The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

9. Causes Lost

9 22 CAUSES LOST The First Vote (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly for 16 November 1867, three and a half weeks after the 22 October election for members of a constitutional convention in Virginia. Under orders from Congress and the United States Army, black Virginians voted for the first time that day. The scene set the stage for twenty-five years of contentious politics. Images such as this inspired black Virginians and some white Virginians who sought ways to cooperate in the new political economy of free labor, but they frightened men who resisted changes that the federal government imposed on them. Black men voting became the symbolic as well as the visible reality that drove politics in Virginia for the remainder of the nineteenth century. After the Confederate armies surrendered in the spring of 1865, a farmer near Winchester plowed up the bones or rotting remains of two Confederate soldiers. Another farmer working nearby did the same thing. What did those farmers then do? They went into town to speak to Mary Dunbar Williams, who four years earlier had organized the ladies of Winchester to provide nursing care for the Confederate men who had been wounded during the first of the many engagements in or near that town. Williams and her sister-in-law and companion in that good work, Eleanor Frances Williams Boyd, organized the ladies of Winchester again. By October of the following year, even though Boyd’s husband died during the meantime, they arranged for the bodies of nearly twenty-five hundred Confederate soldiers to be recovered from shallow graves and local battlefields and reinterred with dignity and respect in a new cemetery in Winchester . It was called the Stonewall Cemetery, named not for Stonewall Jackson but for a real stone wall. At the dedication ceremony on 25 October 1866, former Virginia governor and Confederate brigadier Henry A. Wise spoke for two hours about the past and the future and in praise of the men who died in the war that they had lost but for a cause that he denied was, in fact, lost. “If our cause is lost,” he declaimed significantly, “it was false; if true its not lost.”1 Those women and many thousands like them elsewhere in Virginia and in the states that had been part of the Confederacy formed memorial associations to provide honorable burials for fallen soldiers. They also created Confederate Memorial Day, an annual spring occasion for families and survivors to decorate the graves of their war dead and remember their loss and the loss of the cause for which they died. Those women, who were all decorously identified in public by the names of their husbands—such as Mrs. Philip Williams and Mrs. Rev. Andrew H. H. Boyd—created the culture of the Lost Cause that provided the foundation for the civic and political cultures for a large majority of Virginia’s and the South’s white people for decades. Those were some of the women of the Confederacy to whom Jefferson Davis in 1881 dedicated his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. He dedicated it to the women who had cared for wounded soldiers and looked after families and farms when men were off fighting, and he also dedicated it to the women “whose annual tribute expresses their enduring grief, love, and reverence for our sacred dead,” women “whose patriotism will teach their children to emulate the deeds of our revolutionary sires.”2 Davis included in his dedicatory sweep more than those thousands of Southern white women who 232 the grandees of government voluntarily cooked, sewed, and nursed for the Confederate army during the four years of war; who ran the farms, plantations, and small businesses when the men went off to fight and after some of them did not come back; who labored for wages and sometimes died in munitions factories; and who raised money for uniforms and to support widows and orphans; more than the few notable women who engaged in espionage or disguised themselves as men and fought on the battlefields; more than those socially prominent Virginia women who raised money to construct a gunboat, the Lady Davis, for the Confederate navy. In the concluding phrases of his dedication, Davis slipped into the present tense and looked to the future. He included the women who were memorializing the dead and who were...