Memorial observances

Southern Cultures

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 61-85

  Bishir, Catherine W ^a,b  

^a NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 72849135807     PISSN: 10688218     EISSN: 15341488     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/scu.0.0052     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. On July 4, 2004, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an apology for the paper's previous policy and a week later, on July 11, 2004, published photographs of the demonstrations by local photographer Calvert McCann. (The morning Herald and the afternoon Leader, under the same publisher, were later combined to form a single daily, the Herald-Leader.) See also the Washington Post (Associated Press story), July 5, 2004. The Courier Journal of Louisville published some accounts of the demonstrations at the time. Although I remember knowing about Civil Rights demonstrations and events elsewhere in the nation, I have no recollection of knowing that such events took place in my hometown. For more on the Lexington Herald-Leader 's apologies for its failure to cover the local Civil Rights movement, see Neil Henry, American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 91-96
2. My thanks to the Henry F. duPont Winterthur Museum for a 1987 fellowship to study the roles of monuments and architecture in forming public memory in the South. See Bishir, "Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past, 1885-1915," Southern Cultures inaugural edition (1994): 5-46
3. reprinted in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
4. My thinking about monuments and memorials has benefited greatly from conversations with Fitzhugh Brundage, Jerry Cashion, Jeffrey Crow, Gaines Foster, Kirk Savage, and Dell Upton. My perspective has been informed especially by Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
5. and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
6. Also valuable are Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1998)
7. and Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003 )
8. On "about to die" images in journalism see Barbie Zelizer, "The Voice of the Visual in Memory," in Kendall R. Phillips, Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 168-170
9. See also Wayne Craven, Sculpture at Gettysburg (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1982)
10. and David G. Martin, Confederate Monuments at Gettysburg: The Gettysburg Battle Monuments (Hightstown, NJ: Longstreet House, 1986)
11. Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)
12. and Commemorations Attending the Presentations and Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Wednesday, July 3rd, 1929 [1929]
13. In 1986, the state dedicated a second North Carolina marker at Gettysburg, at the spot almost to the Union-held ridge, where North Carolina troops in "the Pettigrew-Pickett Charge" went "farthest at Gettysburg" on July 3, 1863 - "within ten paces of the stone wall to their front" reads the marker. For facts and images about the Gettysburg monuments, see http://usa-civil-war.com/ Gettysburg/gettysburg.html
14. and Frederick Hawthorne, "Gettysburg: Stories of Men and Monuments," reproduced at http://www.gdg.org/Research/Authored%20Items/ monmen.html. North Carolinians of the Confederate tradition had long been defensive about the state's contribution to the Confederacy, believing that Virginians especially had unfairly denigrated Tar Heels' sacrifice and valor. They saw the state memorial at Gettysburg as a step in rectifying the record - and taking their proper place in American as well as southern history. How the sculptor and sponsors translated this motive into one of the battlefield's greatest works is another part of the saga. My thanks to Mitch Favreau for an enlightening journey to the Gettysburg battlefield in 2004
15. A monument to commemorate the victory at Yorktown was approved by the Continental Congress on October 29, 1781, but never built. After deferring a request from Fredericksburg, Virginia, for the memorial, in 1879 Congress authorized a study for the project, and with the encouragement of citizens from North and South (including the legislature of North Carolina), on June 7, 1880, Congress authorized $100,000 for its construction. The cornerstone was laid in 1881, and the monument was completed in 1884. For segments from the official report from that time, see www.nps.gov/colo/Ythanout/VicMonument2.htm
16. Thanks to Kirk Savage and Dell Upton for insights on this monument's place in history. Reunification on southern terms included national acceptance of southern racial and political policies, which culminated in the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimizing the "separate but equal" doctrine. On this period, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
17. This discussion is adapted from "'A Strong Force of Ladies': Women, Politics, and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh," North Carolina Historical Review 77 (October 2000), 455-91
18. republished in Mills and Simpson, Monuments to the Lost Cause
19. Raleigh News and Observer (hereafter N&O), March 24, 1892; June 15 and 19, 1892; and May 20, 1895
20. N&O, July 16, September 10-12, 1892, February 16-14, 1893, and clippings in Branch Family Papers, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC
21. North Carolina Monumental Association Minutes, in Branch Papers; N&O, May 24, 1894, and May 20, 1895
22. Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), 37- 8
23. and Allen Trelease, "The Fusionist Legislatures of 1895 and 1897: A Roll-Call Analysis of the North Carolina House of Representatives," North Carolina Historical Review 57, No. 3 ( July 1980): 280-309
24. N&O, February 20-22, 1895
25. The Caucasian, February 21, 1895
26. The "land without memories" parallels language quoted in the preface to a poem "A Land Without Ruins," by Father Abram Joseph Ryan, favorite poet of the Lost Cause. The preface includes the language, unattributed, "A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history."
27. This poem and others by Father Ryan would have been known both to the NCMA and the editors of the News and Observer
28. N&O, May 9, 1900
29. If Kentucky politics are "the damnedest," the historians are surely among the kindest. I am grateful for the gracious welcomes and kind assistance of those who know the most about Morgan and his place in Kentucky history, especially James Ramage and Anne Marshall, and Marty Perry, Mark Wetherington, and Bill Marshall. My understanding of Bluegrass Kentucky identity owes much to conversations with David Morgan and Camille Wells, April, 2005; and an email from Anne Marshall to author, April 24, 2005. In her study of historical memory and the Civil War in Kentucky, Marshall shows how "white Kentuckians used the aristocratic bearings of the Lost Cause to embellish their southern identity" to affirm the social and political structure that went with it. Anne Marshall, "'A Strange Conclusion to a Triumphant War': Memory, Identity, and the Creation of a Confederate Kentucky, 1865-1925," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 2005, forthcoming University of North Carolina Press. The mythmaking permeated nearly every aspect of popular and elite culture, including works of poetry and fiction in the local color school and the proponents of the "genteel tradition." This trend, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, attained full and lasting flowering in the twentieth century. The mythic identity and the highly stratified society it glorified and supported prevailed well past the midpoint of the twentieth century. Indeed, judging from the consistent and well-marketed imagery of print, television, and the web, the commercial and official culture of the Bluegrass and of Kentucky supplies updated versions of this myth to assert the region's identity today
30. The idealized Bluegrass landscape is part of a package of created memory that extends unbroken (except by war) from the antebellum golden age to the present. As one young descendant of "horse people" puts it, in a place whose economic engine depends on tracing equine bloodlines, the concern for the class status and lineage of humans is hardly a surprise ( J. B. Scott to author, May 8, 2005). For a critical analysis of the horse imagery of the Bluegrass see Richard H. Schein, "Normative Dimensions of Landscapes," in Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After J. B. Jackson, eds. Chris Wilson and Paul Groth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 199-218
31. Marker no. 1809, http://history.ky.gov
32. James A. Ramage, Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 1-7, analyzes Morgan's stature as folk hero; quote, p. 3
33. The first Civil War novel by a Kentucky writer was Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men, published in 1864, the year of Morgan's death, and of about sixty Kentucky Civil War novels, over half featured Morgan and his men
34. William S. Ward, A Literary History of Kentucky (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 67-68
35. Ramage, Rebel Raider, ix-x
36. Duke quoted in Marshall, "Strange Conclusion," 252
37. In Lexington, Lost Cause apologists even succeeded in having a sixth-grade history textbook censored in 1908 "because it described [Morgan's men's] looting of private property on the Great Raid," Ramage, Rebel Raider, 256, 257-259
38. Burton Milward, "The Unveiling of the Morgan Statue," Lexington - As It Was: A Memento (Lexington, KY: Paddock Publishing, Inc., 1981), 52-56
39. Mrs. B. A. C. Emerson, compiler, Historic Southern Monuments: Representative Memorials of the Heroic Dead of the Southern Confederacy (New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company, 1911), 140, cites the measurements of the horse as 20 hands high, the rider 7-feet tall, and the base 11-feet high; courtesy of Marty Perry. The Morgan figure is one of only two equestrian statues in Kentucky commemorating a Civil War figure. The other is of General John B. Castleman, best known as a founder of the American Saddlebred Association
40. This story has received recent retelling in James Loewen's "Putting the He in Hero" in his Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1999), 164-165
41. The local prank of painting the horse's testicles in brilliant colors (one of innumerable similar pranks aimed at equestrian statues) is characterized as a protest of depicting "Bess" with balls. Loewen states that the monument is inscribed "General John H. Morgan and his Bess" and quotes from a long poem entitled "The Ballad of Black Bess," which he cites as an anonymous Kentucky ballad. In fact, his account is erroneous; the monument inscriptions make no mention of Bess, only of General Morgan and his men, and Kentucky writer Bruce Denbo wrote the satirical ballad in the 1950s. For accounts correcting the "picturesque myth" about the unveiling, see Burton Milward, "The Unveiling of the Morgan Statue," 52-56
42. Burton Milward, "Morgan Statue Unveiled," Lexington Leader, October 16, 1961, courtesy of James Ramage and Marty Perry
43. Pompeo Coppini, From Dawn to Sunset (San Antonio, TX: Naylor, 1949), 163-165
44. Coppini quoted in Emerson, compiler, Historic Southern Monuments, 140, and a photograph of the statue (or a model for it) is pictured on 141
45. "The picture and data were furnished by Mrs. E. D. Potts." On the Robert E. Lee equestrian monument in Richmond, where there was intense debate over how to depict both horse and rider, see Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 129-161. My ideas about the depiction of the relationship of man and horse derive from Savage's analysis of the Lee figure: he observes that the establishment of the image of Lee as representative hero of the South and his depiction on his horse constituted a coded definition of mastery "not in the obvious territory of race relations," but "rather in the relationship of the hero to his animal servant, the horse Traveller" (133)
46. In "Normative Dimensions of Landscape," Schein pointed to the racialized landscape of the courthouse square and called for public acknowledgment of its history of the adjoining Cheapside Street as a slave auction site
47. See also Schein, "Normative Dimensions of Landscape," on the Thoroughbred Park. On issues affecting the traditional horse farm landscape of the region, see the organization Bluegrass Tomorrow, http://www. bluegrasstomorrow.org