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The Ladies of Gray, Maine, Bury an Unknown Confederate Soldier

The Ladies of Gray had good reason to despise the Confederacy and its people. The small Maine town sent 200 of its sons—more than a tenth of its population–to fight for the Union in the Civil War. There are 178 Civil war veterans resting in peace at the Gray Village Cemetery.

Maine sent proportionately more men to serve in the Union forces than any other state. Gray claimed to have sent more men per capita than any other town in Maine.

But, in a foreshadowing of Memorial Day ceremonies that started after the war, the Ladies of Gray showed compassion and forgiveness for the Confederate soldier who arrived in their midst.

Intersection of Greenleaf and Brown in Gray.

Ladies of Gray

Gray at the outbreak of the Civil War had about 1,700 residents and a woolen mill, the first in America powered by water. The town also had sawmills, a brickyard and prosperous farms.

The son of a prominent Gray family, Charles H. Colley, enlisted in the 10th Maine Infantry Regiment on Oct. 4, 1861.

On Aug. 9, 1862, Sgt. Colley was wounded in the knee at the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Culpeper, Va. Promoted to second lieutenant, the 29-year-old died of septicemia on September 20 in a hospital in Washington, D.C.

The Battle of Cedar Mountain by Currier & Ives.

When notified of his death, his family asked to have his body sent home to Gray. During the war, funeral directors loitered around the hospitals, offering to embalm the dead—for a price, of course. Colley’s grieving mother Sally arranged to have her son’s body embalmed and shipped by rail back to Gray.

When the plain, lead-lined casket arrived, someone—probably a family member—opened the lid. Charles Colley wasn’t in it. Instead, an unidentified Confederate soldier dressed in his gray uniform lay in the pine box.

They had no place to return the body. And so the Ladies of Gray had the unknown Confederate soldier buried in the Gray Village Cemetery. After the war, they raised enough money for a headstone on his final resting place. It reads,

“Stranger

A Soldier of the late war died 1862.”

Memorial Day

Ladies all over the country were doing something similar. People on both sides began to long for reconciliation after the agony and bloodshed of the war. The women’s groups began to act on that impulse.

The Ladies of Gray raised money for this headstone of a Stranger.

In Columbus, Miss., a women’s memorial association visited the local cemetery on April 25, 1866. They put flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers who died at Shiloh. Nearby were the bare graves of Union soldiers who had also died at Shiloh. That disturbed the ladies of Columbus, so they put some of their flowers on those tombs.

That act of kindness, so similar to that of the Ladies of Gray, inspired Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to publish an editorial about it. The Atlantic Monthly also published a poem called “The Blue and the Gray” by Francis Miles Finch.

Women’s groups all over the country began decorating the graves of the war dead with flowers. Today, at least 25 towns claim credit as the birthplace of Memorial Day.

The first national Memorial Day – then called Decoration Day – happened on May 30, 1868. Gen John Logan, commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued an order “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

A few days later, Washington officials, including Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over a national ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. From then until 1871, the United States celebrated May 30 as Decoration Day.

In 1971, the federal government changed Decoration Day to Memorial Day, to be held on the last Monday in May.

Charles H. Colley

Perhaps the Ladies of Gray still have some work to do. Charles H. Colley’s family asked the Army to send them the right body. They may not have looked inside that time.

The Gray Village Cemetery.

In the Gray Village Cemetery lies a soldier with the headstone, Charles H. Colley. According to the inscription, he was ‘among the first to rally in defense of his Country.’

But it t appears the Army failed. According to War Department records, Charles H. Colley is still buried in a cemetery in Alexandria, Va., that preceded Arlington.

So is there a second unknown soldier in Gray, Maine?

Image of the Stranger’s headstone By DetroitWheels74 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77620758. Image of Gray Village Cemetery By RootsLilla – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42261992. With thanks to Confederates in the Attic (and Maine cemeteries, too) from Maine at War by Brian Swartz. This story was updated in 2022.

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Seven Fun Facts About John Hay, Winner of All of Life’s Great Prizes

The name “John Hay” pops up frequently in American history, especially during the second half of the 19^th century.

John Hay was one of President Abraham Lincoln’s two secretaries, or “Lincoln’s boys.” A John Hay also ran the New York Tribune, the biggest and most influential U.S. newspaper of its day. Another John Hay served as U.S. secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. And still another belonged to an elite literary circle, an author of bestselling fiction and poetry.

Actually, they were all the same person.

John Hay, by John Singer argent

John Hay during his lifetime won political influence, great wealth, literary renown and the love of his family and friends. With the exception of a tragedy that befell him in 1901, everything went his way. Shortly before he died in 1905, he acknowledged that he had won “all of the great prizes” in life.

He may, in fact, have spent more time in the White House than any of his contemporaries, first as Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and last as Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state.

Though he grew up in the Midwest, John Hay had a foot in New England. He graduated from Brown University, where the library bears his name. He also had a summer home in Newbury, N.H., called the Fells.

John Hay

His mother’s family came from Assonet, Mass., and her father had graduated from Brown. He died while moving his family west, and Hay’s mother taught school in Salem, Ind. There she met and married Hay’s father, a country doctor. Their son John was born there on Oct 8, 1838, but they moved to Warsaw, Ill., when he was a young boy.

By sheer chance, John Hay got the job as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary. After Lincoln’s assassination, he embarked on a diplomatic career. He traveled widely, learned four languages and made influential friends.

John Hay in 1862

Hay kept his hand in politics and in writing. He and John Nicolay, Lincoln’s other secretary, wrote a 10-volume biography of the president that no one has surpassed.

In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes named him assistant secretary of State. Two decades later, President William McKinley named him U.S. secretary of state. Theodore Roosevelt kept him on in the job after McKinley’s assassination. John Hay died on July 1, 1905.

Here are seven fun facts about John Hay

John Hay, A Great Wit

His contemporaries called him the best letter writer and best dining companion they knew. His letters ‘come nearer than any others to Byron’s, which are the best in English,’ wrote William Roscoe Thayer in The Life and Letters of John Hay. “He was at his best at a dinner table or in a drawing room, and in neither place have I ever seen anyone’s best that was better than his,” wrote Roosevelt.

A sampling of his letter reveals a playful and sophisticated wit.

“Of all vices I hold patriotism the worst when it meddles with matters of taste,” he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1882.

In criticizing French writer Alphonse Daudet to Henry James, Hay wrote, “The “Evangeliste” is dreary, the work of a genius smitten with locomotor ataxia; (if I had known that word was so long, I should never have begun upon it).”

”Dear Reid,” he wrote to his former editor Whitelaw Reid, “It is painful, but I must tell you. My wife says, when you come to the house, that you have got to hold the baby.”

Hay-Adams Hotel

Hay’s best friend was John Quincy Adams’ grandson, historian Henry Adams. Together with their wives and geologist Clarence King (who led a double life married to an African-American woman in New York City), they socialized frequently and called themselves the Five of Hearts.

When Adams in 1880 anonymously published a best-selling novel called Democracy, people speculated that the Five of Hearts had collaborated on it.

Adams and Hay were so close they built adjoining mansions on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Eventually, a luxury hotel known as the Hay-Adams replaced the two houses.

Henry Adams lived on the left, John Hay on the right. Image courtesy Colgate Public Library.

Three Funerals

John Hay attended the vigil of three presidents, all of whom he knew well. He stood next to Lincoln on his deathbed.

John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln, John Hay

His friend James Garfield, when elected president, had asked him to serve as his private secretary. Hay chose instead to work as an editor for the New York Tribune, supporting Garfield’s policies. Then a deranged office seeker shot the president in a Washington, D.C., railroad station. Hay covered Garfield’s 79-day slide into death.

Twenty years later, an assassin killed another presidential friend. When William McKinley ran for president, Hay gave his campaign $4,000 a month. McKinley named him his secretary of state, and trusted him implicitly in foreign affairs.

When an anarchist shot McKinley in Buffalo, John Hay visited him at his bedside. After McKinley’s funeral, Hay wrote to a friend, “what a strange and tragic fate it has been of mine—to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen to be head of the State, and all done to death by assassins.”

The Great Chicago Fire

John Hay was working for the New York Tribune in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow allegedly kicked over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire.

His editor, Whitelaw Reid, sent him to Chicago. Two days after the fire broke out, Hay arrived after in the devastated city after a 38-hour train ride. He described the smoldering ruins, interviewed the victims and visited Mr. O’Leary as he watched the cow through the window.

The Great Chicago Fire by Currier & Ives

Hay’s versatility as critic, reporter and editor pleased Reid so much he gave him a raise to $65 a week. That made him one of the highest paid editorial writers in the country, which annoyed Mark Twain, who also wrote for the New York Tribune.

Layabout

His diplomatic career began when he was in his 20s and lasted until his death at the age of 66. He negotiated 50 treaties, including the treaty that gave the United States canal rights to the Isthmus of Panama. He also gets credit for fashioning the Open Door Policy.

Despite his many accomplishments, he had a tendency to laziness and hypochondria. After he married Clara, he wrote a letter to a friend saying, “I do nothing but read and yawn.” He complained to John Bigelow, U.S. ambassador to France, that he was ‘growing more indolent and scatterbrained day by day.’ And in a letter to Henry Adams, he wrote in 1895 that ‘time goes by imperceptibly in indolence and solitude, and there’s nothing to do, or think, or write about. I have developed two or three more mortal disease…’

Hay’s best friend, Henry Adams

He also visited doctors frequently for advice about his imagined illnesses. When doctors prescribed rest, he readily followed their orders.

Lucky Fellow

He had an abundance of luck throughout his life. The best stroke of good fortune that befell him was to graduate from Brown without an idea of what to do with his life. So he went to work for his Uncle Milton, a lawyer with an office next door to Abraham Lincoln’s.

Along with his good friend John George Nicolay, Hay threw himself into Lincoln’s campaign for president. Lincoln then brought them both to Washington, where they roomed together in a shabby bedroom in the White House. Lincoln visited them at all hours of the day and night. The unparalleled access to the president informed the 10-volume biography the two “Lincoln’s boys” wrote together.

Clara Stone

His luck continued in love. He courted and in 1876 married Clara Stone, daughter of a wealthy Cleveland industrialist. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one, and they had four healthy children. His father-in-law gave him fabulous mansion and a job in Cleveland managing his considerable investments, which Hay, it turned out, was good at. The job gave him plenty of money and freedom to travel.

The only time his luck ran out was in 1901, when his son Adelbert died at the age of 24. The young man had just been appointed McKinley’s personal secretary when he fell 60 feet to his death from a New Haven hotel window.

Grandchildren of John Hay

Two of his grandchildren achieved fame in their own right. His daughter Helen married Payne Whitney, son of another Cabinet member, William Whitney. President Eisenhower named Helen’s son John Hay Whitney ambassador to the United Kingdom, 60 years after his grandfather held the post.

Helen’s daughter Joan Whitney Payson in 1962 bought an expansion baseball team, the New York Mets, and brought Willie Mays back to New York.

Joan Whitney Payson

With thanks to All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt by John Taliaferro, Also to The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism by Mark Zwonitze and William Roscoe Thayer in The Life and Letters of J0hn Hay, Volume 2.

Images: Joan Whitney Payson By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49601215. This story was updated in 2021.

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A Brahmin Suffragist Suffers a Night of Terror in Prison

On the night of Nov. 14, 1917, 63-year-old Mrs. John Winters Brannan wrapped herself in her heavy sealskin coat to protect herself from the thugs about to hurl her into a cold, filthy prison cell. A scene of violent confusion had suddenly surrounded her and the 32 other suffragists in the Occoquan Work House. The next 12 hours would ever after be known as the night of terror.

Police had arrested the suffragists picketing in front of the White House, taken them in vans to Union Station and put them on the train to Lorton, Va., 20 miles away. There, more vans picked them up and took them to Occoquan, where they waited in the matron’s office.

Silent Sentinels picket the White House. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The women began to notice shabbily dressed men milling outside. Then the workhouse superintendent, William Whittaker, burst into the room. “Seize these women, take them off, that one, that one, — take her off.” The men began manhandling the women, shaking one suffragist violently, throwing another to the floor.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan, though stunned, said to the superintendent, “I will give my name under protest.” Then she started to walk toward the desk.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” shouted the superintendent. “Don’t talk about protest; I won’t have any of that nonsense.”

It was exactly that intransigence – there’d been a century of it — that drove Eunice Dana Brannan to suffer through a night of terror for women’s rights.

Eunice Dana Brannan

Eunice Dana was born on Aug. 27, 1854, in Westport, Conn., the youngest of four children of Charles Dana, founder of the New York Sun and confidante of President Abraham Lincoln. Her ancestor, Richard Dana, had arrived in Cambridge, Mass., from England in 1640, founding a Boston Brahmin dynasty.

In the decade before the Civil War, Charles Dana worked as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and made it the leading voice of anti-slavery. He also believed in equal rights for women, an uncompromising position his daughter would adopt.

She married John Winters Brannan, a prominent doctor, in 1882. They had two sons and a daughter who later joined the woman’s rights movement.

Eunice Dana Brannan, 1917. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A 1917 photo of her reveals a regal society matron in a jeweled dress with an elaborate coiffure. She was ‘an aristocrat of intellect and feeling,’ according to a colleague in the women’s rights movement.

Suffragist

When Eunice Brannan got involved in the women’s rights movement, the idea of standing on a soapbox to harangue strangers horrified her. But she traveled to England in the 1890s to see for herself the tactics used by the Pankhurst sisters, women’s rights activists who called themselves suffra-gettes.

In 1897, she told the Political Equality Club in Geneva, N.Y., that she had changed her mind when she saw the Pankhursts’ orderly outdoor meetings.

But over the next decade English suffragettes made little progress toward the vote. To gain attention for their crusade, the suffragettes began to smash windows, fight with policemen and go to jail.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan did not approve. Around 1908, Munsey’s Magazine reported, ‘Mrs. Brannan is said to have reduced a young English-American suffragist to the freezing point by the icy question, “And I suppose you have been in jail” leveled at her on the moment of introduction.

But decades and decades of work — organizing, marching, petitioning, campaigning — had not brought women full voting rights except in 11 U.S. states.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan would change her mind about going to jail.

Silent Sentinels

President Woodrow Wilson did not publicly support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. On March 4, 1917, the day of his inauguration for a second term, the suffragists picketed outside the White House.

Calling themselves the Silent Sentinels, they picketed nearly every day, rain or shine, wearing white, gold and purple sashes. They held banners that said, “Mr. President How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty.” And they made it impossible for Wilson to enter or leave the White House without seeing them. Eunice Brannan was among the pickets.

Wilson put up with them for a while, even inviting them in for coffee. They refused. Then in April 1917 the United States entered World War I. That month, police started arresting the suffragists for obstructing traffic. The courts released them quickly.

Police arrest two of the Silent Sentinels. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The women kept it up, and they started getting prison sentences. Then the prison sentences got longer and longer. In July, Eunice Brannan was among a group of suffragists sentenced to Occoquan Work House. One suffragist had a high-ranking husband who complained to Wilson, who pardoned them all after three days.

In August, the suffragists unfurled a banner that said,

“Kaiser Wilson Have You Forgotten Your Sympathy With the Poor Germans Because They Were Not Self-Governed? 20,000,000 American Women Are Not Self-Governed. Take the Beam Out of Your Own Eye.”

More Arrests

In October, police arrested one of the suffragists’ leaders, Alice Paul, and the court sentenced her to seven months in prison. To protest her sentence, a larger-than-usual contingent of women picketed the White House. Police arrested them. A judge released them.

The suffragists went right back to the picket line. Again, police arrested them. A judge released them again.

The suffragists returned to the White House picket line. The police arrested 33 and, this time, the judge handed down sentences from six days to six months.

The prisoners came from all over the country and from all walks of life: the great-great-granddaughter of Revolutionary Gen. Artemas Ward, a Framingham, Mass., shopkeeper, a Romanian immigrant, the country’s only woman geologist, a 73-year-old Floridian with a bad leg and three munitions workers from Bridgeport, Conn.

Eunice Brannan got 45 days. She told the judge, “The responsibility for an agitation like ours against injustice rests with those who deny justice, not those who demand it.”

The Night of Terror

The night of terror began when they arrived at Occoquan Work House. Eunice Brannan wrote a deposition about it, and another prisoner, Doris Stevens, included it in her book, Jailed for Freedom.

“… I . . . saw the guards seizing the different women of the party with the utmost violence, the furniture being overturned and the room a scene of the utmost disturbance,” wrote Brannan. “I saw Miss [Kathryn] Lincoln lying on the floor, with every appearance of having just been thrown down by the two guards who were standing over her in a menacing attitude.

“… The whole group of women were thrown, dragged or herded out of the office on to the porch, down the steps to the ground, and forced to cross the road … to the Administration Building. During all of this time, . . . Superintendent Whittaker was . . . directing the whole attack. . . .

A cell in Occoquan Work House.

The thugs hurled the women into freezing, filthy stone cells, where they had no privacy. An exposed toilet in the cell could only flush from the corridor, so the women had to ask the same guards who’d abused them to flush the toilet for them.

More Terror

Eunice Brannan looked across the corridor and saw Kathryn Lincoln. Brannan asked whether she was all right after the guards had thrown her to the floor.

Instantly Superintendent Whittaker rushed forward, shouting at her, “Stop that ; not another word from your mouth, or I will handcuff you, gag you and put you in a strait jacket.”

The guards shackled Lucy Burns’ hands to the top of the cell, so she had to stand all night.

Lucy Burns in prison. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

They slammed the frail Dorothy Day down on an iron bench. When they hurled Dora Lewis into the cell, her head struck the iron bed. Alice Cosu saw her pass out and suffered a heart attack.

Mary Nolan, the 73-year-old Floridian, wrote that Alice Cosu was vomiting. “We called and called. We asked them to send our own doctor, because we thought she was dying. . . . They [the guards] paid no attention. A cold wind blew in on us from the outside, and we three lay there shivering and only half conscious until morning.”

Eunice Brannan thought of the offense with which they had been charged — obstructing traffic, — and felt their treatment was out of all proportion to the offense. She also concluded the superintendent, the matron and guards must have had the support of higher authorities.

The Next Day

The day after the night of terror, Mrs. John Winters Brannan put on prison clothes. A guard gave her a cup of skimmed milk and a slice of toast, and then took her to the sewing room. There she was went to work sewing on the underpants of the male prisoners.

Doris Stevens, Mrs. Hopkins and Eunice Brannan in prison garb, probably in July 1917. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Marines from Quantico stood as sentinels outside the workhouse. None of their friends or family had any word about their situation. Matthew O’Brien, their attorney, tried to visit them but couldn’t. The phones to the Women’s Congress headquarters were tapped.

Finally, one of the marine sentinels went to the women’s headquarters and said ‘unknown tortures’ were going on. O’Brien, got a court order and forced his way into the workhouse. Still he couldn’t see his clients.

Some of the women refused to eat, including Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis. On Day 7, they prison officials force fed them. Lewis wrote that five people seized her and held her down. The doctor forced a tube down her throat, “I gasping and suffocating with the agony of it.”

9 Days After the Night of Terror

Finally O’Brien got a writ of habeas corpus to show cause why the women should be detained in a Virginia prison after their arrest in Washington, D.C. The hearing started nine days after the night of terror, on November 23, in a little courthouse in Alexandria.

The suffragists filed into court one by one, shocking some of the spectators. Some were so weak they had to lie on the benches. Eunice Brannan collapsed, and court officers took her to a sofa in an anteroom.

Three of the most brutally abused women didn’t appear in court. The judge asked why. The defense said they were too ill. O’Brien retorted the prison officials didn’t want people to see their injuries. The judge ordered the three to be brought in the next day.

Testimony About the Night of Terror

On the morning of November 24, Eunice Brannan got a chance to talk to her husband, now the chairman of the board of trustees of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He testified during the hearing that day:

“I find Mrs. Brannan in a state of almost complete collapse from the shocking treatment to which she has been subjected in Occoquan Workhouse … Today is the first opportunity I have had to hear my wife’s full story, though I have been in Washington three times this week, attempting to find out the actual conditions of her imprisonment.”

The superintendent had forbidden her to describe her treatment to anyone, he said. Brannan said he noticed the look of terror that came into the faces of all the women prisoners when William Whittaker stepped near them.

“From my wife’s account it was evident that the suffrage prisoners were deliberately terrorized when they entered Occoquan and were treated with great brutality by the men guards, who handled them and knocked them about with the fury of thugs, under the immediate direction of Mr. Whittaker himself, who called out that the men ‘would be glad to get their hands on them and handle them rough.’”

Brannan concluded the suffragists had broken no law, since the Constitution guarantees their right to petition and the Clayton Act makes picketing in the District legal.

Not Guilty

“If they are guilty of an offense it is trivial in comparison with the outrageous insults and brutal treatment to which they have been subjected.”

The judge ruled for the women, saying they could be paroled pending appeal. Eunice Brannan and two others agreed to their release, fearing prison would kill them. The others insisted on serving out their sentences in the Washington District Jail.

Julia Hurlbut, Eunice Brannan, 1918, probably in front of National Woman’s Party headquarters in New York City. Note Brannan’s coat. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Vindication for the Night of Terror

News of the night of terror sparked protests across the country. In March 1918, four months after the night of terror, a judge ruled they’d been illegally arrested, convicted and detained in Occoquan Work House.

In 1918, Eunice Brannan burned one of Wilson’s speeches in Lafayette Square. “We have forgotten the history of our country if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate when it is necessary to readjust matters,” she announced

On August 18, 1920, the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

With thanks to David Dismore, “Today in Herstory: The “Silent Sentinels” Go Back to Court — This Time, to Seek Justice,” feminist.org blog. And to Chas Wells, Biographical Sketch of Eunice Dana (Mrs. John Winters) Brannan, Alexander Street, and Doris Stevens, “Jailed for Freedom.” This story updated in 2022.

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