Tiffany Memorial Windows: How They Unified a Region and a Nation through Women’s Associations from the North and the South at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Michelle Rene Powell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master’s of Arts in the History of Decorative Arts The Smithsonian Associates and Corcoran College of Art and Design 2012 ©2012 Michelle Rene Powell All Rights Reserved ii Table of Contents List of Illustrations i Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Old Blandford Church, American Red Cross Building, and Windows 8 The Buildings 9 The Windows in Old Blandford Church 18 The Windows in the National American Red Cross Building 18 Comparing the Window Imagery 22 Chapter 2: History of Women’s Memorial Associations 30 Ladies’ Memorial Associations 30 United Daughters of the Confederacy 34 Woman’s Relief Corps 39 Fundraising 41 Chapter 3: Civil War Monuments and Memorials 45 Monuments and Memorials 45 Chapter 4: From the Late Twentieth Century to the Present 51 What the Windows Mean Today 51 Personal Reflections 53 Endnotes 55 Bibliography 62 Illustrations 67 List of Illustrations I.1: Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company, Reconstruction of 1893 Tiffany Chapel 67 Displayed at the Columbian Exposition I.2: Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company advertisement, 1898 68 I.3: Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company advertisement, 1895 69 I.4: Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company advertisement, 1899 70 I.5: Tiffany Studios, Materials in Glass and Stone, 1913 71 I.6: Tiffany Studios, Tributes to Honor, 1918 71 1.1: Old Blandford Church exterior 72 1.2: Old Blandford Church interior 72 1.3: Depictions of the marble buildings along 17th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 73 1.4: National American Red Cross Building 74 1.5: Colonial Church Layout 74 1.6: Old Blandford Church Layout 75 1.7: Tiffany Studios New York signature on Saint John window, 1903 76 1.8: Assembly Room in National American Red Cross Building 76 1.9: Tiffany Studios New York signature on Una window 77 1.10: South Carolina, Saint Mark window, Old Blandford Church, 1909 78 1.11: North Carolina, Saint Bartholomew window, Old Blandford Church, 1907 79 1.12: Louisiana, Saint Paul window, Old Blandford Church , 1904 80 1.13: Virginia, Saint John window, Old Blandford Church, 1903 81 1.14: Missouri, Saint Peter window, Old Blandford Church, 1903 82 1.15: Mississippi, Saint James the Less window, Old Blandford Church, 1909 83 1.16: Tennessee, Saint Phillip window, Old Blandford Church, 1909 84 1.17: Georgia, Saint Thomas window, Old Blandford Church, 1911 85 1.18: Florida, Saint Matthew window, Old Blandford Church, 1911 86 1.19: Texas, Saint Luke window, Old Blandford Church, 1911 87 1.20: Alabama, Saint Andrew window, Old Blandford Church, 1909 88 1.21: Ladies’ Memorial Association window, Old Blandford Church, 1909 89 1.22: Maryland and Arkansas windows, Old Blandford Church, 1909 89 1.23: Cross of Jewels window, Old Blandford Church, 1909 90 1.24: St. Peter’s Chapel, Mare Island, Vallejo, California, exterior 91 1.25: Saint. Paul window, St. Peter’s Chapel , 1908 92 1.26: Saint Paul window, Old Blandford Church, 1904 92 1.27: Saint Thomas window, St. Peter’s Chapel, 1905 93 1.28: Saint Thomas window, Old Blandford Church, 1911 93 1.29: National American Red Cross triptych, 1917 94 1.30: Saint Filomena window, Left panel, National American Red Cross, 1917 95 1.31: Hiram Powers, busts of Charity, 1871 and Hope, 1869 96 1.32: Hiram Powers, Faith, 1867 96 1.33: Hiram Powers, Charity, 1867 97 1.34: Hiram Powers, Hope, 1869 98 1.35: Una window, Right panel, National American Red Cross, 1917 99 1.36: Red Cross Knight, central panel, National American Red Cross, 1917 100 1.37: Una figure, Right panel, National American Red Cross, 1917 101 1.38: St. Elizabeth of Hungary window, Christ Episcopal Church, Detroit, MI, 1912 101 2.1: Ladies’ Memorial Association advertisement, Macon Weekly Telegraph, 1866 102 2.2: Contract for Virginia Saint John window, Old Blandford Church, 1903 103 3.1: Bunker Hill Monument, Boston, Massachusetts 104 3.2: Yorktown Monument, Yorktown, Virginia 105 3.3: Francis Millet, Student and Soldier window, Memorial Hall, Harvard University, 106 1889 3.4: Edward Simmons, Reconciliation of Themistocles and Aristides, Memorial Hall, 107 Harvard University, 1892 Introduction There has been many publications on Louis Comfort Tiffany; the man, his works, his residences, yet there has not been any written sources on the meaning his glass works invoke. The memorial windows commissioned by women’s memorial associations for Petersburg’s Old Blandford Church and Washington, D.C.’s National American Red Cross Building could convey unity of a region and a nation by their respected geographical locations. By delving into the construction, subject matter, and artistic adaptations, a new avenue of scholarship will be created that reflects a deeper understanding of the material culture in which they were made. The turn of the twentieth century was a time of Progressive Era reform movements, veterans’ assistance, battlefield preservation, and the creation of memorials. Thirty five years after the onset of the Civil War (1861 to1865), Reconstruction (1865 to 1877) was complete, sectional reconciliation still had not been fully attained, while North and South still differed on how they grieved for their soldiers, fathers, sons, and brothers. Women played one of the largest political roles within the reconciliation among the states as they were gaining their rights and freedoms, which developed from wartime events and the advances being made throughout the Progressive Era (1890s through the 1920s). Immediately after the Civil War began, women established relief efforts to supply what their men would need, from gun running to clothing and food. After the Civil War, women established memorial associations to honor those who sacrificed their lives. Such groups included the Ladies’ Memorial Associations at a local level, and later, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Woman’s Relief Corps. Ladies’ Memorial Associations set the stage that guided the national groups into establishing memorial projects. The Ladies’ Memorial Associations began gathering bodies and reinterring them in appropriate burial settings, particularly in the South. In the 1890s when interments were complete, memorials became an outlet for the demonstration of emotions in the forms of monuments or glass. The memorial concept was not new, but reemerged from patriotic endeavors that began after the Revolutionary War (1775 to 1783) accompanying the pride Americans felt after gaining their independence. These actions then reflected Eurocentric beliefs regarding death and how one approached the concept of death from an analytical and intellectual perspective. During the Victorian Era (1837 to 1901) the upper class took its cue from royalty by developing a system of guidelines and rules to follow consisting of manners and rituals reflecting how the genteel (educated, upper class) population should behave, in order to separate them from the “common”. These guidelines were reinforced with the rural cemetery movement that began in the 1820s, which stemmed in part from the influence of Protestantism in England and carried over into American culture decades later. European mourning practices involving memorializing of loved ones are reflected in windows created by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass company at the turn of the twentieth century. Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) is considered one of the most, if not the most esteemed creator of memorial stained glass windows in the United States. Tiffany Studios in New York (1902-1937), provided memorial windows for Old Blandford Church in Petersburg, Virginia (1903 to 1912) and a triptych within the National American Red Cross Building in Washington, D.C. (1915 to 1918). These windows would possibly not have been as successful and meaningful to the unity created by them if not for the use of the firm’s opalescent and favrile glass. Favrile is a term derived from the Latin word fabrilis, meaning “of an artisan or craftsman-like.”[endnoteRef:1] Rutgers University art professor and Tiffany scholar Martin Eidelberg and former Christie’s 20th Century Decorative Art Department head Nancy McClelland in Behind the Scenes of Tiffany Glassmaking (2000) explain that by 1893, labels on fabrile glass were changed to favrile with a more French resonance for a more appealing pronunciation.[endnoteRef:2] Many other companies were competing for stained glass commissions and providing glass for projects, such as J & R Lamb Studios in New York (1857 to 1934, moved to other family members and locations until 1981) and Willet Stained Glass Company in Philadelphia (1898 to 1977). The colorful richness and quality were not the same as that produced by Tiffany’s chemist, Arthur John Nash (1849-1934) and his son, Leslie Hayden Nash (1886-1958) for Tiffany Studios. The Women’s groups, which commissioned both sets of windows, demonstrate a continuing trend of loyalty to the past. At the same time, the content of each series illustrates the idealization of unity in the postwar period, whether this unity framed the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” or the Red Cross’ compassion through service to the sick and wounded. [1: Martin Eidelberg and Nancy A. McClelland, Behind the Scenes of Tiffany Glassmaking: The Nash Notebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 136.] [2: Ibid.] Memorial windows reemerged as an art form in the early1880s as a result of Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge (1835-1910) learning how to work with new techniques in glassmaking and blowing that stemmed from the revived interest in Medieval and Gothic art from Europe during England’s Arts and Crafts movement that then emerged into American culture. An 1889 article in The Decorator and Furnisher reflects that “the idea of making a memorial monument of a window seems to have taken a strong hold on the minds of the early workers in stained glass [12th to the 14th century].”[endnoteRef:3] This was done through the use of saint figures, stories, and inscriptions commemorating kings and heroes seen in Gothic cathedrals throughout Europe. Tiffany and La Farge were reviving this tradition within the Gothic Revival churches being constructed in the 1880s through the turn of the century. According to Art historian and Tiffany scholar, Alistair Duncan in Louis Comfort Tiffany (1992), by the 1890s La Farge was on his way up in popularity on the international market, yet Tiffany surpassed him as La Farge was increasingly encountering financial crises that “punctuated his career.”[endnoteRef:4] Tiffany had the financial resources and marketing capabilities to surpass La Farge in popularity and production into the twentieth century. [3: "Memorial Windows" The Decorator and Furnisher, Vol. 14 No. 3 (June, 1889), 73.] [4: Alistair Duncan, Louis Comfort Tiffany (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 61.] An early business partner of Tiffany’s, Candace Wheeler is quoted as commenting that Tiffany said “We are going after the money there is in art, but art is there, all the same."[endnoteRef:5] La Farge, Tiffany, and others were developing glass formulas and colors, as well as being commissioned for windows in the United States because windows fabricated abroad were subjected to heavy tax duties under the tariff legislation in the late 1890s. [5: Hugh McKean, The "Lost" Treasures of Louis Comfort Tiffany (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980), 101.] Union veteran, President William McKinley (1843-1901), President from 1897 to 1901, held the patriotic belief that any soldier had a right to all of America’s opportunities.[endnoteRef:6] McKinley believed that the giving of lives to support the American government obligated the American government to protect American jobs against foreign competition.[endnoteRef:7] McKinley’s tariffs allowed for the strengthening of the American economy and flourishing of the glass industry. In The Decorator and Furnisher (1889), the article states [6: Quentin R. Skrabec, William McKinley, Apostle of Protectionism (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 47.] [7: Ibid.] Today this instinct to immortalize the names of those departed is as strong, if not stronger than ever and it seeks, as the great gardens outside our cities show, every means that art can offer to express in the most artistic and beautiful manner the faith on which it leans.[endnoteRef:8] [8: Decorator and Furnisher, 73. ] This refers to the rise of popularity in utilizing stained glass as a means to express memorials to deceased loved ones. The same article in The Decorator and Furnisher also describes Tiffany’s Tiffany Glass Company (1885-1892) as “the company we now owe most of the magnificent memorial windows that have been placed in the last few years in our churches.”[endnoteRef:9] Duncan in Louis Comfort Tiffany (1992), states that Tiffany Studios was at its peak of popularity by the end of the 1880s and was “the largest stained glass studio in the nation, due almost entirely to the continuing boom in church construction.”[endnoteRef:10] Beside the boom in church construction, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois gave him national and international publicity with his studios’ Byzantine inspired chapel of mosaics, stained glass windows, and a cross shaped chandelier/ electrolier (fig. I.1). Tiffany scholar Hugh McKean in The “Lost” Treasures of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1980), explains that the Columbian Exposition created great interest in his [Tiffany] work among critics, museums, curators, and dealers of Europe.[endnoteRef:11] He garnered further fame exhibiting blown glass and stained glass windows at the 1900 Paris Exposition through Samuel Bing’s Art Nouveau Pavilion. Tiffany was awarded a Gold Medal for his exhibit in the Exposition and the French government made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.[endnoteRef:12] [9: Ibid., 74.] [10: Duncan, Louis Comfort Tiffany, 60.] [11: McKean, “Lost” Treasures, 63.] [12: Ibid., 83.] Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Tiffany Studios was run with Tiffany as President of the firm, where he oversaw and advised on all projects concerning designs and commissions of works by his Production Managers or department managers. Tiffany Studios had multiple specialized departments involving blown favrile glass, bronze/ metal foundry, ceramic, mosaic, ecclesiastic stained glass, window, and lamp making, in which a hierarchy of management figures and workers coexisted. Martin Eidelberg and Nancy McClellan explain that “Although most of his [Tiffany] objects bore a facsimile of his signature, and although they were the product of his mind and genius, they were not from his hand.”[endnoteRef:13] Tiffany took the company’s accolades, credit, honors, and awards without ever acknowledging the real creators of the works. In Tiffany’s early window creations of the 1880s and 1890s he contracted many known painters and designers to produce design concepts for his stained glass windows. Some of the artists mentioned in Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Rosalind Pepall’s book Tiffany Color and Light (2010), includes Frederick Stuart Church, Samuel Coleman, Will H. Low, Francis D. Miller, and Elihu Vedder.[endnoteRef:14] Some of these artists were acknowledged by their signatures on designs and finished works, but many others are still not credited. [13: Martin Eidelberg and Nancy A. McClelland, Behind the Scenes, 17.] [14: Rosalind M. Pepall, Tiffany Color and Light (Italy: Skira Flammarion for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), 81.] In the 1890s Frederick Wilson emigrated from England as a designer and became Tiffany’s principal designer of figural windows as well as the manager of the Ecclesiastical Department. Decorative Arts historian and Wilson scholar, Diane C. Wright states “little is known about Wilson’s artistic training other than reference to him as a ‘pupil of South Kensington’ (known today as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England).[endnoteRef:15] Wright refers to his artistic training; consisting of watercolors, figure studies, as well as being familiar with religious iconography. His window design characteristics include Pre-Raphaelite elegant bodies, broad foreheads, high cheekbones, and reddish tones in hair and beards.[endnoteRef:16] From these characteristics it is possible that he may have been the designer of the original figures used within Old Blandford Church and the Red Cross window images. [15: Diane C. Wright, “Frederick Wilson: 50 Years of Stained Glass Design” in Journal of Glass Studies, Vol. 51 (Corning, New York: The Corning Museum of Glass, 2009), 199.] [16: Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Glory in Glass: Stained Glass in the United States, Origins,Variety, and Preservation (New York: The Gallery at the American Bible Society, 1999), 105.] Louis Comfort Tiffany, renowned for his stained glass window designs included a specific memorial department linked to the Ecclesiastic Window department within his Tiffany Studios in New York. It was devoted to monuments in glass and stone. Tiffany's ecclesiastical commissions were the foundation of his various studios' production. Tiffany capitalized on the ever-increasing demand for stained glass windows during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.[endnoteRef:17] His advertising material and promotional pamphlets for the public, such as the advertisement in the Architectural Record (1898), touted the use of his famous favrile glass as “produced exclusively at our own furnace” and when employed “the greatest care is exercised in selecting the pieces…that we may obtain the desired effect (fig. I.2).”[endnoteRef:18] He also advertised in many religious periodicals, such as Christian Work, an Illustrated Family Newspaper (fig. I.3) and in the Ministerial Directory of the Baptist Churches in the United States of America (fig. I.4). Memorials in Glass and Stone (1913) and Tributes to Honor (1918) are later published pamphlets, advertising what patrons could choose from (figs. I.5 and I.6). In Memorials in Glass and Stone, Tiffany advertises that: [17: Pepall, Tiffany Color and Light, 84.] [18: American Institute of Architects, The Architectural Record Vol. 8 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1898), 483.] The windows, which are prominent characteristics of all cathedrals, if made of Tiffany Favrile glass, could be designed in complete harmony with the spirit of the originals, but the glass would require no such evanescent property as paint to produce even richer effects than the most skilled workers of the thirteenth century were able to create.[endnoteRef:19] [19: Tiffany Studios, Memorials in Glass and Stone (New York: Tiffany Studios Ecclesiastical Department, 1913), 5.] He is referring to the Gothic windows of European cathedrals and trying to establish a link from the past to the present. Tiffany Studios’ Tributes to Honor, includes more images that can be chosen as well as featuring the left and central panel of the American Red Cross windows as an example to “the women who served their armies during the Civil War.”[endnoteRef:20] Tiffany kept the advertising neutral by not referring to Union or Confederate military branches. [20: Tiffany Studios, Tributes to Honor (New York: Tiffany Studios Ecclesiastical Department, 1918), 5.] Chapter 1 Old Blandford Church, the American Red Cross Building, and their windows As the 1890s turned into the twentieth century, two memorial window projects that provide visual representations of the mourning practice that grew out of the Victorian period (1837-1901), simultaneously incorporated the presence of political influence within sacred space. Women of the memorial associations took the influences collectively gathered from the reform movements and women societies created, and politically voiced their desire to have their respective patriotic monuments to Civil War soldiers created or built. The first half of the eighteenth century, enlightened Europeans became concerned about clean air and open spaces, with their new interest in science and reason. . Religious historian, Colleen McDannell’s in Material Christianity (1995) explains that these “enlightened Europeans” condemned the churchyard as a spawning place for disease and were a danger to public health.[endnoteRef:21] By the 1820s and into the 1830s the rural cemetery movement emerged, sparking the creation of cemeteries created three to five miles outside of urban cities, which had park like settings offering city dwellers to escape the urban overcrowding and congestion. Monuments and memorials were then erected to memorialize loved ones. In Historian Ann McLean’s dissertation on “Civil War Monuments within Virginia” (1998), she claims that “efforts to erect morally inspirational public art were not just a manifestation of the ‘Lost Cause’ but outgrowths of antebellum urban reform theory which assumed an interrelationship between health and morality”.[endnoteRef:22] This correlates with the reform movements forming throughout the most heavily populated cities in the North, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. These reform movements demonstrate a portion of the political voice that the women’s memorial associations wielded. [21: Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 106.] [22: Ann Hunter McLean, “Unveiling the Lost Cause: A Study of Monuments to the Civil War Memory in Richmond, Virginia and Vicinity.” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1998), 189.] Two particularly eloquent examples of the movement can be seen in Old Blandford Church and its windows in Petersburg, Virginia, which showcases the uniting of the South and the building commissioned for the National American Red Cross and windows in Washington, D.C. visually represents the uniting of sections (North and South). Both sites constitute focal points for the public, as well as providing a pilgrimage site. A pilgrimage is any long journey undertaken as a quest for a votive purpose, as to pay homage (for exalted or sentimental reasons).[endnoteRef:23] The Petersburg Ladies’ Memorial Association hoped that by turning Old Blandford Church into a Confederate shrine, they would continue to educate and instill the values of the “Lost Cause” for future generations.[endnoteRef:24] By visiting the National American Red Cross Building and its windows respect for the women of the Civil War as well as the women that worked supporting Red Cross ideals during the Civil War would be given. [23: Dictionary term for pilgrimage. http://dictionary.reference.com. ] [24: Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 183.] The Buildings On a hill in the historic city of Petersburg, Virginia next to the Civil War battlefield sits a small brick edifice, known as Old Blandford Church (fig. 1.1). This church was built in 1735 through contractor Richard Bland (1710-1776) and the parish it housed was founded by Peter Jefferson, the father of Thomas Jefferson.[endnoteRef:25] According to William Clayton-Torrence in A Trial Bibliography of Colonial Virginia (1908), Bland was not a typical contractor, but a writer of political issues, a representative from Prince George’s County in the House of Burgesses, member of the Committee of Safety, and a participant in the Virginia delegation to the first Congress in 1774.[endnoteRef:26] Bland was known to have a keen interest in politics, religion, and the underlying principles of government and theology.[endnoteRef:27] Though not formally trained as an architect, the education of men in the colonial era included architectural lessons, such as drafting and architectural/ art appreciation based on European travel. [25: Philip Slaughter, A History of Bristol Parish, Virginia with Genealogies of Families Connected There with, and Historical Illustrations (Richmond: J.W. Randolph & English, 1879), xvii. Information regarding Peter Jefferson was mentioned in the Old Blandford Church brochure provided by the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Petersburg at the church tour.] [26: William Clayton-Torrence, A Trial Bibliography of Colonial Virginia: Special Report of the Department of Bibliography (Richmond: Davis Bottom of Public Printing, 1908), 25.] [27: Clayton-Torrence, Bibliography of Colonial Virginia, 25.] Blandford Church was constructed in the colonial Georgian style with a brick exterior and rectangular format. This is considered traditional Colonial Georgian architectural structure, featuring classical symmetry, a steep pitched roof, and the use of rounded compass-headed windows.[endnoteRef:28] Architectural historian Harold Donaldson Eberlein explains in The Architecture of Colonial America (1915), that churches of the Colonial period (1625 to 1774), “In the South, especially in Virginia and Maryland, where the Church of England was the recognized dominant body and Church and State were closely allied, we find the churches conforming to English ecclesiastical traditions.”[endnoteRef:29] He describes the characteristics being built as a rectangular brick structure with a steep pitched roof and a heavy, square tower of three stages at the west end (the steeple).[endnoteRef:30] The interior walls would also have been plastered above the wainscot and the ceiling would be a single barrel vault. Windows were rounded at the top, or “compass headed," and the brick surrounds projected slightly from the face of the wall. Above the pediment and just below the cornice is a small elliptical window.[endnoteRef:31] Old Blandford Church’s interior has no wainscoting, but has white plaster walls with rounded compass windows, as well as the brick surrounds that slightly protrude. There is also a wooden barrel vaulted ceiling (fig. 1.2). Blandford Church was soon abandoned after a new Episcopal church was constructed in Petersburg in 1806. [28: Harold Donaldson Eberlein, The Architecture of Colonial America (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915), 164, 218-222.] [29: Ibid., 207.] [30: Ibid.] [31: Ibid., 219-222.] During the nine month Siege of Petersburg from June 9, 1864 through April 2, 1865, Old Blandford Church was used as a Confederate field hospital and then fell into disrepair.[endnoteRef:32] While the church was in ruins, the main focus of the Ladies’ Memorial Association that volunteered to maintain the church, decided to reinter the many Confederate soldiers’ remains that were being collected and shipped to the numerous other newly established Confederate cemeteries, like Blandford, throughout the late 1860s and 1870s. In 1866, when the Ladies’ Memorial Association (LMA) was established, they took over the restoration of the run-down site as well as sending teams of men out to gather Confederate bodies from in the North to bring “home” to be reinterred in Blandford’s cemetery. [32: Old Blandford Church brochure. Ladies’ Memorial Association of Petersburg.] Civil War historian and Associate Professor of History (Civil War, Civil War memory, and Women’s history) at Purdue University, Caroline E. Janney, observes in Burying the Dead but Not the Past (2008), “In 1901, a member [anonymous] of the Petersburg Ladies’ Memorial Association (PLMA) suggested transforming the abandoned building into a mortuary chapel representing every southern state.”[endnoteRef:33] The PLMA proposed the purchase and installation of stained glass windows dedicated to the memory of about thirty thousand soldiers from the Confederate states buried in the cemetery on the adjacent grounds of the church.[endnoteRef:34] The sacred space of this church became a political statement from the LMA to perpetuate the “Lost Cause” and have it represent an eternal shrine to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice during the Civil War. The “Lost Cause” is defined by historians Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson in Monuments to the Lost Cause (2003), as the name given to a whole body of writings, speeches, performances, prints, and other visual imagery that presented a certain version of Confederate history (told from a southern white perspective).[endnoteRef:35] In David Chidester and Edward Linenthal’s American Sacred Space (1995), they quote the Dutch theologian and religious historian Gerardus van der Leeuw’s (1890-1950) claim that “The positioning of a sacred place was a political act, whether that positioning involved, in his [van der Leeuw’s] own terms, selection, orientation, limitations, or conquest.”[endnoteRef:36] [33: Janney, Burying the Dead, 183.] [34: Ibid.] [35: Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: the University of Tennessee Press, 2003), xvii.] [36: David Chidester and Edward Tabor Linenthal eds. American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 7.] Based on other memorial activities that were developed prior to the restoration of Old Blandford Church the women of the PLMA believed Petersburg to be just as sacred to the South as Richmond, Virginia with their establishment of the Museum of the Confederacy or Memphis, Tennessee’s 1867 proposal for a memorial church with mural tablets. The women felt that Petersburg was the rightful place for such a memorial church/ shrine because the city had witnessed the Confederacy’s last stand with the Siege of Petersburg (June 9, 1864 through March 25, 1865) and more than thirty thousand Confederate soldiers were interred on its hillsides than any other spot in the South.[endnoteRef:37] [37: Janney, Burying the Dead, 183.] Over a decade later, in 1915, by the time that the renovation of Old Blandford Church’s interior and its windows (1912) were complete, the Gothic Revival style utilized was outdated. The Spanish-American War ended and a world war loomed over the United States. These war activities prompted a resurgence of patriotism within the United States, with memorial buildings being constructed within Washington, D.C. Chidester and Linenthal state “These constructed religious environments are positioned in relation to a patriotic landscape. Centered in the ritual core of Washington, D.C., this national sacred geography is punctuated by shrines, memorials, monuments, and battlefields at which patriotic orthodoxy has been ritualized and reinterpreted.”[endnoteRef:38] [38: Chidester and Linenthal, American Sacred Space, 14.] The National American Red Cross Building itself represents sacred space devoted to the people of the nation, showcasing the reconciliation of the sections on a political level in the heart of America. Washington, D.C., as the capital of the United States, is the center for American politics. During this time period, building along the National Mall and its adjacent side streets reflected a political agenda, geared toward the people of the Nation. Near the future site of the National American Red Cross Building, there was a grouping of edifices already constructed, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1893 to1897) by Ernest Flagg (1857-1947); the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Memorial Continental Hall (1905) by Edward Pearce Casey (1864-1940); and the Pan American Union Building (1908 to1910) by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945). What these buildings have in common are their locations, situated consecutively along 17th Street NW, a few blocks from the White House. They may first appear Neoclassic in design with their marble fronts. Architectural Institute of America specifies that the use of marble and the temple- styled front in the early twentieth century solidifies the national identity as part of a stable regime with ties to the Greek democracy and Roman republic. As Tenth Annual Report of the American National Red Cross (1914) states regarding the National American Red Cross Building “The exterior will be of Vermont marble, white in color to harmonize with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Memorial Centennial Hall, and the Pan American Union (fig. 1.3)”.[endnoteRef:39] The Corcoran Gallery of Art is created with marble from Georgia and Memorial Continental Hall is created of Dorset, Vermont marble.[endnoteRef:40] These buildings formed from the 1901 Macmillan Plan, and Beaux-Arts style was intended to help make Washington, D.C. the “Great White City” of marble buildings, calling on the impressiveness of Roman temples and Renaissance height. In American Public Architecture (1989), Architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson explains that Washington’s Beaux-Arts styled buildings drew upon the past, specifically the lineage of classicism, not specific, but rather historical forms and details that were abstracted and simplified.[endnoteRef:41] [39: American National Red Cross, Tenth Annual Report of the American National Red Cross (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914), 8.] [40: Samuel Washington McCallie, A Preliminary Report of the Marbles of Georgia (Atlanta: The Franklin Turner Co., 1907), 15. Vermont Office of Secretary of State, Industrial Vermont: The Mineral, Manufacturing, and Water Power Resources in the Green Mountain State (Baton Rouge: Capital City Press, 1914), 26.] [41: Richard Guy Wilson, “Modernized Classicism and Washington, D.C.” in Craig Robert Zabel, Susan Scott Munshower, and Susan C. Scott, American Public Architecture: European Roots and Native Expressions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1989), 273.] Major General Francis Channing Barlow (1834-1896) proposed the concept of the National American Red Cross Building. As New York’s Secretary of State and Attorney General in the late 1860s, he had also proven himself as an accomplished Union soldier, wounded more than once in battle and nursed through his injuries by the tender care given by his Army nurse and wife, Arabella Wharton Griffith Barlow (1824-1864).[endnoteRef:42] He is quoted in an Architectural Record article, regarding the Red Cross Headquarters, saying, “he wished that there would be a monument to the women, like his wife, who cared for the sick and wounded during the Civil War.”[endnoteRef:43] In 1912, when the first bill for such a building was introduced to Congress, it was to establish a memorial commemorating the services of the loyal ‘women of the North in the time of the War Between the States’.[endnoteRef:44] It was not approved until Senator John Sharp Williams, of Mississippi amended the bill to include the women of the South.[endnoteRef:45] Four hundred thousand dollars was appropriated towards the purchase of a site and the constructing of such a memorial with the stipulation that an additional $300,000 was to be donated by private contributions.[endnoteRef:46] Captain James A. Scrymser (1839-1918), a friend and fellow soldier of Major General Barlow, suggested that the building “be given perpetuity to the American Red Cross.”[endnoteRef:47] Funding immediately came through prestigious channels. This was due to the wealthy Northern society figures donating to such an endeavor. The donors of the $300,000 by private contributors were: Captain Scrymser, who donated $100,000, the Rockefeller Foundation donated $100,000, railroad executive’s second wife Mrs. Russell Sage (Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage), who donated $150,000 and a $50,000 donation by the wife of the President of Union and Southern Pacific Railroads, Mrs. E.H. Harriman (Mary Williamson Averell Harriman).[endnoteRef:48] [42: Samuel R. Harlow and H.H. Boone, Life Sketches of the State Officers, Senators, and Members of the Assembly of the State of New York, 1867 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1867), 23-27.] [43: Michael A. Mikkelsen ed., “The Red Cross Headquarters at Washington, D.C.,” Architectural Record Vol. 44 No. 6 (December 1918), 558.] [44: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Vol. I (Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton Co., 1956), 75.] [45: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 75.] [46: Mikkelsen, “Red Cross Headquarters,” 558.] [47: Ibid.] [48: Ibid.] When President Taft laid the cornerstone of the building in March, 1915, Taft stated, “This marble edifice will be a concrete evidence of the removal of the scars of our sectional conflict and the complete union of the people of our republic (fig. 1.4).”[endnoteRef:49] This building became a visual symbol representing the political desire to display unity through monuments and structures throughout the nation. The exterior of the Red Cross has a Roman temple front, faced in white marble, with four rounded columns, topped by Corinthian capitals. In classic Beaux-Arts style, Roman elements are combined with Georgian style on the front of the building, accompanied by the symmetrically placed rectangular windows and the short steep roof. Executive Head of the American Red Cross, Mabel T. Boardman, states in a letter sent to the Woman’s Relief Corps, that “The National American Red Cross Building ‘takes its place in a group of remarkable buildings, representing Art, Humanity, Patriotism, and Peace.’[endnoteRef:50] [49: American Red Cross, The American Red Cross Magazine Vol. 10 No. 1 (January, 1915), 169.] [50: Woman's Relief Corps, Journal of the Thirty-Third National Convention of the Woman's Relief Corps (Boston: Griffith-Stillings Press, 1915), 346.] The building represented peace among the states that were engaged in the Civil War and contains the above mentioned art, humanity, and patriotism as well. Humanity is demonstrated through the services of the Red Cross to those sick and wounded within all wars and disasters that they send aid. Patriotism is showcased through its name as well as the dedication the Red Cross continually demonstrates to all in medical need. Art is realized within the actual architecture of the building as well as the decoration of its interior, and specifically in the triptych window executed by Tiffany Studios. This building can be considered a memorial to the women of the 1860s, and the windows on the interior a memorial to each organization that represents the work women participated in during the Civil War and its aftermath, for the veterans that returned home. The building takes its place within the heart of the nation, as part of a complex that represents the founding of the country as a democratic government modeled after the Greek democracy as well as the Roman republic, and demonstrated through the individual rights given its citizens. The building stands in as a collective voice of the organization founded to help those in need and the women who oversaw the assistance given, crossing dangerous battlefields, as demonstrated by Major General Barlow’s young wife, Arabella, who answered the call for help at a moment’s notice during a time of crisis. This building represents the Progressive Era’s desire to reform public opinion (unity of North and South to commission the windows), educate the public (visitors to the building), and giving a political voice to women (advocating the completion of the edifice and interior through fundraising and events). To explain the Progressive Era’s stance on reforming public opinion, women who did not actively participate in the workforce had the time and ability to support and petition legislation for better quality of lives and services. Due to rapid urbanization in the major cities along the East coast, there was overcrowding in living quarters available, which led to the deterioration of living conditions, such as poor health and sanitation. Helene Weis in her article in Stained Glass Quarterly (1992) states “by means of this joint gift [windows], they [UDC and WRC] demonstrated that the North and the South were united behind the Red Cross, the organization for volunteer aid.”[endnoteRef:51] [51: Helene Weis, “The Quest for the Red Cross Knight” Stained Glass Quarterly Vol. 87 No. 4 (Winter 1992), 289.] By restoring and changing Old Blandford Church’s interior orientation to create a memorial shrine to the Confederate states it became a political statement. That statement included women’s continued support to the Confederacy, or the “Lost Cause,” and the perpetuating glory of the lost soldiers to help deal with the loss not only of Southerners but of their kinsmen. McDannell expresses the belief that Victorian Era cemeteries, such as the one surrounding Old Blandford Church, “are not merely a place for exploring emotion and cultivating religious sentiment.”[endnoteRef:52] Within the church itself, the memorial windows help individuals reflect on death as well as linking the intellect (use of quotes), religion (iconography), art (imagery), and immortality together. Church architect, Ralph Adams Cram felt that “Next to music, stained glass may make the most poignant and emotional appeal…It is the interplay of loving light that gives the old work [the building] its transcendent glory.”[endnoteRef:53] The women of the LMA believed that restoring Blandford Church would have the additional benefit of inspiring the South’s “sons and daughters” to make annual pilgrimages to the location. [52: McDannell, Material Christianity, 115.] [53: Robert Koch, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Rebel In Glass (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1966), 79-80.] Originally Colonial Georgian in style, the interior was modernized with an addition of a north wing with four additional windows on the first floor plus two above between 1752 and 1769 (figs. 1.5 and 1.6). In 1901, the legacy of the Tiffany memorial windows began as the Ladies’ Memorial Association launched a project to erect memorial windows for the church, memorializing fallen soldiers who gave their lives during the Civil War, specifically during the Siege of Petersburg. The PLMA proposed to purchase and install stained glass windows dedicated to the memory of about 30,000 from the Confederate states buried in the cemetery on the adjacent grounds of the church.[endnoteRef:54] The PLMA chose a popular aesthetic style for the interior design scheme at a time when Gothic Revival architecture dominated the ecclesiastic and domestic style from 1840 to the 1880s. Though the exterior structure could not be changed, the windows could. [54: Martha Wren Briggs, The Compass Windows of Old Blandford Church: A Tribute in Tiffany Glass (Sedley, VA: Dory Press, 1992), 3.] Colonial Georgian interior characteristics of white plastered walls, Roman compass- shaped windows, and dark wooden pews give little architectural decoration to view. Just as the PLMA began their renovation of Old Blandford Church, Gothic Revival was waning. It is possible that the PLMA wanted to honor the popular mode of ecclesiastic window design that carried over into the new century by Tiffany Studios. The memorial windows reflect this Gothic Revival aesthetic. The Windows in Old Blandford Church In order to complete the fifteen window commission, the Petersburg Ladies’ Memorial Association solicited various other memorial associations throughout each of the Confederate states, offering them the privilege of erecting a dedicated window to honor their fallen. Kentucky was the only state that declined, because they already had plans for memorials within their state.[endnoteRef:55] The PLMA left the entire subject matter and theme up to Tiffany Studios, because the Blandford donors did not want any disputes over the content of each memorial window.[endnoteRef:56] Their only stipulation was that each window had to have a theme that unified the series in appearance. Each of the windows of the saints are unified by a Gothic inspired aedicule, including the state seal within a medallion set in the arch of the window, and a memorial dedication quote in a separate panel underneath each window. The saints chosen for each window were arbitrary choices left up to Tiffany Studios New York team of designers. Louis Comfort Tiffany did not carry out the artistic construction of the windows himself. His firm had a department specifically for the creation of his firm’s ecclesiastic windows, where the division of labor was allocated among designers, cartoon creators, glass cutters, glass choosers, and fabricators. The names of these individuals were not recorded per commission. Tiffany would grant the final approvals. Each state window is signed in the bottom right corner of the inscription panel with “Tiffany Studios New York” (fig. 1.7). Each state chose their own memorial inscription, placed on the panel located directly under the saint’s feet as well. [55: Rachel M. Bradshaw, “Tiffany Windows in Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia” (M.A. Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1991) 146-180, 147.] [56: Briggs, The Compass Windows, 5.] The Windows in the National American Red Cross Building The windows within the American Red Cross Building are secular and much more modest in scope than the Blandford Church series of ecclesiastical windows. While the Blandford windows represent the Southern states that fought in the Civil War, the Red Cross’ windows demonstrate the Christian virtues of honor and duty to those in need. The decoration of the interior of the American Red Cross Building’s Assembly Room, which houses the windows, was financed through the donation of $15,000 by Mrs. Adolphus Busch (Elizabeth Lilly Eberhard Anheuser) (1844-1928). Due to her husband’s successful brewing company she could pursue philanthropy and support organizations in need. According to Architectural Record (1918), The Assembly Room was decorated “in the Colonial style with a three-panel window, which forms more than one-half of the North wall, opposite the entrance door. It is of favrile glass and typifies the whole thought for which the building stands (fig. 1.8).”[endnoteRef:57] [57: Mikkelsen, “Red Cross Headquarters,” 559.] The creation of these windows begins with the two organizations that were brought together, women from memorial associations representing the North (the Woman’s Relief Corps), an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic and from the South, (the United Daughters of the Confederacy). Philanthropist and Executive Head of the American Red Cross, Miss Mabel Boardman (1860-1946) approved the WRC and UDC to participate in 1912 because these two organizations represented those who cared for the sick and wounded of the Civil War.[endnoteRef:58] Tiffany Studios is signed in the bottom right corner of the UDC window, just as they were at Old Blandford Church (fig. 1.9). [58: Ibid.] Plans by architects of the Red Cross Building, Samuel Breck Trowbridge (1862-1925) and Goodhue Livingston (1867-1951), showed a sketch in the central window of the Assembly Hall of a “Red Cross Knight” in medieval armor aiding a stricken warrior. The general committee agreed to the concept and gave the order to have the three windows tell the story of the Red Cross Knight.[endnoteRef:59] The “Red Cross Knight” is the allegorical figure from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen (1590), and represents all Christians.[endnoteRef:60] Spenser wrote Faerie Queen to celebrate Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), presenting ideas of what constitutes an ideal England, recalling chivalry from a past era, and inspiring such actions again.[endnoteRef:61] In the Red Cross Building’s utilization of the allegorical figures, the Red Cross is presenting the ideals of the Red Cross organization, which primarily involves the Christian and moral duties of helping those in need. [59: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters, 76.] [60: Literary discussion of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, http://www.enotes.com] [61: Ibid.] Two windows were originally planned, but in a 1919 article in Art and Archaeology, the Architectural Society of Washington notes that these organizations “not only accepted the proposition but suggested that they unite in presenting a third window, which should form a central panel.”[endnoteRef:62] In a 1925 Statement about the Red Cross Building, Mabel Boardman reflected, [62: Architectural Institute of America, “The Memorial Windows of the American Red Cross Building in Washington” Art and Archaeology Vol. 8 No. 2 (March-April, 1919), 115.] As the building was to the women of the Civil War of both the North and South, I thought that for one window the symbolic figure of St. Filomena, the name Longfellow gave to Florence Nightingale, would make a beautiful window. I did not know what to suggest for the other window and spoke of it to Mr. Elihu Root, who was then in the Senate and who was always a great friend to the Red Cross. He suggested Una, who in Spenser's Faerie Queen married the Red Cross Knight.[endnoteRef:63] [63: Miss Mabel Boardman, “ Miss Boardman's Statement about the Red Cross Building,” (February 18, 1925), 1. Courtesy of the National American Red Cross Building’s archives, Washington, D.C. ] Lawyer, Elihu Root (1845-1937) went into politics as an advisor, becoming the United States District Attorney in 1883, Secretary of War by 1899, and Senator for his home state of New York (1909 to 1915). In spite of his political servitude, all the while he served as supporter of many committees in Washington, D.C., such as the Pan-American Union (aiding in acquiring the Philippines and Puerto Rico) and the American Red Cross.[endnoteRef:64] [64: Mitchell C. Harrison, Prominent and Progressive American, An Encyclopaedia of Contemporaneous Biography Vol. 1(New York: The Tribune Association, 1902), 290-292.] In November, 1916 it was reported in the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Minutes of the Twenty Third Annual Convention (1917) that the three windows were nearing completion and UDC President General, Cordelia Powell Odenheimer wrote that she and Mrs. James Henry Parker of the Red Cross Committee had inspected the windows in the New York studio of Mr. Louis Tiffany claiming that the windows “are most artistic and beautiful, containing nothing to indicate sectionalism.”[endnoteRef:65] In comparison to the Blandford Church series, these windows were to indicate the groups of women in spirit and not literally the regions (states) they came from. [65: Cordelia Powell Odenheimer, Minutes of the Twenty Third Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton Company, 1917), 108.] The Red Cross Building was dedicated May 27, 1917. The memorial windows would be unveiled in June 1917, when the United Confederate Veterans would hold their reunion in Washington, D.C., but that April, the United States had entered World War I, and by June, all the rooms in the building were needed for war workers.[endnoteRef:66] The Woman’s Relief Corps unveiled their window the same time as the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated, May 30, 1922. Six months later on November 1, 1922, the United Daughters of the Confederacy unveiled theirs on the Red Cross building site. The central window was dedicated the following May on May 26, 1923.[endnoteRef:67] [66: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters, 77. ] [67: Ibid.] The windows at Old Blandford Church and the American Red Cross Building are polar opposites on the public scale. Blandford’s windows are ecclesiastic, meant for an Episcopalian parish in the rural town of Petersburg, celebrating the Confederate Cause through their eternal memory. The Red Cross windows are secular and function as the focal point of an assembly room used for events of the organization. These windows personify the collective virtues of the Red Cross. The Blandford windows are individualized by state, with a solitary figure of a saint or wreath, while the Red Cross windows are narrative with multiple figures. Both of these sets of windows have religious overtones. Old Blandford Church has Christian saints and the Red Cross’ allegorical figures represent Christian virtues of Hope, Faith, Charity, Love and Mercy. Comparing the Window Imagery Eleven of the fifteen windows at Old Blandford Church depict saints for each Confederate state’s memorial association, and measure eight feet eight inches by three feet two inches. As one is meant to enter through the West door and move through the church in a circuitous route, counterclockwise, to experience the order of the program, the windows are in order. The South wall contains three windows: South Carolina [Saint Mark] (fig. 1.10), North Carolina [Saint Bartholomew] (fig. 1.11), and Louisiana [Saint Paul] (fig. 1.12). On the East wall there are two windows, Virginia [Saint John] (fig. 1.13) and Missouri [Saint Peter] (fig. 1.14). The East wall in the North wing features Mississippi [Saint James the Less] (fig. 1.15), Tennessee [Saint Philip] (fig. 1.16), and Georgia [Saint Thomas] (fig. 1.17). On the West wall of the North wing, the two windows portray Florida [Saint Matthew] (fig. 1.18) and Texas [Saint Luke] (fig. 1.19). On the wall to the left of the entrance is the remaining state window, Alabama, with the depiction of Saint Andrew (fig. 1.20). On the West wall above the entrance of the church is the lunette-shaped transom window, which represents the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Petersburg (fig. 1.21). It depicts the Confederate emblem of “stars and bars” in the center wreathed in garland. On the North wall between the Georgia and Florida windows are Maryland with its seal wreathed on the left and Arkansas with its seal wreathed on the right (fig. 1.22). They both have their own memorial quote in a banner underneath the respective wreath and seal as seen in the other states’ windows. Directly above the entrance door as one proceeds out is Tiffany’s personally designed, donated window, Cross of Jewels in lieu of a Kentucky window (fig. 1.23). It has the memorial inscription underneath that reads “in the spirit of reconciliation.”[endnoteRef:68] [68: Bradshaw, “Tiffany Windows in Richmond,” 159.] At least two of the saints used within this cycle of memorial windows were recycled images from Tiffany Studios’ designs. St. Peter’s Chapel on Mare Island, near Vallejo, California is another chapel devoted to military servicemen of the United States Navy and Marines, many of whom also fought in the Civil War (fig. 1.24).[endnoteRef:69] It was constructed in 1901, the same year that the Ladies’ Memorial Association was given permission from the city of Petersburg to turn Old Blandford Church into a memorial chapel. Mare Island’s St. Peter’s Chapel contains twenty nine Tiffany windows with sixteen signed “Tiffany Studios New York” between the years 1905 and1908. Their St. Paul window memorializes Admiral Frank Wildes (1844-1903) and features the same Saint Paul as the Louisiana Saint Paul window at Blandford, with a different background and colors of glass, more reminiscent of the Navy origin of the church since the blues represents the open skies and seas(figs. 1.25 and 1.26). When compared closely, the Louisiana window is far more detailed and uses more of Tiffany’s favrile decorative glass textures. St. Peter’s Chapel’s St. Thomas window memorializes Rear Admiral Thomas Oliver Selfridge (1804-1902). This Saint Matthew image was used first at Mare Island in 1905 and recycled for the Georgia Saint Thomas window at Blandford, which was ordered and unveiled between 1911 and1912 (figs. 1.27 and 1. 28). [69: Sue Lemmon and E.D. Wichels, St. Peter’s Chapel: A Dream, A Memorial, and A Christian Beacon (Vallejo, CA: Gibson Publications, 1979) and http://www.stpeterschapel.org used for basic information on St. Peter’s Chapel of Mare Island, Vallejo, California.] The triptych window within the American Red Cross Building is constructed of three windows representing a whole and installed between 1915 and 1918 (fig. 1.29). Each side panel measures eleven feet by seven feet five inches, and the central panel measures eleven feet by seven feet nine inches. At the time of their installation, they were considered to “occupy greater wall space than any stained glass windows of modern times.”[endnoteRef:70] Reading from left to right, the left panel represents the Woman’s Relief Corps of the North, the central panel is a joint commissioning of the Woman’s Relief Corps and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the right panel represents the United Daughters of the Confederacy of the South. Beginning with the left panel, Saint Filomena is surrounded by an army of women symbolizing Christian virtues (fig. 1.30).[endnoteRef:71] [70: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters, 75.] [71: Architectural Institute of America, “The Memorial Windows of the American Red Cross Building in Washington” Art and Archaeology Vol. 8 No. 2 (March-April, 1919), 115.] These Christian virtues are a repeated element noted by Joe Mitchell Chapple, in National Magazine (1915) to be duplicated “on the landing there will be placed three allegorical busts in white marble, representing Faith, Hope, and Charity.”[endnoteRef:72] These busts, created by American sculptor Hiram Powers (1805-1873) are still placed on the landing windows, although Charity is flanked by Faith and Hope (fig. 1.31). These sculptures were popular and many copies were collected for display. According to American sculptor, writer, and educator Lorado Taft in The History of American Sculpture (1903), Powers used the head of “Faith” incessantly under the title of “Ginerva”, “Evangeline”, “Proserpine”, as well as “Psyche”.[endnoteRef:73] Their attributes are visible in the diadems (crowns that do not encircle the head fully), placed upon their heads seen in the busts from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (figs. 1.32, 1.33, and 1.34). Faith has the cross on her diadem and Charity has flames. Since Hiram Powers was an expatriate living in Italy, he adopted the Italian concept of displaying charity as “the love of God into that of light, or burning fire.”[endnoteRef:74] Hope has an anchor on her diadem worn atop their heads. Miss Boardman of the Central Committee of the Red Cross is quoted as stating that “Saint Filomena was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, Santa Filomena, which glorified the work of Florence Nightingale.”[endnoteRef:75] Florence Nightingale was first to establish order out of the chaos in which the Crimean War hospitals were in at Scutari (modern day Üsküdar in Anatolia, Turkey) in 1854, which led to the establishment of the Treaty of Geneva in 1864 that established the Red Cross as an international entity.[endnoteRef:76] The Treaty of Geneva’s purpose was to ensure the protection of wounded soldiers and those caring for them in times of war. In an article titled “The Red Cross- What it is and What it Does” defines each nation signing the treaty should have an association of volunteers to assist and supplement the medical services of its army.”[endnoteRef:77] Saint Filomena is known as a healer, due to her martyrdom under the rule of Roman Emperor Diocletian. Her symbols are the anchor (she was drowned by wearing an anchor around her neck and thrown into the Tiber River, but healed by angels), arrows (she was shot with arrows on two occasions and darts a third instance, each time she was healed by angels or they missed her and turned against the archers), and a palm frond which is a symbol of her martyrdom. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807-1882) poem regarding Saint Filomena is compared to Florence Nightingale with the lines from Atlantic Monthly (1857) [72: Joe Mitchell Chapple, "Affairs at Washington" National Magazine Vol. 42, September 1915, 744.] [73: Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903), 67.] [74: Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols, 66.] [75: Boardman, “Statement about the Red Cross,” 1.] [76: Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, “The Red Cross- What it is and What it Does” B and O Magazine Vol.6 No.1 (May 1918) (Baltimore: B and O Railroad, 1918), 20.] [77: Ibid.] The wounded from the battle-plain, In dreary hospitals of pain, The cheerless corridors, The cold and stony floors… A lady with a lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.[endnoteRef:78] [78: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Santa Filomena” The Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1857) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Vol.1 No. 1, 22-23 (stanzas 5 and 10).] According to New World Encyclopedia, Longfellow helped to create a national literature based on American myths, history, and landscapes. He was also inspired by the Romantic literary movement he encountered in Europe.[endnoteRef:79] This inspiration of “Romantic” ideals coincides with American preferences of Gothic Revival architecture and the development of a national identity and style based on American culture and contemporary heroes for future generations to admire. [79: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org. ] Six virtues surround Saint Filomena. The first is a woman that carries a shield decorated with the Red Cross sign and she is then followed by Hope, carrying a banner with an anchor. This anchor is one of Saint Filomena’s attributes and also the Christian symbol as characterized by St. Paul who said “It is like an anchor in our lives…it enters in through the veil.”[endnoteRef:80] Mercy follows Hope, with her gifts of fruit and beverage. This is not to be mistaken for Charity, as Charity is often characterized by a bowl of fruit. Faith is next and is carrying a torch and palms. Her attributes are the helmet that protects her from the assault of heretics as well as a candle symbolizing the light of faith.[endnoteRef:81] In this scene she wears a small golden crown that the others do not wear, which is her helmet and she holds a torch, which is her candle of faith. Charity is kneeling by the woman in the foreground and is offering a healing drought. This is not a typical representation of Charity, but is interpreted through the Bible passage regarding the six works of mercy, “tending to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner.”[endnoteRef:82] The mother in the foreground is holding a child, who is passing flowers from a basket at her mother’s side. There is another maiden in the background that holds a Red Cross banner as well. [80: James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), 161, and references the Holy Bible (Heb. 6:19).] [81: Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols, 122.] [82: Ibid., 66 and references the Holy Bible (Matt. 25:35-37).] The right panel given by the South’s United Daughters of the Confederacy depicts an allegorical scene from Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” of 1590 (fig. 1. 34). The panel tells the tale of noble women and noble deeds.[endnoteRef:83] The main character of this panel is Una, the personification of Truth and Fortitude. She is holding her apron filled with roses. On each side of Una are handmaidens. On the left is a maiden holding a cross and the one on the right is holding the lamp of wisdom. Behind Una are maidens holding banners bearing the Red Cross insignia as well as one with a banner with a yellow heart, symbolizing helpful love. In front of Una is a kneeling maiden holding a shield with the Red Cross insignia.[endnoteRef:84] These handmaidens of Una’s; Love, Mercy, and Fortitude are the virtues in which the United Daughters of the Confederacy claim “so nobly possessed by the women of the South for their loyalty and wonderful work among the suffering.” [endnoteRef:85] [83: Architectural Institute of America, “The Memorial Windows”, 115.] [84: Ibid.] [85: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters, 76.] The central panel depicts knights on horseback and holding spears, reminiscent of the Crusades’ Knights Templar (fig. 1.35). The Red Cross organization interprets the window as illustrating that the International Red Cross was conceived on a battlefield near Solferino, Italy between the Austrian and Italian armies in 1859 by Swiss national Jean Henry Dunant.[endnoteRef:86] The panel portrays these knights heading into battle. In the middle of the panel is the standard bearer, mounted on a white steed, with a saddle and bridle bedecked with jewels and he is carrying a large flag bearing the Red Cross emblem. In the foreground at the base of the scene is a fellow comrade supporting a wounded warrior who has fallen from his horse and is receiving food and aid. The scene as a complete work suggests life and action, with emphasis given to the main idea that during the onrush to battle, time must still be found to minister to the fallen.[endnoteRef:87] [86: Weis, Stained Glass Quarterly, 288.] [87: Architectural Institute of America, “The Memorial Windows”, 115.] As with the figures of Saint Paul and Saint Thomas from the Blandford series of memorial windows, the figure of Una has been used before within Tiffany Studios for his representation of Elizabeth of Hungary for Christ Episcopal Church in Detroit, Michigan in 1912 (figs. 1.36 and 1.37). The apron filled with roses is her attribute and part of the story that she was taking loaves of bread to the poor and when questioned by her husband what she had, she opened her apron and the bread had become roses. She is also depicted wearing a crown, which indicates her royal birth into the Arpad dynasty of Hungary in 1207 and is often depicted tending the sick.[endnoteRef:88] The comparison made between Una and Saint Elizabeth is practical in that they both take care of the sick and needy. Recycling images as seen through a few of the examples from both Old Blandford Church and the American Red Cross was a common practice among stained glass artists. It kept costs down as well as making reinterpretations easier to follow through slight modifications. [88: Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols, 116.] The figures used in Old Blandford Church were arbitrarily chosen by the designers and Louis Comfort Tiffany within his studio. Because the building is used for ecclesiastical purposes, it seems fitting that the images within the windows reflect the gospels. The compass windows are relatively narrow and figural subjects was the popular motif for Gothic Revival memorial windows at the turn of the century. Stained glass historian and professor Virginia Chieffo Raguin, in Glory in Glass (1999), claims that “interest in constructing Gothic Revival buildings was supported by the growing taste for collecting thirteenth century stained glass…with [Boston art collector and philanthropist] Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1906 purchasing a large stained glass window from Soissons Cathedral, dated c. 1205.”[endnoteRef:89] Creating memorial windows in a Gothic Revival style represented the current aesthetic in design. This collecting of Medieval and Gothic glass was inspired by the English Arts & Crafts Movement (1860 through 1910, with influences through the 1930s) and the writing by architectural designer Augustus W. N. Pugin (1812-1852). Pugin believed that “both religion and social values could be invigorated through the rebirth of the Gothic style.”[endnoteRef:90] Obtaining Medieval and Gothic stained glass reflected a nostalgic time when craftsmen used their hands versus the Industrial Revolution that created the rise of machines displaying a lack of artistry within works. [89: Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Glory in Glass, Stained Glass in the United States, Origins, Variety, and Preservation (New York: The Gallery of the Bible Society, 1999), 136.] [90: Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003), 177.] The compass windows within Blandford Church have a characteristic medallion format (roundels) with Tiffany’s use of the state seal above the heads of the figures, yet the figures take up most of the allotted space, whereas Gothic Revival elements would have been to use a narrative scene with many figures in smaller scale. The Red Cross figures are narrative, as they tell the story of the Red Cross Knight, but the figures are once again in Tiffany style large in scale, demanding attention. The windows are in a secular office building, so the need to reinforce religious ideas is not acceptable for such a space. Literary and allegorical figures are more suitable to the needs of the Red Cross building to showcase the virtues of the American Red Cross to visitors. Tiffany Studios adopts characteristics of Gothic Revival, personalizing it with Tiffany’s aesthetic to match the eclecticism within the Beaux-Arts architecture of the building. Chapter 2 History of Women’s Memorial Associations Ladies Memorial Associations In the northern areas during the Civil War, only Union dead were interred in the cemeteries. Confederate dead would be left on the battlefields or moved (by some entity other than the federal government) to local cemeteries. Congress in 1866 provided funding for the gathering of all Union soldiers in the “States lately in Rebellion” and crews were sent out across the South to look for the grave sites and organize cemeteries for Union soldiers.[endnoteRef:91] According to Civil War historian Timothy B. Smith, in The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation (2008), “Confederates were technically not United States personnel, they were traditionally buried elsewhere, although some exceptions existed.”[endnoteRef:92] The government viewed Confederates as traitors, revolutionaries, and enemies, and made little effort to memorialize or honor Confederate dead.[endnoteRef:93] This bias favoring the North became the impetus to establish Confederate cemeteries as the initial goal for the Ladies’ Memorial Associations. Union cemeteries were neatly organized, while many Confederate graves were desecrated, shallow and uprooted by farmers or scavenging animals. To these ladies, it seemed that ex-Confederates were second rate citizens.[endnoteRef:94] To bring home the remains of Confederate soldiers from the North and those left strewn across the battlefields in shallow graves to a more appropriate final resting place in organized Confederate cemeteries in the South was the goal of the first women’s memorial groups, the Ladies’ Memorial Association. It began in May 1865 when the founder of the original Ladies’ Memorial Association, Mary Dunbar Williams of Winchester, Virginia told her sister-in-law a story about a farmer who plowed his field and actually plowed up remains of two Confederate soldiers. Mary Dunbar Williams and Eleanor Williams Boyd decided to call a meeting of all the women who had volunteered in the hospitals during the war, with the goal of forming a memorial society that would gather all the dead within a twelve to fifteen mile radius and inter them in one graveyard.[endnoteRef:95] [91: Janney, Burying the Dead, 44.] [92: Timothy B. Smith, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America's First Five Military Parks (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 21.] [93: Ibid., 21.] [94: Janney, Burying the Dead, 55.] [95: Ibid., 39.] Janney, states that “Memory is not a passive act. People actively engage in selecting what should be remembered and what should be omitted from the historical record.”[endnoteRef:96] The story of the “Lost Cause” that the Ladies’ Memorial Associations represented, reflected this notion as a political agenda put forth to commemorate the Confederate soldiers, Cause, and to instill future generations with the knowledge that the South came out of the war with respect equal to that given to the North. As this analysis has mentioned, women became the leaders of this task, specifically the “Ladies” of Virginia. Suzanne Lebsock, Historian and Board of Governors Professor of History (Women and Gender Studies) at Rutgers University, states in The Free Women of Petersburg (1984), “Women as a whole were: More personalistic (tending to respond to the particular needs and merits of individuals), more attuned to the needs and interests of other women, more concerned with economic security, more supportive of organized charity, and more serious about the spiritual life than were men.”[endnoteRef:97] This statement seems true, with regard to the women involved with the Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMA), in particular those in the city of Petersburg, Virginia that will be the biggest focus group when discussing and referring to Ladies’ Memorial Associations. [96: Ibid., 4.] [97: Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town 1784-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 234. ] Prior to the Civil War, women were excluded from political discussions and happenings and were isolated to the domestic sphere, attending to tasks that included; running the household and rearing children. Up until the start of the Civil War, women had increased their control over property ownership, at the same time their work in the domestic sphere became more burdensome as slave labor became scarcer, as well as not remarrying unless they financially had to.[endnoteRef:98] According to Janney, during the Civil War, Southern white women “supported ‘the Cause’ by seeing loved ones off to war, enduring the hardships of the home-front, nursing the wounded, and by forming multiple support groups.”[endnoteRef:99] Women were responsible for much of the continuity of lifestyle while their husbands and sons were away. They became the ones responsible for taking care of the wounded, sick, and the dead. [98: Ibid.] [99: Janney, Burying the Dead, 5.] The women who joined the Ladies’ Memorial Associations were generally white women in the middle to upper class with the time and money to devote to ‘the Cause’. They were the wives of city officials, doctors, lawyers, and wealthy merchants. They tended to be well connected to a network of prominent members of society throughout the South that they could refer to from time to time for financial donations to help with their projects. They also relied on circulars with advertisements to rally the white southerners, especially women, to their cause of membership and tending graves (fig. 2.1).[endnoteRef:100] In the article from the Macon Weekly Telegraph (May 30, 1866), it eloquently expressed with passionate wording “Shall Macon be behind her sisters (referring to the newly established LMAs throughout the South) in this pure device of love- this offering of the heart’s tribute to valor and patriotism?... although our cause is lost, our country desolated, and our fondest hopes blasted, we still cherish and revere, in the deepest and most sacred recesses of our hearts, the valiant heroes who for so long a time bore aloft that banner, sacred to justice and liberty…let her now step boldly forward…and rescue from worse than oblivion the graves of our beloved, heroic dead”.[endnoteRef:101] This phrasing was used to incite the maternal instincts and protective nature of women in general. Tending to those graves was first and foremost the priority from the collection of the Confederate dead from the Northern battlefields and cemeteries and bringing them home to be reinterred in their appropriate Southern resting place. These were the priorities of Petersburg’s LMA (PLMA), a group who was also determined to “expand their civic duties, and redefine the very nature of southern femininity.”[endnoteRef:102] [100: Ibid., 51.] [101: J.R.A. “Memorial Associations,” Macon Weekly Telegraph, June 4, 1866 Vol.1 issue 28, p. 3, news/ opinion section.] [102: Janney, Burying the Dead, 7.] Ladies’ Memorial Associations were one of the first organizations among Southern white women before national organizations arose that provided evidence of womens’ activism and redefined what it meant to be both an “ex-Confederate” and a “Southern lady” in the post war South.[endnoteRef:103] The term “Lady” was considered to be one of status and respect. It is defined by Janney as “a white woman of slaveholding class who was delicate and refined, exhibited exceptional manners and remained obedient and submissive to the men in her life.”[endnoteRef:104] In reality they were those freed from the burdens of work because of their reliance on slave labor. Since slavery ended with the war, they set new markers for obtaining social status by holding membership in memorial societies. Those that did join believed that they were fulfilling a necessary patriotic role through their fundraising, projects, and activities. Providing burials for Confederate soldiers were the goals and thus, Janney claims, filling the “symbolic role of the grieving mother for the boys and men who died beyond the reach of their families,” and created Memorial Day celebrations to celebrate the lives of Confederate soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.[endnoteRef:105] Ladies’ Memorial Associations were organized not only in Virginia but in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama. Virginia, with six LMAs, had the biggest significance because most of the battles fought during the war were on Virginia soil, they had sent the most men to fight, and lost more sons than any other state.[endnoteRef:106] Petersburg, Virginia was the site for one of these original Ladies Memorial Associations set up between May 3 and May 10, 1866. [103: Ibid.,4.] [104: Ibid., 55.] [105: Ibid., 50.] [106: Ibid., 8.] The Petersburg’s Ladies’ Memorial Association was officially established May 6, 1866 with a few requirements. They made the suggestion that any lady might become a member by paying fifty cents a month, or become an honorary member of either gender, without the right to vote, on payment of ten dollars (annually). The second recommendation invited the cooperation of friends, not only in the county but elsewhere, to form similar societies. Thirdly, their efforts were not to be confined to the dead of their city alone, but information was sought and aid extended whenever necessary, honor to all the noble martyrs to this cause, who are buried around us. Lastly, they requested that a committee be appointed to visit every burial spot within their reach to mark more distinctly the names which are rapidly being obliterated.[endnoteRef:107] [107: Confederate Memorial Association of the South, History of the Confederate Memorial Association of the South (New Orleans: The Graham Press, 1904), 288.] By the 1880s the many Ladies’ Memorial Associations had to revise their goals, since almost all Confederate remains from the North were “home” again in the South. The new goals became the maintenance of the local cemeteries, the annual Memorial Day observances, care for the ailing local veterans and their families, monumentalizing of the landscape, and the preservation of Southern history. In order to complete these goals many memorial associations established soldiers’ homes and hospitals, fundraised for everything from statuary and columns, stained glass windows, and many published histories, local and sectional, with a Southern vision of the war and its aftermath.[endnoteRef:108] [108: John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 175.] United Daughters of the Confederacy In the 1890s, a new era, known as the Progressive Era dawned. It is known as the Progressive Era because of the many reforms movements established and the “Progressive Party” that President Theodore Roosevelt created. Reform movements and reform societies created “emphasized efficiency, strongly supported education, science, medicine, and wanted to purify society with a strong support of philanthropy and religion.[endnoteRef:109] It emerged as America experienced rapid urbanization with the influx of immigrants and industrialization due to the rise of factories. This era affected the former Union North and Confederate South veterans differently, as well as how the women’s groups paralleled their activism. Veterans from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line were beginning to reconcile over past differences in ideology concerning the Civil War. Civil War historian Timothy B. Smith states that “White Americans began displaying unity while emphasizing the courage, bravery, and honor of Civil War soldiers with monuments, statues, and joint reunions.”[endnoteRef:110] Many women’s memorial groups followed suit with their own monuments and memorials, such as the Blandford Church memorial windows and the Red Cross memorial windows discussed later. Veterans from the war that were Congressmen were free from the debating of Reconstruction (1865 to 1877) issues of the 1870s and 1880s and could now focus in their old age on preservation issues (of battlefields, but most likely included reenactments and cemeteries too).[endnoteRef:111] They could not replace the soldiers themselves on the battlefield and various lines, but the next best thing was to commemorate those lines with monuments and markers.[endnoteRef:112] Although middle class, married, white women still did not work outside the home, jobs opened up for women overall. Those that did not work turned to reform movements as an outlet for their intellect and creativity.[endnoteRef:113] Many of these “new women” made careers within the movements. Not only veteran groups glorified their fallen comrades of the Civil War, but women’s clubs were created from small, local organizations, such as LMAs into national ones. While the North focused on reforms for working conditions, sanitation, prostitution, temperance, and suffrage, the South formed national societies that promoted the “Lost Cause.” There was this reestablishment of “home rule” as the South could control their regions free from Federal troops of Reconstruction. More celebration of the virtues of the Confederacy and less on bereavement could occur.[endnoteRef:114] [109: An overview of the Progressive era, http://www.conservapedia.com. ] [110: Smith, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation, 5.] [111: Ibid.] [112: Ibid., 8.] [113: National Women’s History Museum site. http://www.nwhm.org. ] [114: Karen L. Cox, Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 11.] Among these national organizations formed is the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which is an outgrowth of similar associations like the Ladies’ Memorial Associations, but on a national level. The first UDC organization resulted from the union of St. Louis, Missouri’s auxiliary of the Ex-Confederate Association and Nashville, Tennessee’s auxiliary of the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in 1892. Mrs. A. C. Cassidy chose the name based on a quote that General John B. Gordon made on April 30, 1886 on a train platform at West Point, Georgia, introducing Jefferson Davis’ daughter Varina “Winnie” Davis as the “Daughter of the Confederacy” to the crowd. Henry W. Grady used the term again the following day, during the unveiling of a monument to Benjamin H. Hill in Atlanta, Georgia. The name stuck and became the name of Cassidy’s organization.[endnoteRef:115] The UDC established itself at a meeting of local memorial, monument, and soldier home groups in 1894 in Nashville, Tennessee. The organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a national entity formed through the efforts of two ladies who headed their own memorial associations, Mrs. A.C. Cassidy of the auxiliary of the Ex-Confederate Association and Mrs. Lucien Hamilton Raines of Savannah, Georgia’s Confederate Veteran’s Association. In April 1894 a meeting was called by the presidents of the two groups, Mrs. Lucien Hamilton Raines of the Savannah Confederate Veteran’s Association and Mrs. Caroline Meriweather Goodlett for all the Daughters of the Confederacy organizations, to meet for the purpose of creating a national organization. They then became collectively known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy across the South.[endnoteRef:116] [115: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Vol.1 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton Co., 1956), 2.] [116: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the Daughters, 8.] The UDC was active at a local, state, and national level, from their national headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. Chapters were organized in small towns and cities, while requiring at least seven members. When three chapters formed in one state, a state division was created with officers elected at annual conventions.[endnoteRef:117] Membership extended to the widows, wives, mothers, sisters, nieces, and lineal descendants of such men as served honorably in the Confederate Army, Navy, or Civil Service, or those persons who loyally gave material aid to the cause, also women and their lineal descendants, wherever living, who can give proof of personal service and loyal aid to the Southern cause during the war.[endnoteRef:118] The UDC, wanted to continue in the footsteps of the LMAs, intending to instruct and instill into the descendants of the people of the South a proper respect for and pride in the glorious war history with a veneration and love for the deeds of their forefathers, which have created such a monument of military renown, and to perpetuate a truthful record of the noble and chivalric achievements of their ancestors.[endnoteRef:119] UDC historian Mildred Lewis Rutherford remarked that "the memorial women honor the memory of the dead, the Daughters honor the living." This indicates that the LMAs honored the memory of the fallen soldiers verses the UDC that honors the memory of soldiers that died for their country as well as serve the veterans of the war.[endnoteRef:120] She also suggested that the relationship between the LMAs and the UDC "should be that of 'mothers' and 'daughters', for without the memorial associations, there would be no Daughters."[endnoteRef:121] In short, the UDC recognized that the Ladies of the LMAs had paved the way for this next generation of southern white women to achieve their own ambitious goals. [117: Cox, Dixie's Daughters, 29.] [118: Mrs. John P. Hickman, Minutes of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Nashville: Foster & Webb, Printers, 1898), 51.] [119: United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the United Daughters, 11.] [120: Janney, Burying the Dead, 170.] [121: Ibid.,168.] These women took on projects that promoted Confederate accomplishments in a positive light. As the UDC gained national popularity in the 1890s, Ladies’ Memorial Associations felt threatened as they struggled to keep up their membership numbers. In order to remain relevant, vital organizations, many LMAs embarked on ambitious projects. For example Virginia’s LMAs reinvigorated their organizations by creating of larger, more purposeful projects. Projects such as, Richmond’s LMA worked to create the Museum of the Confederacy (1894) and Petersburg’s LMA took on the project of turning Old Blandford Church into a Confederate Memorial Chapel, (1901). In order to gather the support needed and still maintain their independence, Ladies’ Memorial Associations united with the national organization of the Confederate Southern Memorial Association (CSMA). The CSMA was established in May, 1900 to unite all men and women memorial associations of the South as to not lose their identities under the United Daughters of the Confederacy.[endnoteRef:122] This new partnership still allowed LMAs to sponsor Memorial Days, tend Confederate graves, erect memorials to the Cause, and tell their story of the Confederate past to younger generations. [122: Confederate Southern Memorial Association, History of the Confederate, 32-34.] Mildred Lewis Rutherford is probably the best known member of the UDC. She was elected President of her local Athens, Georgia LMA, became President of her local Georgia division of the UDC, and went on to become the Historian for life in her state and Historian General at the national level.[endnoteRef:123] She crusaded for “truthful” histories of the Civil War. In a 1914 address titled “Wrongs of History Righted”, she states that her purpose was not to stress the omissions of history, but rather to urge that some of the wrongs that have already entered history be righted.[endnoteRef:124] Her main concern was to right the term of the Civil War as “It was not a WAR OF SECESSION...not a WAR OF REBELLION...not a WAR OF SECTIONS...It was the WAR BETWEEN THE STATES…to force them back into the Union.”[endnoteRef:125] One of the major accomplishments of the UDC was to rewrite history books that cast the South in a more favorable light in public schools. The UDC was upset over the Woman’s Relief Corps continued arguing for the “proper” history of the Civil War to be taught in schools. This led the UDC to closely monitor and censor classroom textbooks through the 1890s into the early twentieth century.[endnoteRef:126] [123: Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 39.] [124: Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted" in the Address delivered to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Savannah, GA (November 13, 1914), 3.] [125: Ibid., 5.] [126: Janney, Burying the Dead, 172.] Woman’s Relief Corps As the North focused on reforms, there was one particular group of women that organized to support Union veterans at a national level. In 1883, the Woman's Relief Corps (WRC) was established, representing northern women's first organized effort for Civil War commemorations. The Grand Army of the Republic’s Commander-in-Chief, Paul Vandervoort (1846-1902) approached a group of Massachusetts women, noting that the men needed a national organization of women to assist the aging veterans.[endnoteRef:127] Within months, twenty six different women's associations from sixteen states joined under the banner of the Woman's Relief Corps at a national convention in Denver, Colorado. They sought to relieve the sufferings of disabled veterans and their families, to assist in the preservation of veterans' documents and records, and "to teach patriotism and the duties of citizenship, the true history of our country, and the love and honor of our flag."[endnoteRef:128] As an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the women promoted the principles of Fraternity, Charity, and Loyalty as their male counterparts.[endnoteRef:129] Unlike their Southern counterparts, membership into the WRC did not discriminate by race. According to The Woman’s Relief Corps Red Book (1914), all that was required was being “a woman of good moral character and correct deportment, which have not given aid and comfort to the enemies of the Union, who would perpetuate the principles to which this association stands pledged, and who have attained the age of sixteen years.”[endnoteRef:130] There were even southern women who had married Confederate soldiers admitted “as long as the lady had remained loyal, notwithstanding the influence of her husband.”[endnoteRef:131] Due to their reform activities in which they supported, they can be linked to the American Red Cross. The WRC supported the ideals of the Red Cross as stated in their Woman’s Relief Corps Red Book (1914), “relief on the battlefield and in the hospital for the wounded and the sick, relief in homes provided for them, of the wives and children of the soldiers at the front, as well as for the widows and orphans of those who went forth to never return.”[endnoteRef:132] Collectively as a group they decided that the WRC “whenever there is a call, cooperate with the American Red Cross to the extent of their ability.”[endnoteRef:133] [127: Ibid., 150.] [128: Ibid., 150.] [129: Woman’s Relief Corps, The Woman’s Relief Corps Red Book (Boston: Griffith-Stillings Press, 1914), 8.] [130: Ibid., 26.] [131: Janney, Burying the Dead, 174.] [132: Woman’s Relief Corps, The Woman’s Relief Corps, 7.] [133: Ibid., 118.] One of the most ambitious projects the WRC took on was the restoration of Andersonville Prison, (also known as Camp Sumter) in Andersonville, Georgia. According to the Woman’s Relief Corps Red Book (1914), it was bought by the GAR to ensure its preservation as a memorial and was presented to the WRC in 1906. Later, in 1911, after the WRC had completed its preservation as a memorial, they presented it over to the United States government.[endnoteRef:134] This prison, according to the National Park Service, was one of the largest military prisons established by the Confederacy during the Civil War. It existed for fourteen months and contained over 45,000 Union soldiers with almost 13,000 of them perishing from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, and exposure to the elements.[endnoteRef:135] The WRC also petitioned for laws through the federal and state governments prohibiting the desecration of the United States flag, and encouraging the daily Pledge of Allegiance to be said in every school room.[endnoteRef:136] Without these women’s organizations many reforms would have been just ideas. Women’s groups acted on their maternal instincts, intuitiveness, and general need to help to make the changes and organize reform efforts in order to promote a better society in the early formative years of the twentieth century. [134: Ibid., 17.] [135: National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov. ] [136: Janney, Burying the Dead, 172.] Fundraising According to craftswoman and textile historian Beverly Gordon in Bazaars and Fair Ladies (1998), fundraising made a significant shift during the Civil War, when fairs became more complex and drew a different kind of attention. Women mounted large scale regional fairs to raise money for the Union (and to a lesser extent, the secessionist) cause.[endnoteRef:137] Women as a whole became unified through their fundraising skills. Politically, the memorial windows within Old Blandford Church are a testament to the South as a whole, commemorating the loss of their husbands, fathers, and sons. Women honored them with the respect deserved in a form of retaliation against the North’s belief that Confederates were traitors and deserving no special burial rites or glorification whatsoever. [137: Beverly Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 10.] Unification of the southern states to the “Lost Cause” is represented through the collective fundraising achieved for each window. The contract for the windows dates from February 10, 1903 and reveals that the price per window was $350 plus another $35 for sash protection, freight shipping, and setting (fig. 2.2). The total cost per window came to the sum of $385, bringing the total for all figural windows to $4,820. Today the price per window would be estimated at about $9,220 and a total of $ 101,420.[endnoteRef:138] The Maryland and Arkansas windows were $100 each. Fundraising was vital to acquire the funds needed for soldier and veteran programs. This continued after the Civil War for memorial purposes as well. The South was more rurally based and far more devastated economically and materially by the war, with most of women's energies directed to basic survival, it was hard for them to coordinate fundraising efforts.[endnoteRef:139] There were local fairs, raffles, and entertainments to accumulate the desired funds for the Old Blandford Church memorial windows. The many LMAs held a variety of fundraising activities, such as Virginia’s idea of selling calendars and children sell buttons.[endnoteRef:140] Some of the fundraising the various state LMAs held were, Missouri held a ball on November 21, 1901 that provided enough funding for the Jefferson Davis Monument and the Old Blandford Church window. Alabama sold “Programs for Children of the Confederacy”, which contained selections of patriotic songs and verse, with the proceeds going directly toward their window.[endnoteRef:141] The fundraising activities not only unified the communities that attended or helped by purchasing items, but united the state in action toward the Cause as well as unifying the South as a whole at Old Blandford Church with the windows. Multiple layers of unification were achieved through fundraising. Louis Comfort Tiffany, though a northerner, is considered a neutral figure within the scope of this venture. While money is money, he donated the Cross of Jewels in the place of the Kentucky window, which confirms that the sectionalism of forty years prior and reconciliation was almost, if not complete. [138: Inflation calculator, http://www.westegg.com. ] [139: Ibid., 96.] [140: United Daughters of the Confederacy, Minutes of the Seventh Annual Convention of the Grand Division of Virginia (Richmond: B.D. Smith & Bros., 1902), 20-21.] [141: Lizzie George Henderson, Minutes of the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Opelika: Post Publishing Company, 1906), 7.] During the Civil War the response to need based items was immediate in the North. Women formed Soldier Relief Associations, which were usually auxiliaries to the medical and human services branch of the Union army as a liaison to local aid associations. The Relief Associations soon subsumed into the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the agency responsible for the "sanitary interests" of the troops (soldier's diet, clothing, living conditions, transport, and care of the sick and wounded).[endnoteRef:142] After the Civil War ended, these same women that were members of relief associations, most likely joined the Woman’s Relief Corps, memorializing the efforts of the Union. [142: Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies, 59.] Based on historically reputable statements from UDC convention meetings, WRC conferences, and the Red Cross archives, the contract between Tiffany Studios and the American Red Cross, set the amount for the set of three windows at $10,000. Each organization committed to donating $5,000 each. Today the set of windows would cost roughly around $168,500, with each organization contributing $84,250 each.[endnoteRef:143] The Woman’s Relief Corps paid their half of the money right away. There are no records that have surfaced regarding who donated, or by what means the money was generated for the WRC’s half of the five thousand dollar window payment. Mrs. A. McKimborough of Greenwood, Mississippi was the chairman for the fundraising from the states’ United Daughters of the Confederacy divisions and chapters. Like the LMAs, the UDC had to fundraise and ask for donations over a period of time in order to come up with their five thousand dollar portion. [143: Inflation calculator, http://www.westegg.com. ] What money the South did earn from employment and business ventures went toward the rebuilding of its cities and livelihoods, literally from the ground up. The January 191