“Flaunting the Evidence of Treason in the Face of Loyalty”: Funerals, Grave Decoration, and the Fashioning of Kentucky’s Civil War Identity

Frances Dallam Peter was a young woman of eighteen when the Civil War broke out. A resident of Lexington, Kentucky, and staunch unionist, Peter kept a diary of her observations from January 1862 until April 1864, in which she wrote about local “rumor, gossip, and military affairs” and also “provide[d] a clear view of a community severely divided by internecine war.” In 1863, Peter wrote of a conversation she had with an unidentified Federal soldier in June, following his visit to the city’s rural cemetery. On arrival at the cemetery, the soldier encountered “several finely dressed ladies busy about them and the graves were adorned with a quantity of all kinds of fine flowers, arranged in every imaginable way.” These ladies were not, however, decorating the graves of the Union soldiers. Rather,

while he was looking at the graves of our soldiers which a[re] near those of the rebels, one of the ladies spoke to him and said “Only see what a difference there is between these two places; that one (pointing to our soldiers graves, which had no flowers or ornaments) so mean looking and this other so beautifully adorned with flowers.” “Yes ma’am” he replied “I was just observing them, they are indeed beautiful flowers, in fact they are magnificent. But pray my dear lady[,”] he continued feigning ignorance[,] “can you tell me why there is so much difference made between the graves?” “Why” said she “don’t you know these are the graves of the rebel soldiers?” “Rebel soldiers!” he said, “do they allow rebels to have a place of burial in a Christian cemetery?” The secesh lady retired.

The soldier went on to explain to Peter and her mother that he had encountered many “rebel ladies” during the war, having to guard them while submitting to verbal abuse and being spit on without retaliating. In this particular situation, though, he just “couldn’t help it.”¹

Such actions on the part of Confederate sympathizers in Kentucky were by no means unusual. Indeed, increasingly throughout the war, observers noted the attention paid to the graves of the rebel dead in the state’s major cemeteries, while those of Federal soldiers remained mostly unadorned, despite widely publicized funerals for Union soldiers and officers. In this way, support for the Confederate cause and declarations of rebel identity were made manifest on Kentucky’s commemorative landscape in the years before the organization of formal memorialization activities devoted to the war’s dead. By commemorating the Confederate dead even as the war was being fought, Kentucky’s rebels established a visual rhetoric on the cultural landscape that denied the state’s political and military loyalty to the Union cause.

Much has been written on Kentucky’s Civil War experience, the conflicts experienced within the state between unionists, rebels and rebel sympathizers, and of the postwar transformations that occurred as white and black Kentuckians grappled with emancipation and how to fashion new social and political policies during Reconstruction. For nearly a century, historians of Civil War–era Kentucky have embraced the argument, so eloquently stated by E. Merton Coulter in the 1920s, that “she waited until after the war to secede.” Numerous twenty-first century historians have echoed this sentiment. In her influential work Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne Marshall asserts that in 1866, “once and for all, Kentucky had exchanged war loyalties.” James Ramage and Andrea Watkins push this figurative secession back to 1865, arguing that the state took “on the role of spokesman and benefactor of the former Confederate states experiencing Reconstruction” and that “in the wave of pro-Confederate feeling, Kentucky’s Union veterans were slighted, and most Kentuckians united in support of the Lost Cause.” Aaron Astor pushes this wholesale shift in identity later to 1870, stating that by then, “Kentucky had become thoroughly Confederate, both in its partisan habits and its cultural hue.”²

Such positions have long been based on the analysis of postwar political activity across the state, as conservative Democrats...