A nice place to visit

Charleston's Magnolia cemetery tells a southern story

Author: By Jane Roy Brown, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, October 25, 1998

Page: P5

Section: Travel

Though Charleston proper is a veritable nest of old cemeteries -- some of them charming 18th-century churchyards tucked behind the city's many high brick walls -- 15 garden cemeteries dating from the 1850s fan out on Charleston Neck along Meeting Street Extension, about a five-minute drive from Charleston's market district. The oldest of these -- and the most elegant -- is the 120-acre Magnolia, laid out in 1849 on the site of the former Magnolia Umbria Plantation.

Sited on a gentle rise overlooking the soft-hued marshes typical of South Carolina's low country, Magnolia is home to an unknown number of living alligators and five dead Confederate generals. Here the graves of Charleston's 19th-century social aristocracy dot a plantation-era landscape of moss-draped live oaks, fragrant tea olives, and glossy-leafed magnolias. A recently restored white wooden bridge spans one of the lagoons that meander around small islands. The sight of a fat, 10-foot gator sunning itself on one of the islands -- it flashed into the lagoon at the sound of voices -- couldn't be less surprising in this landscape comprising more water than land. Even on the promontory where most of the graveyard lies, water seeps up from the marsh in soggy patches, and the remains of old brick-lined drainage ditches crop out of the grass here and there.

On a recent visit, I had the pleasure of strolling the grounds with local historian Ted Phillips, who is writing a book about the cemetery and can unscroll a litany of accomplishments and ambivalences, gossip and grievances, for nearly every person lying under Magnolia's marble markers. Yet the history of the place is larger than even this large collection of haunting Charlestonians, and through Phillips's interpretation, the burial landscape reveals a narrative rooted in social change and regional rivalries.

At the core of the narrative, of course, lies slavery. Phillips notes that 40 percent of the slaves in British North America entered through the port of Charleston, where, not coincidentally, the Civil War erupted. This tranquil sprawl of family plots and rows of Confederate graves commemorates people whose lives were defined in one way or another by slavery and the war they waged, in part, to keep it. Many held high stations in the slave-owning white society of the time: slave traders, generals, judges, painters, writers, and belles. Like any memorial landscape, from Gettysburg to Auschwitz, this one stirs strong emotions.

On a sunny stretch of flat lawn, white tablets in regimented rows mark the graves of Confederate soldiers felled in what many in Charleston and elsewhere in the South simply call ``the War.'' This part of the cemetery, explains Phillips, grew out of the efforts of the Ladies' Memorial Society, which formed after the war to protect Confederate dead. Fearing the bodies of Southern soldiers would not be properly honored in the Northern battlegrounds where they fell, the zealous women exhumed corpses from Gettysburg and shipped them home in piano cases -- the only large crating they could find in aftermath of the war.

The Confederacy's poet laureate, Henry Timrod, lamented that because money was so scarce in that time of hardship, no markers were placed on the graves of the first Confederate soldiers buried in Magnolia Cemetery. Within the decade following the war, the now gray-streaked marble and granite tablets were culled from stone set aside to build the state capitol. In another quarter of the cemetery, backed up against the marshes, sits the grave of Horace Hunley, who put up the money to build the Hunley submarine, which was deployed -- and sunk -- in the defense of Charleston Harbor in 1863. Though other versions of the Hunley existed, only one sub saw battle. Excavators recently recovered the Hunley from its own watery grave in the harbor -- the subject of an upcoming movie.

The remains of Charleston native J. Waties Waring, who died in 1968, lie beside those of his wife on a shady spot farther down the lagoon. Waring, the first federal judge to rule the segregationist ``separate but equal'' doctrine unconstitutional, mentored Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. As a result of these professional deeds, the Warings lived a pariah's existence, prompting the judge's wife, Elizabeth Avery Waring, to comment, ``We are as an atomic bomb to the decadent citizens of Charleston.''

These themes of racial and class tension that emerge in Phillips's anecdotes have everything to do with the founding of this seemingly peaceful place. For the shift from churchyard burial grounds to secular, parklike cemeteries reflected profound social changes brewing in Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as new theories of disease and sanitation.

One push behind the garden-cemetery trend, both in America's growing cities and in Europe's long-crowded ones, was public health. Scientific-minded reformers on both sides of the Atlantic, convinced that ``noxious effluvia'' from the literally overflowing graves in city churchyards were causing disease, agitated to locate cemeteries outside the city where abundant foliage would, according to the beliefs of the time, cleanse the air and reduce the risk of contamination. In Charleston, Magnolia was the first of the city's cemeteries to move beyond the heavily settled center for sanitary reasons, says Phillips. Citizens hoped the move would alleviate the risk of the dreaded yellow fever, which had periodically ravaged the South from the time of its earliest white settlers.

The primary purpose of the new cemetery style, however, was not to improve sanitary conditions but to deliver a moral message. Garden cemeteries like Magnolia and Cambridge's own Mount Auburn encode as much information in the style of their spacious grounds, deliberately melancholy vistas, and classical monuments as in the names, dates, and lofty epitaphs carved upon the tombstones.

The lushly planted grounds were modeled on the idyllic, late-18th-century landscape gardens of England's wealthy elite, who first fashioned these lavish burial parks for strolling in mournful contemplation of humanity's fleeting existence. As Blanche Linden-Ward writes in her history of Mount Auburn, ``Silent City on a Hill'' (Ohio State University Press, 1989), the designers of English estates, and the cemetery designers who imitated them, set out to teach ``lessons of moral philosophy and natural law, contributing to a development of a `cult of melancholy' or a `cult of ancestors' to convey messages about Man's relationship to God and Nature just as surely as any form of literature.'' Burial grounds resembling these symbolic garden estates became ``landscapes of memory,'' evoking thoughts of ``man's fleeting existence, his relative smallness, and above all, his immortality.''

Garden cemeteries were also landscapes of propaganda. Borrowing classical imagery for their elaborate, even grandiose tombstones, they conveyed politically charged messages about the glory of the republic and laid claims to the country's post-revolutionary heritage.

At the country's first such cemetery, Mount Auburn, founded in 1831, the Northern elite used the imagery of classical culture to literally stake out the moral high ground for themselves. From Mount Auburn's shaded lawns and reflective pools, transcendentalists, abolitionists, and other Northern free thinkers of the day proclaimed the rhetoric of the American republic in high-flown epitaphs and even in the form of the grave markers -- miniature obelisks and temples that harkened back to the democratic ideals of ancient Greece. The burial ground of choice for many abolitionists, Mount Auburn also sold plots to such groups as the Friends of the American Slave, who used them to erect antislavery monuments.

Rankled by the idea that Yankees were stamping the country's history with a vision the South did not share, the Southern secessionist poet, novelist, and historian William Gilmore Simms issued a rallying cry to found a Mount Auburn for his region -- what he hoped would be ``a city of history'' for the dead, says Phillips. And so, before the first shots of the Civil War rang out in Charleston more than a decade later, this silently eloquent landscape tried to wrest its own history, identity, and meaning from the tightening grasp of the North.

Magnolia Cemetery is about a five-minute drive from Charleston's historic market district on Meeting Street Extension. Because the cemetery is in a nonresidential area, you may get stuck if you take a cab.