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.
