Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration

“The Right to Love and to Mourn”: The Origins of Virginia’s Ladies’ Memorial Associations, 1865–1867

“The Right to Love and to Mourn” The Origins of Virginia’s Ladies’ Memorial Associations, 1865–1867 Caroline E. Janney Less than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the first Ladies’ Memorial Association in Virginia organized to eulogize and praise the fallen South. The spring of 1865 had brought peace to the state, but the scars of war remained quite visible in the quaint town of Winchester. Graves of Southern soldiers had been scattered across the lower Shenandoah Valley, and with each passing month residents uncovered more bodies as farming activities resumed. One Winchester woman, Mary Dunbar Williams, was greatly disturbed by the lack of proper burials for the Confederate soldiers who had so ardently defended the town. In May of 1865, Williams visited her sister-in-law, Eleanor Williams Boyd, and told her of a farmer who had been preparing his land for corn when he plowed up two Confederate soldiers. The two women decided that they should call a meeting of all the women who had worked together during the war, with the objective of forming a memorial organization to gather all the dead within a radius of twelve to fifteen miles and place them within one graveyard. Additionally, they agreed it was imperative that the entire town assemble each year to place flowers and evergreens on the graves. Throughout the South in 1865 and 1866, Southern women followed in the path of those in Winchester and began honoring the Confederate dead by forming their own Ladies’ Memorial Associations. 166 K caroline e. janney In the antebellum period death and mourning had been the province of women and ministers. Funerals were usually private affairs situated firmly within the domestic sphere. But the astronomical number of casualties brought on by the war necessitated that strangers perform many of the sentimental and personal rituals associated with death. While the Federal government hired troops and the Sanitary Commission to provide proper burials for Northern soldiers, the Confederacy lacked such resources to care for its dead. Elite and middle-class Southern women never relinquished their role as caregivers to the dead, but embraced the cause of caring for their fallen soldiers as an extension of their antebellum and wartime duties. In the months and years following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, women in several communities across Virginia, including Richmond, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Petersburg, and Winchester, organized Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs) to provide proper burials honoring the South and its dead. LMAs, however, did much more than provide suitable resting places for their fallen menfolk; Southern men and women realized that these “ladies” might deploy gender in the interest of Confederate politics, laying the foundation for the Lost Cause. Recent years have seen the publication of numerous books and articles on Confederate memory and the Lost Cause. The authors of these books have explored the cultural, political, and social dimensions of the Lost Cause, the racial promptings and implications of the movement, and the significance of Confederate identity in contemporary America. But in all these debates, historians have largely overlooked the role of women and gender in Confederate memorialization. At most, historians have tended to see women as peripheral to the movement until the 1890s and early 1900s, when the United Daughters of the Confederacy became active. In fact, Gaines M. Foster claims that most white Southerners were hesitant to celebrate the Confederate past in the years between 1865 and the mid-1880s because he fails to recognize the significance of women’s role. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, too, suggests that the 1860s and 1870s were marked by “little organized interest in the past”—even among women—ignoring the importance of LMAs. By examining the roles of Virginia’s LMAs, however, we discover that not only were white women the first to organize community efforts to honor the Confederacy in a region still occupied by Northern soldiers, but also that “memorial” work itself was intensely political and should not be cast aside as insignificant. Many of the same women who had sewn battle flags, volunteered in hospitals, and snubbed Yankee soldiers during the war turned to the LMAs so that they might continue to display their Confederate patrio- “the right to love and to mourn” K 167 tism through memorial activities. Such work allowed them to create an extensive network of like-minded women throughout the South much earlier and with much greater coordination than...