Numbered, Numbered: Commemorating the Civil War Dead in Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper”

At the height of Radical Reconstruction and US Constitutional amendment, when the fates of ex-states and ex-slaves were most insistently joined, Constance Fenimore Woolson set a story of remembrance, a story that turns a sacrificial past into a revolutionary future. First published by the Atlantic Monthly in March 1877, “Rodman the Keeper” has recently been selected by the Norton Anthology of American Literature to demonstrate for growing numbers of students how the opportunities of a tempestuous period were once imaginatively conceived. Because this story will therefore embody Reconstruction’s artistry for years to come, it is important to appreciate its historical nuance as well as its author’s surreptitious choices. Woolson set aside the open violence in Southern states, their occupation by federal troops, and the spread of the Ku Klux Klan as she focused on early 1870, the year when suffrage for African American men was constitutionally ratified. Her story thereby became a selective and widely celebrated gauge of Southern political currents after the war, as white Southerners contemplated bankruptcy and new African American citizens began exercising their rights.

On its way to a portrait of their contentious possibilities, “Rodman the Keeper” follows a former federal officer assigned to a new national cemetery, where his job is to copy down the names of the Union dead. Although Confederates were excluded by law from these state-sanctioned burial grounds, there are thousands of graves for John Rodman to acknowledge in his red-bound ledgers because a burdened Southern prison once stood nearby. Yet writing out the names of the dead proves a lonely task; the townspeople steer clear of the cemetery gates, and the anticipated visitors from the North never arrive. Then one morning, the keeper spots a jaunty procession: old and young, uncles and girls, all former slaves and all carrying spring flowers from their new cabin gardens. Each May for the past two years, he discovers, they have marched to the cemetery, ever since honoring Union graves was declared a national undertaking in 1868. It is these memorialists in Woolson’s story, more than the forgetful Rodman, who keep Decoration Day (as Memorial Day was first known), with its processional lien on a shared postwar future.

Because the keeper must consult (Woolson notes) “hastily written, blotted rolls of manuscript,” rolls that include more than 14,000 names, it has long been thought this story and that postwar future recall the notorious prison camp at Andersonville and its skeletal Union survivors, which means the African Americans paying tribute are marching through Georgia (“Rodman” 261).¹ But a recently unearthed letter from Woolson to an Ohio newspaper reveals a strong case for North Carolina’s Salisbury Prison. Woolson’s comments on her visit to that national cemetery, a traveler’s account published during October 1874 and titled “In the South,” encourage a strikingly different reading, nuance writ large. In the first place, the distinctive practices at North Carolina’s only prison camp made individual documentation so tricky that inventing entries like “John Andrew Warren, Company G, Eighth New Hampshire Infantry” becomes for Woolson an imaginative creation of specific records for fallen Northerners, fiction’s solace when Salisbury graves were actually marked “unknown” (263). In addition, the former slaveowners that the keeper sees dying or departing cannot be the wealthy cotton planters of southwest Georgia but must instead be the older, less oligarchic gentry of the Carolina Piedmont, where slavery was less widespread because labor-intensive crops like cotton were less customary than the grains and foodstuffs of family farms.

Most importantly, the African Americans who march and the family servant Rodman teaches do not suggest the ragged sharecroppers of the cotton kingdom but the more aspiring and better-educated laborers of western North Carolina, where many were free before 1860 and mountain Unionism prospered nearby. When a stern portrait of hapless Georgians is replaced by the more hopeful profile of former slaves who inherit the earth of North Carolina, it is clearer that the recent Confederacy has given way to sovereign states with differing views of Reconstruction, each weighing...