Two new books grapple with such questions by examining the rich subject matter 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 during the Civil War came quickly and hard for many Southern women. For example, Hetty Cary married Confederate Colonel John Pegram on January 19, 1865, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. Three weeks later, she attended his funeral in the same building.
For some, the state of mourning passed quickly. Fannie Franklin Hargrave married in the middle of the war, lost her husband and remarried 19 months later. Other women almost became professional widows, turning it into what Elders called “a post-war career.” Flora Cooke Stuart, who had been married to JEB Stuart, the flamboyant cavalry commander, dressed in mourning for 59 years. Mary Anna Jackson, the widow of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, became a Lost Cause stalwart, published a popular memoir of his and supported Confederate organizations.
Interestingly, Elder, a historian at Converse University in South Carolina, notes that commemorating the Confederate dead was controversial after the war, but not for the reasons under scrutiny today. Rather, the question was whether public funds should be spent on erecting memorials or instead on supporting the impoverished widows and children of the dead.
Honoring the Black Civil War dead was also a fraught issue. For example, in the 1950s, to make way for a shopping center, the city of Baltimore paved parts of a cemetery where black Civil War veterans were buried. It is not clear what eventually happened to their bodies.
More strikingly, an attempt to have the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass lie in state in the US Capitol in 1895 was thwarted. In SPECTACLE OF GREF: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina, 352 pp., paper, $34.95), Grinnell College historian Sarah J. Purcell examines the burials of Douglass and eight other prominent 19th-century Americans. Funerals and commemorations were ostensibly impartial, but were often used to define the legacy of the war, she notes. For example, the death of Robert E. Lee in 1870 sparked a controversy over whether the flag of the United States should be lowered in honor of a man who had waged war on the nation. Of course, many thought it should be with a West Virginia newspaper hailing him as “the greatest American.”