A Rabbit's Review 4/5/2012

By LisaMary Wichowski

Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause

Caroline E. Janney

University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

$35.00 (cloth),

ISBN 978-0-8078-3176-2

     A visit to any bookstore will only hint at the number of books written on the Civil War and Reconstruction, enough, in fact, to make one wonder if there is a subtopic left untouched.  Caroline Janney’s  Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause  presents to us locally-based women’s groups known as Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAS), that were essential to the origin  of the southern culture’s Lost Cause philosophy and the birth of some of the South’s most remarkable cemeteries. LMAS directed the efforts to create national Confederate cemeteries, built memorials to war dead across the South and were instrumental in the founding of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. 

     The LMAS began in wartime women’s aid networks that had organized middle and upper class women allowing them to actively participate in the support of the new nation of the Confederacy.  Janney believes that Southern white women were fiercer backers of the Confederacy and more actively political than recent historians have recognized.  At the end of the war when women set out to venerate the Confederate dead they were not only trying to protect their men’s honor and reaffirm their masculinity, they were engaging in a time honored tradition of civic involvement in which women knew themselves to be patriots whose duty was support the state as much as it was it was to protect memory.

     As many as one hundred of these Ladies Memorial Associations sprang up all over the south, from Virginia to Mississippi.  Although there was no umbrella organization, the groups supported each other and occasionally maintained (mostly) friendly rivalries.  Janney chooses to concentrate on several cities in Virginia as a way to bring focus to the how the LMAS functioned as part of the community and how individuals could shape each groups’ narrative.  For our purposes, however, it is the actual memorializing activities these ladies undertook which is most important.

     As the war came to a close and the occupiers remained to “keep the peace,” women were horrified by the Union program of disinterment and creation of national memorials solely for the soldiers of the North. As paid Federal workers circulated through the South, looking for Union soldiers’ bodies to dig up and rebury in Federal cemeteries, they stirred suspicion and resentment among white Southerners.  Would remains be treated respectfully? Would all the dead soldiers’ remains receive equal consideration, Confederate and Union alike? Were they thorough in disinterring not only all the dead, but each as completely as possible? The Federal government had taken responsibility for the postwar reburial of Union soldiers, as there was no central government in the South, nor any State government as yet willing or able to assume it.  The LMAS took on the task of disinterring and reburying the Confederate dead in their own newly founded cemeteries, such as Richmond’s Hollywood.

    The organizations proved to be successful fundraisers.  The Ladies took advantage of family connections and husbands’ political power in seeking funding from individuals, churches, and legislatures. The earnings from soirees and appeals purchased land for internments, but just as important, paid for labor which the ladies of the LMAS  found themselves supervising. This was dirty, physical work and as there was a labor surplus in the South the groups found plenty of men to locate and rebury the massive number of remains.  Along with learning the role of employer (of white men) for the first time, these women found themselves renegotiating their relationship with the state itself.  Janney refers to the LMAS as “shadow governments;” they were the formal authority, record keepers, construction coordinators and officialdom of these public works projects.

     Indeed, the Memorial Associations even organized publically recognized holidays.  Former Confederate soldiers who wanted to commemorate their cause during Reconstruction were viewed by the occupying forces with much apprehension, even though in the North, Union veterans organized and directed similar projects in their home communities. Women, on the other hand, could continue to express their allegiance to the Confederacy in the guise of mourning because they were considered apolitical and not fomenters of rebellion.  The LMAS thus became the guardians of Confederate memory during Reconstruction, creating legitimate venues for men to gather and publicly praise their lost cause without being regarded as a threat to Reconstruction.  The LMAS set these “memorial days” and coordinated the grave decorating and speeches of war heroes. The people responded to these requests for honoring the dead by closing businesses and turning out in large numbers.

     Burying the Dead book helps us to further understand how mourning works in a group setting, engaging and building upon Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering.   For visitors the history of the cemeteries can be as important as those buried in them.  Burial places are reflective of their surrounding culture and the changes it has undergone. For southern post-bellum culture, the LMAS helped consolidate a sense of identity through memorializing the Lost Cause.  Beyond this they served as a catalyst for rebuilding the economy through the substantial public works they initiated.  Last, but not least, they represent the beginning of a transformation of women’s roles and women’s organizations that would prove to have far reaching implications.  Janney has produced a great resource for cemetery researchers who are trying to understand how memorialization and cemeteries function, giving us insights that go well beyond what her topic seems to promise at first glance.