Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Under Dixie Outfitter’s “Southern History” section, I stumbled upon this gem. While I don’t doubt that, as a battlefield nurse, Barton tended to wounded Confederates as well as Union troops, it sure seems a bit of a stretch to claim this Unitarian daughter of Massachusetts as a “Confederate heroine.” (This is almost as good as the time recently when I saw a paean to the virtues of traditional antebellum Southern womanhood, headed by a picture of New England Quaker, abolitionist and proto-feminist Lucretia Mott.) It’s hard to imagine what the woman who organized the exhumation, identification and reburial of the remains of over 12,000 Federal prisoners at Andersonville would think of Dixie Outfitters’ honorific. The Geocities link at the bottom died with that online hosting service in 2009, but you can view it here in the Internet Way-Back machine. No “Confederate heroine” foolishness there.

I’m not sure why I should be surprised; the subject of Dixie Outfitters’ “Legends of the Confederacy: Washer Women” shirt was actually the wife of a soldier in the 31st Pennsylvania Infantry.
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