My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  The UCV provided its members a national standing, an affiliation with small-town former Confederates throughout the country. Members of a nine-man camp in Ringgold, Georgia, could join with counterparts in Honey Grove, Texas, or Rosedale, Mississippi, or any of the hundreds of other communities throughout the rebuilt South to raise money for a national memorial or share stories at one of the popular annual reunions.

  By 1892, when the fifteen camps of John Boyd's Confederate Veteran Association of Kentucky affiliated with the United Confederate Veterans, the UCV commanded more than two hundred camps and was the fastest-growing fraternal organization in the nation. At the national meeting in New Orleans in 1892, Commanding General John B. Gordon commissioned John Boyd Major General, Commander of the Kentucky Division.11 The zealous former private soldier of Lexington eagerly adopted his UCV rank and thereafter would be known as Major General John Boyd.12 Yet “this is not a military organization,” John Boyd told a reporter, “but is merely a brotherhood or fraternity with benevolent intentions.”13

  While it was true that the members of Boyd's Kentucky Confederate Veteran Association and other early UCV camps were not armed combatants, they surely liked to march in their uniforms.

  More than 150 members of the Confederate Veteran Association gathered outside the gates of Lexington Cemetery on Saturday afternoon, June 10, 1893. Most of the men wore a gray suit: matching pants and jacket cut and ornamented to look like a military uniform. In its early days, the UCV had no standardized uniform for members; any ex-Confederate who could afford it would engage a tailor to create a uniform as ornate and fanciful as the veteran desired. Men like John Boyd, however, were irritated by the inconsistency of dress, and often designated a local clothier as the sole source of member uniforms. (Globe Tailoring of Lexington did a booming business in Confederate veteran uniforms at $30 each.)

  Outside the cemetery, Boyd formed his men into a line of march. It was becoming traditional among veterans’ groups to arrive at their events on parade. The marching column echoed their service in the military and—especially if accompanied by a band—placed them at the center of attention.

  For this march, the veterans formed up in pairs, the first two being the chaplains of Lexington and Winchester camps. The next two were Boyd and U. S. congressman W. C. P. Breckinridge, the featured orator for the day. Boyd barked a command, and an honor guard of the Brown Light Infantry led the column of men (which marched mostly in step) through the heavy iron cemetery gates, along the lanes between the gravestones, to the Confederate lot, with its sprays of fresh-cut flowers and a speakers’ platform. (“The march was strikingly impressive,” according to one observer.)14

  Arriving at the Confederate section, the marchers broke ranks, and Boyd and Breckinridge took their seats on the platform. The remainder of the veterans joined the crowd of two thousand to await the dedication of their statue and the celebration of Confederate Decoration Day, two of the New South's most common Lost Cause rituals.

  In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Southerners began transforming their collective memory of utter defeat and total destruction in the Civil War into a myth-history known as the Lost Cause. Taking its name from The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, an 1866 book by Virginia newspaperman Edward A. Pollard, the mythology of the Lost Cause allowed Southerners to downplay the calamitous outcome of the war while celebrating the manner in which it was fought.

  “Whatever opinions may exist as to the right or wrong of the long and bitter controversy that culminated in the War Between the States, one thing can be confidently affirmed,” a Lost Cause orator of the time declaimed: “That the annals of our common history bear no greater chapter than that wherein is written the record of Confederate valor and constancy.”15

  Valor and constancy.

  As years passed, reverence for the Lost Cause would grow into something akin to a new civil religion that rendered Southerners the true believers, a people set apart in their willingness to fight and die for independence.

  Lost Cause writings and activities reinforced the bravery of the common Confederate soldier, his prowess at arms, and his chivalry toward women and the cause of the weak. Lost Cause oratory praised the Confederate soldier for his devotion to comrades and his lifelong fidelity to principles of individual and sectional independence.

  Kentucky became an active supporter of the federal government during the war. But twenty-five years later, Kentuckians embraced the myth of the Lost Cause more firmly than it had ever embraced the Confederate cause during years of conflict.

  In 1861, as other slaveholding states bolted the Union, Kentucky was led by a pro-secession governor and a pro-Union state legislature. Meeting in a special session called by the governor to organize a secession convention, Unionist legislators balked, voting instead for an official policy of neutrality in the coming conflict. Unwilling to accept neutrality, two hundred pro-secession legislators and other citizens from sixty-five counties met shortly after in Russellville to pass a sovereignty resolution, voting Kentucky out of the Union and into the Confederacy. (Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress accepted the action of this rump legislature and admitted Kentucky as the thirteenth state of the Confederate States of America.)16

  The official neutrality policy lasted only until Kentucky's shooting war began, when the pro-Union state legislature created a military force to expel the Confederates. By early 1862 Federal troops controlled the state's major cities, river ports, and rail centers; by the end of that year the Federals owned the state.

  Kentuckians of every political stripe chafed under the wartime measures of the military occupation. Censorship, loyalty oaths, seizure of goods and crops, conscription, and restrictions on movement led to a smoldering resentment toward the Federal occupiers.17 With every Federal outrage (or rumored outrage), more Kentucky men left their homes and drifted southward to join the Confederate forces.

  At the end of the war, when crisp Union soldiers marched northward to home and their victory parades, Kentucky's Confederates returned to the Bluegrass State battered, worn to rags, and, in many cases, bearing the scars of vicious combat.

  Kentucky was spared the harsh restrictions of Reconstruction, but the drastic changes brought about by Emancipation, the objectionable operations of the Freedmen's Bureau, and an unwise military administration evoked sympathy even among the state's Unionists. In the first postwar elections, Kentuckians thoroughly repudiated the party of Lincoln to elect a solidly Democratic state legislature and state house. No Republican would again hold statewide office for almost three decades.

  In the main, Kentuckians accepted the destruction of slavery and the renunciation of state sovereignty, but many adopted the historiography of the Lost Cause. They decried the war, but ennobled the higher principles for which it was fought and exalted the warriors who fought it. Johnny Reb, an earnest Kentucky farm boy with a squirrel rifle in 1861, had become, by the 1890s, a knightly warrior with “illustrious courage and splendid patriotism and unselfish consecration to the cause of liberty.”18

  The civil religion of the Lost Cause spawned its own rituals: the veterans’ solemn march through the cemetery, soaring oratory at patriotic or memorial gatherings, the dedication of a public statue to the Confederate soldier, decoration of the graves of Confederate dead.

  In Lexington Cemetery on June 10, 1893, at 4:00 P.M. sharp, according to John Boyd's pocket watch, the bittersweet Lost Cause celebration began.

  Opening the ceremony, Boyd called to the podium Rev. E. L. Southgate to invoke a Christian blessing on the afternoon's events. Next, a local vocalist sang “A Conquered Banner,” a Lost Cause anthem that brought tears to the eyes of some in the audience.

  Then Congressman W. C. P. Breckinridge took the podium.

  William Cabell Preston Breckinridge came from a prominent Bluegrass family, and his Confederate military service had propelled him to a successful career in law and politics. Breckinridge was currentl
y serving his fifth consecutive term in Congress and had every expectation of winning reelection for a sixth. He was known (without a speck of irony) as “the silver-tongued orator of Kentucky,” and his appearance at this dedication added to the importance of the event.

  Breckinridge opened his speech by pointing at the statue to be dedicated, still hidden under a white drapery. He spoke of those who contributed money to purchase the statue, and of their desire to honor Confederate heroes under the gaze of this noble figure.

  At his signal, two young women pulled ropes to unveil the marble monument, a larger-than-life Confederate soldier standing on a seven-foot base. The figure wore a neatly blocked hat and kneelength greatcoat, a rifle resting before him. (“The dress is of better style and fit than the real soldier ever wore or saw on his proudest day,” an observer remarked.)19

  Breckinridge spoke of the valor of the Confederate soldiers represented by this marble figure: “History did not record more daring or braver soldiers.” He spoke of the constancy of their devotion to the cause, describing them as “heroes who had fought desperately and given their life blood for what they believed was right.” He preached reconciliation: “Though the memories of the past are dear to Southerners, we are American citizens.” And patriotism: “The love we now hold for the Union is second to none.”

  After an emotional conclusion, in which Breckinridge described what he would say to his comrades when he met them again in heaven, the silver-tongued legend returned to his seat amid cheers from the crowd.20

  To cool the heat of Breckinridge's passionate oratory, a choir sang “We Will Cross over the River and Rest under the Shade of the Trees,” a mournful Lost Cause standard written by Sidney Lanier, based on the final words of General Stonewall Jackson:

  Thou land whose sun is gone, thy stars remain!

  Still shine the words that miniature his deeds.

  O thrice-beloved, where'er thy great heart bleeds,

  Solace hast thou for pain!

  After a respectful silence for the sentiment of the hymn, Boyd stepped to the podium to introduce Addie Graves. The clubwoman would preside over the next part of the ritual.21

  As in centuries past, women took care of the war dead.

  In one of the hundreds of mostly forgotten battles of the Civil War, a Union force met three Confederate brigades on a rainy January morning in 1862 near Mill Springs in Pulaski County, Kentucky. By the end of the day, more than two hundred men lay dead on the ground of a small meadow. The bodies were separated—blue on one side, gray on the other—and hastily buried as the armies moved on to other killing fields.

  After the war, Federal employees returned to Pulaski County to disinter the Union dead. Some of the remains were shipped back to the soldiers’ homes; the rest were reburied in individual plots of a neat cemetery. The Confederate dead remained in their mass grave, covered with earth, stone, and logs, largely forgotten.22

  But a child who grew up in a cabin adjacent to the battlefield didn't forget.

  Each spring, as others gathered at the nearby cemetery to honor Federal dead, Dorothea Burton collected roses from her mother's garden, fresh fern branches, and mountain flowers to lay in tribute on the brushy mound that marked the Confederate mass grave. Year after year she enlisted others to join her, and they brought still others, until Dorothea's annual decoration of the burial pit and its nameless dead became a regular community event.23

  Throughout the postwar South, women memorialized their lost sons, husbands, and fathers. Recalling ancient tradition, the women marked soldiers’ graves with flowers, then later erected monuments to Confederates living and dead. This memorial work continued a tradition of volunteerism demonstrated by Southern women during the Civil War. While men fought, their wives, daughters, and mothers formed hospital associations, sewing circles, relief societies, and food lines in towns and villages throughout Kentucky.

  Women of South Carolina claim to have organized the first formal postwar memorial society. Members of the Charleston Ladies Memorial Association walked to the city cemetery under the hostile glares of occupying Federal troops in May 1865 to decorate the fresh graves of their Confederate dead. Memorialization was an activity that could be restrained by only the most callous of military authorities during Reconstruction, and springtime tributes at Confederate gravesites proliferated throughout the South. By 1868, when the United States designated a national Memorial Day, hundreds of Southern communities were already celebrating a Confederate Decoration Day on the last weekend of May or the first weekend of June.24

  As local economies recovered, civic organizations, often driven by women, began to commission formal monuments to their Confederate dead. More than three thousand ladies’ memorial associations—many in Kentucky—would sprout throughout the South to honor Confederate dead in the decades following the war.

  Kentucky's earliest Civil War monument was erected in Cynthiana in 1869. The Cynthiana Confederate Memorial Association installed a twenty-five-foot-tall marble obelisk on the grounds of the city cemetery and surrounded it with the graves of forty-eight Confederate dead from seven states.25

  It was in the Lexington Cemetery, however, not far from where Boyd's Confederate Veteran Association statue would be unveiled twenty years later, that the Ladies Memorial and Monument Association of Lexington in 1874 placed one of the most touching memorial statues of the period. The memorial sits on a pedestal carved to look like a pile of stones. Atop the base stands a rough-hewn Christian cross of logs; a broken flagstaff and drooping banner leans against the cross. The monument, with its themes of death and mourning, evokes the feeling of sadness and loss that drove Kentucky's earliest memorialization efforts.

  By the 1890s, however, firsthand memory of the war years was fading. A new generation of women, daughters of ex-Confederates and the Confederate dead, turned from the personal grief symbolized by a broken flagstaff and drooping banner to a celebration of the valor and constancy of their living veterans and the mythology of the Lost Cause.

  Addie Graves had the personality, inclination, and household income necessary to be an active clubwoman.

  By the end of the century, Kentucky women, even in the smaller towns, were enjoying increased leisure and prosperity. A woman with a new indoor cast-iron cookstove and the ability to fill a mop bucket without having to draw water from a well had more time to contribute to the social needs of her community. Women's clubs dedicated to increasing literacy, improving health care, reforming prisons, preserving heritage, and promoting temperance were forming all over Kentucky. (In 1895 women of Lexington would form the Kentucky Federation of Clubwomen to help coordinate the good works of all these women's organizations.)

  Addie Graves was a one-woman civic organization: a preacher's daughter brought up with a natural gregariousness and a proclivity for involvement in social causes. Her social skills were faultless, she wrote a good hand, and her stationery was exquisite. Addie Graves was active in a dozen clubs and organizations where, depending on the need, she could lead with grace or follow with enthusiasm.

  Addie was married to James M. Graves, chief operating officer of Lexington's City National Bank. Their children were grown, but she and her husband cared for his ninety-six-year-old mother. James, a Confederate veteran, seldom spoke of his military service. His mother, Polly, however, spoke often of the two sons she had lost to the war.26 John Boyd had honored the elderly Polly Graves and her contributions several times, so when Boyd asked her daughter-in-law Addie to assist the Lexington veterans’ organization, the younger woman accepted.27

  In 1893 Addie Graves was president of the Honorary Confederate Veteran Association and was responsible for Lexington's Decoration Day ceremonies.

  “It is hoped all will exert themselves in bringing all the flowers which they can possibly spare,” she wrote in a newspaper announcement published the day before the ceremonies. As she sat at the podium on Decoration Day in her china silk dress, she was surrounded by blossoms and greenery.

/>   After the hymn and Boyd's introduction, Addie Graves nodded at the choir, which began to sing “Rest, Comrades, Rest.” Thirteen young girls, each one the daughter of a Confederate veteran, came forward and took bouquets of flowers from around the podium and began decorating the nearby graves of Confederate soldiers. The crowd was still as the choir sang and the girls spread blossoms around the gravesites or wove greenery around the headstones.

  The choir then began “Nearer My God to Thee,” and the vast audience joined in. Members of the crowd picked up flowers and, still singing, walked off to join the girls in decorating more graves.

  When the flowers were gone and the hymn was complete, John Boyd, Addie Graves, the veterans, the dignitaries, and the crowd walked silently through the gathering twilight and out the gates of Lexington Cemetery.

  Confederate veterans’ organizations were men's clubs, the price of admission being honorable military service to the Confederate States of America. Despite their wartime and memorialization activities, women would never gain full membership in that elect group.

  Still, women did have a place in the veterans’ organizations.

  On behalf of Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky, John Leathers invited “any … woman whose sympathies were with the South during the struggle, or the wives and children of Confederate soldiers and sailors” into an auxiliary organization. John Boyd also appealed to the wives, sons, and daughters of veterans to become honorary members of his Confederate Veteran Association.28

  Women were invited to participate in the various brigade and regimental reunions (usually as hostesses), but they were limited to “honorary” or “auxiliary” status in Kentucky's two main veterans’ groups. “Fifty young ladies, principally the daughters of ex-Confederates, clad in white dresses with red sashes over their shoulder, will take upon themselves the duty of serving the veterans at the table,” organizers of a Kentucky Orphan Brigade reunion announced in 1889.29