Quotes from Gaines M. Foster

Memorial activities during the first two decades after the war increased the importance of the voice of the Confederate dead—gave authority to the ghosts of the Confederacy. But the South had not yet decided who would speak for the ghosts of the Confederacy and to what larger purpose.

Calls for federal compensation for their freed slaves suggested that such confidence was not simply braggadocio in the face of the Yankees. Southerners still sincerely believed slavery a matter of property rights, not the immoral expropriation of the life and labor of another human being.7

Indeed, many defeated Confederates consoled themselves that all had been lost save honor. Certainly, most wanted and needed to believe that was the case. Yet the code of honor in the Old South had made personal bravery and oath-taking central to a male's status.

Faced with defeat, they judged their actions against their consciences and ruled themselves righteous.

Dolly Blount Lamar of Macon, Georgia, remembered as a little girl spending Sunday afternoons in the local graveyard with her father who "would read [her] the tombstone inscriptions and discourse on the dead with considerable pomp and oratory."13