminder of the proclamation’s limits, many African

Americans heralded its author as the “Great Emancipator.” In cheers from

the crowd and banners carrying his image, they memorialized Lincoln as

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Mourning and Celebration / 91

the man who “stretched out his long arm and smote the monster on the

head with his Emancipation hammer, such a blow as none but Abe could

strike.” 70 But others were quick to remind the crowds that Lincoln should

not reap such high praise. After all, they reasoned, as late as August 1862,

he had declared that if he “could save the Union without freeing any slave

I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it;

and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would

also do that.” Thus, Confederates’ unwillingness to surrender, not Lincoln,

had forced emancipation. “Davis is our modern Pharaoh, and through the

hardness of his heart, God wrought our freedom,” declared J. Carey of

Iowa in 1866.71

Freedom was not the only thing on the minds of African Americans on

such occasions. The centrality of black soldiers in the processions served

as a reminder that USCT troops had not only been present at Appomat-

tox, but that they had also participated in defeating Robert E. Lee.72 In

their estimation, reunion was still uncertain on Palm Sunday, April 1865,

but they had played a central role in securing northern victory. Highlight-

ing the USCT’s role in quelling the rebellion allowed African Americans

to offer a powerful contradiction of the Lost Cause image of heroic Con-

federate forces overwhelmed by northern resources and manpower. In

the African American memory, the virtue of the northern cause, coupled

with black troops’ devotion, had secured Union victory. Righteous in the

eyes of providence, their cause had prevailed.73 White Unionists might

have demurred from setting aside a holiday that celebrated the end of the

war or the vanquishing of the enemy, but the black citizens of Hampton

would not.74 For many African Americans the war would be much more

than merely the “War of the Rebellion.” Instead, for them it had been the

“Slavery War,” the “Freedom War.” 75

THE CONFEDERATE DEAD

If freedom celebrations and occupation troops were enough to rouse the

ire of former rebels, the presence of the Union Burial Corps tending to the

graves of U.S. soldiers ignited their passions. The well-tended, neatly orga-

nized Union cemeteries stood in stark contrast to the vast number of Con-

federate skeletons and bones that lay exposed and bleaching on the fields

of Shiloh, the trenches of Petersburg, and on other battlefields.76 The real

issue, however, was the underlying message of these new “national ceme-

teries” (as they had been designated by Congress). The care rendered to

only the Union dead led white southerners to believe that the federal gov-

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92 / Mourning and Celebration

ernment intended to subjugate the Confederate South rather than place

the region on an equal footing within the Union. Here was no gesture

of reconciliation, no forgetting and forgiving. Instead, providing national

cemeteries for the northern dead confirmed that these soldiers had given

their lives for a noble cause, while Confederate soldiers had died in vain.77

Perhaps more important, national cemeteries and monuments to the U.S.

soldiers on southern soil served as constant reminders of Union victory.

Silently resting in their sepulchers, the Union dead would prove to be a

permanent occupying force in the South.

In the spring of 1866, Confederate women rushed to the defense of their

dead.78 Transforming their soldiers’ aid societies into Ladies’ Memorial

Associations (LMAs), women from Richmond, Vicksburg, Chattanooga,

Memphis, Augusta, Charleston, and countless other places in between

sought to create their own national cemeteries—Confederate national

cemeteries.79 Like the Union cities of the dead, Confederates treated each

grave with equal importance, designated a separate location for the un-

identifiable remains, and frequently left a central space where a monument

might later be erected. But in a distinct departure from most Union ceme-

teries, they grouped Confederate soldiers from the same state together.80

States’ rights would remain alive and well in Confederate burial grounds.

The LMAs quickly realized, however, that the cost of disinterring and

reinterring thousands—in places such as Richmond tens of thousands—

of remains would be astronomical.81 Women in these communities simply

could not afford to reinter so many bodies or purchase land for cemeteries

without the aid of a unified South. Members of Richmond’s Hollywood

Memorial Association (HMA) sent an appeal addressed to “the Women of

the South,” reminding their “southern sisters” that the South remained

united even if the Confederate war effort had failed. “The end we propose

is the cause of the South . . . the permanent protection and adornment” of

at least 13,000 Confederate dead interred in Hollywood Cemetery. The

South remained “one family,” they observed; “the southern heart [still]

throbs with one impulse.” Calling on all former Confederates, LMAs in

Fredericksburg, Richmond, Franklin, Perryville, and “other places where

great battles were fought” likewise appealed to every state in the South

for funds so that the “names and graves of your noble sons are saved from

oblivion.”82 In response, donations poured into LMAs from all corners of

the former Confederacy.83 For the women of the LMAs and the individuals

who sent them money, the end of the war had failed to sever their cultural

and emotional ties to the former slave states.

But these cemeteries would prove to be much more than places for the

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Mourning and Celebration / 93

dead to slumber. If the U.S. Burial Corps had forever altered the south-

ern landscape by creating national cemeteries for the Union dead, former

Confederates would do likewise, creating their own permanent, endur-

ing memorials to their slain soldiers. Within the walls of these cities of

the dead, white southerners had created a literal space where the Con-

federate cause might live on indefinitely. Many no doubt agreed with the

HMA when it hoped that its “Mausoleum, to the Martyrs of the South”

might become the “ ‘Mecca’ of the South—to which, annually, shall come

from every Southern State, Pilgrim widows and Orphans, Fathers and

Mothers, Brothers and Sisters, relatives and friends, bringing their trib-

ute of flowers, bedewed with Southern tears!” For generations to come,

Hollywood Cemetery would be one “of the Holiest and most sublime fea-

tures in the History of the Southern Cause.84 Ever cognizant of the fact

that rebel dead had been excluded from the U.S. national cemeteries, one

Virginian declared upon visiting the soldiers’ cemetery at the University of

Virginia that “these are not the ‘nation’s dead,’ they are ‘our dead.’ ”85 Un-

like many of their soldiers, Confederate nationalism was far from dead.

As one white southerner observed in 1866, “The South is now united by a

band of graves—a tie that can never be sundered.”86

Establishing Confederate cemeteries motivated women to organize

LMAs, but their most visible and popular activity was the annual celebra-

tion of Memorial Days, which began in 1866.87 Held in the spring as a sign

of renewal and rebirth, communities chose dates that held special reso-

nance for them rather than settling on a universal date (as the North would

do). Petersburg’s LMA elected to observe June 9, the date on which, two

years prior, the “grey haired sires and beardless youths” of the home guard

defended the city until Lee’s troops could arrive.88 The women of the HMA

agreed on May 31, the anniversary of the day Richmonders first heard the

cannons of war. Farther south, groups such as the Ladies of Columbia,

South Carolina, and those of Augusta, Georgia, selected April 26 to mark

Johnston’s surrender to Sherman.89 Notably, none of the groups—includ-

ing the Appomattox LMA—chose to observe April 9, suggesting that the

day most associated with the death of the Confederacy was far more pain-

ful than the death of the men who gave their lives for the cause.90

Regardless of date, Memorial Days tended to follow similar patterns.

The women of the LMAs gathered on the days preceding the event to make

evergreen and floral arrangements and requested that young men or boys

do any physical work such as remounding of the graves. On Memorial Day,

hundreds and even thousands of citizens gathered at some central loca-

tion in town, usually a church or town hall, and then marched in proces-

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94 / Mourning and Celebration

sion to the cemetery where the women and children decorated the graves

with flowers and evergreens. Subsequently, former Confederate military or

civic leaders chosen by the LMAs delivered prayers, poems, and speeches.

If the occasions had merely involved mourning loved ones, the victo-

rious North might not have noticed. After all, mourning was a sacred as-

pect of Victorian culture. But it quickly became apparent that Memorial

Days were more than mere sentimental occasions.91 The fact that LMAs

in several Virginia communities elected to hold their services on May 10,

the anniversary of Stonewall Jackson’s death, underscored the degree to

which the day was intended to enshrine the Lost Cause as immortal. From

Richmond to Lexington, residences exhibited photographs and likenesses

of the general draped in mourning, while businesses posted signs such as

“Closed in honor of Stonewall Jackson and other Confederate dead.” At the

cemeteries, speakers boasted of Jackson’s piety, heroics, undying devotion

to the cause, and the terror he struck in the hearts of the enemy. Central

to their adulation of Jackson was the fact that he had never surrendered.92

Like Jackson, Confederate soldiers who had died in service remained un-

defeated. They had known the Confederacy as an independent nation;

they had never surrendered. They had died free from the clutches of the

U.S. government, free from the alleged horrors of Reconstruction. Such

sentiment was doubtless on the mind of the ever-recalcitrant and dra-

matic Sallie Strickler after she returned from services in Charlottesville,

Virginia, in May 1866. “I almost wish I was dead, & in the grave with them

when I think of our state of degradation,” she lamented.93

At the May 10 services as well as at others, speakers elaborated on the

ever-increasing Lost Cause sentiment. They invoked the superior-numbers

explanation for defeat, honoring the dead warriors who had given their

lives to protect southern homes and hearths. Most likewise praised the

sacrifices of civilians, especially women, reminding the crowd that the de-

pravity and suffering inflicted by cruel Yankees had created an enduring

bond among former Confederates. More than a few of the 1866 services

evoked a militaristic tone. At Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery in early

May, former general Raleigh E. Colston praised the loyalty of the enlisted

men to the Lost Cause, after which 200 Confederate survivors saluted

him with a rebel yell. Replicating the freed slaves Evacuation Day proces-

sion a month earlier, on May 31 twenty-three military companies (wearing

their uniforms without military insignia or buttons as the law required)

marched to Grace Church before heading to Hollywood Cemetery.94 Most

important, speakers universally insisted that white southerners had been

just in their cause. Not one offered apology or remorse. Rather, as a Vir-

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Mourning and Celebration / 95

ginia newspaper reported, “Proudly, defiantly, we proclaim our love for the

dead soldiers of the Confederate armies.” White southerners would obey

the laws of the victors, but the federal government would “never control

the affections, sentiments, and sympathies of the Southern people.”95

In continuing to invoke the “Spirit of ’76,” white southerners were well

aware that they trod on dangerous ground so soon after defeat and while

Union forces still occupied their communities. Indeed, the services did

excite the ire of many northerners. On Monday, May 28, only a month

after the first Confederate Memorial Days (and before the more elabo-

rate ceremony at Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery), Representative

Thomas Williams of Pennsylvania offered a resolution in Congress calling

for President Johnson to make good on his promise “that treason should

be made odious.” Williams had heard numerous reports that “the memo-

ries of the traitor dead have been hallowed and consecrated by local pub-

lic entertainments and treasonable utterances in honor of their crime.”

Most egregious, however, were rumors that these services had “not only

been tolerated by the national authorities, but in some instances approved

by closing the public offices on the occasion of floral processions to their

graves, while the privilege of paying like honors to the martyred dead of

the armies of the Union who perished in the holy work of punishing the

treason of those who are thus honored . . . has been denied to the loyal

people of those communities by the local authorities.” Such displays, he

insisted, were “calculated to make loyalty odious and treason honorable,

and to obstruct, if not entirely prevent, the growth of such a feeling as is

essential to any cordial or permanent reunion of these States.”96

Others joined Williams in warning of the dastardly consequences Con-

federate Memorial Days were generating. The New York Times cautioned

northerners that the “Southern spirit” was continuing to grow “with

wonderful rapidity.” “Its most fruitful feeders,” it noted, “are the Memo-

rial Associations.” The paper reminded its readers that these seemingly

“noble” Memorial Days provided forums for ex-Confederate men to make

speeches, “wherein [they] adroitly inculcat[e] hatred of the North.” “These

memorial days have now become painfully frequent, and on every one

of them recruits are gathered to the Democratic banner,” it fumed. The

Chicago Tribune agreed, denouncing the Ladies for strewing flowers on

the graves of the Confederate dead, charging that these women sought

“to keep alive the political feeling of hostility to the Union.”97 Northern-

ers understood that reunion with their former enemies had been their

primary war aim and thus had been relatively lenient in doling out pun-

ishments. But they hardly expected former Confederates to honor their

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96 / Mourning and Celebration

traitorous cause in such public displays. Reconciliation might be a goal

of reunion, but it was not intended to be reciprocal. The victorious North

anticipated dictating the terms of reconciliation to the defeated South.98

Former Confederates thought otherwise. For them, reconciliation de-

manded mutual forgiveness, more lenient treatment by the North, and

an adherence to the Constitution. Some suggested that the best way to

achieve reconciliation was not through legislation but by talking of other

things, engaging in intersectional commerce, and even inviting northern-

ers to live among them.99 Others offered only vaguely veiled threats in

pursuit of a southern version of sectional accord. In the fall of 1866, John

Baldwin of Staunton, Virginia, observed that the continued imprisonment

of Jefferson Davis preempted “all real reconciliation between the North

and South.” If Davis were to die in captivity, he warned, “his name will be-

come the watchword of Southern hate!”100 Taking up his pen as a politi-

cal philosopher, Robert E. Lee argued that if the war had confirmed the

inviolability of the Union, then “it naturally follows . . . that the existence

and rights of a state by the constitution are as indestructible as the union

itself.” In his estimation, reunion meant that all political rights should be

restored to the South.101 The following spring, the Virginia General As-

sembly cautioned that with the Union restored, attempts by Congress to

enfranchise former slaves or fasten “the yoke of negro supremacy upon the

necks of hereditary freemen” would forever forestall harmonious relations

between the sections. As “free American citizens in a free American state,”

these former Confederates expected to be treated as equal members of the

Union under the Constitution.102 Having acquiesced to reunion, they ex-

pected reconciliation to be a two-way street.

Even as they defined reconciliation on their own terms, white south-

erners consciously framed their Memorial Day services’ blatant displays of

Confederate patriotism within the domestic sphere of women in an effort

to avoid cries of treason from northerners. As both newspapers and ora-

tors throughout the South universally noted, Memorial Day was “under

the direction of the Ladies”—they selected the date, chose the orators, in-

vited groups to participate in the procession, and even picked the musical

selections.103 “The mothers and daughters of Virginia are the chief mourn-

ers and actors in these touching obsequies,” Maj. Uriel Wright reminded

those attending Winchester’s first service on June 6. Because the day’s ac-

tivities had been born in the heart of women, he argued, it could only be

interpreted as true and pure. According to his reasoning, these women

certainly could not be viewed as traitorous—they were simply exhibiting

the qualities nineteenth-century Victorian ideology attributed to women:

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Mourning and Celebration / 97

sentiment, emotion, and devotion to one’s menfolk. In fact, Wright de-

clared that southern white women “were not political casuists.” They had

not paused “to enquire whether the teachings of Jefferson, Madison, or

Mason furnished the true interpretation of the Constitution, and cor-

rectly marked the boundaries of State and Federal powers.” If women were

not political, then by extension their actions could not be construed as

such. Memorial activities, clearly within the province of female mourning

(and hence the domestic sphere), therefore should pose no threat to sec-

tional reunion. But in so vigorously denying the political nature of women,

Wright and other male speakers only served to underscore the very politi-

cal nature of the LMAs and their memorial work.104

It is easy to overlook what a bold and daring move this was on the part

of former Confederates. Only a year earlier, rebel women had been re-

quired to sign loyalty oaths to acquire government rations or marriage

licenses. As the North reeled in anger following Lincoln’s assassination,

women had not been exempt from suspicion or punishment. Many had

been arrested for treasonous speech and, most famously, Mary Surratt

had been hanged. Of course the backlash against Johnson and his ad-

ministration for her death had been overwhelming.105 Former Confed-

erates were well aware of this and no doubt recognized that highlighting

women’s apolitical nature would serve them well. It was therefore under

the direction of the LMAs that Memorial Days provided legitimate venues

for ex-Confederate veterans to march into towns, for thousands of white

southerners to gather in a central location, and for former generals and

political figures to praise the Confederate cause in a public forum. Pro-

tected by their gender, white women were able to escape charges of trea-

son during Reconstruction for which men, as “political-beings,” would

have been found guilty. By allowing white women to take center stage

at memorial activities, men could both express their bitterness toward

Yankees and assure the federal government of their loyalty.106

Although white southerners’ couched their memorial services in the

“gentle and tender hands” of women, such displays only heightened the

sense among some Unionists that something needed to change. Former

Confederate soldiers parading through the streets, orations filled with

bombastic claims about the South’s cause, southern whites’ treatment of

freedmen, and President Johnson’s moderate policies toward the South

all prompted the Republican-dominated Congress to begin passing the

Reconstruction Acts in March 1867. Together these acts denied all former

Confederates political power, instituted martial law, directed southern

states to provide freedmen with political rights, including access to the

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98 / Mourning and Celebration

ballot box, and laid out the means by which civil governments might be

restored.107

In the months following the Reconstruction Acts, Union authorities

began restricting expressions of Confederate sentiment throughout the

South. In Raleigh, North Carolina, occupying troops ensured that the

local LMAs abstained from organizing a procession on Memorial Day.

Members of the association later recalled that “indeed the threat was

made that if the Ladies’ Memorial Association, chiefly women and chil-

dren in mourning, did form a procession, it would be fired on without fur-

ther warning.” The LMAs throughout the state were thus prohibited for five

years from marching in processions to cemeteries, although small groups

of women quietly made their way to the burial grounds to lay wreaths and

flowers under the watchful eye of Federal soldiers. The Union commander

in Memphis likewise refused to allow any processions, speeches, or pub-

lic demonstrations for that city’s 1867 Memorial Day.108 While there ap-

pears to have been no official crackdown on memorial services in Virginia,

nearly all of the state’s LMAs elected to dispense with official processions

and orations.109 Yet in Richmond, businesses still closed as if for the Sab-

bath and nearly 60,000 people, mostly women and children, turned out

to place flowers on the graves at Hollywood Cemetery. The significance of

this overwhelming feminine presence was not lost on James Henry Gard-

ner of Richmond. Witnessing the day’s activities, he noted that even with-

out the parades and speeches, if the affair “had not been under the control

of the Ladies,” then a “thousand bayonets would have bristled to prevent

the celebration.”110

UNION MEMORIAL DAY

Confederates were not the only ones who felt compelled to honor their

war dead with Memorial Day observances. The origins of the national

(Union) Memorial Day are highly disputed. Some accounts suggest that

commemoration began at Gettysburg in May 1864 when a soldier’s widow

and another soldier’s mother happened upon each other placing flowers

on the graves. Some point to services at Charleston’s Race Course ceme-

tery led primarily by black South Carolinians and their abolitionist allies

on May 1, 1865, as the first commemoration. Others suggest the practice

began among veterans in Waterloo, New York, in May 1866. Still others

contend that the wife of a Union general, John A. Logan, witnessed such

activities in Petersburg and suggested that northern soldiers implement

the practice for their own fallen. Whatever the origin, in the spring of 1868

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Mourning and Celebration / 99

General Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic

(GAR), the northern veterans’ association, called for the first nationally ob-

served Memorial Day. Released as General Order No. 11, Logan called on

GAR posts throughout the country to organize ceremonies on May 30 at

which they might strew with flowers or otherwise decorate “the graves of

comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”111

Claiming Memorial Day as a southern institution, many former Con-

federates were incensed. The outspoken Southern Opinion seethed that

the “memorial tributes paid the Federal dead is [sic] a miserable mock-

ery and burlesque upon a holy and sacred institution, peculiar to South-

ern people, and appropriately due only to the Confederate dead.”112 And

at least some northerners agreed. The Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch re-

buked the GAR for modeling its celebration after the treasonous “rebel

practice” and shuddered to think that tributes to the Union’s noble dead

should mimic those honoring rebels. The New York Times concurred, re-

minding its readers that the “ladies of the South instituted” Memorial Day

to “keep alive the rancors of hate” and “to annoy the Yankees.” “Now the

Grand Army of the Republic, in retaliation, and from no worthier motive,

have determined to annoy them by adopting their plan of commemora-

tion. The motives of both are unworthy,” the writer exclaimed. Such ser-

vices seemed to engender sectional animosity rather than reconciliation.113

Despite the protests, on Sunday, May 30, 1868, U.S. veterans across

the nation followed Logan’s orders and initiated memorial services in 183

national cemeteries in twenty-seven states, including southern states such

as Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.114 The occasion was remark-

ably similar to those organized by Confederates: crowds gathered at the

cemetery (either on their own or via a procession), decorated graves with

flowers and evergreens, and listened to orators discuss the merits of sol-

diers’ patriotism and virtue. There were, however, three key differences be-

tween the celebrations of Confederate and Federal Memorial Days. First,

Union Memorial Day took place on a single day (rather than the myriad

of dates chosen by former Confederates). Second, it was supported by the

federal government.115 Third, whereas the Confederate practice had begun

and remained under the auspices of women, Union services were the prov-

ince of men, most often military men. While Unionist women attended

Memorial Days, took part in the processions, and placed flowers on the

graves, they played no role in organizing the events. Nor did Union orators

generally pay tribute to women’s wartime sacrifices and devotion to the

cause, as was common rhetoric at Confederate exercises. As the victors,

Union soldiers were primarily responsible for honoring their war dead.

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100 / Mourning and Celebration

Unlike ex-Confederate soldiers, Federals saw no reason to turn over their

tributes to the feminine sphere.116

Like their Confederate counterparts, Union Memorial Days were re-

plete with political and patriotic meaning. In Cincinnati in 1868, 3,000

citizens gathered at the newly erected Soldiers’ Monument for the city’s

first Memorial Day. Earlier that morning, a procession that included the

police force, carriages bearing the city council, a detachment of 100 U.S.

regular soldiers, 200 members of the German Veteran Society, and nearly

400 GAR men wound its way through the streets to the cemetery. There,

Gen. Henry L. Burnett of Ohio gave the oration. “We are met to-day . . .

to strew flowers upon and fittingly decorate the graves of those who died

in defence of their country,” he began. He described the war as a “con-

flict between the idea that man should be free, against the idea that man

should be enslaved.” “In response to this and subsequent calls by their

chief,” he observed, “they came, millions of men, to fight for the rights of

man, and that the nation might live and be free.” 117 In neighboring Port-

land, Indiana, Gen. John C. P. Shanks offered similar remarks. The men

in blue had “voluntarily entered that greatest of human struggles . . . to

save our common country and institutions of freedom from destruction.”

All realized that “the perpetuation of slavery in America” had been “the

rallying-ground, for forces to carry out the nefarious work” of attempt-

ing “to utterly overthrow the Government of our fathers.” 118 As with the

monument dedications in Gettysburg and Manassas in 1865, many of the

first services tended to emphasize both the preservation of the Union and

its happy byproduct, emancipation.119

In the border regions where many Unionists had been slaveholders,

emancipation was not nearly so universally celebrated. In Frankfort, Ken-

tucky, Col. Jonathan Mason Brown informed the crowd of 1,000 that the

slain soldiers resting in their midst “were willing to die that the Nation

might live,” but he made no mention of slavery as the cause of war or

emancipation as an accomplishment.120 Yet in Louisville, Col. Charles A.

Gill unabashedly rejoiced that slavery was no more. The dead had not died

in vain, he assured the attendees: “The war for the Union was not a fail-

ure,” he proclaimed. Rather, it was “a victory, glorious, grand and brilliant

for the Union, liberty, and equality. The Union was restored, the shackles

were broken from the hands, the manacles removed from the feet, and

the brand of the slave obliterated from the brows of four million bonds-

men.”121 In Lexington, Professor Robert Graham neglected to mention

anything about slavery to the thousands of white Kentuckians gathered

for the service. But after these ceremonies concluded, African Americans

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Mourning and Celebration / 101

assembled to decorate the graves of their soldiers. Black men composing

Post No. 5 of the GAR headed the procession, followed by a group of dis-

charged USCT soldiers, African American women, and carriages contain-

ing the speakers. At the cemetery, the Reverend W. L. Muir reminded the

crowd that “these men fought for your freedom, and not only you, but your

children after you, and you should come here to do them honor.” “We are

now a free people,” he rejoiced. Gen. James S. Brisbin seconded Muir’s

remarks, observing that “you owe these dead men much; and on each re-

curring anniversary . . . come here and strew flowers on the graves of your

heroes.” 122

The prominence of so many African Americans at Union Memorial

Days, especially in the South, allowed former Confederates to both dis-

miss and rebuke the services. Of the 3,000 people who attended the 1868

services at the national cemetery along Williamsburg Road in Richmond,

the Daily Dispatch estimated that only 400 were white. Moreover, the

presence of so many former slaves seemed to confirm former Confeder-

ates’ suspicions that the day lacked the respectability of their services. The

newspaper appeared to take a special glee in observing that “the solemnity

of the exercises” at the national cemetery “was much marred by the cries of

cake, lemonade, and peanut-vendors, who made the most noisy efforts to

dispose of their wares.” And if pointing out the alliance of white and black

attendees at the Federal celebration was not enough to condemn the occa-

sion, the southern press reminded former Confederates that the Union

cemeteries stood in stark contrast to their own. Funded by Congress with

neat wooden headboards painted white in precise rows, “this cemetery is

a beautiful spot,” observed the correspondent.123

Although many former Confederates made no effort to conceal their en-

mity, at least some Unionist orators made a special effort to invoke themes

of reconciliation that would became more pronounced by the 1890s.124 A

speaker in Lexington, Kentucky, encouraged the crowd to “go forth from

this place in the spirit of kindness, free from hatred and all uncharitable-

ness, but with the love of country and humanity invigorated.”125 But just as

would be the case at the close of the century, Union veterans set forth the

clear conditions for this reconciliation. As a Colonel Curtis of Erie, Penn-

sylvania, remarked in 1868, “When the angry passions which have been

engendered in the recent conflict shall have passed away; when the States

lately in revolt shall be made to understand their own true interest . . . the

people of these very States will then rejoice with us in our nationality, our

common country, and the prospect of glorious destiny.”126 But that time

had not yet come.

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102 / Mourning and Celebration

An incident at Arlington National Cemetery’s 1869 Memorial Day ser-

vices made it abundantly clear that reunion and reconciliation remained

two very different things. Even as the orator pleaded for a brotherly re-

union between “this great united people,” a patrol of Union veterans stood

guard over the thirty Confederate graves within the enclosure to prevent

visitors from honoring the rebel remains. When a woman threw a small

bouquet on one of the graves, the commanding lieutenant rushed to the

spot, grabbed the flowers, and trampled them beneath his feet. As on-

lookers gathered around, the infuriated commander threatened them

with a bayonet, shouting “D—n you, get away from here, every one of you,

or I’ll make you.” Public response to the episode in the North was mixed.

Some thought that the guard had acted too harshly, thereby creating an

unnecessary controversy. But others were more sympathetic. Members of

the GAR Post No. 1 supported the guard’s actions, passing a resolution ob-

serving that while they bore no malice toward the Confederate dead, they

would not tolerate the decoration of their graves “and thereby taint the

character of those who sacrificed their lives that their country might live.”

Writing to Supreme Court chief justice Salmon P. Chase, who had publicly

proposed a conciliatory policy toward the South, one Unionist noted that

while veterans might be ready to forgive former Confederates, “we will

never consent by public national tribute to obliterate the wide gulf which

lies between the objects, motives and principles for which we fought, and

our comrades died.”127 Reunion seemed certain, but reconciliation would

have to wait.

The dying may have ended in 1865, but death and mourning would

continue to shape the contours of Civil War memory, setting the parame-

ters of reunion and, to some degree, of reconciliation. Efforts to provide

sepulchers for the battlefield dead of both sides through national ceme-

teries—both Union and Confederate—tended to exacerbate sectional ten-

sions rather than heal the nation’s wounds.128 Such efforts did not dimin-

ish as the years passed; rather, they tended to gain in popularity. By 1869,

336 cities and towns in thirty-one states had organized Union Memorial

Day services. Four years later, New York’s legislature designated May 30 a

legal holiday, and by 1890 every northern state had followed suit.129 And

just as former Confederates used Memorial Day to defend their cause, so

Unionists continued to espouse the successes of theirs: the preservation

of the Union and the end of slavery and its poisoning effect on America’s

future.

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