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An Excerpt From Digging Up The Dead; A History of Notable American Reburials

Michael Kammen's new book from the University of Chicago Press explores the grave sites, among others, of Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis (below) and Abraham Lincoln.

"Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America from February 1861 until its collapse in April 1865, died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889, at the age of eighty-one. Five days later, following a frenzy of local and regional arrangements, Confederate veterans and many others packed an immense procession that accompanied the body to Metairie Cemetery for what turned out to be temporary burial in a vault guarded round the clock, awaiting a decision about the erstwhile CSA president’s permanent interment. Bells tolled from every church tower in New Orleans to accompany the long and solemn parade to Metairie. The issue of his final resting place, however, had actually begun on the very day that Davis died and swiftly became what we now call a'hot button issue.' Although his reputation revived during the 1880s, he had been reviled by white Southerners after the Confederacy fell and he fled from Richmond only to be apprehended by Federal troops in Georgia. During his lingering last illness he wisely said to his wife, Varina, 'You must take the responsibility of deciding this question, I cannot — I foresee [that] a great deal of feeling about it will arise when I am dead.' "

"Davis understood the delicate situation all too well. Southern press coverage of his death signaled swelling admiration and pride in the former leader — utterly inconceivable less than a generation earlier, at the time of unbearable defeat. Six Southern cities each hoped to 'host' the body into eternity, above all Montgomery, Alabama, where Davis had reluctantly assumed the presidency, and they all intensively lobbied the quickly created Jefferson Davis Memorial Association (JDMA). The decision belonged entirely to Varina and her children, however, and they waited more than eighteen months before choosing a prime site at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, where the Davises had lived for four years and where a great many honored Southern dead already lay buried. The civic leaders of New Orleans, feeling bitter disappointment at surrendering a prized symbol of states’ rights and resistance to Northern aggression, decided to build a monumental memorial to Davis that would equal in scale the ones already erected to Abraham Lincoln in Springfield and just recently conceived for Ulysses S. Grant in New York City. Their ambition, however, wildly exceeded their collective or potential purse."

"Necessary fund-raising and the complexity of related preparations meant that the Richmond reburial would finally be scheduled for May 31, 1893. On May 27 Davis’s coffin was removed from the Metairie vault and opened to make certain that the JDMA really had the right body, which then was placed in a brand-new hand-carved coffin and loaded onto a specially designed railroad car with oversized glass windows. A mournfully decorated locomotive hauled the ensemble of passenger cars. Each step in this meticulously planned event was taken, as the press reported, with 'every possible mark of respect.' That word will recur in many episodes in the chapters that follow. Relocation and reburial (or 'translation' of a body, to use the traditional, Latin-derived word) are invariably all about the resurgence of the reputation of and hence respect for someone whose lamp and visage had dimmed in some way."

"As the leading authority on Davis’s demise has observed, 'Southerners grew increasingly anxious as the departure date neared for what was expected to be one of the most elaborate and ceremonious funeral processions in American history.' Intensifying the precedent and coverage of Davis’s death in December 1889, newspapers across the South and quite a few in the North reported every step in lavish detail. Many sent their top reporters to accompany the special train on its mournful but politicized mission to the Old Dominion’s distinctively honorific grave."

"The train coursed along at a top speed of sixty-two miles per hour, slipping smoothly across and then sloping eastward down the Piedmont like a child’s coiled Slinky, pausing at major state capitals so that the coffin could be viewed for a few hours by dignitaries and large throngs of worshipful citizens. In Atlanta, the delegations from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi failed to adjust from Central Time, which had only recently been regularized, so thirty members of the honor entourage accompanying the cortège were unhappily left behind when the train departed at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The embarrassed laggards caught up in Greensboro, North Carolina, on a regular train. Even though Southern pride was displayed with Confederate flags throughout the journey, talk of the bygone secession was already giving way to sentiments favoring national reconciliation. Although that seems to have been most true in progressive Atlanta, capital of the New South, it was manifest elsewhere as well. As early as 1886 one former Southern general had referred to the 'circle of a new nationality.' Others soon echoed that refrain."

Read the rest of the excerpt from the book at the University of Chicago Press site.

An Excerpt From Digging Up The Dead; A History of Notable American Reburials

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