There he was, Abraham Lincoln in a Confederate Army cap, staring out of the page of an old Courier-Journal.  I had been looking for something else when I happened upon this collateral descendant of the 16th president, photographed in front of the obelisk that is the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, as he honored the late president of the Confederacy on Confederate Memorial Day, April 1954.  Remarkable as the picture seems now, it is a reminder that there was a time when Northerners and Southerners had agreed to the useful fiction that both sides had their points in the terrible argument that was our Civil War, and that we could live together as one country, and even pose respectfully for a camera at the graves of each other’s leaders.

But those days are long gone.  Today, if your ancestors include a Confederate veteran, April really is the cruelest month—a time to be pilloried nationally in the ongoing unpleasantness over the Late Unpleasantness.  Last year the attempt by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia to get their state government to honor their dead progenitors spurred a CNN commentator to call the Southern army “terrorists” and compare them to the September 11 hijackers.  That language is not extreme anymore.  It is the standard argument now that there is nothing to do with the Confederate South but bury it, preferably in an unmarked grave.

If you live north or west, or are the child of immigrants since 1865, perhaps none of this seems important to you.  But there are several states south of the Mason-Dixon line that have a lot of rooted people in them, and a lot of battlefields, skirmish sites, and old houses who remember the sick, the dead, and the looters.  There are still many people—a number of them political and social liberals—who find this kind of public hate unreasonable.  But what is a body to do with it?  Was the Civil War truly so simple a matter of good versus evil that nothing more need be said about it?  Must it be that people who find so much to admire in the political understanding and character of Lee, Calhoun, Randolph, and Jefferson are ipso facto cryptoracists who have no leg on which to take their stand?  (In modern parlance that’s a list with two terrorists, one madman, and “Thomas Jefferson the rapist,” as I heard an NPR commentator casually identify him a year or two ago.)

There isn’t much else we can hold up to hate, except history.  So here is the story of Elizabeth Temmes, and while it is a story that is imperfectly remembered and only partly known, it is a story about the only sure antidote to hate.

Elizabeth Scott was born in Gordon County, Georgia, about 1836.  She married George Temmes (or “Temms”) and with him settled on a farm near the Conasauga River.  From military records we know a bit about George: On July 4, 1861, he enlisted in the Darby Rifles, Company G, 21st Regiment of the Georgia Volunteer Infantry.  He was wounded in Winchester, Virginia, in 1864 and surrendered with General Lee at Appomattox in April 1865.  But it is likely that his wife did not know where he was, or if he were living or dead, when Sherman’s Army came through Gordon County in May 1864.

We do not know for certain what Mrs. Temmes did to get herself arrested.  There are tales she was captured wearing a soldier’s uniform, or that she was a nurse to the Confederate Army, or a spy.  But the story that makes most sense is this: The Battle of Resaca was fought near Mrs. Temmes’ farm on May 15, and the routed Union soldiers hid in a dry creek behind a high fence near her house, where they were shooting down any Confederate soldier who climbed over in pursuit.  Mrs. Temmes could see what was happening from a window in her home, and despite the obvious risk she went out and called to the Confederate soldiers to warn them.  She was successful in saving them, but in doing so was seized herself and became a prisoner of General Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi.

She was ordered to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Union, which of course to her mind would be an act of treason to her state and the Confederacy and an explicit betrayal of her soldier husband.  So, like many others, she refused, and like many others whom General Sherman arrested she was somehow sent north, in her case to the federal prison in Louisville, Kentucky.  In doing this General Sherman separated her from her young children—the oldest was only about ten, and the youngest must have been about three.  Who cared for them we don’t know, but they were now effectively orphaned in an exhausted and starving South.

When exactly Mrs. Temmes arrived in Louisville no one knows either, but once there she was imprisoned in the women’s and children’s section of the federal prison located at what is now Broadway and 12th.  This was a prison for short-term detention only—if she had lived, she would have been sent further north—and despite the relative wealth of the city as a Union transport hub and army-base center, the conditions were very bad.  Prisoners remembered that the food was terrible even in flush times (not fit for a dog, said one), and there were sometimes shortages citywide.  There were also other problems, perhaps related to the poor food.  Lt. Col. J.H. Hammond, commandant of the Louisville Military Prison, said the women’s section was “no better than a brothel.”  There were tens of thousands of soldiers in a city of 69,000, and women prisoners might have been vulnerable, especially if they were hungry.

In September 1864 the Union physician Mary Walker was given the job of overseeing the women’s prison.  A native of Oswego, New York, an oddity as a female surgeon who made herself more conspicuous by her mannish clothes, she had been a prisoner herself of the Confederate Army earlier in the war.  In Louisville she worked to improve the prisoners’ diet and morality, but she had little sympathy for any Southerner and was a strict disciplinarian.  In her papers she records handcuffing a woman for two hours for calling a guard a “D.S.B.” and locking up other women in a storehouse for “yelling out for Jeff Davis when rebel prisoners were passing.”  It is plausible, then, that it was Dr. Walker who punished Mrs. Temmes by locking her overnight in an old icehouse, for some reason no longer remembered.  Elizabeth Temmes took sick that night, and her illness soon became the pneumonia that killed her.

Dying, she knew there was no money to send her back to Georgia, even if there were any of her family left to bury her or any farm to return to.  (It had in fact been ruined by Sherman’s army.)  So she told a sympathetic Louisville woman who asked for her last directions to “Bury me with my people.”  The best this woman could do was to place her in the Confederate section of Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, a parcel that had been purchased by Louis­villians Elijah Lyter Huffman and Samuel S. Hamilton for the burial of Confederate soldiers.  Their purchase was all the more necessary since Louisville, though Kentucky had not seceded, was an occupied city, and one of its federal commanders had stated that no Confederate prisoner would be buried on Union ground.

When she died Mrs. Temmes was 28.  Her grave marker lists 1867 as her death date, but researchers at the cemetery believe it was actually 1864, because the gravestones on either side of her are from that year.

It was not until three decades later, in 1894, that George Temmes learned of his wife’s fate from an article published in a Calhoun, Georgia, newspaper.  He wrote back to say he was grateful to know what had happened to her and to be able to tell her children, who had survived the war.  The prison where Elizabeth Temmes died is long gone, and not even a photograph of it exists today.  I have heard a Louisville historian—a man who is no Confederate apologist—speculate that the federals were so ashamed of the conditions there that they did not wish to keep any visual record of the place.

But Mrs. Temmes lies in Cave Hill still, among the soldiers she gave up everything to save.  Hate her if you can.