Two new books grapple with such questions by examining the rich subject of American funerals in the 19th century. In LOVE AND DUTY: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (University of North Carolina, 224 pp., paper, $27.95), Angela Esco Elder describes how, among other things, widowhood arrived fast and hard for many Southern women during the Civil War. For example, Hetty Cary married the Confederate colonel John Pegram in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Va., on Jan. 19, 1865. Three weeks to the day later, she attended his funeral in the same building.
For some, the status of bereavement passed quickly. Fannie Franklin Hargrave wed in the middle of the war, lost her husband and, 19 months later, married again. Other women became almost professional widows, making what Elder calls “a postwar career” of it. Flora Cooke Stuart, who had been married to J. E. B. Stuart, the flamboyant cavalry commander, dressed herself in mourning for 59 years. Mary Anna Jackson, the widow of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, became a stalwart of the Lost Cause, publishing a popular memoir of him and supporting Confederate organizations.
Interestingly, notes Elder, a historian at Converse University in South Carolina, memorializing the Confederate dead was controversial after the war, but not for the reasons it is being scrutinized today. Rather, the question then was whether public funds should be spent on erecting memorials or instead be dedicated to supporting the impoverished widows and children of the dead.
Honoring the Black dead from the Civil War also has been a fraught issue. For example, in the 1950s, to make way for a shopping center, the city of Baltimore paved over parts of a cemetery where Black veterans of the Civil War had been interred. What ultimately happened to their bodies isn’t clear.
More prominently, an effort to have the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass lie in state in the U.S. Capitol in 1895 was stymied. In SPECTACLE OF GRIEF: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina, 352 pp., paper, $34.95), Sarah J. Purcell, a historian at Grinnell College, examines the funerals of Douglass and eight other prominent 19th-century Americans. Burials and memorial services ostensibly were nonpartisan but often were used to try to define the war’s legacy, she notes. For example, Robert E. Lee’s death in 1870 provoked a controversy about whether the flag of the United States should be lowered to honor a man who had waged war against the nation. Of course it should, many felt, with a West Virginia newspaper hailing him as “the Greatest American.”
