Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists Podcast. This is something we're doing at the NBN with our friends at Grinnell College. I happen to be a graduate of Grinnell College. And today I'm very pleased to say that we'll be talking with another graduate of Grinnell College who is now a professor there, Sarah Purcell. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Purcell:
Thank you, Marshall. Nice to be here.
Marshall Poe:
Absolutely. My pleasure. I usually begin with a question, but I'm going to begin with a kind of confession. I was in Washington, DC about 20 years ago and I had never spent a lot of time there. This is when they were building the World War II Memorial right in the center of the thing. And there's also a little DC War Memorial, which I think is for World War I.
And I thought to myself while standing on the mall, "Why isn't there a memorial for the Civil War?" And then it occurred to me that the entire mall is a memorial war with Lincoln there one end and the Capitol at the other. And you have Grant in front of the Capitol. One of the things I was interested in doing some research for this interview is that these things were built very late, except the Lincoln Memorial was built in like 1920. Is that right?
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. Yes, 20th century.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I think Grant similarly. That was a late thing. And I think this speaks of the topic of your book in the attempts of Americans really to come to terms with what had happened. And it took them a while to process it. I guess we're still processing it. But I was very interested in the idea of public commemoration of such a dramatic event and so I found the book fascinating. So maybe you could begin the interview by telling us just a little bit about yourself.
Sarah Purcell:
About me. Well, as you said, I'm a professor at Grinnell College and I am a graduate of Grinnell. I am a historian of US History, specializing largely in the 18th and 19th centuries. And I have a long time interest in memorials and memory, and have previously worked on the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War. And then have transitioned over the past decade or so, little bit plus, into this new work on the Civil War, because I've been teaching both periods for many years and it's just been very exciting to fuse my teaching and my research.
Native of Iowa, but I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and then went to college at Grinnell. And so have kind of lived in various regions of the country. Went to graduate school in New England. So it's been an interesting ride and I'm very excited about this new book and the opportunity to share it with you.
Marshall Poe:
So I have to ask, and I'm sure you saw this question coming, what is it like to have been a student at Grinnell College and then be a professor there?
Sarah Purcell:
I mean, I'm truly used to it by now. I've been there for 21 years as a professor. But when I first arrived as a professor, there were still plenty of people in my department who had been my mentors and professors. But it was fine. I think partly it helped that I taught at Central Michigan University for three years before I went to Grinnell. So I had a well established self-identity as a faculty member by the time I went to Grinnell to be on the faculty.
But I think also, I don't know, anyone who knew me as an undergraduate was not exactly shocked shall we say, that I became a history professor. I was pretty much a giant history nerd from day one at Grinnell and so I think it kind of fit my profile, including too many of my faculty members. And the way the academic job market functions and has function for decades now, it's certainly not something I ever could have planned on or expected in my life or my career. But I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to be a faculty member at the college that I love the most.
Marshall Poe:
Well, they're very lucky to have you. I can tell that it's wonderful that you're there and it's kind of a storybook kind of thing. And I think it's just great. So let's move on to the book itself. And the name of the book is Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era. And it will be out from UNC Press in April, is that correct?
Sarah Purcell:
Yes, April 12th I believe is currently scheduled.
Marshall Poe:
Right. So the lucky listeners get a preview of what's become. And could you tell me why you wrote Spectacle of Grief and what you were hoping to accomplish with the book?
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as I said, I have a long-term interest as a historian in public memory and particularly the way that memory of warfare shapes US national identity. And that's a subject I explored in the book that came out of my doctoral dissertation, which was about public memory of the Revolutionary War.
And in the course of that book, which is called Sealed With Blood, I did encounter public funerals as one of the mechanisms of commemorating important people related to the Revolutionary War, people like George Washington and Richard Montgomery. In any case, I was sensitized to that topic and had done some work on public funerals.
And as I said, I taught Civil War and Reconstruction. I've been teaching it for many years, 23 years at Central Michigan and Grinnell. I was digging more and more into possibilities for research. I was looking at Civil War Memory, steeping myself in that very interesting field of history in Civil War Memory. And trying to do something that I think US historians don't do enough of, which is to connect the ideas and scholarship in one time period, the Early Republic, to a related field, Civil War and Reconstruction, Memory and Commemoration, and kind of look at how those eras speak to one another.
I also just got really interested in spectacle funerals. I, at one point, was considering writing a book about funerals across US history. I don't know, Judy Garland's funeral, Buffalo Bill. There are a whole bunch of really interesting later funerals. But once I got onto these Civil War funerals, I really started honing in. And I perceived that it was a way to examine how Civil War Memory helped to shape lots of different battles over US national identities and the way people related to the reconstitution of the United States after the Civil War. And very importantly, it was one that really hadn't been explored all that much.
A lot of people know about important Civil War funerals because of the presidents. So people know something, if anything, about Abraham Lincoln's funeral, which was enormous. Maybe about Ulysses S. Grant, possibly about Jefferson Davis. So presidential funerals are a thing that people and scholars have paid attention to.
But I quickly discovered that there are quite a few other very important figures who had quite, quite significant funerals. Public funerals that were huge spectacles, huge rituals of politics, and they really were fairly overlooked. So I really honed in on it, brought together all of my interests in memory, commemoration, political rituals, material culture. I love newspapers and press reports and it was just a great topic of research.
It sounds quite morbid. It has a sort of morbid twist to it. And I've spent a long time watching people recoil a little bit when I tell them my book is about funerals. But they're really very, very important. And so the more I got into it, the more I could feel that I had something to say about Civil War Memory and about the United States as a result.
Marshall Poe:
So I want to put this in the right frame. These funerals, I did not know this before I read your book, are not like the funerals that we have today. So Bob Dole just died, right?
Sarah Purcell:
Mm-hmm.
Marshall Poe:
Bob Dole, great American statesman and he fought World War II [inaudible 00:08:27] just like me. I don't remember hearing anything about Bob Dole's funeral. I assume he's somewhere and there was some commemoration. Did he lie in state? I don't know.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah, actually there are echoes of these funerals. I think we have a lot more media now and a lot more popular cultural fragmentation. So you can go through your daily life and not hear about it perhaps a little bit more easily than people in the 19th century who had a big proliferation versus the 18th century, but a lot less media saturation than we have now, many fewer things.
But yeah, Bob Dole did lie in state in the US Capitol. And he had a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral that was attended by the president and a lot of other dignitaries. It was somewhat smaller because of COVID protocols. Right now we're a little bit scaled down.
The other recent funeral that was fairly notable was Colin Powell who died of COVID. And he did not lie in state, but he did have a large funeral that was televised live on CNN and all the television networks. And so I think it probably was noted, but it's easier to miss. It's a little harder to have an event these days that's completely collective in the same way that events were in the 19th century.
At the same time, we have a lot more simultaneous coverage now. But I will say there are echos of the past, so people do lie in state. The first person to lie in state is the subject of the first chapter of my book, a senator-
Marshall Poe:
I was going to come right to him, yeah. And then one of the things I wanted to point out is these funerals are not like the funerals we have today. They are big multi-day, multi-territory, thus the corpse is taken all over the place sometimes and kind of introduced to crowds. And it's not like the way we do it today.
Sarah Purcell:
Not the average funeral today, no. I do think there are a few echoes in some places and times for very famous people and for political leaders, the types of people that the book covers, both political and social activists. The Afterward, for instance, talks about John Lewis' funeral, Congressman John Lewis. His body did travel. I mean, it traveled across the country and was driven through the streets and was applauded by people. But it wasn't the probably tens of thousands of people who did such things in the 19th century.
So it's kind of an echo of a previous era that we have just a little bit, and it doesn't make as much effect on the public consciousness as it did in the 19th century. And I don't think it affects politics quite as much now or nearly as much now as it did in the 19th century.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I think I can say with some confidence, it does not.
Sarah Purcell:
Right.
Marshall Poe:
So let's begin with Henry Clay. He died in 1852. And if I have my dates right, that's before the Civil War.
Sarah Purcell:
Yes, it is. Yes.
Marshall Poe:
So why did you begin the book with Henry Clay? Who was Henry Clay and why did you begin the book with him?
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. Well, so Henry Clay was a long-time congressman and senator. He was a four-time unsuccessful presidential candidate. Kind of known as one of the most famous also-runs of presidential history. But previous to his death, he had been in the US Senate for a number of decades. He had a long career stretching back to the 1810s all the way to the 1850s, was known as "The Great Compromiser", was someone who sort of probably prolonged the career of the institution of slavery in the United States by brokering the Missouri Compromise and then the Compromise of 1850.
So I start with Clay because of two things. One is it's really important to understand the lead-up to the US Civil War. And looking at his funeral is a way to show how anxiety over the Union breaking apart was expressed in political rituals. So the question of, if the great compromiser is dead, how will the nation survive?
And spoiler alert, it didn't necessarily work out so well right after that. And so that's one thing is that it's materially a good way to look at that question. Just as you wouldn't study the US Civil War without looking at the run-up to it, in the 1850s it's important to see that in the creation of the political rituals and even the memory of the war.
But also, and crucially important, Clay's funeral is the one that sets the template for all other public funerals in the book. It was really the key funeral that switched from the kind of traditional public funeral, like George Washington and other figures from the Revolutionary Era, which were important and large. And it kind of kick-started a new era of an even bigger public funeral with the technology and the press coverage, and even the funerary technology, all kinds of material culture production for the 19th century.
So basically you have to start there because it's really, really important. And that's where the story of these great politicized public funerals that are trying to work out issues of the Civil War and relate them to the American nation itself starts. That's where the story starts, so it has to start there.
Marshall Poe:
I want to digress for just a second, and I will betray my ignorance. I remember talking to a historian of the Early Republic, and he told me that it wasn't sure at all that the Early Republic would remain one state and that has remained an issue for a really long time before the Civil War.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, sometimes we forget that. And I think it's important to remember even in our own day that people at the beginning didn't take for granted. They weren't sure how the story was going to turn out. They didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't necessarily sense a great deal of unity.
And one of the important points of my book and many other pieces of historical scholarship is even when the United States has achieved unity, it's often quite fragile and it's contested. And people don't mean the same thing when they say "God Bless the United States" and "I love the United States of America". They have very different feelings about what that means to them. And so even our long-achieved unity has some, I won't say they're fictitious elements, but elements that are made out of air and sentiment as much as any kind of institutions.
Now we have a lot more institutions. But in those early years, they were still building those things and those things are changeable. And I think the US Civil War shows that we as a nation have been lucky I think that the country managed to get back together. But as you pointed out at the beginning, the story of all those monuments in the 20th century, and we've still been fighting over a lot of the issues around race and power and regionalism and many other things up to the current day.
Marshall Poe:
So this may be simplistic, but the 1820s or '30s when someone said, "Massachusetts is when they succeed," that was seditious. Today when someone says, "California is going to succeed," people kind of laugh.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah, that's true. And generally, I would agree with you that it seems rather ridiculous in the modern era. I don't know. I sort of wonder if our politics is swinging back to where it might be like real fractiousness could be a real possibility. But I think it's important nonetheless to remember that it's not just a given, it's not something to take for granted. Yeah, I think that's right. It was very fragile.
And in part it was fragile because of the way the poli [inaudible 00:16:34] was constructed and especially the institution of slavery. And not just the experience of enslavement, which was tremendously searing for the entire country, but the way that the institutions of government bent over backwards to make slavery work actually built in problems that were difficult to overcome.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I mean it was an honest question, like how to keep the thing together. And people had to compromise is the right word. And sometimes they had to compromise themselves ethically.
Sarah Purcell:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
It's hard to enter the mindset of those people and it's difficult to understand them. But it's our job.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. As historians, we're always trying to understand what people thought at the time, and it means trying to understand both the circumstances and the ways of thinking in another era.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, it's somehow morally repugnant to us. It's very sobering.
Sarah Purcell:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
All right. So let's move to the Civil War and to Elmer Ellsworth. I did not know who Elmer Ellsworth was. And Stonewall Jackson's funeral, you pair them in a chapter. Who is Elmer Ellsworth and why should we care about? He died in 1861, why should we care about him?
Sarah Purcell:
1861, yes. Well, he was actually quite, quite famous nationally in 1861. But someone whose fame has kind of diminished over time, probably more of a regional figure now if anything. He was from Illinois and he was actually had been a law student of Abraham Lincoln's. And he had started kind of a volunteer militia drill unit before the Civil War. He was someone who was very interested in military drill.
He formed a Zouave unit, which he recruited from New York City firefighters at the beginning of the US Civil War, and they were mustered into the federal service. And he was considered by many, the first Union officer killed in the US Civil War. There were actually a few who died before him in skirmishes in various places. But he has one of the claims to be the first Union officer killed in the capture of Alexandria, Virginia in May of 1861.
And in part, we should care because everyone at the time cared. Lots of people at the time cared. Tens of thousands of people, especially Abraham Lincoln cared. He was very affected by the death of Elmer Ellsworth. There were absolutely enormous funeral pageants, all kinds of mourning. He was given a funeral in the White House. He was paraded through Washington, DC. His body was taken all the way to his hometown in New York State, given big celebrations in New York City and various places along the way. It was covered in gallons and gallons of ink.
Partly, it's an interesting story because he was killed not in the actual skirmish of capturing Alexandria, Virginia, which was fairly easy militarily, but actually removing a giant Confederate national flag from the top of the Marshall House Hotel where a pro-confederate hotel keeper had put this flag on the top of his hotel. And Ellsworth was shot by the hotel keeper named James Jackson. And his aide, Francis Brownell, actually killed the hotel keeper.
So it's this kind of skirmish over a confederate flag. It became tremendously symbolic. It's also very interesting because they managed to have all of this funeral pageantry and tears and celebration of Elmer Ellsworth as a lost potential hero of the future right at the beginning of the Civil War when they did not understand pretty much at all that so many hundreds of thousands of people would die.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, this was my question. Yeah, they did not know what was coming.
Sarah Purcell:
No, exactly. Another example, they didn't know what was coming. Because they figured out fairly soon thereafter, you could not celebrate the death of even every famous officer like this because it was simply too much. Too many people were killed and sacrificed. And too many people were killed in much bloodier, much harder-fought conflicts, although lot plenty of symbolism to spare. But Ellsworth was seen as a great hero in the North and as an "assassin" in the South, someone who just spoiled the confederate flag. So he had this kind of hero-villain duality that made him into a big popular cultural figure. And he was beloved of Abraham Lincoln, that's another factor.
Marshall Poe:
So let's move on to Stonewall Jackson. Some people probably know who Stonewall Jackson was. He died in 1863 at Chancellorsville.
Sarah Purcell:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
And how was he commemorated right from the South?
Sarah Purcell:
Yes. Well, he was commemorated, I would say this, as much and as well as the Confederates could in the midst of 1863 because they were... Robert E. Lee for instance was fearful that if they took too much time off or spent too many men to go with Jackson's body, that they were still in the middle of a campaign and that would cause military troubles. There were shortages of paper. The press was under lots of pressure, et cetera.
But nonetheless, his body was taken from the site where he died near Chancellorsville, to Richmond on a special train. He was given essentially a Confederate state funeral in the City of Richmond. And then he was transported to Lexington, Virginia where he was buried. And then his gravesite became the site of pilgrimage, you could say almost religious fervor pilgrimage. It's very near a Virginia military institute, where he was on the faculty and where he was much celebrated. And it became one of the sources of Confederate Memorial Day, was people visiting Stonewall Jackson's grave site. And it is still a place of symbolic importance in confederate memory there in Lexington.
So he was given a large funeral. Now large, in the Confederacy, by the standards of what was possible in 1863. And one of the things that's interesting is to see an actual tension over a lot of Confederates feeling like, "We wish we could pay him even more respect." But the respect in our hearts will have to do. So a lot of writing in people's diaries and letters about how much he would be missed. And also the question of maybe the Confederacy would be more threatened because of his actual absence, because of his military prowess as a commander.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. Okay, so let's move on to... We're actually after the war now. And George Peabody, we talked a little bit in the pre-interview about Peabody. It turns out that my grandparents lived in a town called Peabody, Kansas. I never understood why it was called Peabody, but now I do. George Peabody, who was he and what do we learn from his funeral?
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah, George Peabody. He was an American who was basically tremendously wealthy and he lived for most of his career and life in England, in London. And he was kind of an international financier, sort of pre-industrial, proto-industrial magnet. And he was someone who gave some support to the US Civil War. He was from New England from what is now known as Peabody, Massachusetts in his honor. And he was well-known as a philanthropist. And basically he dispensed large amounts of his fortune before the great era of philanthropy that people know about much more.
Marshall Poe:
Right. Carnegie before his time.
Sarah Purcell:
Exactly, Carnegie before his time. And he did that both in England and in the United States. He was also somewhat controversial because right after the Civil War, he gave a lot of money to post-confederate Southerner institutions, especially institutions of education. And he had a special fondness for what is now Washington and Lee University, was then Washington College that Robert E. Lee was the president of. And he sort of bailed them out with various financial contributions.
And he was controversial because he advocated basically forgiveness for the Confederates and some former Union advocates and Northerner politicians. Northerners saw him as too forgiving of the Confederates. And there's a lot of argument over whether he was pro-confederate or not. He also then, in his funeral and in his life, becomes something of a figure of "forgiveness" between the United States and Great Britain, whose diplomatic and general cultural relationship had been somewhat fractured by the US Civil War because certain elements in the British government had given quite a bit of naval and financial help to the Confederacy.
And so when George Peabody dies in England, he is first given a huge funeral in Westminster Abbey, basically almost a state funeral. And then put on a British ship of war accompanied by a US ship of war, and shipped across the ocean back to New England for burial, where he was given huge funerals in the United States. And it becomes a large funeral pageant that allows people to work through their issues about, well, how much should the North forgive the South? How much should the Confederacy be forgiven? And can it be seen as this great symbol of reunification of the traditional friends between the United States and Great Britain?
It's an interesting story and quite a huge funeral as well. And for the first time, you also see a little bit of a disagreement around the edges. Well, not the very first time, because some abolitionists had objected to Henry Clay for instance. But some people questioning, maybe we shouldn't be spending all this money on these giant funerals when Peabody himself did a lot to help the poor. Maybe there are other ways we could spend these funds rather than huge parades and monuments and fabric, and all kinds of things that cost money.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. So you pair Peabody with everybody has heard of, and that is Robert E. Lee. He died in 1870 in Lexington, Virginia. This is a much harder sell in terms of bringing the Union together. How did they massage this?
Sarah Purcell:
It is and it's interesting because... Well, two things. One is, when Robert Lee died, there isn't as much actual physical funeral. But there's a huge amount, I'm sure you can imagine, of sort of ink that is spilled. Lots of arguments about what does it mean, what did his life mean.
A lot of Northern newspapers, even ones that were Republican that supported reconstruction really talk about Robert E. Lee's virtues. Some of them say, "Well, it's too bad he was a traitor, but what a great man he was." So it's the beginning of the kind of valorization of Robert E. Lee, even in some of the Northern institutions. And so it's an important point about reconstruction, which is a lot of things about reconstruction failed because Northerners lost their political commitment to keep them going. And so you can kind of see that cracking, starting.
Sometimes people erroneously emphasize how quiet Lee had been in the post-war period. They spin versions of his life in various ways. On the other side of it, you see something that has also been very important in subsequent decades, which is a lot of Confederates talking about what a great American Lee was, even though he fought against the United States of America. And that of course he would join the Pantheon of Heroes, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, that his story was part of the American story.
And it becomes important to what becomes shortly thereafter, the Lost Cause mythology of... It was just a doomed great cause for the Confederacy, so called. And if not for that, this great man, he too would've been this. So it's a really interesting sort of like the question of how do you turn Robert Lee into a hero?
But one thing that I really emphasize and I try to look at carefully throughout the book is the ways that confederate nationalism and this pro-confederate heroizing of people like Robert E. Lee is actually part of the history of the United States. And that the post-Civil War sense of the United States' national identity sometimes incorporates pro-confederate notions.
And it's contested. I mean, not everybody agrees about that. Certainly, for instance, Black people don't agree about that in the time period. And those who supported Black rights were very skeptical of this kind of early rehabilitation of Lee. But that too is part of the story, like how that contestation happens. And when he died, it was part of the thing. It's kind of what happens in many of these funerals. Because when someone dies, it's kind of the moment when people speak well of them, right?
Marshall Poe:
Yes.
Sarah Purcell:
The notion is not to talk about how bad the person-
Marshall Poe:
Eulogy, whatever the opposite of you.
Sarah Purcell:
Yes, right. And it goes back to classical tradition. I mean, we don't speak ill of the dead. It's the notion of the public virtues of the person. But there are problems with that if one of the questions you're trying to come up with is like, "Okay, this person turned against his country. How do you rehabilitate that?" So that's why the funerals and the kind of eulogies for Lee are so important.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. One of the things I found remarkable is that, again, I'm not an expert on American history, but it stuck when I think of Robert E. Lee, I think, "Oh, what a great man."
Sarah Purcell:
And we can look to our own day when people of-
Marshall Poe:
I was taught that. I thought of my own.
Sarah Purcell:
No. And certainly for instance, you were talking about Civil War memorials. I mean, the reason we have controversy now over taking down memorials to Robert E. Lee for instance is, many of them, and they were put up largely in the 1890s and after.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, this is amazing.
Sarah Purcell:
They weren't put up in 1868 or even 1870. It did start in 1870 when he died. But the big public memorials really came later. And that's because this conversation about greatness continued. And because it spoke to the politics of the later days, they were using the symbol of Robert E. Lee to say something about their current day.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, yeah. No, I get that. The narrative is changing, let's put it that way. I've now been informed about Robert E. Lee. I'm seeing more.
Sarah Purcell:
Yes, I figured.
Marshall Poe:
So let's move on to Charles Sumner and Joseph Johnston's. Charles Sumner maybe few have heard of him, he dies in 1874. What did we learn from his funeral?
Sarah Purcell:
Well, Charles Sumner was a Massachusetts senator and had been a great advocate of Black rights against slavery and Black voting rights, and many other things in reconstruction. He had some stumbles in late in his career, partly because he opposed Ulysses S. Grant in the 1872 Presidential Election. And really what we learned is that try as they might, major figures cannot control their own memory.
And Sumner advocated for forgetting some of the Civil War, kind of muting its memory. He did that through a particular resolution to not include Civil War battle flags in a particular federal register. And it just blew up. It kind of went viral as we would see today, that sort of term. And basically, it took away a lot of attention from his commemoration as this kind of fighter for Black rights and for the kind of heart of the abolitionist cause, and then the continued fight for Black equality. And it turned into a fight over Civil War flags and remembrance of the Civil War.
He wanted memory to be a certain way, and he couldn't have it that way. And instead, he became a symbol of the continued contestation over Civil War Memory. Lots of Black preachers and Black political figures, people like Frederick Douglass, Turner, many other people tried to use Sumner as a symbol of white people who were willing to fight for Black rights. And there's a whole question about, will that continue now that Sumner is dead? It's kind of one of these perennial questions, what happens now that this person is gone? But really, it's a lesson about no one person can really control the consequences of their own memorialization after they die, or the consequences of some war memory.
Marshall Poe:
Was Sumner hated in the South? I mean, did he-
Sarah Purcell:
Oh, very hated. Oh my gosh. I mean, he famously was beaten on the floor of the US Senate by Preston Brooks in the run-up to the Civil War, and he was seen as an absolute villain. One of the interesting stories in the book is about how even a few people in the South, particularly Mississippi Congressman Lucius Lamar actually eulogized Sumner after his death and was attacked for doing so.
But he explained like, "Look, number one, I told you this flag controversy, Sumner kind of was saying things on positive to the post-Confederate side. So we need to seize on that. And number two, right now everyone will listen to us. And if we look magnanimous towards Sumner, it'll kind of make us look good." But it was interesting to see how his reputation shifted over time.
And it's I think probably a little hard for us to appreciate today. But he was someone who really embodied that fight over Black rights in the US Senate because there were no Black senators obviously before the Civil War, even immediately after in the Senate. So really he was a lightning rod for that kind of controversy.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. He's done pretty well compared to Robert E. Lee in recent memory.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. But again, it might depend on who you ask. It's always the question.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I should call my sister in Alabama, see what she says.
Sarah Purcell:
And there are lots of people who revere Robert E. Lee today and lots of people who don't know who Charles Sumner is. So it depends who you ask.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. So who is Joseph Johnston? He died in 1891 in DC.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. Joseph Johnston was a very important Confederate general and one of the immediate subordinates to Robert E. Lee, and somewhat controversial in his command decisions. But an important general. And he was someone who then lived a long time after the war. As you said, he died in 1891 and took part in a lot of different festivals of commemoration, veterans' gatherings, monuments.
And he importantly served as a pallbearer at a lot of other funerals for Civil War generals, and especially for Union Civil War generals. So he was interesting because he's a figure both of post-confederate nationalism. He never apologized for the war, he still supported the Confederacy, but he also emphasized reconciliation. He served in the US government after reconstruction was over. But again, his own funeral couldn't be controlled.
His funeral shows how even though he wanted to valorize certain parts of the Confederacy and have the nation engage in a narrative by which Confederates were forgiven and the regions were reconciled, that isn't how it works out in the particularities of his own funeral because people can't control the memory. That's kind of the theme of that chapter.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. You mentioned apologizing for the Civil War. Did Confederate generals and statesmen apologize?
Sarah Purcell:
Not much. No. No.
Marshall Poe:
Is there any sort of outpouring like that? Yeah.
Sarah Purcell:
No, not really. Not a lot of apologies. No.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I just wondered. I would think it would be very uncharacteristic.
Sarah Purcell:
No. And I mean, there are lots of questions about amnesty that's granted to former Confederates and the terms of amnesty, and is there some kind of remorse involved. But not really. So nothing like an apology tour that we would see today.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, right. That's what I was thinking of.
Sarah Purcell:
There were a few were who seemed more pro-Northern or pro-US or pro-United States after the war. And some of them became controversial, but they still didn't tend to apologize. I don't think that's a thing, really.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I was thinking about our tendency to apologize for everything these days. I can see why they might not do that. Well, let's move on to Frederick Douglass. People know who Frederick Douglass was, but why don't you remind us. He dies in 1895. And what do we learn from his funeral?
Sarah Purcell:
Well, he is of course one of the most famous and important Black activists of the 19th century, if not, probably of all of US history. He was formerly enslaved. He freed himself. He had been one of the most prominent abolitionists before the war. He was a big supporter of the Union cause and the Civil War, and he became associated with the US government.
He served in a number of roles. He was never elected to office, but he was a diplomat to the country of Haiti among other appointed positions. And continued to be a huge advocate for Black rights until the end of his life in 1895, arguing against lynching and working for Black equality. His funeral in 1895 is very, very important for one thing, because it was so big and it happened. And it's the first time that a Black American merits "this level of national praise and commemoration".
Even in the South, there is commemoration of Frederick Douglass' death. He also received a giant funeral in Washington, DC, though importantly was blocked from lying in state in the US Capitol, which a few people did propose, but he was not able to do that. He was then processed on a special train to his previous home in Rochester, New York where he was buried, also a huge funeral in Rochester. And lots of coverage of that and the beginnings of monuments to him. And really a debate about the legacy of Frederick Douglass and it becomes a debate about the legacy of abolitionism and Black equality, both of which he had posed himself as a symbol of in his own writing and political work.
And Douglass himself, interestingly he's actually a figure throughout the book because he is someone who frequently commented on other people's funerals and talked about what a disgrace it was that we were mourning Robert E. Lee. He said the country was crying crocodile tears over Robert E. Lee. So it's then interesting to see how...
The ritual was flexible enough to include, basically to recognize that a Black man could also be a hero, on this level, a national hero. But there is backlash and that's one of the ironies of the story is that, white supremacists in several places, perhaps most notably in North Carolina, really take the opportunity to do some damage and express themselves in the wake of Frederick Douglass' funeral and his mourning as well.
So in 1895 is of course when Jim Crow segregation is really getting started in earnest and lynching was on the huge rise. And kind of a whole era of late 19th and then into the 20th century, a new era of repression of Black Americans is really adding fuel to the racist fire. And so a debate about Douglass and his demise is a debate about those things. And the role of the Civil War Memory in that did the Civil War mean anything after all? What about the end of slavery, et cetera?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. So the final person that you deal with in the book is Winnie Davis. And I found this absolutely fascinating. Is there a biography of Winnie Davis? Somebody should write a biography.
Sarah Purcell:
There is, yeah. There is quite a good biography of Winnie Davis actually, though it doesn't talk much about her funeral but about the rest of her life. It's very interesting.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. And absolutely fascinating figure. You can see a lot of the issues that we're dealing with today in Winnie Davis's activity, let's put it that way.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. So she was the youngest daughter of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. She was born during the US Civil War in the so-called Confederate White House. And yet she was kind of one of these figures you sort of asked about generals, but she's someone who then lived in the North after the war, and also some of the time in Europe. She wrote for Northern newspapers and she wrote novels.
Her mother, Varina Davis, was often accused by some Southern veterans organizations and others of being too pro-Union, and that she had kind of betrayed the South by moving to the North. In any case, Winnie Davis died at a fairly young age. She was just in her 30s and she passed away. And her body then was put on a special train from Rhode Island, where she passed away, down to Richmond where she was given again kind of post-state funeral. And she was buried in Hollywood Cemetery next to her father. And she had been dubbed... During a tour she took with her father before he died, the Daughter of the Confederacy.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, this is fascinating,
Sarah Purcell:
Kind of her title, The Daughter of the Confederacy. The phrase then is adopted by the organization, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, UDC, which was in the late 19th and early 20th century. It still exists. One of the most important organizations, most virulent organizations of promoting a pro-confederate memory. And it took its name from her nickname, The Daughter of the Confederacy.
And so several things are interesting and important. First of all, that she's one of the few women who merited, again, a large public funeral of this kind. There are a few others that happened after 1898, but she's kind of one of the first times a woman gets anything even remotely as large as all the other men who are in my book.
And it's this argument over whether the wounds of the war are healed. Is it this going to be this super virulent Lost Cause pro-Confederacy sentiment that will take over the culture of the post-confederate time. Or in another theme, it's just after the Spanish American War has concluded, and has the country totally reunited and gotten over the Civil War in the interest of, I don't know, fighting new imperialist wars as a reunited country, for instance.
And there has been a lot of interesting work on that theme of how the Spanish American War, Nina Silber, notably, and other scholars have worked on that for decades, of how the Spanish American War presented this reunified North and South to move into the 20th century on a different footing. And so Winnie Davis kind of crystallizes that for a moment with her funeral rituals in 1898.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. So this brings us to the period of the 1890s and early 20th century. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what I perceive as a state of monument building in honor of Southern Confederate figures.
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. A lot of it is intentional and kind of comes out of this organizing of United Daughters of the Confederacy, of Sons of Confederate Veterans, of other organizations, a kind of virulence. So it's interesting because this is what we see in Winnie Davis's funeral. Also happens then subsequently in these monuments, which is the simultaneous virulent pro-confederate, let's put up these monuments.
Even in places like Kentucky that were border states that were very contested, or even in some other states that were still in the Union. But especially in places like Richmond that was the capital of the Confederacy will put up the most laudatory possible pro-confederate monuments to generals and to average soldiers. But simultaneously, we will emphasize how the country is reunited. And how now, going into the 20th century, everything is healed. So it's kind of the ability to have Lost Cause mythology right alongside "God Bless the United States of America", and kind of fusing those two together. And then the story of those two things, we'll see how it spins through the 20th century up until the current day.
And again, meeting the political moment. A lot of it also has to do with propping up then the support of organizations like that, but also just generally kind of suppressing the notion that slavery was the cause of the war, suppressing the power that could potentially have been gained by Black Americans during and after the Civil War. It's not a coincidence that it comes at the time when voting rights are being redacted for Black people who had regained them in many places after the war and during lynchings, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's the kind of cultural and memory component of the reemergence of white supremacy with the vengeance at the end of the 19th century. And there's also been a lot of work by many other scholars about how the memory of the common soldier... So now I'm not talking about statues to Robert E. Lee, but statues to the Civil War soldier, memorials to the Civil War soldier, which are in many, many, many communities all over the United States.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, they're all over the...
Sarah Purcell:
They're everywhere.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, in any place in New England, you're going to find a Civil War memorial.
Sarah Purcell:
Right. And how that David Blight, among others, but he's sort of the big figure in this history, has talked about... And also the scholar of monuments, Kirk Savage, talks about how the figure of the standing soldier, the memorial to the average soldier-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's what it all this is.
Sarah Purcell:
Right. Whether he is a Northern soldier or a Southern soldier, they look very similar, they're very much the same, and they're all white. And they kind of emphasize a bland, common sort of caucasified sacrifice in the Civil War that makes it about this common sacrifice somehow even though they were fighting each other. And it sort of helps the culture mute the actual debates about Black power and the hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers who served in the Union military, et cetera, et cetera. So it's basically the monuments are in many, many cases, a symptom of the reemergence of white supremacy and it's extreme power in various forms, in various communities, more virulent, less virulent.
Marshall Poe:
When I've traveled a lot over the United States and you do in a lot of small towns, you will see these monuments of these single, standing soldiers with the rifle and the bayonet. They're incredibly stereotyped. You just change the uniform and it's the same.
Sarah Purcell:
Well, I mean that was literally what people did. You could order it from a catalog. And in some parts of the catalog, it had Confederate uniforms, and in some parts, it had Union uniforms. And that's not to say that each community that erected those statues was trying to build a monument to white supremacy, but just that that's the way the collection of monuments functioned, right? Intention and overall cultural effect and political effect are not always the same thing. And that's something important to keep in mind in the 20th century story. But it's a really interesting thing.
But sometimes it was intentional. The United Daughters of the Confederacy was very intentional. They had monument building as part of. They introduced what they called catechisms in Southern education, public education, private education, about the Confederacy. They tried to erect monuments of the so-called "Loyal Slave" in many communities around the South. I mean, they really tried on purpose. Again, lots of other historians have looked into this. But yeah, my piece is just to kind of contribute that, like see how Winnie Davis helped to kick all that off.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's why I was especially interested in Winnie Davis. Well, it's a terrific book and I want to thank you so much for being with us today. We have kind of a traditional final question on the New Book's Network, and that is, what are you working on now?
Sarah Purcell:
Great. Yeah. I am working, as much as COVID allows, on a new project which is about the Bunker Hill Monument. So it's interesting that you asked about monuments. So we now live in an age of contested monuments, controversies over monuments, questions about what monuments represent, who they represent. Are they malleable enough to... Can we even have a hero in today's world? How do we deal with the legacies of imperialism, slavery, racism, et cetera?
And so I'm returning to a topic I've looked at before, which is the Bunker Hill Monument, which is the monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill. One of the first battles of the Revolutionary War in 1775. And I'm going to examine moments in that monument's history from 17... Well, it was first started in 1825, but there were some precursors.
Marshall Poe:
Really? 1825 back?
Sarah Purcell:
Yeah. From the beginning of the 19th century until today, moments of controversy, the monument has always been contested. There have always been people who disagreed about what it should mean and who it should stand for and how it should function in the landscape in the city of Boston, what it meant for a nation during the Civil War. Was it a symbol of the North only? Was it something that Confederates should fear? How did the memory of the American Revolution shift over time?
But also the fact that monuments have always been controversial, and I want to use that as a way to contribute to our current conversation about monuments. And to kind of look and see, oh, what do these past controversies have to tell us? So I'm turning to the Bunker Hill Monument. And I think it'll be great because it does also bring together a lot of these themes that I'm interested in.
Marshall Poe:
The same historian who I mentioned earlier, the historian in Early Republic, he is a historian of Boston. And one of the things he said to me, which really shocked me, is that Boston kind of considered itself a nation-state and was not particularly interested in the rest of the American project.
Sarah Purcell:
Yes. In some ways, yes. So that would read with the Bunker Hill Monument. So for instance, when the founders of the Monument Association first started it, they only wanted to accept financial contributions from Massachusetts residents and Massachusetts citizens. They did go outside Boston, but Massachusetts only. Even though lots and lots of other people as far as South Carolina wanted to contribute to the project because they saw it as a national monument. But one of the downsides of their sort of Boston colonialism, or I don't know, localism, shall we say.
Marshall Poe:
Localism, yeah.
Sarah Purcell:
It was that it took them decades to raise enough money to actually build the thing. It went unbuilt for quite a few decades. So that's actually part of the story too, is like, how do you even fund a monument like this? What should it look like? Is it a monument to one person or to many people? So yes, I think that's correct. And actually this built perception of Bostonians, and interestingly in the case of the Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown-
Marshall Poe:
Charlestown, yes.
Sarah Purcell:
... first as a separate entity from Boston, and then it's incorporated into Boston later in the 20th century. So that's an interesting story in and of itself. Even though it also resonates for the whole country and for the American Revolution. So that's what I'm turning to next. And still looking at material culture, monuments, memory, and really how memory and the physical world we construct contributes to national identity and political fighting, and fights over racism and class and all kinds of other things in the United States.
Marshall Poe:
That sounds absolutely fascinating. Let me tell everybody we've been talking to Sarah Purcell. She's a professor at Grinnell College. And this is the Grinnell College Authors and Artists Podcast. I'm Marshall Poe, the editor of the New Books Network. And let me say first of all, thank you very much, Sarah, for being on the show.
Sarah Purcell:
Thank you, Marshall. I really appreciate it. It was fun.
Marshall Poe:
Absolutely. And let me say to all the listeners, thank you and we'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.
Listen to more episodes of the Grinnell College Authors and Artists Podcast.
