"[T]hese things I have named are but the symbols of the thing for which I risk my life, symbols of the kind of life I love. For I am fighting for the old days, the old ways I love so much but which, I fear, are now gone forever, no matter how the die may fall. For, win or lose, we lose just the same." ~Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind1
Anna T. Murray to Charles Henry Hart, 4 June 1914
In this 1914 letter, Anna Murray explains to Charles Henry Hart how she came to own two paintings by Gilbert Stuart, one of America's most well-known portraitists. In the letter, she traces her family line through the Lee family and describes her childhood in Washington, DC.
Anna Thornton Miller Murray
Anna Thornton Miller was born into the Southern elite. Her mother, Virginia Collins Jones, was the great-granddaughter of Colonel Thomas Jones, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and was related to the Lees of Arlington. Her father, Dr. Thomas Miller, was the physician to President William Henry Harrison, president of the Washington D.C Board of Health, and established the first mental health hospital in that city, St. Elizabeth's Asylum for the Insane, as well as a children's hospital.2 Despite living in the nation’s capital, he remained loyal to Virginia and the South throughout his life. Anna's loyalty to the Confederacy would remain with her throughout a life dedicated to the preservation of its memory.
Anna Murray's Life in Washington, DC
In 1899, Virginia Miller, Anna’s younger sister, wrote Dr. Thomas Miller and His Times,3 collecting her recollections of her family’s life in Washington, DC. The sisters appear to have been quite close as there are several notices in the social pages of their visits to one another well into their old age, and Anna’s will lists Virginia as her primary heir.4 Virginia speaks idealistically of a carefree childhood, attending an exclusive girls' school and dance classes, gawking at Native Americans visiting the city to sign treaties, and having President Franklin Pierce pop in for a visit while on his morning walks. Dr. Miller “was the physician called in when needed by all the other occupants of the White House until Mr. Lincoln became President, when Dr. Robert King Stone was called in.”5
Dr. Miller’s Confederate sympathies during the Civil War did not waver, and the family seemed to walk precariously close to the line of treason against the United States without overtly crossing it. Virginia writes, “Our home was regarded as headquarters for Southern people during the war, and one time it was placed under strict surveillance, a mounted guard being on duty in front of it.”6 In May of 1863, Dr. Miller was sent South,7 arrested by Col. Baker, and subsequently released.8 Anna “worked continuously among the Confederate prisoners confined in the old capitol in Washington and at Point Lookout and Fort Johnson, where she earned the loving sobriquet, ‘angel of mercy.”9 Virginia maintained correspondences with Confederate soldiers held in Union prisons as far away as Ohio.10 Being that Anna was not married until after the war’s conclusion, it can be assumed that she spent the war living in her father’s DC home, fully immersed in Confederate culture.
After the war, the Miller home became a refuge for former Confederates when traveling to the nation’s capital. Again, being that Anna was not married, it can be assumed that she continued to live in her parents’ home and attended the dinners hosted by the family for Robert E. Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, James Longstreet, John B. Magruder, and John S. Mosby.11 Likewise, she may have provided comfort to Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, when she stayed with the Millers while visiting her husband during his imprisonment at Fort Monroe.12 On November 6, 1866, Anna married Judge Stirling Murray of Baltimore, who, despite being from Maryland, fought in the Confederate Army,13 and Dr. Miller purchased a home for the couple in Loudoun County, VA.14
"Thus, women supported chivalry to help men find meaning in their defeat in the Civil War. The resulting emphasis on conformity to gender roles in the South translated into an understanding of Southern identity itself, to describe the section one had only to describe the Southern lady and gentleman. Moreover, because that identity was based in Southern tradition, women looked to the past to reformulate their gender identity." ~Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Woman15
Anna Murray's Involvement with the United Daughters of the Confederacy
After her marriage, Anna’s dedication to the Lost Cause manifested itself through her involvement with The Loudoun Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Chartered on November 11, 1897, the 29th out of an eventual 198 chapters established in Virginia, Anna would lead its efforts to venerate the Old South for two decades.16 Although a rather small battle, the women of the Loudoun Chapter annually celebrated the Confederate veterans’ victory at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff with honorary events and commemorative pins. Likewise, they marked Robert E. Lee’s birthday by bestowing pins with “the bronze cross of honor given by the association for honorable service in the Confederate Army.”17 At the ceremony in 1902, Anna personally affixed each of the pins made from former Confederate cannons and featuring a wreath of laurels around the Southern stars and bars battle flag onto the lapels of the “gray-haired and tottering veterans.”18 The women’s influence and their self-acknowledged importance were evident in the placement of the wording displayed on the pins; on the top, each pin read, United Daughters Confederacy,” while on the bottom was written, “To the U.C. V.” (United Confederate Veterans).19 While balancing gender norms, the women of the UDC made it clear that while the war was lost by the men of the South, it would be salvaged by Southern women.
As the Loudoun pinning ceremony indicates, white women like Anna turned the glorification of the men of the Lost Cause into a tool to maintain the allusion of the demur Southern lady while also demonstrating the characteristics of the New Woman,20 “able to step outside the bounds of domesticity, stand atop the speakers’ platform at a veterans’ reunion, and still be admired for typifying tradition.”21 This was accomplished, in part, by linking the language of home with the re-establishment of the racial hierarchy fought for by the Confederacy. Mildred Lewis Rutherford, the Historian General of the UDC, made this point when she said, “The time has come when the South, the true home of the Anglo-Saxon race, which has stood for truth and honesty and righteousness in the past, should come back to the faith and principles for which their fathers stood.”22 This equating of home and racial hierarchy was reiterated by Rutherford’s successor, Laura Rose, when she created a primer for Mississippi schools entitled, The KKK. In it, she opined that people joined the Klan to protect white women from Black men and to provide for the “love and protection of the home.”23
When the ideological protection of the South became the protection of the concept of home, the space in which this occurred also became the gendered space of women. As Massey points out, “The construction of ‘home’ as a woman’s place has, moreover, carried through into those views of place itself as a source of stability, reliability and authenticity. Such views of place, which reverberate with nostalgia for something lost, are coded female.”24 Florence Barlow, the editor of the Lost Cause magazine, noted, “The rehabilitation… of the Southern States would have been impossible”25 without women. For their part, white men repaid these women by making the protection of Southern white womanhood the ballast of the Jim Crow South, thus legitimizing white women’s central role in Southern society while also giving them significant leverage.
With the ascension of the UDC, Southern white women took on the “custodianship of memory,”26 and to avoid a fixation on the Confederacy’s defeat, “emphasis was placed on the living, not graves and cemeteries.”27 This change is explained through Foucault’s concept of crisis heterotopias, which links places, specifically cemeteries, with moments of change or transition, “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis.”28 However, he notes that these crisis heterotopias can disappear and be replaced by heterotopias of deviation wherein “behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm.”29 This move is evident in the UDC’s transition from using the space of death with its focus on the loss endured by the Confederacy to the creation of a place of honor for a defeated army through the erection of Confederate monuments in public spaces.
Confederate memorials converted the Civil War from a series of events culminating in loss into a concept of the Lost Cause that constructed an imagined version of history that could outlast the events of Appomattox. As Truillot points out, “[T]he statements produced by most historians seemed often bland or irrelevant…[T]hose to whom history mattered most looked for historical interpretations on the fringes of academia when not altogether outside it.”30 These types of monuments, in the sheer scope of their placement which extended into Union states to the North and states that were not even in existence during the Civil War to the West, are a deviation from the norm because, as Foucault further explains, “a society, as history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society.”31 The UDC redefined the history of the Confederacy by relocating its commemoration from a crisis heterotopia to a heterotopia of deviation through the creation of a geographic site of mythological Lost Cause memory thereby linking in space the imagined glorious prospects of 1861 with the present and the future in an effort to recast both.
In the 1890s, the UDC made building monuments the first of its four organizational objectives, as the edifices both vindicated the South’s past, preserved the values and morality of the Lost Cause for future generations, and recast the Confederate soldier as a heroic individualist.32 These Southern white women made the same connection as Massey: “the social is spatially constructed too, and that makes a difference.”33 Local clubs oversaw the fundraising and construction of town memorials, which could be purchased for between $1,500 and $3,000 from commercial monument makers like The McNeel Marble Company, the self-proclaimed “largest monument dealers in the South.”34 The low cost of these lone soldiers or obelisks enabled the placement of memorials in hundreds of towns and cities. More prominent monuments, like those located at Shiloh, TN and Richmond, VA, were overseen by the national organization as they generally cost tens of thousands of dollars.35
Despite having no official voice in the government, Southern white women were often able to procure tax dollars for their projects. In 1892, the North Carolina Monumental Association received $10,000 for a commemorative sculpture in Raleigh from the Democratically controlled state legislature.36 When private fundraising faltered in 1895, the women requested a loan for an additional $10,000 from the state legislature; however, in the ensuing years, control of the General Assembly had transferred to the Fusionists. Although the bill was soundly defeated by a vote of 28 to 8 on February 23, it was reconsidered on February 28 and passed by a margin of 21 to 20 in the Senate and 60 to 38 in the House. Furthermore, the money was allocated as an appropriation instead of a loan. In the five days between the legislature's rejection and approval of the bill, the women organized a successful public relations campaign juxtaposing the passage of a resolution honoring the recently departed Frederick Douglass with the defeat of the bill put forth by white women. Their efforts resulted in bipartisan support, and upon the bill’s passage, the Raleigh News and Observer declared, “Blue and gray join in honoring Confederate dead.”37 This type of tenacity is what enabled the UDC to convince the United States government to pay for the reinterment of Confederate soldiers in section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery and to erect a Confederate memorial “on land that surrounded Arlington House, Robert E. Lee’s former home.”38 They also established a tradition wherein almost every president since 1903 has sent a commemorative wreath to that memorial on June 7th. Meanwhile, the bodies of Black Union Civil War veterans remained in section 27 because the burial ground continued to be segregated until 1948.39
Anna and the Loudoun members of the UDC likewise secured government funding to construct the Leesburg Confederate monument. The Loudoun Board of County Supervisors, at their July 1906 meeting, unanimously appropriated $500, the equivalent of over $17 thousand in 2023, to assist “in paying for the erection of a monument to the memory of the Confederate Soldiers of Loudoun County who served in the Confederate Army.”40 The appropriation was contingent upon the group raising the additional $2,500 to cover the cost of the memorial within fifteen months, which they did through book sales and a beautiful baby contest.41 In addition, the Board voted that the monument would “be erected in the Courthouse square in Leesburg.”42 When viewed through Lefabvre’s principle of space, this placement appears to have officially codified the linkage of the lived space of justice with an imagined space of Confederate glorification through the conceived space designed around the placement of the statue.
The Leesburg Confederate memorial, known as the Silent Sentinel, was not simply placed in the Courthouse Square; on May 28, 1908, it was unveiled with pomp and pageantry. The statue was the second commission of its kind completed by Frederick William Sievers, who would go on to sculpt the Virginia Memorial and the Robert E. Lee Memorial at Gettysburg, as well as the statue of General “Stonewall” Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. Approximately six thousand people attended the event, which swelled Leesburg’s population by over 300%. A team of oxen pulled a float upon which rode eleven girls dressed in red and white representing the eleven states of the Confederacy. After hosting the attendant Confederate veterans at a luncheon on the Courthouse Square, Anna bestowed Crosses of Honor to each of them. The speakers included Virginia Governor Claude A. Swanson and Senator John W. Daniel, and, in the symbolic gesture of passing this history on to the next generation, the statue was unveiled by four children representing the Confederate veterans and three chapters of the Daughters of the Confederacy.43
The celebration surrounding the unveiling was a necessary rite of passage to transform the space of the Courthouse Square into a repository of memory. Troulloit posits that this metamorphosis does not occur by happenstance:
"[T]he presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral or natural. They are created. As such, they are not mere presences and absences, but mentions or silences of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one 'silences' a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing.”44
Taking Truilloit’s points along with Lefabvre’s statements on Imagined Space, Foucoalt’s ideas on heterotopias, Massey and Flather’s accounts of gendered spaces, it becomes clear that the efforts of Anna Murray and the Loudoun chapter of the UDC to erect a Confederate memorial was not about remembering the past but rewriting it into an idealized allegory that justified an ideology rooted in Lost Cause mythology, racial hierarchy, and the veneration of white women.
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1 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (Bombay: MacMillan and Company Limited, 1957), 214..
2 Virginia Miller, “Dr. Thomas Miller and His Times,” Historical Society of Washington DC, 1900, 314, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40066758.
3Miller, “Dr. Thomas Miller and His Times.”
4 “Miss Virginia Miller, of Washington, Is Visiting Her Sister, Mrs. Sterling Murray,” Richmond Virginian, August 13, 1910, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=RIV19100813.1.3&srpos=20&e=-05-1865--08-1917--en-20--1--txt-txIN-Loudoun+%22Sterling+Murray%22-------; Anna T. Murray, “Will of Anna T. Murray,” November 22, 1917, Loundoun Courthouse.
5 Miller, “Dr. Thomas Miller and His Times,” 312.
6 Ibid., 315.
7 “To Be Sent South,” The Sentinel, May 23, 1863, Virginia Chronickle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=STN18630523.1.1&srpos=12&e=--1860---1875--en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22Dr+Thomas+Miller%22-------.
8 “The Property of Mr. Corcoran, The Banker,” The Sentinel, May 23, 1863, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=STN18630526.1.3&srpos=13&e=--1860---1875--en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22Dr+Thomas+Miller%22-------.
9 Mrs. John L. Gill, “In Memoriam: Mrs. Sterling Murray,” Confederate Veteran, 1918, Duke University Libraries, https://archive.org/details/confederateveter26conf/page/124/mode/2up.
10 William Henry Luse, “William Henry Luse to Virginia Miller,” September 21, 1864, https://sparedshared16.wordpress.com/2019/06/15/1864-william-henry-luse-to-virginia-miller/.
11 “Dinner to Confederate Generals,” The Daily Express, November 10, 1865, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TDE18651110.1.1&e=--1860---1875--en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22Dr+Thomas+Miller%22-------; “The Latest News By Telegraph,” The Wheeling Intelligencer, November 8, 1865, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TWDI18651108.1.3&srpos=4&e=--1860---1875--en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22Dr+Thomas+Miller%22-------.
12 “Mrs. Jefferson Davis in Town,” The Baltimore Sun, May 25, 1866, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/senate-reconstruction-mrs-jefferson-davis-town/docview/533813996/se-2?accountid=14541; Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America : A Memoir, vol. 2 (New York: Belford Company, Publishers, 1890), 768, https://archive.org/details/jeffersondavisex02davi/page/n9/mode/2up.
13 “Married,” The Alexandria Gazette, November 8, 1866, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=AG18661108.1.2&srpos=5&e=--1860---1875--en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22Dr+Thomas+Miller%22-------.
14 Stirling Murray, “$50 Reward,” The Alexandria Gazette, June 10, 1871, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=AG18710610.1.3&srpos=6&e=-05-1865--08-1917--en-20--1--txt-txIN-Loudoun+%22Stirling+Murray%22-------.
15 Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 18..
16Essie Wade Butler Smith, History of the Virginia Divisions United Daughters of the Confederacy: 1865-1967 (United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1968).
17“An Impressive Scene,” Norfolk Landmark, January 25, 1902, Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TNL19020125.1.6&srpos=5&e=-05-1865--08-1917--en-20--1--txt-txIN-Loudoun+%22Stirling+Murray%22-------.
19 Ibid.
20 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, 2019 Kindle edition with new preface, New Perspectives on the History of the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 41–43.
21Ibid., 41.
22Elizabeth McRae, MOTHERS OF MASSIVE RESISTANCE: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, Digital (New York: OXFORD UNIV Press, 2020), 43.
23Ibid., 50; Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 18 digital.
24Doreen Barbara Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Reprinted (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 80.
25Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 10.
26W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Woman’s Hands and Heart and Deathless Love: White Women an the Commemorative Impulse in the New South,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia J. Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, [New edition] (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019), 71.
27David Currey, “The Virtuous Soldier: Constructing a Usable Confederate Past in Franklin, Tennessee,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia J. Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, [New edition] (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019), 140.
28Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24–25, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.
29Ibid., 25.
30Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Hazel V. Carby, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2015), 21.
31Foucault and Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.
32Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 94; Currey, “The Virtuous Soldier: Constructing a Usable Confederate Past in Franklin, Tennessee,” 142; Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 49.
33Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 254.
34Cynthia J. Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, [New edition] (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019), xxiii-xxiv.
35Karen L. Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington: A Token of Reconciliation,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia J. Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, New edition (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019), 150.
36Catherine W. Bishir, “A Strong Force of Ladies: Women, Politics, and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia J. Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, [New edition] (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019), 12.
37Ibid., 12–17.
38Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 69.
39“Confederate Memorial: Section 16,” Arlington National Cemetery, accessed December 7, 2022, https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/Monuments-and-Memorials/Confederate-Memorial.
40“Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Minute Books, July” (Loudoun, VA: Loudoun County Board of Supervisors & Friends of the Thomas Balch Library, July 1906), Thomas Balch Library.
41Becky Hackney Fleming, “The Story of ‘Loundoun’s Silent Sentinel’ Unfolded,” Bulletin of the Loudoun County Historical Society, November 2009, 42, https://diversityandequalityfairsofvirginia.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/2008-sentinal.pdf.
42“Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Minute Books, July.”
43Fleming, “The Story of ‘Loundoun’s Silent Sentinel’ Unfolded,” 43–49; “Programme of Ceremonies Attending the Unveiling of the Monument to the Confederate Soldiers of Loudoun County, VA” (Loudoun Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, May 28, 1908), Thomas Balch Library.
44Trouillot and Carby, Silencing the Past, 48.
Kris Nohe