Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations & the Lost Cause (review)

Abstract

J U L Y 2 0 0 9 227 Integration of the football team in the early 1970s happened so seamlessly that readers might forget that this was George Wallace’s Alabama. Yet African American players such as Heisman winner Bo Jackson opened a new era of Auburn gridiron heroes. Only one receives bad press from Hemphill: Eric Ramsey, a fifth-year cornerback, who had the audacity to record Coach Pat Dye’s illegal offers (leading to Dye’s resignation). That said, A Tiger Walk Through History is well worth the price and not just because of Hemphill’s narrative. The volume is a quality product, evident from the heavy glossy pages to the numerous illustrations. Readers will delight in the many photos, images of game programs, newspaper clippings, sidebar pages devoted to memories of former students and staff, and appendixes, all designed to advance and illuminate the narrative . A lot of effort went into this volume; it deserves a place on library shelves as well as on coffee tables. JOHN SAYLE WATTERSON James Madison University Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations & the Lost Cause. By Caroline E. Janney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xiii, 290 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3176-2. The scholarship on the Confederate Lost Cause has grown considerably in the last few decades, incorporating the actions of both men and women who celebrated the failed Confederacy. Many of the scholars in this field, however, have looked to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a national organization created in 1894, in order to explain women’s participation in the Lost Cause. For Caroline Janney, this focus is misplaced. In her book Burying the Dead but not the Past, Janney intends to set the record straight about the creation of the South’s postwar culture by focusing on the women of the Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs). She argues convincingly that these women provided the very foundation for Confederate memorial efforts during the Civil War and then continued to shape Confederate memory throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth century, the years when the UDC came to prominence. In essence, the women of the LMAs gave birth to the Confederate Lost Cause and nurtured the movement even in the midst of challenges from within. Janney’s discoveries have important ramifications for how we understand not only the creation and development of the Lost Cause, but also T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 228 the behavior of southern white women in the postwar period. The white middle- and upper-class women in this study shifted easily from their work in soldiers’ aid societies to taking care of those who had died in battle. Their tasks went beyond the decoration of tombstones and the organization of memorial parades to include the rescue and reinterment of thousands of bodies in proper burial grounds, the construction of monuments to the Confederacy, the financial support of veterans and their families, and, in later years, the education of the next generation of southerners about the Confederate past. In her analysis of their behavior , Janney claims that the actions of LMA women as mourners were political and that because they were women, LMA members were effective in stoking Confederate nationalism even at the height of radical Reconstruction. Whereas white southern men were under the watchful eye of northern Reconstruction officials, women could surreptitiously keep the pro-Confederate spirit alive well after the Confederacy had ceased to exist, and do so with the full support of their chastened men. But once political circumstances allowed men to participate on their own in Confederate memorial efforts, the women of the LMAs did not change their behavior. Instead of yielding their leadership roles to men, as had been customary for southern women before the war and as some historians have claimed took place in the postwar years, these women held on, with motherly tenacity, to their control of the movement and rebuffed efforts by Confederate veterans’ groups to push them aside. In her research, Janney uses the rich records of seven LMAs from...