Intimate Reconstructions by Catherine A. Jones

Author:Catherine A. Jones [Jones, Catherine A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780813936765
Google: E7TdBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2015-02-09T01:41:08+00:00

Saving Children and Memorializing the Past

Public appeals for support of Richmond’s orphan asylums in the wake of the war provided occasions for memorializing the Confederate past and projecting a postdefeat Confederate future. As orphan asylums expanded their institutional missions after the Civil War, they attempted to retrofit Virginians’ Confederate loyalties to new postwar purposes. Their supporters argued that existing public mechanisms for providing for orphans were acceptable for black children but inadequate for Confederate orphans. By elevating racial identity and history over localism as the foundation of the duty to assist poor children, Richmond’s orphan asylums helped to deepen racial difference in the treatment of orphans. The institutions’ calls for support suggest that Virginians’ postwar embrace of Confederate identity was less a story of continuity than adaptation.

As advocates for orphans appealed to the legacies of the Confederacy in their efforts to convince the public to take up support of vulnerable children, they gave it new life by attaching it to the immediate needs of women and children left vulnerable by the colossal failure of Confederate ambitions.36 Both men and women explicitly invoked the burdens of Confederate loss in their appeals to fellow citizens to support the orphan asylums. In “An Appeal to the Young Ladies of Richmond,” “Loyal” closed her request for donations of money and clothes with this reproach: “Remember your homes were defended in time of trouble by them that have sacrificed their lives upon the battle-field, and now you are enjoying that home, while the widows and orphans are forgotten.” She implied that the Confederate public had incurred a debt during the war that had now come due in the form of providing for Richmond’s implicitly white orphans.37 Another plea for support of Richmond’s orphan asylums appealed both to a sense of duty and pride: “Our Southern community must be really as barbarous as it is represented to be by those paragons of civilization, Wendell Phillips and Sumner, if it did not promptly, cordially, and effectually answer such appeals.”38 The failure to honor the obligations created by shared Confederate identity would constitute a moral defeat quick on the heels of a military one. In promoting a fundraising concert to establish a larger orphanage and school in Richmond to serve Confederate orphans from across the South, the Southern Orphan Association asserted that the needs of such children should galvanize white southerners. As the organizers explained, “Whatever may have been the relative political views of ladies and gentleman heretofore, all must agree that the children referred to, could not, by any possibility, have any agency in bringing about their present Deplorable and Destitute Condition, and are suitable objects for the charity of all persons whatever shade of political opinion.”39 The vulnerability and innocence of orphans proved useful for Virginians promoting a postnationalist Confederate identity.

In an 1869 public address on the occasion of the Richmond Male Orphan Asylum’s twenty-second anniversary, Major Robert Stiles, a Confederate veteran and committed supporter of the asylum, braided his historical anxieties into a call to conscience.

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