Decoration Day
There are no shortage of towns and individuals who lay claim to the founding of Decoration Day, or Memorial Day as it is now known, and frankly I have no insight into which claim is better than the others. But, I have lived in one of the towns to make such a claim, Petersburg, Virginia, and I thought that story worth sharing.
Standing at 126 S. Adams St. in Petersburg is the former home of Miss Nora Fontaine Davidson. Miss Davidson was the founder of a “Confederate School” in Petersburg dedicated to instructing students about “the true Cause” and honoring the Confederacy. This is not unusual, by the way. One can find Confederate textbooks and schools throughout the South for decades after the war. In fact, one of the primary missions of many United Daughters of the Confederacy groups was to weigh in on school curriculum, selecting texts that represented what we would call today, the Lost Cause mythology (the Lost Cause emphasizes states’ rights, and the honor and bravery of Confederate soldiers while neglecting to mention that the state right the Confederacy was most interested in protecting was the right to own other human beings as slaves).
In any case, starting in 1866 Miss Davidson took her students to the Confederate section of Blandford Cemetery to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. Mrs. Mary Logan, wife of Major General John Logan was traveling through Petersburg and took note of the decorated graves, and told her husband, then head of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Union army veteran’s group created after the war), what she had seen. It was then General Logan, through the GAR, that initiated Decoration Day as a national celebration.
Right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate, there stands the Petersburg claim to Memorial Day.
More compelling is the story found one-layer deeper than the Decoration Day claim, particularly when lensed through our modern-day discourse about Confederate monuments and memorials.
In a previous life, I gave custom tours of Civil War sites in and around the Richmond and Petersburg area. In each tour, there are instances in which a combination of story-telling and physical location come together to provide a “moment” where the lines of history and present-day merge, providing insight into both the past and present in a unique way. The City of Petersburg tour consistently provided two of those moments. One was in front of the Wallace House (still standing) where President Lincoln met General Ulysses S. Grant to smoke cigars on the front porch and discuss the end of the war. An excellent, though perhaps a bit dramatized, eye-witness account from one of Lincoln’s guards provides narration for the “moment.”
The second occurs at the previously mentioned Blandford Cemetery. I ended each of my City of Petersburg tours at Blandford Cemetery because the space represented not only a physical connection the past, but very tangibly represented how that past was being remembered.
Like all of Petersburg, Blandford Cemetery was impacted by the military campaign that raged around the city. Cemetery Hill was the objective of the Union army during the Battle of the Crater. The abandoned Blandford Church served as a field hospital during the campaign. One can even find headstones damaged by artillery fire throughout the old section of the cemetery. Most importantly, there are an estimated 30,000 unidentified Confederate soldiers buried in Blandford Cemetery, many of them dug up from area battlefields and re-interred by Ladies Memorial Associations, like the one co-founded by Miss Nora Davidson, our Decoration Day heroine.
When the Civil War began, the United States government, and the Confederate government for that matter, did not accept responsibility for the bodies of dead soldiers, relying on battlefield burials, and leaving it to individual families to identify and transport the remains of their loved ones. As the war progressed, however, the sheer volume of bodies made it impossible for the federal government to ignore these soldiers. Thus, the United States government established National Cemeteries, paying individuals to locate Union soldiers buried throughout the South, dig them up, and reinter them in National Cemeteries.
Confederate soldiers, however, were not permitted burial in National Cemeteries. It was left to individual states, many of which were entirely broke, and private organizations like the Ladies Associations to fill the void. They had a monumental task in front of them. Approximately 25% of white Southern men of military age were dead at the end of the Civil War.
The Ladies’ Memorial Association of Petersburg was founded in 1866 and is still active today, making it one of the oldest women’s groups in the United States. The City of Petersburg donated the land that comprises Memorial Hill, and the women of this group began the arduous task of moving the bodies of Confederate dead from the scattered graves. It took years, but eventually 30,000 unidentified Confederate soldiers were moved to this place, almost twice as many as can be found in the more famous Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. It is the largest Confederate burial ground that I know.
By the turn of the century, the re-internment effort was at its end, and the Lost Cause mythology had taken root, perpetuated in literature, speeches, and even those Confederate schools like the one at 126 S. Adams St. In 1901 the Lost Cause came to Blandford in a unique way, manifested by the transformation of Blandford Church into a Confederate chapel.
As part of that transformation, the Ladies Association wrote to every state in the Confederacy (plus Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky, though Kentucky refused to participate) requesting funds to create huge stained-glass windows personally designed and executed by Louis Comfort Tiffany (seriously, they are pretty amazing). In all, fifteen windows were placed. Visitors who walk through this chapel are awed by the stained glass, moved by the inscriptions bearing witness to the brave soldiers of the Confederacy, and remember the honor and sacrifice of the 30,000 soldiers buried beneath their feet – exactly what the Ladies Association intended.
And this is where the lines of past and present merge to give us questions and insight at the same time. Immersed in the historic Petersburg of 1861-1865 via the tour, and shaped by interpretation of that history at Blandford Cemetery and the Confederate Chapel, visitors leave the gates of Blandford Cemetery and are immediately struck by the incongruities of modern-day Petersburg.
This is a town ruined by the Civil War, and yet the Civil War is a primary, though under-utilized, resource (via tourism). This is a town with three of its four elementary schools named after Confederate generals, that serves a population that is around 75% African-American. This is a town defended at the Battle of the Crater by a slave-holding Confederate General named William Mahone, and a town that today is immediately adjacent to Virginia State University, a historically black college supported by former slave-holding Confederate General William Mahone. This is a town that was so beaten and economically depressed by the war that many of the structures soldiers knew in 1865 are still standing today; there was never enough money to replace them. And yet, this aesthetic is now a resource as movies like Lincoln and t.v. shows like Mercy Street and Turned use Petersburg as a set with all original pieces. You cannot turn a corner in Petersburg without running into a jumbled mess of the past and the present and our ever-changing interpretation of both. This is what makes history hard and incredibly valuable because history and memory and their sometimes contentious relationship with one another informs our decisions today.
History is memory and memory is history. The 30,000 bodies that Miss Nora Davidson took her school kids to visit are real – they are history worth remembering and studying. So too is the Lost Cause Confederate chapel. It is history worth remembering and studying because it helps us understand what some people were thinking and feeling when it was started in 1901, which informs how we reached this point of dissident collective memory today. History is complex – the same woman who may have inspired Memorial Day, the day we remember our soldiers who died in service to our country, is the same woman who helped create a Confederate chapel that makes no mention of the very issue that caused a war that led to the death of those 30,000 soldiers buried in Blandford Cemetery.
I started my tour at 126 S. Adams St. with Miss Nora Davidson’s Confederate School because I knew I would end it on Cemetery Hill, where history and memory collide with every visitor. All good history tours attempt to answer the same question – how and why did we get here? And you can’t answer that question by only looking at the external scars of history. You must also engage with the internal scars – how we remember. We are mesmerized by the physical scars – the trenches, the headstones, the remnants of that war, but it is the internal scars that are more pervasive.
Scars are evidence of wounds healed, but not gone. They are evidence of damage done. You can cover them and you can hide them, but they still exist. Better, I think, to let them be seen, discussed, and studied so we can better answer that question – how and why did we get here?
So on a day dedicated to remembering, let us try it with minds wide open.