The Confederate Cemetery at UVA is contiguous with the university graveyard and serves as a constant reminder of UVA as a Confederate institution, embodying the Lost Cause memory strand present in Charlottesville.
A video of the University of Virginia Cemetery, with the Confederate Cemetery showcased from 0:50-1:11. Note the Confederate flags on display in front of the monument.
ORIGIN/BACKGROUND
Confederate cemeteries were usually organized by state as a result of the state pride that accompanied the Confederate banner of states’ rights. However, the UVA cemetery isn’t separated by state, with soldiers buried simply in the order that they died. This is a result of the fact that UVA became a vast hospital complex during the war thanks to Charlottesville’s centrality as a railroad junction and its close proximity to major battle sites. The Confederate Cemetery did not begin as a memorial, but rather as a practical way of dealing with the dead bodies that were piling up on Grounds. It served as the burial place for 1,097 soldiers who died in the Charlottesville General Hospital from July 1861 to 1865. This included 82 confederate soldiers from Alabama, 13 from Florida, 224 from Georgia, 84 from Louisiana, 4 from Maryland (a border state), 69 from Mississippi, 200 from North Carolina, 161 from South Carolina, 10 from Tennessee, 12 from Texas, 192 from Virginia, 29 whose states are uncertain, and 17 from unknown states. None of these men were UVA students or faculty, except for General Carnot Posey, who was ultimately not even buried in the soldiers’ section but instead interred in the family plot of a friend in the regular UVA cemetery. Union dead were also buried there until 1866, when Union burial corps moved them to Culpeper.
LADIES MEMORIAL ASSOCIATIONS
In 1866, after the Civil War had ended, a group of Charlottesville women, most of whom had cared for sick and wounded soldiers during the war, started the Albemarle Chapter of the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association (LMA). This LMA played a major role in preserving the historical memory of the cemetery. These women recorded the names, states, regiments, and other information of those who had died, and they transferred the information onto rough wood markers that were placed at the head of each grave. The women also collected $1,500, which they used to build a stone wall around the cemetery. In general, LMAs were an outlet for Southern women’s Confederate patriotism through memorial activities, fostering a sense of white southern solidarity and Confederate nationalism. They had the responsibility to keep alive the Confederate cause and memory, and their gender shielded them from accusations of treasonous political undertakings. Ultimately, the LMAs created a permanent reminder of the Confederate war effort through their cemeteries and set in motion Lost Cause traditions through their memorial efforts.
By 1890, the Confederate Cemetery at UVA was in dismal condition: the wooden headboards had decayed and the cemetery itself was overgrown and unkempt. Distressed by the unsightly condition of the cemetery, the LMA spearheaded a three-year reclamation effort. In order to raise funds to “embellish with turf and flowers the neighboring burial place where so many hundreds of those who defended [them] repose,” the LMA hosted various events, such as a “Fair and Supper.” They argued that “these men died for the South and for a cause that was sacred to [their] people,” and thus deserved proper memorialization. Mrs. Charles S. Venable, the leader of the memorial association, sent an appeal for funds to all the states having soldiers in the cemetery, emphasizing southern solidarity. “The United States Government spends great sums in protecting and beautifying the graves of the Federal dead,” Mrs. Venable’s letter announced. “Our dead are as sacred to us, and though we cannot build such beautiful cemeteries or splendid monuments, we can, without great pecuniary sacrifice, at least keep their graves green and rescue their names from oblivion.” Acknowledging the efforts that the national government was taking to preserve the Union dead, the LMAs took upon the same role for themselves regarding their own dead. As historian John R. Neff explained, “the drive toward honoring the lives and deaths of Union soldiers [seemed] to have necessitated…the neglect of the Confederate soldier dead,” which motivated Southern efforts to memorialize their own soldiers. Civic organizations such as the LMAs gave many Confederate soldiers a respectable burial at a time when little financial support was provided by the northern government. This was ultimately part of a larger campaign to better maintain Confederate cemeteries and ensure their preservation and memorialization into the future.
Fundraising Letters from the Albemarle LMA
MONUMENT TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
The most noticeable feature of the cemetery is the tall statue in the middle, which came courtesy of the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association in 1893 as a culmination of their intense restoration efforts. It is an eight foot bronze statue that rests on a twelve foot high gray granite pedestal. The statue depicts a young Confederate soldier, holding his hat and with his rifle at the rest position. Bronze plaques on all four sides of the monument list the names of those buried there. On the base of the statue is a stone inscription that reads, “Fate denied them victory but crowned them with glorious immortality.” This phrase is a clear example of Lost Cause ideology and the glorification of Confederate soldiers for their supposedly righteous cause.
The monument was dedicated on June 7, 1893. The program for the dedication ceremony included instructions for an elaborate, military-style procession, followed by the playing of “Dixie” while the Confederate flag was raised once they reached the cemetery. On the day of the dedication, University students and faculty joined Charlottesville community members and Confederate veterans in a march from downtown to the monument, where a former Confederate major then delivered a speech supporting the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War. Major Robert Stiles asserted in his oration that the war was really about states’s rights, not slavery, and he also spent much of his speech extolling the virtues of Lee and Jackson, both of which are key tenets of Lost Cause rhetoric. Additionally, Stiles highlighted UVA’s participation in the war and the sacrifice made by its valiant soldiers. Such a celebration reveals how little had changed in the nearly thirty years since the Civil War as the South continued to embrace the Confederacy wholeheartedly, as if it had never lost.
CONTROVERSY IN RECENT YEARS
Interestingly, when doing research on the Confederate Cemetery, I learned that it has actually still been used relatively recently as a meeting spot for Confederate heritage groups. In 2012, members of Albemarle Chapter 154 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy met with the Sons of Confederate Veterans to hold a Memorial Day service at the site. They had a speaker for the event, Rob Craighurst, who gave a talk focusing on the Charlottesville General Hospital during the Civil War. Re-enactors in period garb also participated in the Memorial Day events. It's unclear whether such Confederate Memorial Day celebrations have occurred at the cemetery in more recent years, but I'm not sure if such a gathering on Grounds is entirely appropriate or accurately reflects the values or beliefs that the University wants to endorse.
Another controversy occurred in mid-June of this year, when entrances to the Confederate Cemetery were barricaded and locked in the wake of national protests calling for racial justice. This move to temporarily restrict access to the cemetery reflected a national reckoning with Confederate monuments around the country. Although the university made a statement claiming these steps were taken out of concern for personal safety due to uncertainties about the “structural integrity” of the statue, many saw the actions as indicative of the University’s broader priorities in seeking to protect the Confederate Cemetery.
UPD Chief Tim Longo said the barricades were erected out of concern that an incident could occur in which a vehicle could potentially be used to bring down the statue, but such a move inherently recognizes the fact that the monument can be seen as racist in the first place. This connection between the controversial monument and current events is not new either. In August 2018, a day after the Confederate ‘Silent Sam’ monument had been toppled by protesters at the University of North Carolina, there was a University Ambassador guarding the statue in the UVA Cemetery. This assignment also implied that the university grasped, on some level, that some might view the statue as racist and thus try to tear it down.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The fact that no Confederate soldiers buried in the UVA cemetery actually possess a connection to the university is striking. It begs the question, why does such a space exist on university property? Does knowing who paid for the monument change how we view it? How do spaces like these, even if overlooked and “hidden in plain sight”, serve to contribute to the glorification of Confederate memory? Although I think the cemetery is harmless, the Confederate monument in the middle deserves reconsideration and better recontextualization. What role does such a monument have on Grounds today, and what message does it send to first-year students of color who are forced to walk by such a symbol glorifying the Confederate cause every day on their way to class? It’s surprising how little the University does to acknowledge such a space and the harm it may cause to students. I lived in the Alderman Road Dorms both as a first-year and as an RA second-year, which means I walked by the Confederate Cemetery everyday for two whole years without noticing it or realizing what it represented.
On the other hand, I also want to acknowledge a point brought up by Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor of religious studies at UVA, who argues that it’s important to draw a distinction between the Confederate monument in the cemetery and the ones in downtown Charlottesville glorifying the Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Schmidt argues that “[the cemetery monument] is doing different work because of its placement and because of its design.” She explains that the earliest LMA Confederate monuments were associated with mourning and remembering the dead, but the rise of the United Daughters of the Confederacy led to the migration of Confederate statues out of cemeteries and into the public square, where they became symbols of reverence rather than simply remembrance. Although the LMAs and the UDC were two distinct organizations founded at different times, it’s also important to recognize their similarities in promoting a vision of the South founded on the principles of white supremacy
I think the reason the Confederate monument hasn’t been a major controversy yet is because it is out of the way and unnoticed for the most part. However, as Justin Greenlee, a recent PhD graduate in Art History from the University, wrote in an analysis of the statue, the Confederate soldier at UVA can be forgotten only “by those with the privilege of such forgetting.” This just goes to show how easy it is for the University to brush aside its history as a predominantly white institution and neglect to confront its past when it’s not a pressing issue being brought to attention by students. Greenlee goes on to argue that “if the statues of Lee and Jackson in Emancipation and Justice Parks deserve our attention; if the statue of a Confederate soldier in Court Square deserves our attention; if plaques bearing the names of Confederate soldiers on the Rotunda deserve our attention; then the statue of the infantryman in the Confederate cemetery at UVA also deserves our attention.” He asserts that these Confederate monuments “continue to be fixtures of white institutions that fail to listen to — and often denigrate — their minority populations,” a symbol of grievances that continually fall on deaf ears.
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