Burying The Dead But Not The Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations & The Lost Cause
By Caroline E. Janney
(April 2009 Civil War News)

Illustrated, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, index, 290 pp., 2008. The University of North Carolina Press, 116 S. Boundary St., Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808, $35 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Michael Russert
Michael Russert, a member of the North Shore Round Table of Long Island and the Company of Military Historians, has a MALS plus 60 hours in American Studies. He is Coordinator of The New York State Veteran Oral History Program.

Review:
The Southern artist William D. Washington immortalized the death of Confederate cavalryman Capt. William D. Latane in what became one of the iconic historic paintings of the Confederacy. “The Burial of Latane,” completed in 1864, was transposed into a popular engraving. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust observed this painting depicted “blacks and women uniting the home front in support of the nation’s divine mission.”

This was a harbinger of the role played by elite and middle-class white women who, through the Ladies’ Memorial Associations, gradually created what would be known as the Lost Cause.

Caroline E. Janney’s Burying The Dead But Not The Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations & The Lost Cause is the first full-scale study of these neglected organizations and their function in Southern postwar history.

Professor Janney has written the seminal study of the important, yet ignored, role of Southern white women as “the creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition between 1865 and 1915.”

As she notes in her introduction, “this book reveals the ways in which middle- and upper-class Southern white women of the Ladies’ Memorial Associations played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late-nineteenth century Virginia.”

While the associations existed throughout the South, Janney’s readable study primarily focuses on Virginia, in particular on five communities — Winchester, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Lynchburg and Richmond—as case studies.

 She challenges some of the previous conclusions drawn by such preeminent social historians of the Antebellum South and the Confederacy as George Rable and Drew Gilpin Faust.

Janney suggests Southern women directly after the war did not return to their antebellum roles. She states middle-class and elite Southern white women “…emerged from the war more active, both socially and politically.” These findings contradict the notion that Victorian women were indifferent to politics.

Burying The Dead But Not The Past uses a range of previously unpublished primary sources and published diaries and letters such as Mary Boykin Chesnut’s. Janney’s book is a thoughtful exploration of the postwar period. She reviews the histories of the various associations, their evolving place in the late-19th century, their conflicts with Jubal Early and emerging Southern organizations.

She especially analyzes the disputes surrounding the placement of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond and the reburial of Confederate dead from Gettysburg.

The Ladies’ Memorial Associations developed mourning rituals, established cemeteries for Confederate soldiers, scheduled and celebrated memorial days, and covertly challenged the tenets of Radical Reconstruction policies as they kept alive the Confederate identity that would eventually emerge as The Lost Cause concept.

Although the Ladies’ Memorials Associations, founded in 1867, predated the United Daughters of the Confederacy by some 30 years, the earlier organizations have been greatly ignored and forgotten. Often the UDC is mistakenly credited with many of the Ladies’ Memorial Associations’ accomplishments.

Burying The Dead Not The Past is highly recommended for its insight and straightforward narrative. It is a valuable addition to the growing number of serious studies of women’s service and dedication during and after the Civil War and their place in the preservation of memory following the war.

Janney’s conclusions are thought-provoking and offer a new perspective on the part played by Southern women during the postwar period.