A new look at Memorial Day

When you think about it, Memorial Day is all about the male of the species (or has been, until the recent insertion of women into combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan).

And yet there is still a profound validity to the statement, “The men fight, the women remember.”

Purdue University history professor Caroline Janney, a native Virginian, has built a book and a groundbreaking theory around this truism, one with regional as well as gender implications.

The practice of Memorial Day did not begin, she discovered, with the leathernecks or the doughboys or even with the blue-clad victors in the American Civil War. Rather it began in the shattered and defeated cities of the South, springing from the pain of the widows.

“If Confederate men would have organized memorials to honor their fallen soldiers in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, it would have been considered treason against the United States,” Janney said. “Instead, women organized each event, and the men were figuratively hiding behind the skirts of these women. The memorial celebrations served as shields so that participants could simultaneously criticize the postwar government and praise their ‘Lost Cause.’ What many people don’t realize is that these women, who are often portrayed as politically indifferent, were motivated by politics, too.”

Janney’s book is called “Burying the Dead But Not the Cause: Ladies Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause,” and part of her research was done in Lynchburg.

Lynchburg’s modern incarnation of the Confederate Memorial Association is the group responsible for the renovation and transformation of Old City Cemetery, beginning with attention to the Confederate graves but then expanding to the cemetery as a whole. Under their care, it has blossomed into one of the showplace memorial gardens in the commonwealth, if not the nation.

Janney also looked at the history of Ladies’ Memorial Associations in Winchester, Fredericksburg, Petersburg and Richmond. At a time when the Confederate men wanted more than anything else to put the war behind them, she said in a recent telephone conversation, it was the women of the newly formed memorial associations who were responsible for finding and re-interring the remains of more than 72,000 southern MIAs.

The first antecedents of today’s Memorial Day, Janney discovered, took place in several Virginia cities early in 1866.

This would not sit well, probably, with the citizens of Waterloo, N.Y., considered the official birthplace of the holiday. That town observed what is credited as the first Memorial Day on May 5, 1866, a collaboration between Union Gen. John Murray (a Waterloo native) and Gen. John A. Logan, a proponent of Memorial Day nationwide. Janney believes the Southern Memorial Associations did it earlier.

There is even a place in her book for Gen. Jubal Early, the curmudgeonly unreconstructed rebel who moved to Lynchburg after the war and made the city one of the headquarters of the “Lost Cause” movement.

“After Reconstruction,” Janney said, “Early and some of the others thanked the ladies of the memorial associations for their work and said, ‘We can take it from here.’ And the women stood up to them. They said, ‘We’ve taken on this leadership role, and we’re going to keep it.”

Janney grew up in Luray, surrounded by reminders of the Civil War.

“I’m also a Triple Hoo,” she said, meaning a person who received her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree from the University of Virginia.

Her interest in the Ladies’ Memorial Associations rose out of her doctoral thesis.

“There is such a dual legacy about these women,” she said in a recent article on the Purdue University Web site, “and I’m really torn about how I feel about them. On one hand, I feel they are responsible for some of the racist sentiment that is attached to the Confederacy, and they put into motion this romanticized image of the Confederacy today.

“Yet these were incredibly high-spirited, passionate women who engaged in and fought for what they believed in.”