A Place Called Appomattox

11. The Resurrection

11 THE RESURRECTION One year after Lee’s surrender another sweet burst of spring provoked remembrance among the women of Appomattox Court House. The troubling uncertainty of national collapse and economic turmoil had ebbed, and they made their way to church or the village store with minds less muddled by plans for mere survival. In their passage along the stage road they may have searched the ditches for flowers, finding instead the raw graves of unclaimed Confederates bathed again in cold April showers. Sadness touched their sensitive souls—sorrow for young men who lay apparently forgotten, for the Lost Cause to which they gave their lives, and perhaps for the way of life that had disappeared from the earth with them. With these blended sentiments more than two dozen wives and daughters gathered in the courtroom on May18 to form the Ladies Memorial Association of Appomattox. They elected the wife of a newly arrived minister as president and named Jennie Peers treasurer, while Ella Flood agreed to take the minutes. The president read a moving letter from the mother of Captain Macon, of Richmond, thanking Edward Hix and the others who buried her son, and with the inevitable flourish of handkerchiefs the ladies proposed to gather all the Confederate dead of Appomattox into a single cemetery. Theirs was but one of many such societies that coalesced across the South that spring of 1866, fueled by similar emotions. Most of the other organizations sought to decorate the graves of Confederate veterans, but the Clover Hill committee had first to offer their Confederates graves worthy of decoration, and they enlisted some of their men in the project: at the next meeting, a week later, Joel Flood said he would donate any money the group needed. The women approached Fountain Wright for a piece of land on the main road, apparently near his father’s brick house in the village, but he demurred. Joel Flood then offered some land north of the village, and Betty Tweedy asked her father, John Sears, to give them a plot of ground; Sears gave them a fraction of an acre at the end of his farm lane, just west of where it intersected with the stage road. The association chose the Sears piece and then requested Francis Meeks, whose own son occupied the only formal soldier’s grave in the village, to clear the lot. Despite his sixty-three years, Meeks hacked away at the brush and briars during a few days in the first half of August. Sarah F. Abbitt, daughter of Nancy LeGrand and widow of the doctor who had built George Peers’s house, arranged for lumber to build the coffins, getting some of it for nothing . They hired carpenters to build the coffins. By then the Floods had departed on a lengthy vacation abroad, so to pay for these incidental expenses the women invited a former Confederate officer from Richmond to address the community with a benefit lecture on the subject of ‘‘Johnny Reb,’’ and Wilmer McLean—Major McLean, to these ladies—agreed to entertain their guest. After more than six months of preparation, the women mobilized the village men for the least pleasant portion of their endeavor on the last day of November, sending them up the stage road with shovels. Jennie Peers prevailed upon her husband, George, and her brother, Charles Sackett; Sally Abbitt recruited her late husband’s cousin, George A. Abbitt, and her brother, Thomas LeGrand; Martha and Carrie Hix called on their brother, Edward. Wilmer McLean went along, and John McKinney, and the bankrupt former sheriff, William Paris. The village harness maker, Thomas Smith, fell in with them. So did Bob Sweeney, who had replaced his cousin as J. E. B. Stuart’s headquarters banjo player, and Captain Robert Kyle, who had led ten dozen Appomattox men to Richmond in1862. John Sears joined them, too, although he was pushing seventy. These volunteers spent the afternoon and evening of November 30 digging eighteen graves in a single row. The next morning they undertook the work they had wisely postponed since summer, unearthing the disintegrating bodies of Captain Macon and seventeen of his comrades and carting them all to their new resting place on the brow of the hill. Sealing their grisly cargo in the simple coffins, they dropped them into the neat graves, arranging eight headboards bearing names and units with varying degrees of accuracy: the passage of nearly twenty months had...