Wisconsin Historical Society
Alice Whiting Waterman tended to the graves at Confederate Rest for 30 years.
In the controversy over Confederate plaques at Madison’s Forest Hill cemetery, one thing has gotten lost: the cemetery plot where Confederate soldiers are buried has been a positive force in the city, used in the aftermath of war to emphasize compassion and reconciliation, not divisiveness or hate. The history of Confederate Rest is, according to research I’ve done, quite different from that of the controversial plaques.
The Confederate soldiers buried in Madison were captured by Union forces on April 8, 1862 near New Madrid, Missouri. For several months, more than 1,100 Southern POWs were held at Camp Randall, which had been primarily used to train Wisconsin’s Union companies. With an understaffed and ill-equipped hospital on the grounds, poor housing, and a lack of supplies, 139 of the prisoners from Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi died of disease or wounds they had received prior to their capture. These men were buried in a small area near Soldier’s Lot, which would eventually also hold 240 Union casualties.
In 1868 a widow named Alice Whiting Waterman took an interest in this part of the cemetery, which came to be known as Confederate Rest. She had come to Madison to work as a hotel matron at the Vilas House, having previously run hotels in Chicago and Milwaukee. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, her family moved to New York City when she was 10, and she spent her entire adolescence and adult life in the North. After losing all her savings in a failed business venture in the early 1880s, she lived in Madison with Civil War veteran Major Frank Oakley and his wife Cynthia, probably either as a boarder or a housekeeper.
According to a 1885 Wisconsin State Journal article, Waterman cleared away weeds at Confederate Rest, trimmed the grass, had a wooden fence constructed around the plot, and installed new wooden headboards inscribed with the name, company, regiment, and date of death for each soldier. She devoted 30 years to maintaining the plot, during which time she replaced the wooden headboards three times and provided information to Southern families looking for their deceased relatives. Her 1897 obituary noted that she “beautified the spot, encircled it with shade trees, had the graves suitably marked, and year after year she unceasingly performed a most sweet and charitable labor of love.”
Her efforts were supported by Wisconsin Govs. Lucius Fairchild and Cadwallader Washburn, both former Union generals. Major Oakley and another distinguished Wisconsin Civil War Veteran, Colonel Hugh Lewis, were so impressed by her work that after her death, both men raised funds for a monument to Waterman.
Gov. Cadwallader used Confederate Rest as a tool for reconciliation in a speech he gave on Memorial Day in 1872:
I would not have these ceremonies perpetuated for the purpose of keeping alive resentments or dividing people that ought to be united, but only to remind us of the priceless value of our glorious union, and our obligations to those who sacrificed their lives to uphold and maintain it and to the near and dear ones they have left behind.
Here, almost side by side, and in one silent bed, are laid not only those who sacrificed their lives to preserve — but also destroy our fair fabric of governance. Misguided as the last were, you wage no war with lifeless clay and your resentments stop at the grave. Let us then, after we shall have decked the graves of our brave defenders, scattering pansies, forget-me-nots and the ‘rosemary of remembrance,’ not forget the lowly bed of those who sleep so far away from their once happy and sunny homes.
He then led the gathered attendees in scattering flowers over both Union and Confederate graves, a tradition that continued for decades.
In 1904, The Daughters of the Confederacy sent $835 to Major Oakley to fund a granite monument listing all Confederate dead in Forest Hills and also acknowledging Waterman. This neo-Confederate group erected many memorials across the country to further the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Civil War, indoctrinate children in white supremacy, and rewrite textbooks to present a romanticized version of slavery.
In short, Waterman’s work was co-opted by an organization with a hate-filled political agenda. In Confederate memorial associations’ fundraising literature, Waterman was also routinely characterized as a good antebellum woman taking care of “her boys” out of a lifelong loyalty to the South. But that is not really the case. She spent most of her life outside the South and I don’t think her actions were politically motivated; I think they were selfless. That so many prominent Union veterans applauded her work reinforces that notion for me.
Confederate Rest began as a way to acknowledge our common humanity, and was later used to urge unity. The cemetery was not erected to glorify a lost cause or trumpet white supremacism. Burying the dead in a respectful way is the decent thing to do in wartime. I hope when a new monument is erected in the portion of Forest Hills dedicated to Confederate veterans, it can more accurately reflect the sentiments of those who established and cared for the cemetery in its early years.
