Memorial Day and Decoration Day. Confederate Societies

Peculiar interest attaches to the inauguration of Memorial Day in Richmond, in 1866, when Northerners, watching Southerners cover the graves of their dead with flowers, went afterwards and did likewise, thus borrowing of us their “Decoration Day” and with it a custom we gladly share with them.[31] In Hollywood and Oakwood slept some 36,000 Southern soldiers, representing every Confederate State. On April 19, Oakwood Memorial Association “was founded by a little band in the old Third Presbyterian Church, after prayer by Rev. Dr. Proctor.” The morning of May 10 a crowd gathered in St. John’s Church,[32] and after simple exercises led by Dr. Price and Dr. Norwood, “the procession, numbering five hundred people, walking two and two, their arms loaded with spring’s sweetest flowers, walked out to Oakwood” and strewed with these the Confederate graves. May 3, the Hollywood Memorial Association was formed, and May 31 was its first Memorial Day. The day before, an extraordinary procession wended its way to the cemetery.The young men of Richmond, the flower of the city, marched to Hollywood, armed with picks and spades, and numbering in their long line, moving with the swing of regulars, remnants of famous companies, whose gallantry had made them shining marks on many a desperate battlefield. “It was a striking scene,” wrote a witness, “as the long line filed by, not as in days of yore when attired in gray and bearing the glittering muskets, they were wont to step to the strains of martial music while the Stars and Bars of the young Republic floated above them; but in citizens’ garbs, bearing the peaceful implements of agriculture, performing a pilgrimage to the shrine of departed valour.” It was symbolic. The South sought to honour her past in peaceful ways, and to repair by patient industry the ravages of war, wielding cheerfully weapons of progress to which her hands were as yet unaccustomed. As the soldier-citizens marched along, people old and young, by ones and twos and threes, or in organised bodies, fell into the ever-lengthening line. At the cemetery, the pick-and-spade bearers were divided into squads and companies, and under the direction of commanders, worked all day, raking off rubbish, rounding up graves, planting head-boards and otherwise bringing about order. Old men and little boys helped. Negroes faithful to the memory of dead friends and owners were there, busy as the whites in love’s labour. Several men in Federal uniform lent brotherly hands. When the sun went down the place was transformed. That first fair Memorial Day looked as though it were both Sabbath and Saints’ Day. Over or on doors of business houses was the legend, garlanded with flowers or framed in mourning drapery: “Closed in Honour of the Confederate Dead.” Federal soldiers walking the quiet streets would pause and study these symbols of grief and reverence. Carloads of flowers poured into the city. Every part of the South in touch with Richmond by rail or wagon sent contribution. Grace Church was a floral depot; maids, matrons and children met there early to weave blossoms and greenery into stars, crosses, crowns and flags—their beloved Southern cross. Vehicles lent by express and hotel companies formed floral caravanseries moving towards the cemetery.

MRS. REBECCA CALHOUN PICKENS BACON

Daughter of Francis W. Pickens, the “Secession Governor”
of South Carolina: organizer of the D. A. R. in her state.

Then, another procession wound its way to Hollywood, the military companies and the populace, flower-laden, and a long, long line of children, many orphans. There were few or no carriages. The people had none. Old and young walked. The soldiers’ section was soon like one great garden of roses white and red; of gleaming lilies and magnolias; of all things sweet-scented, gay and beautiful. Scattered here and there like forget-me-nots over many a gallant sleeper was the blue badge in ribbon or blossom of the Richmond Blues. Thousands visited the green hillside where General Jeb Stuart lay, a simple wooden board marking the spot; his grave was a mound of flowers. From an improvised niche of evergreens, Valentine’s life-like bust of the gay chevalier smiled upon old friends. No hero, great or lowly, was forgotten. What a tale of broken hearts and desolate homes far away the many graves told! Here had the Texas Ranger ended his march; here had brave lads from the Land of Flowers and all the States intervening bivouacked for a long, long night, from whose slumbers no bugle might wake them. What women and children standing in lonely doorways, hands shading their eyes, watched for the coming of these marked “Unknown”!

Little Joe Davis’ lonely grave was a shrine on which children heaped offerings as they marched past in procession, each dropping a flower, until one must thrust flowers aside to read the inscriptions that make of that tiny tomb a mile-stone in American history—“Joseph, Son of our Beloved President, Jefferson Davis,” “Erected by the little boys and girls of the Southern Capital.” As blossoms fell, the hearts of the flower-strewers beat tenderly for little Joe’s father, then the Prisoner of Fortress Monroe, and for his troubled mother and her living children.

In freedom to honour the Confederate dead by public parade, Virginia was more fortunate than North Carolina. In Raleigh, the people were not allowed to march in procession to the cemetery for five long years. Yet, even so, the old North State faithfully observed the custom of decorating her graves at fixed seasons, the people going out to the cemetery by twos and threes. Indeed, the claim has been made that Dixie’s first Memorial Day was observed in Raleigh rather than in Richmond, and the story of it is too sad for telling. March 12, 1866, Mrs. Mary Williams wrote the “Columbus Times,” of Georgia, a letter, from which I quote: “The ladies are engaged in ornamenting and improving that portion of the city cemetery sacred to the memory of our gallant Confederate dead.... We beg the assistance of the press and the ladies throughout the South to aid us in the effort to set apart a certain day to be observed, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and to be handed down through time as a religious custom of the South, in wreathing the graves of our martyred dead with flowers.” All our cities, towns and hamlets shared in the honour of originating Memorial Day, for, throughout the fair land of Dixie, soon as flowers began to bloom, her people began to cover graves with them; and the North did likewise.

In reading the recently published “History of the Confederated Memorial Associations of the South,” I am newly impressed with the devotion of Southern women, their promptness, energy and resourcefulness in gathering from hillside and valley their scattered dead and providing marked and sheltered sepulture and monuments when there was so little money in their land. I am impressed, too, with the utter lack of sectional bitterness in this volume, which consists chiefly of unpretentious reports of work done. Here and there is a word of grateful acknowledgment to former foes for aid rendered. The simple records throb with a deep human interest to which the heart of the world might make response.

At a meeting of the Atlanta Memorial Association, May 7, 1897, Mrs. Clement A. Evans offered a resolution providing for concert of action among State Associations on questions relating to objects and purposes in common. Before long, this movement was absorbed in a larger. One of the latest formed local associations was at Fayetteville, Arkansas, where war’s end found “homes in ashes, farms waste places” and “every foot of soil, marked by contest, red with blood”; six long years of care and toil passed before the women found time for organised work. Yet from this body, not large in numbers nor rich in treasury, sprang the measures—Miss Garside (afterwards Mrs. Welch) suggesting—which resulted in the organisation, May 30, 1900, in the Galt House, Louisville, Kentucky, of the Confederated Southern Memorial Associations with Mrs. W. J. Behan, of New Orleans, President. In 1903, Mrs. Behan, in the name of the order, thanked Senator Foraker of Ohio for bringing before Congress a bill for an appropriation for marking Confederate graves in the North, a bill Congress passed without delay.

As Ladies’ Memorial Associations developed out of the war relief societies, so the United Daughters of the Confederacy grew out of Memorial Associations and Ladies’ Auxiliaries to the United Confederate Veterans. Immediate initiative came from “Mother Goodlett,” of Nashville, Tennessee, seconded by Mrs. L. H. Raines, of Savannah, the “Nashville American” aiding the movement by giving it great publicity; the U. D. C. was organized at Nashville in the fall of 1894. Of the United Confederate Veterans, a member of the Association tells me: “The Ku Klux—not the counterfeit, but the real Ku Klux working under the code of Forrest—was the Confederate soldier protecting his home and fireside in the only way possible to him. General Forrest disbanded the order; then, for purely memorial, historical, benevolent and social purposes, Confederate Veteran Camps came into existence, springing up here and there without concert of action; presently they united,” the federation being effected in New Orleans, June 16, 1889, by representatives of about fifty camps, General John B. Gordon in command. There are now some 1,600 camps with 30,000 members. Of about 300,000 Confederates at the end of the war, this 30,000 is left—“the thin, gray line.”

When our veterans have gone North a-visiting, the North has been unsparing in honour and hospitality. Our old gray-jackets give some illustrations like this. Two, walking into a Boston fruit store, handed the dealer a five-dollar bill to be changed in payment of purchases, and received it back with the words: “It cannot pass here.” A veteran laid down silver. “That is no good.” Concerned lest all his money be counterfeit, the gray-jacket said to his comrade: “May be you have some good money.” The comrade’s wealth was refused; but in opening his purse, he revealed a Confederate note. “Now,” said the smiling storekeeper, “if I could only change that into the same kind of money, it would pass. That’s the only good money in Boston today.”

The object and influence of these Confederate orders are primarily “memorial and historical”; they occasionally transcend these—as when, for instance, a few years ago, U. C. V. camps passed resolutions condemning lynching. Their tendency is the reverse of keeping bitter sectional feeling alive. It is their duty and office to see to it that new generations shall not look upon Southern forefathers as “traitors,” but as good men and true who fought valiantly for conscience’s sake, even as did the good men and true of the North. While the Daughters of the American Revolution, a larger and richer body, are worthily engaged in rescuing Revolutionary history from oblivion, it is the no less patriotic care of the Confederate orders, whose members are active in Revolutionary work also, to preserve to the future landmarks and truths about the War of Secession. Upon Memorial Hall, New Orleans, the Confederate relic rooms at Columbia and Charleston; the “White House,” Montgomery; the Mortuary Chapel, “Old Blandford,” Petersburg; the Confederate Museum, Richmond; other relic rooms; and monuments and tablets scattered throughout the South; the work of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society; the Battle Abbey to be erected in Richmond for reception of historic treasures;—upon these must American historians rely for records of facts and for object lessons in relics that would have been lost but for the patient and faithful endeavours of these orders.

Mrs. Joseph Thompson, in welcoming the Daughters of the American Revolution to Atlanta during the Exposition of 1895, commended in the name of the South, the “broadening and nationalising influence” of the order. To no other one agency harmonising the sections does our country owe more than to patriotic societies. In 1866, Northern and Southern women found their first bond of reunion in the Mount Vernon Association, which began in 1853, as a Southern movement, when the home and tomb of Washington were for sale and Ann Pamela Cunningham, of South Carolina, called upon America’s women to save Mount Vernon, won Edward Everett to lecture for the cause, coaxed legislators, congressmen and John Washington to terms, and rested not until Mount Vernon belonged to the Nation; during the war it was the one spot where men of both armies met as brothers, stacking arms without the gates; Miss Cunningham held her regency, and Mrs. Eve, of Georgia, Mme. Le Vert and the other Southern Vice Regents continued on the Board with women of the North. In 1889, when the tomb of Washington’s mother was advertised for sale, Margaret Hetzel, of Virginia, appealed successfully through the “Washington Post” to her countrywomen to save it to the Nation. The founders, in 1890, of the Daughters of the American Revolution were Eugenia Washington of Virginia, Mary Desha of Kentucky, Ellen Hardin Walworth of Virginia and Kentucky ancestry; a most active officer was Mary Virginia Ellett Cabell, of Virginia. The First Regent of the New York City Chapter was a Virginian, Mrs. Roger A. Pryor. Flora Adams Darling, widow of a Confederate officer, had a large hand in originating the order and founded that of the Daughters of the Revolution and the Daughters of the United States, 1812. The daughter of the Secession Governor of South Carolina, Mrs. Rebecca Calhoun Pickens Bacon, started the D. A. R. in her State, delivering seven flourishing chapters to the National society. The daughter of General Cook, C. S. A., Mrs. Lawson Peel, of Atlanta, is a power in D. A. R. work. The present National Regent, Mrs. Donald McLean, is a Marylander and, therefore, a Southerner, as Mrs. Adlai E. Stevenson, one of her predecessors, avowed herself to be in part if her Kentucky and Virginia ancestry counted. In no movement of patriotism, in no measures promoting good feeling, has the South been unrepresented.

MRS. ROGER A PRYOR

“Mary, when I die, bury me in my Confederate uniform. I want to rise a Confederate.” So said to his wife Dr. Hunter Maguire, the great Stonewall’s Surgeon-in-Chief, a short time before his death. He was no less true to the living Union because he was faithful to the dead Confederacy. Visitors used to love to see General Lee at the Finals of Washington College in his full suit of Confederate gray; it became him to wear it in the midst of the draped flags and stacked arms, for while he was teaching our young men to love our united country and to reverence the Stars and Stripes, he did not want them to fail in reverence to the past. None can want us so to fail. Mrs. Lizzie George Henderson, President of the U. D. C., says in the “Confederate Veteran”: “Wherever there is a chapter North or West, our Northern friends are so kind and help so much that it brings us closer together as one people.”

The thought of her who was “Daughter of the Confederacy” is inseparable from my text. One afternoon Matoaca and I called on Miss Mason at her quaint old house in Georgetown, D. C., a place of pilgrimage for patriotic Southerners. We sat on the little back porch which is on a level with Miss Emily’s flower-garden, and she gave us tea in little old-fashioned cups, pouring it out of a little old-fashioned silver tea-pot that sat on a little old-fashioned table. She and Matoaca fell to talking about Mr. Davis.

“I shall never forget him as I saw him first,” said Miss Emily, “a young lieutenant in the United States Army, straight as an arrow, handsome and elegant. It was at the Governor’s Mansion in Detroit; my young brother was Governor of Michigan, the State’s first Executive; Lieutenant Davis was our guest; the Black Hawk War, in which he had greatly distinguished himself, was just ended, and he was bringing Black Hawk through the country. I was much impressed with the young Lieutenant. I watched his career with interest. I met him again when he was a member of President Pierce’s Cabinet. He made a very able Secretary of War.

“Strange how events turn, that it should have been Mr. Davis who sent General McClellan (then Colonel) and General Lee (then Colonel) to the Crimea to study the art of war as practised by the Russians. General McClellan’s son, now Mayor of New York, has said that his father had ample opportunity to form unbiassed opinion of the Secretary, as he spent much time in Washington before and after his mission to Russia and was in close touch with Mr. Davis. He quoted his father as saying: ‘Colonel Davis was a man of extraordinary ability. As an executive officer, he was remarkable. He was the best Secretary of War—and I use best in its widest sense—I ever had anything to do with.’”

“I like ‘Little Mac’ for saying that and his son for repeating it. ‘Little Mac’ fought us like a gentleman. When his son runs for the Presidency perhaps I shall urge everybody to vote for him,” said Matoaca.

“Unless a Southerner runs,” I suggested.

“Alas! When will a Southerner be President of the United States? I heard Mr. Davis make his famous speech bidding farewell to the Senate when Mississippi seceded. It was the most eloquent thing I ever listened to! All the women—and even men—were in tears. Senators went up to him and embraced him. I saw Mr. Davis in Richmond as President of the Confederacy. I saw him in prison; His Eminence, the Cardinal, secured me permission. He was very thin and feeble, but he rose in his old graceful manner and offered me his seat, a little wooden box beside his bed, a small iron one. The eyes of the guard were on us all the time. General Miles came and looked in. I asked Mr. Davis if I could do anything for him. He said he would like some reading matter. I had had some newspapers, but had not been permitted to bring them in. I was allowed to remain only a few moments.

“I next saw him in Paris. I am so glad to have that memory of him. So many Southerners came abroad in those days. During reconstruction the procession seemed endless! While in Rome I introduced so many Southerners to Pope Pius IX. that His Holiness used to call me ‘L’Ambassadrice du Sud.’ Mr. Davis was much fÊted in France, as he had been in England. While he was at Mr. Mann’s in Chantilly, Judah P. Benjamin came from London to see him. Mr. Benjamin was delightful company. I was at Mr. Charles Carroll’s when Mr. Davis was entertained there. I recall one dinner when the Southern colony flocked around him in full force and played a game on him. You know of his wonderful memory and wide reading. We laid our heads together before he came in and studied up puzzling quotations to trip him. But the instant one of us would spring couplet, quatrain or epigram on him, he would answer with the author. He perceived our friendly conspiracy and entered merrily into the spirit of it. I alone tripped him—with something I had read in early childhood. I am glad to have this happy memory of Mr. Davis. Otherwise I should always be seeing him as he looked in prison.”Mr. and Mrs. Davis came to Paris for their young daughter, Winnie, who was under Miss Emily’s care. They had left her some years before at school in Carlsruhe. Knowing in the early part of 1881 that Miss Mason was travelling in Germany, they wrote her to bring Winnie to Paris, where the girl was to abide until their arrival, studying music and acquiring Parisian graces. When Miss Mason called at Carlsruhe, Winnie rushed into her arms joyously: “I am so glad,” she cried, “to see someone from home!”

She had many questions to ask; no sooner were they alone in their railway compartment than Winnie turned to Miss Mason: “At last I see a Southern woman! Now I can learn all that happened to my parents just after the war, when I was a baby. Miss Em, what did Papa do just after the war—just after Richmond fell? What happened to my papa then?” Miss Emily caught her breath! “Winnie, what your papa did not think best you should know, I must decline to tell you. You will soon see him in France.” Winnie took small interest in acquiring Parisian graces. “Miss Em, what are papa’s favourite songs?” Miss Mason sought faithfully to turn her attention to chansons of the day and to operatic airs in vogue. “But I am only going to sing to papa. I am going to the plantation—to Beauvoir. How shall I need to sing opera airs there? Tell me, dear Miss Em, the songs my father loves!”

“When I met her father,” Miss Mason says, “I ventured to question him concerning Winnie’s ignorance of his prison life, expressing surprise that he had not claimed the sympathy of his child. ‘I was unwilling to prejudice her,’ he said, ‘against the country to which she is now returning and which must be hers. I thought that but justice to the child. I want her to love her country.’”

THE DAUGHTER OF THE CONFEDERACY

Winnie (Varina Anne), youngest child of Jefferson Davis;
born in Richmond, Va., June 27, 1864, and died at
Narragansett Pier, R. I., September 18, 1895.

General John B. Gordon gave her the
above title by which she was known.

Years later, in Georgia, Veterans gathered to hear her father speak, greeted Winnie’s appearance with ringing cheers. General John B. Gordon, placing his hands on her shoulders as he drew her forward, said: “Comrades! here is our daughter, the Daughter of the Confederacy!” She lived much in the North and died there. An escort from the Grand Army of the Republic bore her remains from the hotel at Narragansett Pier to the railway station; in New York, a Guard of Honour from the Confederate Veterans and the Southern Society received her and brought her to Richmond, and Richmond took her own. North, South, East and West sent flowers to deck the bier of the Daughter of the Confederacy, and the North said: “Let us be brothers today in grief as we were only yesterday brothers-in-arms at Santiago.”

Men in blue followed Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee and Joe Wheeler to their graves; Joe Johnston and Buckner were Grant’s pall-bearers. Our dead bind us together. The voices of Lee, our Beloved, Davis, our Martyr, Stephens, our Peacemaker, Grady, our Orator, of Hampton, Gordon and all their noble fellowship, have spoken for true Unionism; blending with theirs is the voice of Grant, in his last hours at McGregor, the voice of McKinley in Atlanta, the voice of Abraham Lincoln, as, just before his martyrdom, he stood pityingly amid the ruins of Richmond.

When President McKinley declared that the Confederate as well as the Federal dead should be the Nation’s care, he said the right word to “fire the Southern heart,” albeit our women were not ready to yield to the government their holy office. The name of Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, is a household word in the South because of his tributes to Lee when Virginia thought to place Lee’s statue in Washington. The names of Col. W. H. Knauss, of Columbus, and W. H. Harrison, of Cincinnati, and of others of the North should be, for the pious pains they have taken to honour our dead who rest in Northern soil. In Oakwoods Cemetery, Chicago, stands the first Confederate Monument erected in the North; the Grand Army of the Republic, the Illinois National Guards, the City Troop, the Black Hussars, took part with the Confederate Veterans in its dedication. After Katie Cabell Currie, of Texas, and her aides had consecrated the historic battery given by the Government, the Guards paid tribute by musket and bugle to Americans who died prisoners at Camp Douglas. A sectional bond exists in the National Park Military Commission, on which Confederate Veterans serve with Grand Army men; General S. D. Lee, Commander-in-Chief of the U. C. V., is Chairman of the Vicksburg board of which General Fred Grant is a member. When Judge Wilson on behalf of Bates’ Tennesseeans presented the Confederate Monument at Shiloh to the Commission, General Basil Duke accepted it in the name of the Nation.

When President Roosevelt and Congress sent Dixie’s captured battle-flags home, the Southern heart was fired anew. In all our history no more impressive reception was given to a President than when on his recent visit to Richmond, Mr. Roosevelt was conducted by a guard of Confederate Veterans in gray uniforms to our historic Capitol Square. In other Southern cities he found similar escort. Earlier, when he visited Louisville, a Confederate guard attended him, General Basil W. Duke, who followed Mr. Davis’s fortunes so faithfully, being on conspicuous duty.

True to her past, the South is not living in it. A wonderful future is before her. She is richer than was the whole United States at the beginning of the War of Secession; in a quarter of a century her cotton production has doubled, her manufactures quadrupled. In one decade, her farm property increased in value twenty-six per cent, her manufacturing output forty-seven; her farm products nearly one hundred. Her railroad and banking interests give as strong indications of her vigorous new life. Immigrants from East and West and North and over seas are seeking homes within her borders. The South is no decadent land, but a land where “the trees are hung with gold,” a land of new orchards and vineyards and market-gardens; of luscious berries and melons; of wheat and corn and tobacco and much cattle and poultry; of tea-gardens; and rice and sugar plantations and of fields white with cotton for the clothing of the nations. She is the land of balm and bloom, of bird-songs, of the warm hand and the open door.

I prefaced this book with words uttered by Jefferson Davis; I close with words uttered by Theodore Roosevelt, in Richmond, which read like their fulfilment:

“Great though the meed of praise which is due the South for the soldierly valor her sons displayed during the four years of war, I think that even greater praise is due for what her people have accomplished in the forty years of peace which have followed.... For forty years the South has made not merely a courageous but at times a desperate struggle. Now, the teeming riches of mines and fields and factory attest the prosperity of those who are all the stronger because of the trials and struggles through which this prosperity has come. You stand loyally to your traditions and memories; you stand also loyally for our great common country of today and for our common flag.”

The End.