Synopses & Reviews
Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve and rebury the remains of Confederate soldiers scattered throughout the region. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers, nearly 28 percent of the 260,000 Confederate soldiers who perished in the war. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women's place in the historical narrative by exploring their role as the creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition between 1865 and 1915.
Although not considered "political" or "public actors," upper- and middle-class white women carried out deeply political acts by preparing elaborate burials and holding Memorial Days in a region still occupied by northern soldiers. Janney argues that in identifying themselves as mothers and daughters in mourning, LMA members crafted a sympathetic Confederate position that Republicans, northerners, and, in some cases, southern African Americans could find palatable. Long before national groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for lost Confederates. Janney's exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.
Review
"Janney's thoughtful study helps the Ladies to claim their rightful place in the history of Confederate memory making. Her lively stories of their hard-fought campaigns to build some of the most notable monuments of the state likewise make this an entertaining and valuable addition to the history of southern women's activism after the war."
-Virginia Magazine
Review
"[An] impressive book. . . . Highly recommended."
-Choice
Review
"Sheds light on a previously obscure part of southern women's history. . . . Convincingly demonstrates that women continued to participate in a civic role after the fall of the Confederacy."
-Virginia Quarterly Review
Review
"Janney has succeeded in crafting a thoughtful study that illuminates a little known area of the formation of the Lost Cause ideology."
-South Carolina Historical Magazine
Review
"A well-documented study of this unique women's movement after the Civil War. Any serious student of the Civil War or Reconstruction should be aware of the powerful arguments extended by Janney."
-On Point
Review
"[An] impressive book. . . . Highly recommended."
-Choice
Review
"Janney's fine monograph is grounded in an impressive body of archival material supported by a very strong command of a wide array of secondary source literature."
-Southern Historian
Review
"This clearly written and well-researched book definitely deepens our understanding of the earliest roots of Confederate memorialization and the Lost Cause."
-Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Review
[S]mart, well-researched, well-written, and well-argued . . .
-Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine, coeditor of The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture
Review
"This excellent and well-written book illuminates the work of an important group in the South's Lost Cause movement."
-American Historical Review
Review
"[This] excellent study speaks to a significant gap in the literature of southern cultural memory, gender, and Reconstruction. Not only is it a must read for anyone working in those areas, but it is a key contribution to the study of women and gender in this period."
-Journal of American History
Review
"While this book is necessary exploration into the political relationship between [Ladies' Memorial Associations] and the Lost Cause, it also reveals that there is work to be done on the emotional and political implications of death and memorialization in the postwar South. Certainly,
Burying the Dead but not the Past is an important opening salvo in that broader conversation."
-Bowtied and Fried
About the Author
Caroline E. Janney is assistant professor of history at Purdue University.
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1 Patriotic Ladies of the South: Virginia Women in the Confederacy
2 A Fitting Work: The Origins of Virginia's Ladies' Memorial Associations, 1865-1866
3 The Influence and Zeal of Woman: Ladies' Memorial Associations during Radical Reconstruction, 1867-1870
4 A Rather Hardheaded Set: Challenges for the Ladies' Memorial Associations, 1870-1883
5 The Old Spirit Is Not Dying Out: The Memorial Associations' Renaissance, 1883-1893
6 Lest We Forget: United Daughters and Confederated Ladies, 1894-1915
Epilogue: A Mixed Legacy
Appendix
Table A.1. Confederate Burials in LMA Cemeteries from Five Virginia Communities
Table A.2. Number of LMA Members in Five Virginia Communities, 1860s
Notes
Bibliography
Index