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4 WHAT SHALL BE THE MORAL TO YOUR KENTUCKIANS?: Civil War Memorial Activity in the Commonwealth, 1865–1895
- The University of North Carolina Press
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What Shall Be the Moral to Young Kentuckians? 4 civil war memorial activity in the commonwealth, 1865–1895 For the divided populace of Kentucky, the Fourth of July 1865 was a day that reflected the fractures of the previous four years. Confederate sympathizer Lizzie Hardin noted that in Harrodsburg “the ‘glorious fourth’ passed . . . in a very inglorious manner, the citizens refusing to make any demonstration whatever. . . . I suppose the men thought there was no use in making a fuss over the day on which our forefathers gained their liberty .” She remarked contemptuously, however, that it was a different story only twelve miles away, at Camp Nelson, a Federal army base, where “the Negroes had a grand jubilee.” As the first Independence Day that had ever applied to them, July 4, 1865, was a day of particular rejoicing for black Kentuckians. Thousands attended a similar celebration at Camp Dick Robinson, near Lancaster. Though he was only eleven at the time, decades later Samuel Sutton remembered the “big time” African Americans had speaking and celebrating that day. Never again, he claimed, would he see so much rejoicing on Independence Day.1 In other areas of the state, among other citizens, the Fourth seemed to go unnoticed. One loyal Kentuckian wondered, “Where are our liberty poles, where are our fireworks, the ringing bells, and the loud resounding report of cannon?” Things were, instead, “as hushed and quiet as the midnight hour.” In Clark County, Confederates planned their own alternative celebration for July 5, in honor of the day on which, two years before, John Hunt Morgan and his men had ridden into Lebanon, raiding Unionistowned businesses and destroying $100,000 worth of property. Alarmed 82 · civil war memorial activity at the prospect of such a symbolic affront to a national holiday, Federal troops garrisoned the town to quell any Confederate activity.2 The various ways Kentuckians observed or ignored the Fourth of July 1865 and the significance they accorded it were early indications of divisions within public postwar memory in the state. Whether white or black, Confederate or Unionist, Kentuckians grappled with what to remember and what to forget and with what kind of meaning they should assign to the tumultuous half-decade that lay behind them. In their comportment, memorial activities were quite unlike the electoral politics and violence that painted Kentucky as a Confederate state. Carefully choreographed and decorously executed, memorial activities were full of symbolic meaning and rarely invoked the public controversy that Kentuckians’ electoral politics or extralegal violence did. Yet the cultural expressions Kentuckians used to either appropriate or reject various memories of the war were loaded with political meaning and became as much a potent means to shape the present as they were a vehicle to remember the past. In this way, July 4, 1865, was an early occasion of remembrance that was indicative of the varied courses historical memory would take in the next thirty years. Holidays marking Confederate achievements or losses became more compelling reasons to celebrate for ex-Confederates than national holidays. As new heirs to American citizenship, African Americans would successfully lay claim to national memorial days and create new holidays out of Emancipation Day and the anniversaries of constitutional amendments. Meanwhile, left out of the Confederate Lost Cause and repelled by African American claims on Union heritage, Kentucky’s white Unionists found themselves with little to celebrate. They, too, would mourn their dead and remember their sacrifice, but in very muted ways. at war’s end, Kentuckians of all wartime sympathies mourned the nearly30,000of theircitizenswhohadgiventheirlivesinthegreatstruggle. They took part in the national effort to collectively grieve and honor their fallen men, adorning their graves with flowers and flags on specified Decoration Days. Southern partisans assembled in late April at cemeteries across the state to lay flowers and wreaths on the graves of Confederate soldiers, while Union sympathizers did the same on congressionally designated Memorial Day in May. The rituals of burial and reburial were also important ways Kentuckians remembered their dead, and they worked tirelessly in the years following the war to reinter the dead in Kentucky. While the federal government assumed responsibility for the reburial of Union soldiers, Confederates had to fund and arrange the reinterment of [3.234.177.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:15 GMT) civil war memorial activity · 83 their dead independently. By the early 1870s, Kentucky had a chapter of the Confederate Burial Memorial Association, the Nashville-based organization , headed by E. Kirby Smith, dedicated to...