Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America 9780226059747

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Sacred Relics

Sacred Relics Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America

TERESA BARNETT

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

T E R E S A B A R N E T T is director of the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, where she has worked for twenty years. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05960-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05974-7 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barnett, Teresa. Sacred relics : pieces of the past in nineteenth-century America / Teresa Barnett. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-05960-0 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-226-05974-7 (e-book) 1. Collectors and collecting— United States—History—19th century. 2. Souvenirs (Keepsakes)— United States—History—19th century. I. Title. AM305.B37 2013 790.1′32097309034—dc23 2013005613 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Joyce Nelson 1935–2012

Objects created in the past are the only historical occurrences that continue to exist in the present. JULES PROWN

So long . . . as we can preserve the material objects left to us which those great men saw, used, or even touched, the thrill of vitality may still be transmitted unbroken. In description “one hundred and ninety years ago” is almost as indefinite, as unreal to our adult ears as the “once upon a time” that was wont to usher in the fairy tales of early childhood; but give us the Treaty Elm, the residence of Penn, the Home of Washington, the “strong box” of Robert Morris, the walking stick of Franklin—what you will—material evidences of the public action, or even of the daily life and habits of the men of the day, and we can annihilate distance in time as in space. F R A N K E T T I N G , H I S T O R I C A L A CCO U N T O F T H E O L D S TAT E H O U S E O F P E N N S Y LVA NIA NOW KNOWN AS INDEPENDENCE HALL

Uncle Silas he had a noble brass warming-pan which he thought considerable of, because it belonged to one of his ancestors with a long wooden handle that come over from England with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or one of them early ships and was hid away up garret with a lot of other old pots and things that was valuable, not on account of being any account, because they warn’t, but on account of them being relicts, you know. HUCK FINN

Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1

PA R T 1

Origins and Meanings

1

Beginnings 13

2

History’s Remains 29

3

The Sentimental Relic 50

PA R T 2

The Civil War

4

The Battlefield’s Remains 79

5

“In Memory of Our Beloved Confederacy”:

11

77

Pathetic Relics of the Lost Cause 106 6

From Relic to Souvenir: Buffs’ Collecting of the War 141

PA R T 3 7

Conclusion

The Waning of the Relic 163

Notes 197

Index 245

161

Acknowledgments In this digital age an amazing abundance of online sources is available for the plucking, and I certainly used many digital collections in writing this book. Still, archives remain an essential component of historical research and one of its real joys. I particularly thank the Department of Special Collections staff at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the invaluable sources they provided from the William Wyles Collection on Lincoln and the commemoration of the Civil War; the staff of the Huntington Library, who helped me find a wealth of scrapbooks, catalogs, and ephemera that illustrated the nineteenth century’s passion for the commemorative; and especially Ruth Ann Coski of the Museum of the Confederacy, who was both inventive and indefatigable in identifying materials that would illuminate the use of relics in the postwar South. This book could never have come into being without the help of Joan Waugh. In the increasingly pressured and hectic atmosphere of academia, her engagement with her students is exemplary. Her thorough knowledge of the history of the Civil War and its commemoration was an indispensable grounding for my own work. And her assiduous reviews of the manuscript and patient but unremitting insistence that I immerse myself in the literature and hone my arguments accordingly pushed me to rethink and revise again and again. I can only hope that the result in some small way compensates her for her efforts. I also thank Cécile Whiting for her faith in the book and her encouragement to see it through to publication. And it xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

was from David Sabean that I learned to consider even the smallest minutiae of daily life worthy of historical interrogation. He has been both the most probing of critics and the most enthusiastic of champions, and like so many students who have passed through his classes, I owe him an inestimable debt. Finally, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the support and feedback of my writing group. They were congenial and perceptive colleagues, superb cooks, and a welcome antidote to the isolation of solitary research. And Mary Casey was endlessly patient with what must have seemed an interminable process. Her support and love sustained me throughout, and I cannot thank her enough.

xii

INTRODUCTION

On a recent trip to Colorado, seeking to learn more about the area’s history, I stopped in at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. Like most contemporary museums, its exhibitions follow current standards in displaying a limited number of well-chosen objects, carefully explicated and accompanied by contextualizing wall labels. But in the foyer the staff had chosen to stage an exhibition that reflected on the museum’s own collecting practices and how they had changed over time. There, among the apparently capricious collocation of objects that the museum had collected and displayed in its earliest years, one could see such things as •

a liquor decanter that supposedly had belonged to George Washington

•

a framed twig from Connecticut’s Charter Oak

•

a piece of wood from the cabin Lincoln was born in

•

a swatch of fabric from Martha Washington’s wedding dress

•

hardtack from the First World War

•

a fragment of brick from the first San Diego Mission

•

debris from a plane crash that killed two people in 1911

•

a sliver of wood labeled “Heart of the Stump of a Telegraph Pole of the First Telegraph Line Built in Colorado in 1867”

By our own lights, these bits and pieces of the past may be just eccentric odds and ends that have little to do with a museum’s mission or with understanding history per se. But as the labels point out, the practice of preserving such objects was not peculiar to the Colorado Springs Museum. 1

INTRODUCTION

In fact, most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical collections were made up almost entirely of things that have come to be known as association items—objects, fragments of objects, and bits of nature valued solely because they had been associated, however tangentially, with a prominent person or event. These were things that the nineteenth century knew by the more direct and evocative term relics, and however arbitrary or eccentric they may appear to us, for well over a century they were the principal way the material past was preserved and exhibited. The intimation that there was a category of things self-consciously called relics that represented the past in a very specific way first crystallized for me during my research on a highly eccentric local historian and collector named Christian Sanderson (1882–1966), who lived in a small town outside Philadelphia.1 The things Sanderson treasured— pressed foliage and other fragments, as well as innumerable trivial objects connected to his own and the nation’s past—mark him as yet another example of that perennial figure of American popular lore, the obsessive hoarder. In reviewing Sanderson’s own accounts of his life and acquisitions, however, I came to realize that in his own mind he was not simply accumulating random things but was continuing an established tradition of collecting articles he specifically designated relics. He reported visiting exhibitions of such things, noted other collectors’ acquisitions, and described his own finds to others, confident that they too would find them meaningful. In other words, these things that most twentieth- or twenty-first-century viewers might consider random detritus had a recognized name and set of collecting practices. And if their exact functions and meanings were not immediately apparent, recognizing that the relic was an established cultural form at least suggested that with patience and study some of its meanings might still be retrieved. With further research I began to understand that the relic’s apparent irrelevance to real history is itself a historically specific phenomenon. In a sense this book actually begins in its ending. It begins, that is, in the subject of my final chapter—in the early twentieth-century museum professionals’ refusal to admit relics as a legitimate form of representation. For if we understand relics as objects improper to the representation of the historical past, it is because those professionals defined their collections precisely in opposition to the relic. In its apparent triviality, its inability to offer any verifiable data about the past, the relic was positioned as the shadowy antimatter of the solidly infor-

2

INTRODUCTION

mational historical artifact. It was the thing that was banished—that had to be banished—to make way for the twentieth century’s own historical things. As I argue in the final chapter, the rejection of the relic was part of the more comprehensive rejection of the “curiosity” that was central to defining the collecting of professional museums in a variety of disciplines. In recent years discussions of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury curiosity cabinets have worked to dispel the stigma of the haphazard and the indiscriminate that has long been attached to these collections and to reestablish them as a form of knowledge in their own right.2 The historical relic is not strictly comparable to the curiosities assembled in the early modern Wunderkammern in that it was a fairly unsystematized form of popular collecting rather than a form cultivated by learned men that reflected the science and cosmology of its time. Still, in these pages I have followed the lead of those scholars by trying to re-create a sensibility in which the relic could have meaning. I wanted to consider these untheorized nineteenth-century fragments— untheorized even by those who collected them—as objects capable of supporting the kind of sustained attention the curiosity cabinets have received, to look back on objects that seem trivial, arbitrary, unconscious of historical meaning and recuperate them as relatively cogent forms of historical representation. I say historical representation, yet I am well aware that of course relics are not historical in any accepted sense of that word. In fact they are firmly embedded in a network of objects and modes of meaning that bears little relation to our conception of how the material world represents the past. And that is precisely the point. For we usually trace the development of historical understanding primarily through academic channels and through written documents alone (albeit allowing for that subsection of the discipline we call material culture). Moreover, even within the museum, the one arena where objects are foregrounded, they are typically assigned to a particular discipline and framed to illuminate the tenets of that discipline. Their own complicated histories as objects and their functions within earlier systems of representation are thus obscured. My repeated references to relics as a “historical” form of representation, then, are intended to sketch an alternative genealogy of the historical—one that occurs in relation to the material world, that admits impulses other than the need to generate conceptual structures, and that may involve emotional connections, the relationship between the living and the dead, and the processing

3

INTRODUCTION

of mortality and loss. It is an approach that asks us to take seriously the relationships that old things as old things are capable of initiating and to understand the past not simply as something one takes an analytic stance toward but as something one makes an investment in. My case study is situated in the nineteenth century, but I do not presume that the tale of investments that lie outside the analytic concludes there. We have never been modern, Bruno Latour argues, and, equally, we have never been truly historical, if by “historical” we mean the entirely time-bound notion that our interest in the past does not extend beyond the imperative to map it in the most disinterested of ways.

Though such nonacademic modes of representing the past as monuments, festivals, and collecting have been the object of much scholarly attention in recent years, most such studies have focused on the way these representations served contemporaneous political or social agendas and not on historicizing modes of historical representation as symbolic forms in themselves. Moreover, within this plethora of literature I am aware of no serious study devoted to the form of the historical relic. The articles and relatively brief references in scholarly monographs that do focus on “association items” or “numinous objects” mostly either defend the value of such things in the most general sense without historicizing them or simply note, with some bemusement, the nineteenth century’s inordinate fondness for them.3 While such works have been valuable in calling my attention to the many facets of relic collecting, they have not necessarily provided much theoretical grounding for my project. Among the scholarly works that have proved helpful, I have already mentioned studies of the curiosity cabinets. In addition, I would cite the ever-proliferating scholarship on museums and collecting and the extensive work on sentimental literature, which has explored in great depth Victorian modes of feeling and sentimental identification that I argue are essential to understanding the relic’s function and efficacy.4 Finally, with their insistence on seeing objects, in Sandra Dudley’s words, “not as background scenery to the drama of human life but as actors within it,” theorists of the cross-disciplinary body of theory often referred to as “the material turn” or “the new materialism” have been immensely suggestive for my project.5 In his Art and Agency, Alfred Gell has argued that art should be seen as “a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”6 Similarly, I have tried to advance a conception 4

INTRODUCTION

of relics that understands them not simply as representations of the past but as the necessary means of negotiating affective transactions with the past—as objects that worked to do things that could be done in no other way. The fact that relics are a relatively unexamined field of study explains why I have confined myself primarily to discussing the historical relic only as it developed in the United States. This by no means implies that the relic was a specifically American form. In fact, as my first chapter documents, it had deep roots in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe, and relic-collecting traditions flourished throughout the nineteenth century in Europe as they did in the United States. However, though discussions of European traditions would undoubtedly have been illuminating, casting my net wide enough to cover all possible manifestations of the relic would have been impossibly complicated and unwieldy. In this connection, I should also note that, in concentrating on relic collecting in the United States, I have deliberately focused more or less exclusively on the practices of white Americans. The reasons are twofold. In the first place, primary sources of any kind on relics are difficult to find. My examples come from hours spent scanning memoirs and published diaries and letters and searching databases of nineteenthcentury literature and texts, as well as looking at a range of museum catalogs and commemorative publications. During this period African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans were not publishing museum catalogs or commemorative bulletins, and though memoirs and diaries from individuals in those groups certainly exist, they are obviously far fewer than those by white Americans. Second, and more important, I have focused on the relic tradition as a manifestation of white middle-class practices because that is in good part what it was. As I argue at length in these pages, the relic tradition was a historically specific phenomenon that had its roots in European collecting practices, participated in a more general European understanding of historical change, and was deeply implicated in middleclass sentimental ideology. Given the immense social flux and continuing growth of the middle class throughout the century, sentimental ideology had a marked aspirational quality, and its appeal certainly extended well beyond those who might have been classified as middle class based on income or economic circumstances alone. Nonetheless, Native peoples or African American slaves, for example, would have had little opportunity or reason to subscribe to sentimental values. And the things from the past individuals in those groups might have 5

INTRODUCTION

been attached to would have come out of culturally specific object traditions and could hardly have been neatly and unambiguously classed as historical relics. The one group that very likely would have demonstrated some interest in relics were free African Americans, particularly as their own collective narrative intersected with the larger national narrative in the abolitionist struggle and in the Civil War and its aftermath. However, African Americans’ accounts of this period were often primarily contributions to the antislavery literature or the literature of racial uplift, not solely retellings of their experiences in the Civil War per se, and thus black accounts are less likely to mention battlefield collecting. That does not mean, of course, that African Americans never collected their own souvenirs of the battlefield or of the war’s heroes and political gains. Some white abolitionists preserved relics of John Brown, particularly the pikes confiscated from Brown when he was arrested, and it is certainly possible that black abolitionists kept such things as well. African Americans may also have preserved relics related to Lincoln. After Lincoln’s death, for example, Mary Todd Lincoln sent a cane that had belonged to the president to Frederick Douglass and another to the black minister and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet. She also gave several articles belonging to her or associated with the assassination to Elizabeth Keckley, the African American woman who worked as a seamstress for many members of Washington elite society, including Mrs. Lincoln. Both Douglass and Keckley clearly understood these objects as things of sentimental and historical value. In his thank-you note, Douglass invoked the language of sentimental memory, assuring Mrs. Lincoln that “this inestimable memento of [Lincoln’s] presidency will be retained in my possession while I live—an object of sacred interest,” and Keckley too used conventional sentimental terminology when she referred to the objects as “sacred relics” and as things “too sacred to sell.”7 Keckley also envisioned her relics as being of interest to a larger audience and at one point offered to donate them to Wilberforce University, a private black institution, where she thought they could be exhibited to raise money.8 In addition, African Americans seem to have preserved emblems of specifically African American struggles. For example, when Frederick Douglass assisted in the escape of three men who had killed a slaveholder attempting to recapture a fugitive slave, he was given the slaveholder’s revolver as a memento.9 How widespread the collecting of such artifacts was and whether any particular ceremonial practices were associated with them remains an open question. Again, blacks were in no position to establish museums or other 6

INTRODUCTION

public collections, so the wealth of catalogs and published descriptions of commemorative ceremonies that are such a rich resource for anyone examining the history of relics do not exist to the same extent for black communities. Finally, even charting the development of the historical relic in the United States among white, largely middle-class Americans over the course of the nineteenth century is an immense undertaking, and I make no claim to have done so comprehensively. I have tried to outline the course of the relic from its rise as a distinct historical form to its eventual displacement by other forms of historical representation in professional museums as well as in popular collecting. But although my book spans a full century and more, still it might profitably be considered chapters in the history of the relic rather than a definitive and exhaustive narrative. I have focused on objects and collecting traditions that seem to illuminate important aspects of the relic’s history and for which sources were relatively available. It is fairly easy, for example, to say something about the immense number of Civil War relics, since such relics are referenced in countless diaries and letters, had whole museums devoted to them, and, particularly in the South, sometimes served as a focus of collective ritualistic observances. But it is much more difficult to discuss in great depth what Lincoln’s relics—to take one example—meant to those who preserved them, since only isolated, brief references appear in personal documents and catalogs, and I have never encountered any description of ceremonial observances focused on Lincoln-related objects. Thus I have devoted relatively little attention not only to Lincoln’s relics but to such central strands of the relic tradition as the relics of Washington or the relics of disasters and traumas other than the Civil War—the Deerfield Massacre, the Chicago Fire, or the Johnstown Flood, for example. In other words, this is not an exhaustive account of the relic but simply an attempt to put it on the scholarly agenda: to map the general contours of its history and define the conditions of its meaning. The organization of the book is roughly chronological. Part 1 is devoted to a discussion of the relic as a form of representation. In chapters 1 and 2 I look at its origins in popular collecting and argue for its status as a specifically historical form of representation that was congruent with the nineteenth century’s new sense of historical time. I also argue there that because it was understood as a thing marked by its implication in historical processes, the nineteenth-century relic was qualitatively different from earlier kinds of objects it is often grouped with, such as the religious relic and the curiosity. In chapter 3 I then 7

INTRODUCTION

suggest that the historical relic cannot be understood apart from the cognate form of the sentimental token, and that it therefore functioned very differently than the kinds of historical objects that would later be instantiated in museums. It was a thing that could be interacted with on an intimate level and used to achieve certain emotional states. It created a relationship with the past rather than a stance versus the past. Following this conceptual groundwork, part 2 is a case study of the nineteenth century’s most extensive popular relic tradition—the collecting of articles from the Civil War. In chapter 4 I discuss the multifarious forms collecting took during the war itself and the ways relics were used to process the war’s bodily horror. In chapter 5 I show how private practices of sentimental collecting and memory were institutionalized in the public memorial practices of white Southerners and used as a means of reworking their collective loss. There I explicitly try to demonstrate how relics performed both personal and political work—how indeed they did their political work by engaging their users’ most intimate psychic processes. Finally, in chapter 6 I describe the competing tradition of collecting pursued by turn-of-the-century Civil War buffs, which repudiated the sentimental tradition by casting the war’s artifacts as souvenirs of a collective male experience of battle. Although these souvenirs were still called relics, I argue that they were objects of a different kind and promoted a different kind of engagement with the past than the prototypical sentimental relic. The final chapter outlines the waning of the relic in both popular and professional collecting and discusses the representational norms that came to replace it. In the turn of the century’s professionalized museums, it was supplanted by the ideal of a historical artifact modeled on the scientific specimen; in popular collecting and exhibitions it yielded to generic implements of everyday life, which referenced not specific historical moments but a more general, often preindustrial past. And over the first half of the twentieth century, it was also replaced by modes of apprehending the past that involved full spatial re-creations of vanished environments rather than investments in individual objects or fragments. In all these ways the relic was superseded, and its particular way of representing the historical past was thus rendered largely invisible.

In conclusion I should also note that, although I have chosen to construct a narrative that emphasizes the eclipse of the relic by other 8

INTRODUCTION

forms of historical representation—and though I think that narrative captures something essential about the relic’s historical specificity—it is also true that the relic’s story does not decisively end with the nineteenth century. In recent decades the association item has experienced a marked resurgence in public venues, particularly in contexts intended to convey the reality of mass trauma. Many of the objects on display in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC— the burned books and defaced religious artifacts, the shoes and other possessions of the dead—are strongly reminiscent of objects that appeared in the nineteenth-century relic museums.10 Similarly, the events of 9/11 have been commemorated in numerous public exhibitions by what can only be labeled contemporary relics: a flight attendant’s uniform, a firefighter’s helmet, fragments of the doomed planes, a scorched and bent stairwell sign from the World Trade Center, a clock stopped at the moment the flames reached it. The reasons for the reemergence of these relic-like things are undeniably complex and include an alienation from impersonal, statesponsored forms of commemoration; a reaction against the patent artificiality of themed historical environments; and the historical process by which the nineteenth century’s sentimental structures of feeling have been continued and reworked in our own therapeutic culture. In any case, the objects now on display in our history museums demonstrate that examining the nineteenth-century relic is not simply an abstruse exercise in antiquarianism but engages ways of transmitting the past that are reverberating anew in our contemporary culture. And though I have tried to document the relic as a manifestation of a specific historical period, I hope that, far from simply inducing wonder at those alien anthropological others, the nineteenth-century men and women who preserved such strange and often apparently arbitrary objects, this book will prompt its readers to look anew at our own scarcely articulated notions of what makes an object historical and of how things work to represent the past.

9

ONE

Beginnings The Reverend William Bentley (1759–1819) was among the most learned of the American republic’s early scholars. A Congregationalist minister who resided in Salem, Massachusetts, he read twenty-one languages, according to one biographer, and “his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian was probably unexcelled in America.”1 His learning extended far beyond topics connected with Christianity and the ancient world where it had its genesis. The notebooks he bequeathed to the American Antiquarian Society, for example, included volumes on mathematics, ornithology, and natural history; meteorological observations; and “general statistical notes relating to the United States during the years 1806–1811.” In addition to these scientific and mathematical pursuits, Bentley was also interested in subjects we might now think of as anthropological, archaeological, or historical. From his somewhat secluded station in Salem, he participated in the larger world of his time, uniting an interest in antiquity and its venerable traditions with a knowledge of the specific flora, fauna, and human history of his own locale. Although Bentley’s library was reputed to be second only to Thomas Jefferson’s, his studies were by no means confined to the written word.2 As testified by the voluminous diary he kept for over thirty years, he was passionately interested in material objects and the meanings they could impart. He collected natural history specimens from around the world, donating most to the museum of the East India Marine Society.3 His diaries also contain numerous references to American Indian burials , which he 13

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

often visited and examined for himself. Finally, he was fascinated with New England’s European American past as it persisted in old buildings, cemeteries, and artifacts, and his entries enumerate such finds as excavated fragments of Dutch delftware, furniture handed down as heirlooms in local families, a gun from 1698 found in the ruins of a blacksmith’s shop, and quaint caps and shoes that had survived from an earlier time. Bentley’s fascination with the material world was not peculiar to him, nor was it uniquely American. The practice of assembling cabinets of natural history specimens was well established in England and on the Continent, and individuals such as Pierre Eugène du Simitière, the founder of one of America’s earliest natural history museums, and the better-known Charles Willson Peale only continued that tradition with American specimens. Likewise, an interest in objects from the past can be traced back several centuries before Bentley began collecting to British antiquarians’ fascination with classical antiquities, implements excavated from Anglo-Saxon barrows, old coins, armor, seals, and objects of daily use. In their investigations, as Graham Parry has noted, “the method of enquiry moved from the study of texts to the study of objects” and from “a position where the past was recovered mainly by means of ancient authors . . . to where material objects became of greater significance and could be used to interact with the written record.”4 And in a very real sense Bentley simply continued these practices, with the signal difference that instead of excavating Roman or Anglo-Saxon remains he sought out American Indian burials, and rather than tracing the history of British royalty, he marveled over the evidence of the Puritan forefathers and their times.5 Like his predecessors in England, Bentley exhibited what one commentator has identified as the typical antiquarian’s “fanatical obsession with the historical significance of the individual object” and a sense that the peculiarities of these objects offered a wealth of enigmatic meanings about the past.6 When he visited sites of Indian burials, he inevitably sought out whatever information he could gain on the circumstances of their discovery, noting the direction the skeletons had been facing, whether they were sitting or lying, and the artifacts found with them. Similarly, when he described the remains of a European American past, he sometimes displayed an almost inordinate fascination with the minutiae of physical characteristics. Looking at a woman’s shoe from the seventeenth century, for example, he took care to note in his diary that “The heel and square toe were of the same length 2 1/2 inches. The sole leather was of the common thickness of 14

BEGINNINGS

English soles. The Straps were cut for Clasps. The heel tap of the same leather with the sole 1/2 inch.”7 Though objects from the past often inspired interest because of their inexplicable strangeness, their very peculiarities might be a tantalizing source of meaning. In his sometimes detailed musings, Bentley showed a desire to develop a more systematic knowledge that would build on and account for the sometimes anomalous physical specifics before him. A glass demijohn unearthed in Salem and bearing the name Philip English, for instance, was “one among the many proofs” that English’s “style of living was the best of his day.”8 And delftware and glass in an Indian grave showed Bentley that “this Indian must have been buried about the time of the Plymouth settlement which came from Holland.”9 In an address to the American Antiquarian Society in 1816, he offered detailed information on the physical particulars of seventeenth-century settlers’ housing, inventories of their possessions, and an elaborate discussion of the tonnage of their ships, all as proof of his argument that, contrary to popular belief, these early settlers had not lived in austere poverty and that antiquarianism had much to contribute to an understanding of the colonies’ early economy and material prosperity.10 Though Bentley clearly loved old things for the connection to the past they inspired, in general his task as an antiquarian was not simply to accumulate objects or use them for nostalgic reflection but to marshal them in the service of a more methodical historical knowledge. Bentley’s intense involvement with things from the past continued throughout his life. In 1819, however, toward the end of his life, an object appears in his diary that, at least in retrospect, can be seen to be qualitatively different from most of the things he had collected up to that time. As the entry notes, Lt. Armstrong gave me a walking Cane said to be made out of the bottom plank of the old Ship Resolution in which Cooke went around the world. It has an ivory head & silver ring below it & silver at the holes through which a leather string is braided. It is colored black & has a ferrel of brass, plugged with iron. Mr. Felsh, the Chaplain, warrants for the wood & the worm holes prove it from some ship or other. So I receive it.”11

Bentley explicates the cane as he would any other historical artifact, proceeding from its physical particulars to inferences about its origins and significance. But in this case the artifact does not admit of such empirical investigation beyond a certain point. As he ironically ob15

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

serves, the many wormholes tell him the wood is indeed from some ship, but the posited connection to Captain Cook must remain an article of faith. And in any case, the cane cannot supply any new information about Cook or his voyage. Bentley’s ironic tone, along with the fact that he had been given this particular article rather than actively seeking it out, suggests that he did not prize this ship-turned-cane or consider that it could engender a meaningful relationship with the past. If so, however, he was at odds with the collecting tradition that was taking root in both Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century and that signaled a new conception of how objects embodied the past and brought that past into the present. No one better epitomized the new breed of collector than Philadelphian John Fanning Watson (1779–1860). Born twenty years after Bentley, Watson continued many of the passions and preoccupations of an earlier generation of antiquarians. Like Bentley, he was fervently attached to any manifestation of previous times—to old buildings, old texts, old artifacts. And like Bentley he spent time copying inscriptions from graveyards, peering into excavated foundations, and collecting a multitude of objects that had survived from past eras. Yet Watson’s preoccupations also differed significantly from the generations of antiquarians who preceded him. Early nineteenth-century members of the American Antiquarian Society were often doctors, lawyers, and ministers who, like Bentley, had university educations and were well versed in the knowledge appropriate to the educated man of their time. Watson, on the other hand, epitomized the early nineteenth century’s rising commercial class. The son of a sea captain who had served in the Revolutionary War, he worked his way from clerking for the War Department to owning several book and stationery stores in Philadelphia to serving as cashier of Pennsylvania’s Bank of Germantown and finally to a position as secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad. Watson showed little interest in some of the subjects that had traditionally engaged learned antiquarians, including natural history and classical antiquity. He was primarily interested in the history of his own locale—Philadelphia and its environs— and particularly the remnants of its earlier Euro-American history. He was one of the founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, established in 1824; he championed the preservation of sites connected with William Penn; and—the accomplishment that brought him the most renown—in 1830 he published his Annals of Philadelphia, a compendium of anecdotes and observations on Philadelphia’s past based 16

BEGINNINGS

on research in archival sources, examination of earlier eras’ material culture, and questionnaires and interviews soliciting the memories of the city’s oldest inhabitants.12 Watson’s zeal for uncovering the history of his own environs was characteristic of antiquarians in general, who typically focused on a limited local past rather than on a larger national history. Thus William Bentley’s historical investigations, for example, were largely confined to sites in and around Salem, and he was generally concerned with artifacts’ ability to illuminate everyday life in that region rather than with their status in a larger national narrative. In concentrating on the history of Philadelphia, Watson continued this tradition. At the same time, his investigations of local history were strongly marked by the celebratory patriotic narratives that had emerged in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. His earliest commemorative work in the 1820s and 1830s focused largely on William Penn, who was obviously central to Philadelphia’s own history. But Penn’s status as a founding father for the state of Pennsylvania meant that Watson was promoting a type of historical figure that had not appeared prominently in earlier antiquarian discourse but was very much a feature of national patriotic rhetoric and commemoration throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, precisely by celebrating a local hero when a national history of the United States was emerging that gave pride of place to New England, Watson and the group of Philadelphians who promoted Penn’s reputation were implicitly championing a local founding father whose deeds could be set against the Pilgrims and the heroes of the Revolution and could thus position Pennsylvania within the pantheon of states.13 Similarly, when Watson collected souvenirs from nearby Revolutionary War battlefields or arranged for the reburial of officers killed there, he was commemorating local historical sites only as arenas where the nation’s founding event had been played out. Watson’s interviews with elderly Philadelphians and his fascination with the minutiae of the city’s built environment may have evinced a concern with the local and the quotidian, but in accordance with the uses increasingly being made of the past in the early republic, his history making also promoted very different tendencies: the subordination of local history to the grand narrative of the nation-state, an extreme investment in the lives of great men, and a fascination with the dramatic individual event rather than with the ongoing patterns of daily life. If Watson’s practice differed from earlier antiquarians’ in the kind of history it purveyed, it also differed in the means used to portray that history. Like Bentley, Watson was an inveterate collector and con17

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

noisseur of things from the past. But the objects that interested him were seldom the kinds that could yield more knowledge about the past through patient examination and explication. Instead, they were “association items.” Like the cane given to Bentley, they were valued not because of the information encoded in their physical particulars but simply because they had been associated with—had been owned by, participated in, or merely been physically contiguous to—an illustrious person or a major historical event. Among many other treasures, Watson preserved a chair that had belonged to the Penn family; a lock of Washington’s hair and a button from his uniform; cannonballs, bullets, and other objects from Revolutionary War battlefields; and pieces of wood from various trees, ships, and buildings that had witnessed monumental events of the past. In each of these things he sought a connection to the past, but it was not the same kind of connection earlier antiquarians had sought. His mode of preserving history was highly specific to the nineteenth century and was thoroughly structured by his age’s concerns and by the emerging relation between past and present that characterized his time.

Collecting objects that can be described as association items certainly predated the nineteenth century. Like so many of the articles eventually exhibited in museums, association items trace their descent to the curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In those collections, most objects connected to some past event or person seem to have been religious artifacts, such as the proverbial fragments of the true cross, vessels from Solomon’s temple, or pieces of Noah’s ark. Such objects could be seen as historical in that they commemorated events that devout Christians believed had actually occurred. But they were presumably valued largely because, in the tradition of the religious relic, they transmitted some of the sacred power of their origins, not primarily as reminders of “history.” Similarly, in an age that still believed in the divine right of kings, the apparel and possessions of royalty that appeared with some frequency in curiosity cabinets may have had a potency that had little to do with the way they symbolized an earlier era. This is not to say, however, that the kinds of association items that would eventually make their way into history museums never turned up in curiosity cabinets. Objects owned by Erasmus were preserved in a Basel cabinet after his death in 1536.14 The Tradescants collected a fair number of things associated with famous people, in18

BEGINNINGS

cluding—along with gloves that had belonged to Edward the Confessor, Anne Boleyn’s veil and gloves, and Henry VIII’s gloves, stirrups, hawk’s hood, and dog collar—a “trunion” from Captain Drake’s ship and a knife that the catalog asserted had been used to kill Henry Hudson.15 And at the Bodleian Library in the mid-seventeenth century, visitors could see a lantern that had purportedly belonged to Guy Fawkes.16 By the early eighteenth century the range of objects preserved in the cabinets of the wealthy and learned had also made their way into more popular venues. According to a catalog published in 1732, a collection on exhibit at Don Saltero’s Coffee House in London boasted such wonders as the four evangelists’ heads carved on a cherry stone, a petrified oyster, and a fifteen-inch frog, along with a smattering of objects that marked a range of supposedly historical occurrences—a rose from Jericho, manna from Canaan, Queen Elizabeth’s strawberry dish, and William the Conqueror’s flaming sword.17 By midcentury, Adams Museum at the Royal Swan tavern was displaying thunderbolt stones, Chinese chopsticks, and a corn mill in a bottle that ground without wind, water, or clockwork. But it also displayed Charles of Swedeland’s boots, Henry VIII’s spurs, and a tobacco stopper made from the Royal Oak where King Charles hid.18 Such collections were clearly the descendants of the curiosity cabinets in their broad range of objects and their propensity for the strange and the marvelous. Like the curiosity cabinets, they displayed a smattering of what could be considered historical objects, but those made up only a small percentage of the collections’ wonders, and there is no evidence that they attracted any particular attention or were distinguished from the marvels that surrounded them. For all their teeming wealth of things, the cabinets and the popular collections that evolved from them do not seem to have considered things to be of interest solely because they were from the past. They did not develop a category of the historical object. It was in antiquarian investigations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that a category of artifacts fi rst emerged whose defining characteristic was that they came from an earlier time. As I noted above, however, those antiquarians did not typically show any great interest in association items. In their focus on the generic and often unspectacular articles of everyday life and in their emphasis on the information that close examination of artifacts’ physical characteristics could offer, they were the forerunners of contemporary archaeologists and historians of material culture. In fact, as Rosemary Sweet has argued, they initiated the focus on the particulars of the past that characterizes the modern historian more generally.19 However, the antiquarian 19

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

legacy had little effect on the popular tradition of historical collecting that dominated the nineteenth century. This tradition elevated association items to a new prominence, making them an exclusive focus of collecting and elaborating a rhetoric and a complex series of linkages that enabled these formerly marginal objects to signify in new and unprecedented ways. The rise of the association item can perhaps be seen most clearly in the cult of Shakespeare memorabilia that flourished at Stratfordon-Avon from at least the 1760s on. Whereas earlier assemblages of association items had been unsystematic at best, the attachment to objects connected with the Bard coalesced into a bona fide collecting tradition—a focused effort that centered on one figure, dealt in a relatively limited range of canonical objects, and continued into at least the early twentieth century with a highly self-conscious sense of its own lore and traditions. By the late 1700s, pilgrims to Stratford could visit Shakespeare’s birthplace as well as the cottage of Anne Hathaway, and at the former, at least according to early nineteenth-century accounts, they could see the chair the Bard sat in, his tobacco box, and the sword he used in a production of Hamlet. In addition, visitors could buy souvenirs made from the wood of a much venerated mulberry tree that Shakespeare purportedly planted and an equally prolific assortment of objects made from a crabapple tree he was said to have rested under. The Shakespeare industry was given particular impetus by the actor David Garrick, who in 1769 staged a succession of commemorative festivities in Stratford where the playwright was remembered in several days of processions, speeches, poetry, and fireworks. True to the traditions of the place, Garrick presided over the whole with a wand made from the famous mulberry tree and at one point, not content with this mute proffering of the artifact, apostrophized the tree in his ode “Shakspeare’s Mulberry-Tree,” delivered holding a cup that— inevitably—was also fashioned from that selfsame tree.20 The Shakespeare industry was perhaps the most concerted tradition of popular historical collecting in England, but it was by no means the only one. Throughout the nineteenth century, souvenir hunters spirited away chips hacked from Stonehenge (in the early part of the century a mallet hung handily attached to the ruin for this very purpose), bits of tapestry from Mary Queen of Scots’ bedroom, wooden chips from John Bunyan’s home, bullets from the Battle of Waterloo, and fragments of anything associated with Napoleon.21 Given the more recent arrival of its European inhabitants and its lack of a significant literary tradition, the United States could never boast the range of souvenir collecting 20

BEGINNINGS

that England did, but it developed its own canonical sites and collecting traditions, most centering on political and military persons and events and bolstering a patriotic narrative of glorious national origins. It was in the 1770s, for example, that the archetype of all American association items, Plymouth Rock, was enshrined as the site of the nation’s originary moment, and in the ensuing years fragments of the rock made their way into public and private collections.22 In general, souvenirs of the Pilgrim fathers were among the first American artifacts deemed worthy of veneration. Articles that had belonged to leading Pilgrim families were passed down to their descendants for generations, and Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth—perhaps the earliest American establishment that could be considered an exclusively historical museum— was founded in 1824. Among the many objects displayed in the hall were a chair that had belonged to Governor Carver; Miles Standish’s sword; and a piece of timber from the house of Elder Thomas Faunce, the last ruling elder in the first church of Plymouth and the source of the tradition that identified Plymouth Rock as the site of the Pilgrims’ landing.23 Plymouth Rock would become one of the very few nineteenthcentury relics that would continue to be recognized and valued down to our own time, but it was not the only natural object used to represent the past. Collectors often took pebbles, flowers, foliage, and especially pieces of trees from historic sites.24 In fact, before the Civil War, pieces of wood from the Charter Oak—the tree where the charter of the colony of Connecticut was believed to have been hidden in 1687—were probably the single most common object in American historical collections.25 And the oak’s popularity was only enhanced when it finally toppled in a thunderstorm in 1856, a much lamented event that, according to one report, “brought thousands of people . . . who bore away acorns, sprigs, leaves, and parts of limbs.”26 The relics most venerated throughout the nineteenth century, however, were undoubtedly those of great men, particularly statesmen and founding fathers. Just as Pennsylvanians valued objects related to William Penn, so inhabitants of Rhode Island enshrined Roger Williams.27 And if relics of the Pilgrims were displayed in Pilgrim Hall, by the 1850s a small collection of relics relating to the founding of the republic had begun to be assembled in Independence Hall, including a desk that had belonged to Benjamin Franklin, the chair John Hancock supposedly sat in when he signed the Declaration of Independence, a piece of the Charter Oak, and a fragment of the wooden step from which the Declaration of Independence received its first public reading.28 21

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

Among a multitude of objects related to the founding of the republic, articles associated with Washington were held in particularly high esteem. Individuals who had known Washington personally or had a connection to his family were able to acquire intimate personal effects that were handed down in their families for decades. Thus, when Robert Gould Shaw visited Boston Brahmin Josiah Quincy in 1863, he exulted that Quincy was able to show him “some of the most interesting relics I ever saw. Some of Washington’s hair, letters, gloves, & documents.”29 And the lock of the president’s hair that Massachusetts congressman Peleg Wadsworth acquired from Martha Washington and that he said sent “a Thril of Awe & reverence . . . Thro my whole frame,” was eventually passed down to his grandson Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.30 Ordinary Americans who had no access to the president or his heirs had to be content with objects more generally available. Tourists to Mount Vernon thus regularly clipped sprigs of foliage and gathered pebbles at the tomb or eventually, as the site became more commercialized, bought packets of seeds from the garden. Association items were avidly accumulated by individual collectors, but they were clearly considered to have meanings beyond any one person’s interests or predilections, since they were also the objects that represented the past even in the public repositories founded by serious students of the nation’s history. The Massachusetts Historical Society, the nation’s first state historical organization, was founded in 1791, and close to thirty such societies were founded over the next seventy years.31 Though the historical societies collected primarily manuscripts and books, they also preserved collections of artifacts. Virtually all were association items, and many would be unlikely candidates for preservation in any museum today. In addition, for example, to the sword of Miles Standish, knee breeches belonging to Benjamin Franklin, and a pair of dress epaulets George Washington wore at Yorktown, the Massachusetts Historical Society preserved a “box made of wood from the house on Tremont Street, former location of the Massachusetts Historical Society,” a lock of Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow’s hair, “taken from his head in 1740, sixty years after he was buried,” and “a hook from the Sandwich Islands, supposedly made from a bone of Captain James Cook.”32 Throughout most of the nineteenth century the United States had no official national historical collection, but as objects representing the nation’s past made their way into the federal government’s possession, they were routed to the US Patent Office, where they were displayed somewhat haphazardly. Among these things were Washington’s camp gear and tent, the printing press Franklin supposedly oper22

BEGINNINGS

ated as an apprentice, the top hat Abraham Lincoln wore on the night he was assassinated, a piece of the Charter Oak, and a framed display of hair from the first fourteen United States presidents. This assemblage, along with many other such items, was eventually moved to the Smithsonian Institution and formed the nucleus of its historical collections.

As association items came to be collected in unprecedented numbers and were grouped in collections focused solely on them, they assumed a new significance. These new assortments were every bit as disparate as the displays in Don Saltero’s Coffee House, but as Don Saltero’s objects were united by the category of the curiosity, so these things were united by the simple fact that they came from the past. Their origin in that earlier time was their signal and unifying characteristic; it was the attribute that gave them meaning. Pastness, in other words, had become a significant category in its own right, and it brought into existence a new kind of object. This object appealed not to the now superseded faculty of wonder or curiosity but, as chapter 3 will discuss, to the quintessentially nineteenth-century faculty of memory. At the same time that articles from the past took on a new significance, they also came to have a common name. The category of the relic was never a conceptually rigorous classification, but in nineteenthcentury usage the term loosely designated any and all objects from the past. “Relic” would thus have referred to many items—Washington’s uniform, for example, or equipment left behind on Civil War battlefields—that might still prove of historical interest today. Yet the items that seem most characteristic of the nineteenth century and that are usually associated with the word relic are precisely the things not likely to appear in twentieth-century historical collections. These things that nineteenth-century Americans collected so assiduously can be roughly divided into three categories. First, there were the items that had had only casual, one-time contact with a historical person or event: the log Lincoln supposedly split; the glass Washington once sipped from; the handkerchief Robert E. Lee touched. Then there were the partial objects—the fragments which, however indistinguishable from any other fragment they now were, supposedly had been part of an object that participated in a historic event. Such were the chips of prominent individuals’ tombstones, the fragments of battleships or buildings, Washington’s uniform buttons, the buckles from his shoes. Finally, there were the natural objects found at historic sites: those prototypi23

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

cal relics, pieces of Plymouth Rock and the Charter Oak; flowers and mosses plucked from Civil War battlefields; foliage from Washington’s grave. Like Bentley’s cane made from Captain Cook’s ship, all these articles were notable for their inability to provide what a later age would come to identify as the sine qua non of the historical artifact: hard, analyzable evidence about the specifics of the past. In fact, Victorian Americans cared so little for informational value that they routinely hacked up or otherwise altered articles that, in our eyes, would have historical significance only if they were preserved whole. Thus in the 1850s a man who acquired a coach that had belonged to George Washington noted that he’d had it “taken to pieces and distributed among the admiring friends of Washington who visited my house” and had also given portions to benevolent associations, which “made a large profit by converting the fragments into walking-sticks, picture-frames, and snuff-boxes.”33 Another admirer of the first president had the pew where Washington sat at Christ Church remodeled into a bench, while the owner of a sword that supposedly had belonged to the Pilgrims’ pastor in Leyden decided to divide it among his three sons, each of whom had his separate piece made into a chopping knife.34 This tendency to rework artifacts found its most elaborate expression in the practice of creating furniture and other articles from the wood of historic trees or buildings and other structures.35 As Robert Trent has documented in his article on the Charter Oak, the things made from that tree ranged from furniture (cradles, chairs, oak-veneered pianos) to such smaller objects as jewelry, canes, snuffboxes, goblets, picture frames, crucifi xes, and souvenir nutmegs and acorns.36 Sometimes relic furniture was even crafted out of different pieces of wood, each with its own historical associations. A cabinet that held Civil War relics at the Buffalo Historical Society, for example, was made of wood from the Charter Oak, Old South Church, Faneuil Hall, the belfry of Independence Hall, Old Ironsides, the “Faneuil Hall oak,” the “Faneuil Hall pine,” and the “Independence Hall oak.”37 And John Fanning Watson designed a chair made of mahogany from the house Christopher Columbus allegedly lived in in Santo Domingo, wood from Penn’s Treaty Elm, oak from William Penn’s house in Letitia Court, a piece from the last of a group of walnut trees that stood in front of Independence Hall, cane seating from a chair that had supposedly belonged to William Penn, and wood from the ships Constitution and Pennsylvania, with a lock of Chief Justice John Marshall’s hair placed under glass in the center.38 24

BEGINNINGS

Finally, a relic was sometimes defaced with inscriptions or other markings. In one of the more blatant examples of such alteration, the Armistead family, who owned the flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write “The StarSpangled Banner,” not only snipped off pieces of the flag as souvenirs for visiting friends but confirmed their ownership by having a large red A embroidered in the middle of one white stripe.39 More often, a relic served as the ledger of its own history by having its date of provenance or information about the historically significant event it was associated with painted or scrawled directly across its surface. To our own sensibilities, dismembering an object or writing on it annihilates any possible historical value, since it so clearly violates the integrity of the object in and of itself that we have come to see as the prerequisite of the historical artifact’s ability to represent the past. But the people who dismantled and defaced these artifacts did so specifically because they considered them to have great historical value and wanted to make that value more generally accessible (distributing pieces) or more readily identifiable (writing on them) or more richly layered with associations (fashioning articles from many historical woods). Objects’ visible material characteristics had little to do with their ability to represent the past, since ultimately old things’ significance resided not in specific characteristics that had to be teased out but in a kind of invisible essence that was presumed to imbue the entire object and that could be subdivided or visually altered without impairing its essential power in the least. The relic was thus an example of what Susan Stewart, borrowing from Umberto Eco, has identified as “homomaterial” representation— that is, the metonymic equivalence by which a material piece of the past stands in for a larger event to which it was closely allied.40 Though Eco’s term may seem unduly cumbersome, it is useful for calling attention to the way the relic’s power was grounded in a certain conception of matter. Matter need not be assumed to bring its past with it or inevitably to speak of that past. Conversely, the past can be accessed through other means than its physical substance.41 But those who valued relics proceeded as if, through having once been in propinquity to certain personages or events, a relic held the impress of those events as an indisputable property for as long as it existed. Matter’s sameness— its identity with itself over time—served as the analogue and guarantee for other types of continuity and connection. And its perdurance or deterioration was somehow coextensive with the persistence or disappearance of the past itself. 25

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

By the early twentieth century, at least in professional museum circles, nineteenth-century relics would come to be seen as a kind of pseudohistorical representation. Yet it is important to note that however “magical” or “superstitious” homomateriality may appear when we see it at work in foliage from Gettysburg or furniture made from the Charter Oak, it is a principle that has been integral to historical representation down to our own time. We can see how central the continuity of matter is to our own modes of representation if we compare it with earlier ways of representing the past. As several commentators have noted, when the past was represented in museums and private collections before the nineteenth century, it was often through what Charles Sanders Peirce defined as iconic representations—through paintings and illustrations that offered a likeness of past events but no material connection.42 Historical artifacts appeared largely in the collections of antiquarians and, in a culture that emphasized the primacy of textual knowledge, remained somewhat suspect in learned circles more generally. Thus Charles Willson Peale’s museum included a significant historical component, but that component consisted almost entirely of portraits—illustrations—of illustrious Americans rather than other kinds of historical objects. And as late as 1833 the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, Christopher Columbus Baldwin, reiterated old prejudices against the artifact, asserting that a historical collection “should contain nothing but books, coins, statuary and pictures.” It was absurd, he continued, “to pile up old bureaus and chests, and stuff them with old coats and hats and high-heeled shoes,” since “the true history of all these things are handed down by painting.”43 In contrast to traditional iconic forms of representation, the association item as it emerged in the late eighteenth century represented the past with an actual piece of that past. Unlike paintings, relics called on the past as an entity that existed outside the present’s own representations. They asserted that the having been there of history was crucial, that by definition the past could be represented only by itself. Whereas a copy of a copy of a painting, for example, could still be an authentic representation of the past, a copy of an old object was no longer an authentic historical artifact. It may have illustrated the past or served as a signpost that pointed in its direction, but it could not embody it. Phrased this way, it becomes clear that, far from being superseded, homomateriality has continued to be the very basis of historical representation. We designate the old things the nineteenth century collected as “association items” because their only claim to significance lies in their connection with given individuals or historical events and 26

BEGINNINGS

in their ability in turn to provoke associations of them. But by classifying association items as qualitatively different from all other historical artifacts, we bracket “associations” as a quality incidental to a thing’s historical value. Yet it is the fact that a thing can be associated with something in the past—that it can be experienced as having been in conjunction with a certain event, be that Lincoln’s death, the Civil War, or the Industrial Revolution—that makes it historical in the first place. The thing standing like a placeholder in time’s flow, taking us to the site of a historically specific phenomenon, that is the definition of an association item and also of the historical artifact more generally. Rather than being marginal or insufficiently historical, the association item foregrounds that most basic attribute of the historical object—its having been there in history. The relic, then, embodied the principle that has made historical representation historical. And it did so not only by establishing the principle of material continuity as the guarantor of historical authenticity, but by highlighting past time as the thing it referred to. For the fact that the association item is united to the event it represents by nothing else than the common denominator of a shared historical moment has the effect of foregrounding historical time itself. Antiquarian objects had been the first class of things to be valued solely because they were from the past and to be collected in any systematic way. But they usually offered evidence of ongoing daily practices rather than being tied to particular events. The history they recovered was an indeterminate span of pastness, not a series of unique moments or circumstances. In contrast, each one of the myriad objects that came to crowd nineteenth-century historical displays was linked to a very specific event or span of human life: the fragment of the rock the Pilgrims reputedly stepped on in that originary moment; the Liberty Bell, in which resided the history of its various ringings and the one fateful peal preserved in its crack; furniture whose distinction was that it was brought over on the Mayflower; pieces of the last American flag flown at Fort Sumter; bits of wallpaper from Ford’s Theatre, invisibly marked by their proximity to history on that one night; the clock from the room where Grant died, stopped at the exact hour of his death. These individual objects’ claim to uniqueness—the impossibility of replicating them—was the analogue of time’s own irreversible character. An artifact was the distinctive thing it was because it had had contact with that one person, that one event, that all its physically identical counterparts—other rocks, other trees, other flags and bits of wallpaper—had not. Nineteenth-century association items effectively parsed time into 27

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

a succession of particular, differentiated moments and events. However random these bits and pieces of things might seem, collectively they articulated a coherent historical vision, one that emphasized the specificity of time’s individual moments and the irreversibility of its flow. Matter was marked by its position in space and time. It had been marked in its very substance, and what it had been marked by was the course of history itself. The nineteenth century’s turn to the historical has usually been discussed only as it was refracted through the forms of high culture: through science, through literature, through historical writing.44 Yet a careful consideration of the relic shows that the new historical consciousness was equally present in this popular practice that may seem pre historical collecting proper—though in reality it was prior only to the kinds of historical collecting that would be recognized by the professional museums of the twentieth century. Relic collecting was not a manifestation of timeless superstition or even simply a continuation of the curiosity cabinets, but a specifically historical mode of collecting that came into being in concert with a new sense of the past as an entity in its own right. Even saving minuscule bits of objects no longer extant was a part of creating what Peter Fritzsche has called “common coordinates of time and space in the increasingly unified experiential field recognized as history.”45

28

TWO

History’s Remains In September 1775, en route to attack British strongholds in Quebec and Montreal, a contingent of the Continental Army stopped briefly at the Presbyterian church in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to hear the Reverend Samuel Spring preach. Some five years before, Newburyport had achieved sudden fame when the evangelical minister George Whitefield died unexpectedly at the home of a friend there. Despite considerable pressure from other locales, the town refused to relinquish the body and buried the renowned evangelist in a vault beneath the church. Newburyport thus ensured its reputation—and an unceasing stream of visitors—throughout the nineteenth century, and though the American army may have stopped primarily to hear the sermon, the evangelist’s tomb was certainly an attraction as well. In his Chaplains and Clergy of the Revolution, published in 1861, J. T. Headley quoted Spring’s account of what took place after the sermon: Some one requested a visit to Whitfield’s [sic] tomb. The sexton was hunted up, the key procured, and we descended to his coffin. It had lain in the tomb six years, but was in good preservation. The officers induced the sexton to take off the lid of the coffin. The body had nearly all returned to dust. Some portion of his grave-clothes remained. His collar and wristbands, in the best preservation, were taken and carefully cut in little pieces, and divided among them.1

This practice of preserving souvenirs from Whitefield’s tomb seems to have had some currency in the new nation, 29

ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

since references to it appear in several sources. An 1823 biography of the American Methodist preacher Jesse Lee described his visit to the tomb in 1790, from which he brought away “a small relic of the gown in which [Whitefield] was buried; and prayed that he might be endued with the same zeal which once inspired the breast of its wearer.”2 Robert Philip’s 1837 Life and Times of the Reverend George Whitefield reports that one of the preacher’s arm bones was filched from his grave and sent to England by a zealous admirer.3 And this extreme fascination with the great man’s bodily remains was not confined to this one instance. A blackened remnant billed as a piece of Whitefield’s thumb made its way to the Methodist Archives at Drew University, where it could still be seen some two centuries after his death.4 As Robert Cray has argued in an article on the posthumous veneration of Whitefield’s remains, the visits to the tomb seem to continue the centuries-old practice of making pilgrimages to saints’ tombs to see and acquire relics.5 Moreover, Cray further notes that, in contrast to Headley’s assertion that “the body had nearly all returned to dust,” several of the earliest visitors’ accounts take pains to emphasize how well preserved Whitefield’s corpse was—an emphasis that Cray argues suggests the miraculous suspension of decay associated with the bodies of saints.6 Thus in his 1810 treatise on the history of the Methodists in the United States, Jesse Lee noted that when he “went into the vault to see the body after it had lain there twenty years,” he “was greatly surprised to find the greater part of it firm and hard. A small part of it only had putrefied.”7 A letter that the Reverend Luke Tyerman, one of Whitefield’s biographers, says appeared in the Christian’s Magazine of 1790 is even more emphatic on this point: In 1784, I visited my friends in New England, and, hearing that Whitefield’s body was undecayed, I went to see it. A lantern and candle being provided, we entered the tomb. Our guide opened the coffin lid down to Whitefield’s breast. His body was perfect. I felt his cheeks, his breast, etc.; and the skin immediately rose after I had touched it. Even his lips were not consumed, nor his nose. His skin was considerably discoloured through dust and age, but there was no effluvium; and even his gown was not much impaired, nor his wig.8

Cray’s argument has a compelling inevitability. Viewing a decayed corpse and perhaps even taking away physical reminders of it may seem so alien to our own sensibilities—and indeed to most nineteenthcentury notions of how the dead should be treated—that it is perhaps most easily comprehended as a survival of earlier and more familiar re30

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ligious practices. Moreover, the work of such scholars as Jon Butler and David D. Hall has made us aware that, regardless of official church sanction, noncanonical religious practices persisted in the American colonies into the early nineteenth century. Thus the veneration of a Protestant minister’s corpse as if it were a Catholic saint’s can be seen simply as evidence of the astonishing persistence of pre-Reformation beliefs even in the apparently unpromising clime of Puritan New England.9 Yet though there is an undeniable formal similarity between the actions at Whitefield’s tomb and those surrounding saints’ remains, we should resist the temptation to read the one as merely the continuation of the other. The practices around Whitefield’s body cannot be labeled “survivals” of the adoration of saints’ relics as if there were an unbroken line of descent between the two or as if, at base, they somehow meant the same thing. Seeing those practices only as pale outliers of a robust cultural tradition that flourished elsewhere fails to ask what they might mean on their own terms. It fails, that is, to place them in the context of their own cultural and historical milieu. Ultimately, I would argue, the attention lavished on Whitefield’s body should not be read as evidence of an unbroken continuity between medieval practices and late eighteenth-century ones. Rather, it indicates that the investments in the dead body, which had long been assigned various theological meanings—not only as the relics of saints but also, for example, as the signal manifestation of earthly corruption or, conversely, as a token of the resurrection to come—were being renegotiated in unprecedented ways. In thinking about what Whitefield’s body meant in the context of its time, we should first consider it in relation to the wide range of bodies and bones that circulated in early nineteenth-century America. To begin with, certain body parts were regularly put on display in popular attractions and museums. Even as august an institution as Peale’s museum exhibited the trigger finger of a murderer; Barnum’s museum displayed the supposed arm of the pirate Tom Trouble; and the collections of smaller local museums might sometimes contain the bones of notorious local criminals whose bodies had been conveyed to the museum after they were executed.10 Early nineteenth-century Americans seem to have been most interested in skulls, which were collected and exhibited in a variety of contexts. Some of this collecting served the dictates of the early nineteenth century’s newly racialized scientific taxonomies. The Philadelphia physician Samuel G. Morton, for example, gathered skulls from non-European peoples around the world in an effort to demonstrate the supposedly superior cranial capacity of a Caucasian 31

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race.11 The remains most commonly put on exhibit, however, were the rows of skulls that began to be displayed in popular phrenological collections and museums in the 1830s. Casts or actual skulls attributed to blacks, Indians, criminals, or other marginalized groups typically appeared with explanations of how limited intelligence or criminal propensities could be read in their physical characteristics, while casts of the skulls of prominent literary and scientific figures were glossed with interpretations of their supposedly more noble characteristics.12 While such displays most obviously prefigured the anthropological collecting of the later nineteenth century, in displaying the remains of great men—often referred to as the dead’s “relics”—phrenologists’ preoccupations also dovetailed neatly with the era’s historical interests, and the more famous skulls can thus be seen as historical objects as much as scientific ones. Accounts of responses to Whitefield’s remains suggest some links to phrenology in that, once the soft parts of the body had decayed, visitors focused almost exclusively on the skull and repeatedly reported either picking it up or, in an enigmatic but clearly significant gesture, ritually laying a hand on it. And at least one account, which an 1857 biography attributed to the London Sun, offered a laconic description of the skull’s physical properties that suggests it was being read in phrenological terms: “I took the skull in my hands,” the author wrote, “and examined it carefully. The forehead was rather narrow than broad, and by no means high.”13 In confining their attentions to the decay-resistant bone and subsuming the various remains into a system of classification that superseded any one of them, phrenologists maintained a certain distance from the bodies they put on display. In other contexts, however, the corpse itself was the overt object of interest. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans evinced a distinct fascination with bodies that had been disinterred, particularly ones that, like Whitefield’s, were reported to be well preserved.14 In 1783 the American museum proprietor Pierre Eugène du Simitière wrote to a friend about a recently unearthed body that was being exhibited as a popular marvel. Quoting the account sent to him, he noted that “on opening the grave of a woman that had been interred about 22 years ago to bury her son, her corpse was found perfectly petryfied and the coffin decayed. The family are poor and have kept the grave open since for people to visit it and numbers have gone to see it.” Du Simitière also noted that it had been proposed that the corpse be sent to him—a suggestion that testifies to the ongoing perception of the museum as a place to exhibit marvels contrary to the order of nature. Like Peale, however, he was a man of 32

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science whose museum was intended to serve a very different purpose than the old cabinets of curiosity. He may have preserved specimens of the natural world, but he did not necessarily display wonders, and he noted that he was “really well pleased . . . on many accounts” that the body had not been delivered to him.15 Though Du Simitière rejected the idea that this curiously preserved corpse was a fit object for his museum, the suspension of bodily decay was an issue of prime interest to others of his learned contemporaries. Having developed his embalming techniques on the birds and mammals displayed in his museum, Charles Willson Peale, for instance, had become interested in embalming human beings as well. In 1806 he tried to obtain for study a child’s body unearthed during the building of a new chapel in New York, which he was told had been artificially preserved. “The preservation of human bodies has for many years engaged the thoughts of some of my leisure hours,” he asserted in his account of why he wished to study the corpse, “& I have devised various means to effect it, some more perfectly than others.”16 Peale was interested in the specifics of embalming on the most practical level, but how and why bodies were preserved after death was of interest in learned circles more generally, as several entries in William Bentley’s journals testify. In the summer of 1798, for instance, Bentley visited a recently opened tomb to investigate the condition of a coffin that its occupant had had made from wood he believed would resist deterioration. He found, however, that the bottom of the coffin had softened, the top was covered with mold and its fibers were weakened, and “in fourteen years . . . from the excessive dampness, all was in a state of perishing.”17 A decade later, in 1809, Bentley again evinced interest in suspending decay when he noted that the well-preserved body of a man who had died in 1726 had been unearthed in Boston the year before. The body’s state of preservation had apparently received some attention, since even in Salem Bentley was aware of it. He cited the explanation for its well-preserved state advanced in a publication he called “the Anthology” even as he offered his own competing theory. His discussion shows that naturalistic explanations were applied to Whitefield’s body as well, since Bentley cites that case in laying out the competing theories advanced to explain arrested decay.18

Given the examples above, the interest in the preservation and display of human remains might be seen as a fascination with marvels or 33

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curiosities or, alternatively, as an exclusively scientific preoccupation. Yet many contemporary accounts of the disinterment or preternatural preservation of such remains were most closely related to what were coming to be defined as historical preoccupations. In contrast to the more or less anonymous bodies that Bentley, Peale, and Du Simitière described, the exhumed bodies exciting the greatest contemporary interest were, like Whitefield’s, those of prominent historical figures. In fact, in both England and America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the remains of a wide range of historical figures became sites of what may seem to us rather ghoulish practices of collecting and display. One of the more extended accounts of collecting at a grave site that circulated during this period described the exhumation in 1790 at Saint Giles Church, Cripplegate, in London of a body that supposedly was Milton’s. Though workmen were charged only with ascertaining where the poet was buried, once the coffin had been unearthed, they decided to open it, and onlookers reportedly took away clumps of hair, teeth, and bones.19 Exhumations of illustrious bodies on American soil were usually conducted in much more formal, ceremonial contexts, and the pilfering of body parts thus was more restrained, but the interest in viewing the body and taking souvenirs from it continued unabated. When the skeleton of the executed British spy John André was disinterred in 1821 to be sent for burial at Westminster Abbey, crowds of onlookers gathered, according to the British consul James Buchanan, “to pass around in regular order and view the remains as they lay, which very many did with unfeigned tears, and lamentations.” And though his clothing had rotted away, the leather string that had bound his hair was sent to his sister, and the owner of the land was given a box made from a tree that had grown at the grave.20 Some forty years later, in 1860, those who attempted to exhume Roger Williams and his wife found that the bodies had completely disintegrated. Nonetheless a braid of hair, nails from the coffin, and the root of an apple tree that supposedly had grown around the body were salvaged and eventually deposited at the Rhode Island Historical Society.21 The interest in bodies was not confined to the corpses of famous individuals but extended to the human remains left in the wake of major historical events. In England the battlefield at Waterloo was an abundant source of relics that occasionally included body fragments. One author, for instance, claimed he knew “one honest gentleman, who has brought home a real Waterloo thumb, nail and all, which he preserves in a bottle of gin,” and Walter Scott admitted owning the skull of a 34

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soldier who had been killed there.22 In the United States during those same years collectors preserved teeth and bones from the body of Jane McCrea, who had become an object of obsessive popular commemoration after she was killed and scalped by Wyandot Indian allies of the British during the Revolutionary War.23 In his 1851 chronicle of the events and sites of the Revolution, the historian Benson Lossing cited a collector of Revolutionary War relics who included among his cannonballs and shot a number of teeth taken from skulls left on the battlefield.24 And Lossing also reported that the bones of a Count Donop, who had been killed in battle near Red Bank, New Jersey, were not left to rest in their grave but were “scattered about the country as cherished relics, his skull being in possession of a physician of New Jersey!”25 Bodies of historical figures seem to have been of particular interest if, as described in the earliest accounts of Whitefield’s corpse, they had somehow resisted normal decay. When the body of Edward I was exhumed in 1774 it supposedly was almost perfectly preserved after 467 years in the grave.26 Some years later, when the body of Charles I—with the head neatly severed from the body through the fourth cervical vertebra—was rediscovered by chance in 1813, Henry Halford, the royal surgeon, published an account of its appearance. Readers were told that the back part of the scalp was “entirely perfect, and had a remarkably fresh appearance” and that the tendons in the neck “were of considerable substance and firmness” and the hair “thick at the back part of the head, and, in appearance, nearly black.”27 And when the corpse of the poet Robert Burns was disinterred in 1815, almost two decades after his death, one contemporary account described it as “nearly entire . . . exhibiting the features of one who had newly sunk into the sleep of death—the lordly forehead, arched and high—the scalp still covered with hair, and the teeth perfectly firm and white.”28 Accounts of these exhumations were not confined to historical or literary sources. Halford’s account of Charles I’s head was widely disseminated in medical publications, for example. Yet the corpses were clearly of interest not simply as well-preserved curiosities but because they were the remains of historically significant figures. Indeed, the fact that the exhumation of Edward I was carried out by the British Society of Antiquaries is evidence that it was conceived of as a kind of historical, rather than scientific, project. Americans had access to accounts of exhumations in Europe, but they also had their own encounters with the corpses of historical figures. Undoubtedly the most revered and symbolically significant body to be exhumed in the United States in the early nineteenth century 35

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was that of George Washington. His remains were transferred to a new marble sarcophagus in 1837, and, unable to pass up the opportunity to view the president’s body, the privileged few who had gathered to witness the occasion decided to pry open the coffin. In a widely circulated account that is strongly reminiscent of the equally painstaking descriptions of Whitefield’s body, the architect William Strickland described the particulars of what they saw. To begin with, he carefully situated the viewing of the corpse against a backdrop of ghastly putrefaction. When those who had gathered to participate in the transfer of the body entered the tomb, he reported, the first object which struck our view upon the threshold of the vault was the scull of a young man, encrusted over with a green mould, and surrounded on all sides with the decayed fragments of coffins, which appeared as though they had been thrown together promiscuously, or had fallen in, exposing the bones of various parts of the human body. The air of the vault was foul. . . . The slimy snail glistened in the light of the door opening. The brown centipede was disturbed by the admission of the fresh air, and the mouldy cases of the dead gave out a pungent and unwholesome odour.

Having proceeded through this set piece of transience and decay, once the men opened the coffin they beheld, according to Strickland, a head and breast of large dimensions, which appeared, by the dim light of the candles, to have suffered but little from the effects of time. The eye-sockets were large and deep, and the breadth across the temples, together with the forehead, appeared of unusual size. There was no appearance of grave-clothes; the chest was broad; the colour was dark, and had the appearance of dried flesh and skin adhering closely to the bones. We saw no hair, nor was there any offensive odour from the body, but we observed, when the coffin had been removed to the outside of the vault, the dripping down of a yellow liquid, which stained the marble of the Sarcophagus. A hand was laid upon the head and instantly removed.29

Like the accounts of visits to Whitefield’s tomb, this account emphasizes the confrontation with the body of the venerated man and the slow taking stock of the physical features so venerated in their living form. Again we see the brief quasi-phrenological notation of the skull’s physical characteristics, again the enigmatic ritual of laying a hand on the venerable head. Presumably taking souvenirs from Washington’s actual body would have been perceived as a desecration, but

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mementos were taken from Washington’s tomb, just as they were from Whitefield’s. Pieces of the old wooden outer coffin were preserved and often cherished for years and occasionally were even fashioned into jewelry.30 The most striking similarity with the descriptions of Whitefield’s corpse, however, is the emphasis on the body’s amazing state of preservation. In evoking the large, deep eye sockets and broad forehead, still recognizable after more than thirty years, Strickland brought Washington’s iconic features into his readers’ presence still uncannily intact. Yet this preternaturally preserved body was not simply a marvel—a quasi-miraculous phenomenon that provoked wonder simply because it was contrary to the laws of nature. Instead, it represented a very specific piece of the historical past. Because the body was Washington’s, it allowed a connection with the great man as he had existed in life and, through him, with the nation’s founding moments. In essence, the continued existence of relatively undecayed organic matter served as a metaphor for the continuance of the past even in a completely new historical epoch.31 Though the attention lavished on these bodies and other articles from the grave may be reminiscent of the adoration of the bodies and secondary relics of saints, in fact they served a rather different function. The religious relic connected its devotees to a transcendent power. It was efficacious in the most literal way in that it transmitted divine force and could thus heal and effect other miracles. When nineteenthcentury commentators reflected on the power of the bones, bits of coffins, and other articles they took from graves, however, they did not stress these objects’ literal efficacy or their ability to channel a divine essence. Instead, they emphasized what we might think of as their representational function: such things stood in for the individuals they had once belonged to and allowed those who had preserved them to envision the events those individuals had participated in. Insofar as they were imbued with the presence of an invisible other, that other was not a divine power that transcended the temporal world but the entirely mortal yet still potent past.32

To frame the encounter with history as an encounter with corpses and their assorted well- or ill-preserved effects may seem to offer a perverse and lurid angle on the nineteenth century’s newly heightened

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sense of historical process. Yet the engagement with death, exhumation, and survival amid decay was more integral to early nineteenthcentury engagements with the past than the specific instances of disinterment described above might suggest. The antiquarian enterprise in particular was repeatedly portrayed as a kind of visceral participation in the particulars of death and decay.33 In an age when libraries, archives, and historical societies were only beginning to be established, antiquarians conducted their investigations where decaying remnants could be found. They were noted for browsing among tombstones and copying inscriptions and for excavating mounds, old cellars, and innumerable other sites. Their most treasured fi nds were marked with the signs of time’s passage—redolent of mold, discolored by earth, layered with rust. And like long-dead bodies they had often lain interred in the ground, sometimes even in the grave itself. So pervasive was the association of antiquarians with burial, decay, and exhumation that they themselves often used the image of unearthing an object as a metaphor for engagement with the past more generally. Describing her discussions with other antiquarians, John Fanning Watson’s friend and fellow devotee of the past Deborah Logan noted that they “raked up from oblivion old anecdotes and things. ‘Grey with the Rust of Years.’”34 And after Watson’s death Benson Lossing eulogized him as “an enthusiastic delver in the mines where antiquarian treasures are to be found.”35 Watson himself was prolific with such metaphors, referring to his antiquarian pursuits as revealing “the hidden and curious past,” making available “the contemplation and the secrets of a buried age,” and “unearthing old legends and old bones.”36 If antiquarianism was constituted by its preoccupation with unearthing decayed remnants, the implicit focus of its attentions was ultimately the dead body. And indeed, in early nineteenth-century historical discourse the image of the corpse sometimes appeared as a figure for the past itself.37 Thus in the introduction to his 1845 Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport and West Newbury, the local historian Joshua Coffi n compared compiling his history to the endeavors of the Egyptian goddess Isis, “who went forth wandering and weeping to gather up the parts and fragments of her murdered and scattered Osiris, fondly yet vainly hoping that she might recover and recombine all the separate parts, and once more view her husband in all his former proportions and beauty.” In a similar manner, he said, he had tried to gather the “scattered fragments of ‘Ould Newberry’” and arrange them into a complete whole.38 The passage of time and the loss of the

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past were thus presented as equivalent to the death and destruction of the human body, and historical investigations were cast as the means of reconstituting the primary organic unity of the living being. In the reflections on antiquarianism that introduced volume 2 of the 1844 edition of the Annals, Watson resorted to a similar image of historical investigation as reconstituting the body of the past. Quoting the British bookseller and local historian William Hutton, he asserted, “The antiquarian brings his treasures from remote time—calls things back into existence which were past—collects the dust of perished matter, remoulds the figure and stamps the past with a kind of immortality,—by his recreative power.”39 Unlike Coffin’s image of Osiris, Hutton’s is an implicitly Christian image. “Recreative power” was often seen as an attribute of divinity, and creating figures from dust suggests the account of human creation given in Genesis. Moreover, the reference to remolding a figure out of the very dust that had once constituted it would have had particular resonance for a Christian audience, since in a traditional understanding the efficacy of resurrection depended on the soul’s being reunited with its original body—not, that is, with a newly created form that simply resembled that body but with the long-decayed body itself, miraculously reconstituted from its original substance. Although by the mid-nineteenth century Americans were beginning to deemphasize the belief in a general bodily resurrection in favor of an entirely spiritual conception of immortality, Hutton’s lines evoke the lingering power of homomateriality as a theological principle. The resurrected body’s material identity with the self’s previous, mortal body was what enabled the continuity of self, just as the continuance of the substance of the past enabled the past to be reconstructed in the present and rendered that reconstruction efficacious—made it something other than a mere replica. The image of a body composed of the same substance as its former living self reappears several times in the Annals. In the most extended instance, Watson justified the study of the past by appealing to the “irrepressible reverence” and “hushed silence” an observer must inevitably feel “in the contemplation of a known relic, or the remains of what was once memorable and peculiar.” And as the supreme example of such a relic, he then offered not one of his own battlefield souvenirs or an object handed down from the nation’s forefathers but a thing that, according to our own standards, it is perhaps difficult to think of as a historical artifact at all—a mummified body. “Who can behold an ancient mummy, for instance,” he asked rhetorically, “and not instinc-

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tively revert in reflection to [a] touching apostrophe to such an impressive relic!” And he continued with a passage from the poet Horace Smith’s “Address to a Mummy”: Statue of flesh—immortal of the dead! Imperishable type of evanescence! Come, prithee tell us something of thyself; Reveal the secrets of thy prison house:— Since in the world of spirits thou hast slumber’d What hast thou seen—what strange adventures numbered?40

Like the objects we might more ordinarily think of as historical artifacts, the mummy enacts a relationship between past and present, between what once was and what has persisted. And if it is the quintessential relic, it is because it enacts that relationship in a particularly heightened form. In fact, it is the ultimate exemplar of the indisputable efficacy of homomateriality. What renders it so powerful is its complete and total congruence with the lineaments and indeed the very material composition of what it once was. It is the past as it was centuries before, and yet it is the past here, intact, in the present. But of course the mummy does not really stop time, or at least it stops time only after the damage has been done, and it is that paradoxical status that the poem’s neatly balanced antitheses specifically address. In Smith’s lines, the mummy is perishable flesh yet also an enduring statue, dead and yet immortal. Most intriguing, it is “an imperishable type of evanescence”—a thing that betokens evanescence and continuously reenacts that evanescence while itself remaining undiminished. In other words, the mummy does not simply offer an image of what endures. Within its now stabilized and unchanging material confines, it also brings the viewer face to face, again and again, with the fact of temporal change. Watson’s focus on the mummy—which offers the past as it once was and also offers an image of the absolute incommensurability of the living past and its survivals in the present—forces us to reconsider the meaning of the uncannily preserved bodies of such figures as Edward I, Whitefield, and Washington. Surely the crucial fact about these bodies and the reason they were of such interest was that they offered a material past that persisted through time and beyond death. Yet such a formulation does not take into account that those describing the bodies seem as fascinated by decay itself as by its unaccountable suspension. In fact, the interest in the preternaturally preserved corpse seems to 40

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have flourished alongside an equally intense and complementary interest in the ongoing processes of dissolution. William Bentley offers a striking example of this fascination with decay in an 1801 journal entry that describes how, in laying a foundation, parishioners exhumed a fellow minister’s remains and then decided to put the body on display. “The Bell was tolled & the assembly was invited of all ages to come & see the corps,” Bentley wrote, “which was exposed to public view, in a high state of putrefaction.” And he himself suggested that the interest in such things was a historically specific phenomenon. “This is a new kind of curiosity,” he concluded, “& a new way of exciting it.”41 Although Bentley’s comments might be construed as censorious, paradoxically he himself offers the best evidence of this supposedly new fascination with the decaying human form. In an entry made only half a dozen years earlier, he had noted that the bodies of a family he had been acquainted with were being transferred to another burial site and that he had gone to watch the exhumation. He then proceeded to detail the corpses’ exact physical condition and degree of decomposition. One body “remained entire, & the grave cloathes, only the dark appearance in the last stage of putrefaction.” Another body “was found with the greater part of the grave cloathes easily separable from the bones, but no flesh remained,” and the hair “was as entire & in as apparently good order as when she was buried.” And the condition of a third body was laid out in the most graphic detail: The Grave Cloathes were yet to be seen & the folds in the Shroud plainly, but as tho’ they had been applied wet to the body. The Substance of the flesh was like a liquid in which the Bones were laid & from which they could not free themselves when the Coffin was turned over, without striking with a spade on the bottom and then the small bones did not disengage themselves. Upon examining it, it was found in the Sun to be alive with a motion from the worms which covered the whole surface but which were clearly distinguished near the part on which the body rested.42

As extreme as this account is, its unrelenting insistence on cataloging the corpse’s exact condition is at least reminiscent of the equally detailed fascination with the particulars of Whitefield’s and Washington’s corpses. And it suggests too that an apparent fascination with miraculous intactness may be only one facet of a broader interest in the specific course of physical decay. Thus, although Strickland’s description of Washington’s remains does indicate that the well-known features had “suffered but little from the effects of time,” it also situates 41

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the corpse in a setting of vividly described decomposition and carefully describes the discolored, dried flesh “adhering closely to the bone” and the dripping yellow liquid. Jesse Lee’s published account of Whitefield’s corpse may have stressed its well-preserved condition, thus playing to his readers’ preconceptions and perhaps, as Cray suggests, emphasizing Whitefield’s sanctity. But the 1823 biography of Lee, which relied heavily on his journals, suggested that in looking at the body, Lee was far more fi xated on decay. An account that seems to have been quoted or closely paraphrased from the journal itself tells how, when Lee and his companions opened the coffin, they were enabled to witness the fearful change which the king of terrors makes upon the most perfect forms. On taking a particular view, they discovered his ears, hair, and a part of his nose had fallen off. His face was nearly in the common shape, though much contracted, and appeared quite destitute of moisture, and very hard. His teeth were white, and fast in their sockets. His breast bone had parted, and his bowels disrobed. His wig and clothes, in which he was buried, were all decayed, except in a few places. . . . His flesh was black; and, as might be supposed, destitute of comeliness; yet it is said that any person who once knew him, might discover some traces of his former likeness.43

Although the account culminates in the assertion that the traces of Whitefield’s living self could still be read in his dead features, the bulk of the description is consumed with an enumeration of the physical particulars of decay: the disintegrated ears and nose, the discolored flesh, the parted breastbone, and the “disrobed” bowels. What it delineates, in other words, is not necessarily miraculous wholeness but a tenuously preserved impress of the past that is always in the process of dissolution. Placed alongside Lee’s description, even the Christian’s Magazine’s 1790 account of Whitefield’s corpse cited above need not be read only as an example of the adoration of a body suspended beyond decay. For one thing, nothing in the segment Tyerman quotes suggests that its author perceived any odor of sanctity in the corpse’s preservation. And more tellingly, perhaps, the account in the Christian’s Magazine does not simply assert the enduring perfection of Whitefield’s face and form. Instead, like the description drawn from Lee’s journal, it too enumerates the body’s condition point by point with an almost clinical rigor: the skin’s dryness or elasticity, the extent of discoloration, the precise inroads and channels through which dissolution has made or

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not made its incremental encroachments. Like the more detailed description in the Lee biography, the Christian’s Magazine’s account positions the momentary suspension of decay within larger temporal processes. And though it is of course concerned primarily to emphasize the amazing perdurance of Whitefield’s physical form, its overall thrust is not simply to convey a sense of wonder but to specify the corpse’s exact position on the continuum of disintegration. Like the mummy in Horace Smith’s poem, these still recognizable corpses were images not only of what survived but of the process of time itself, which, even as it—momentarily—spared the occasional auratic fragment, eventually and inexorably annihilated even those few traces that remained.

When objects were taken from graves, they were able to serve as memory tokens precisely because, like the still recognizable features of Whitefield or of Washington, they too had survived more or less intact amid the grave’s otherwise omnipresent dissolution. From one of the decaying bodies Bentley described, for example, he took a silken bow that had remained intact and on which “the parts not in immediate contact with the body were as sound as ever.”44 Writing of John Fanning Watson’s involvement in the reinterment of the body of a Captain Jacob Turner, who had died at the Battle of Germantown, Watson’s biographer Benjamin Dorr noted that when the body was exhumed, “the manly form of the brave Turner was still known amid the decaying relics of humanity.” Like so many other accounts of disinterment, Dorr’s compulsively sought continuity even amid the evidence of decay. But Dorr also noted that, before Turner’s body was reburied, a “still undestroyed” piece of cloth was taken from his coat as a “sacred memento”—the relic serving as the evidence of continuity and connection with the deceased and the past he had inhabited when the body itself could no longer do so.45 Objects taken from graves were the most blatant examples of the relic’s implication in decay, but the connection between relics and dissolution was not confined to things from the tomb. Writing about the Revolutionary War ship the Alliance, Watson stressed the immediate connection to the past that its physical presence offered. It was “a relic visibly uniting the present to the former navy, and in her single remains preserving single and alone the solitary link of union.”46 But in asserting the intense connection the relic provided, he implied that

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that connection could occur only across a general desolation. Even within the confines of his one sentence, the old ship is triply isolated— “single,” “alone,” and “solitary”—by the chasm of time, which leaves nothing else behind. Similarly, in his History of Independence Hall, D. W. Belisle noted that a chair once used by Franklin had “survived the wreck of years, and stands before us now as a silent memento.”47 And when the venerable Charter Oak fell in 1856, the report of its demise in the Historical Magazine lamented that “one of the venerated links which bind these days to the irrecoverable past [has] been sundered” and reinforced the connection between a human corpse and a relic by noting that the loss of the tree had been so keenly felt that the occasion was marked with commemorative acts usually reserved for funerals: “At noon, a dirge was played by Colt’s Armory Band over the fallen tree, and at sundown the bells of the city were tolled.”48 Relics may have inspired wonder for the apparently unmediated access to the past they offered, but the prerequisite of that wonder was a sense that there was an absolute disjunction between past and present that only the occasional object could momentarily overcome. Because the relic implicitly testified to the passage of time, in addition to the profound and instantaneous connection to the past that it offered, it could inspire an equally intense sense of transience and loss. For Watson, even so apparently archival a pursuit as perusing old newspapers could become the occasion for a meditation on mortality, since such papers “must make us thoughtful, for we also shall make our exit; there every name we read of in print is already cut upon tombstones. The names of doctors have followed their patients’; the merchants have gone after their perished ships, and the celebrated actor furnishes his own skull for his successor in Hamlet.”49 And if this was true of archives of printed material, it was perhaps even truer of three-dimensional artifacts and ruins. “One feels a sentiment of veneration at seeing such a vestige of antiquity,” Watson noted of the emotions he experienced on viewing an old building. And he followed this sentence with one that reflects less on history—at least as we might understand that term—than on mortality: “The generation to which it belonged, and those who successively inhabited it have all gone to join ‘the nations beyond the flood.’”50 In a similar vein, Watson’s account of his visit to Philadelphia’s Christ Church, where Washington, Franklin, and other notable figures had worshipped, noted the contact with the past that the remains of the past reliably provided but concluded not with the joys of communion across the decades but with a carefully staged sic transit. “In such a place,” he reflected, 44

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we may contemplate our forefathers as being once engaged in the same duties, confiding in the same faith, hearing the same service and the same doctrines,— and even occupying the same seats. Such reflections must generate grateful family remembrances—must solemnize us, as in their ideal presence; and, finally, must admonish us that we are also in a state of transit, and “know not what a day may bring forth.” Christ church is a place to think.51

Watson was not alone in experiencing thoughts of mortality in the presence of the historical past. The writings of early nineteenth-century antiquarians and local historians in general frequently offered elegiac reflection as the natural and even necessary accompaniment of factual historical narrative. At the conclusion of a series of letters recounting the history of Valley Forge that appeared in the Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Intelligencer in 1850, former Valley Forge resident Henry Woodman stopped to reflect on the passing of the Revolutionary generation: More than thirty years have rolled around since the last of them have gone down to the grave. . . . Myself and the contemporaries of my youthful days, who still survive, are now growing old, and in a quarter of a century more how few of us will be in this state of existence; the most of us will be moldering in the dust, and our children and grandchildren will fill our places.

And he concluded his account with an elegiac verse: And when another century, As unperceived has passed away— Fleeting from day to day: Alas! the scene must shift again And we who now our seats retain, Will sleep as sound as they.52

Nor were such sentiments confined to antiquarians and historians. The early nineteenth-century tourists that Allison Lockwood describes in her study of American travel to England were recurrently and apparently irrepressibly brought to thoughts of mortality by the sight of objects from the past. “All must die—all must die,” lamented one traveler at Abbotsford, the estate that had belonged to Walter Scott. “It comes to this at last. The man of genius no less than the most insignificant creature. There is no escape.” “Gone, gone forever—dust, dust, these twenty years!” wrote another. And a third specifically linked her melancholy to the sight of the great man’s desk, pen, inkstand, and books, 45

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which served as “sacred relics . . . at which thousands will look mournfully and sigh that Scott ever was born to die.”53 The remains of the past, in Watson’s words, offered an opportunity to think, but the thoughts they occasioned were not necessarily the ones that would come to define the discipline of history as we know it. Engaging with the past, antiquarians pondered questions that lay outside the scope of any historical period per se. The impulse to the historical arose less from the desire to understand the past on its own terms than from the need to reflect on ultimate questions of time, transience, and mortality. And the relic’s implication in temporal processes was integral to its meanings. Indeed, it is in this light that the prevalence of fragments and partial objects in relic collections should perhaps be understood. Rather than being a peripheral or eccentric historical object, the fragment can be seen as the paradigmatic relic: it imaged the relic’s innate melancholy, since every relic, no matter how apparently whole, was in fact a fragment of the whole that had once been the past. If the relic served as a symbolic means of transcending decay, in its implicit fragmentariness, its visible subjection to the forces of time, it was also that decay itself made manifest.

Transience and decay had of course been a recurrent theme of religious and philosophical thought long before the nineteenth century, and the reflections cited here can be seen as additional instances of that tradition. In some sense they simply continued the genres of the moral homily or the vanitas sermon, as is evident in their sometimes deliberate biblical references (Watson’s citing of Proverbs 27:1, “For thou knowest not what a day may bring forth”; the echoes of Genesis and Ecclesiastes in the many references to dust). At the same time, however, in applying such reflections to artifacts that marked temporally specific moments—in applying them, that is, to historical objects— devotees of the relic were participating in a subtle but significant shift in the meanings attached to old things. Such things were no longer simply the emblems of a generalized, ongoing decay but markers of the distance between one historically specific moment and another. And as such, they asked their viewers not simply to reflect on or lament transience but in some sense to invest in it—to invest in particular moments and events long since gone and in the sometimes fragile but still extant objects that had participated in them.

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This engagement with the decaying remnants of the past can be seen in the context of more general cultural changes at the turn of the nineteenth century. As numerous commentators on attitudes toward death in the early republic have argued, by the end of the eighteenth century both the corpse and the grave were coming to serve less as sources of doctrinal instruction than as a means of perpetuating memory.54 Robert V. Wells has summarized the change in tombstone epitaphs, in particular, with the observation that before 1800 they “were prospective, as their messages in icon and word stressed the afterlife and the need to prepare for death. After 1800, they became retrospective, looking back on the life just ended.”55 In other words, epitaphs had once served the same function as sermons on the vanity of earthly life: they reminded their viewers of the corruption beneath the gravestone and exhorted them to turn their sights to the enduring realm beyond. But by the early nineteenth century, rather than pointing exclusively beyond the site where mortal remains were buried, they prompted an investment in that site as what remained of the departed. Rather than emphasizing only an existence beyond death, they had begun to ask viewers to remember what had occurred here on earth. This passage from the stern “memento mori” of the Puritan gravestone to the elegiac “in memoriam” of Victorian sentimental mourning has repeatedly been discussed as a shift in the meanings attached to death and mortality, which indeed it was. But it can also be seen as a shift in the present’s relationship with the past and in the function and importance of memory. Here again the much visited and much remarked-upon body of Whitefield is perhaps most illustrative. Whereas in focusing on the corpse’s physical particulars, the earliest accounts may have implicitly evoked the memory of the living evangelist, as the century wore on and the body resolved into a skeleton, visitors’ accounts quite explicitly framed their encounters with Whitefield’s remains as a means of accessing memories of his life and deeds. In 1845, for example, the American Methodist preacher Abel Stevens took care to situate his encounter with Whitefield’s remains in the tradition of the memento mori when he described “the skeleton faces” of Whitefield and the two other ministers buried in the tomb looking up at their visitors “with ghastly expression.” And he framed this set piece as an overtly theological allegory by averring that the tomb was “instinct with the gloom and dread of death, reminding us of the doom of the fall.” Yet Stevens’s brief allegorical suggestions did not move toward a theological resolution. Instead, lifting the skull out of

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the “slight depth of black mold” that covered the bottom of the coffin, Stevens says he reflected on the “thoughts of grandeur and power [that] had emanated from that abode of the mind, and stirred with emotions the souls of hundreds of thousands.” Whitefield lived on—transcended death— not in a miraculously preserved body or even, at least in this account, in a resurrected body or a spiritual afterlife, but in the powerful and instantaneous memory that his skull summoned up. “I held it in silence,” Stevens concludes, “but my mind ran over the history of the ‘seraphic man.’”56 Abel Stevens was not alone in deploying the evangelist’s body as an aide-mémoire. In 1867 an Englishman named Henry Vincent offered a condensed version of the contrast between the death of the body and the ongoing life of memory when he implicitly opposed the inert materiality of Whitefield’s “blackened” bones to the memories of greatness his “perfect” skull inspired: “The bones are blackened, as though charred by fire. The skull is perfect. I placed my hand upon the forehead, and thought of the time when the active brain within throbbed with love to God and man; and when those silent lips swayed the people of England, from the churchyard in Islington to Kennington Common.”57 And a decade later, when the Reverend J. B. Wakeley repeated the ritual of touching the skull, he asserted, in a strikingly textualized image, that he could read the equivalent of a written history off those bare bones. “What mighty plans of usefulness had originated in the brain that skull had once contained! What sermons it had given birth to!” he exulted. “Whole volumes of history passed through my mind in a few moments.”58 The potency of Whitefield’s remains, in other words, ultimately lay in their ability to evoke the long-distant events of the evangelist’s life. In effect, the body came to serve as an association item, a historical relic, and like all such relics, its virtue lay in the connection it offered with the past. Indeed, the dead body could be understood as the most efficacious of relics, able to call up the living being with an immediacy that surpassed any other object. As one visitor to Whitefield’s tomb enthused, he had previously looked on such relics of Whitefield as his books, rings, and chairs, but these were as nothing compared to “part of his very self.”59 Peter Fritzsche has argued that the turn of the nineteenth century was characterized by a “deep shift” in identity that was based “on a categorical distinction between past and present, on the ineffable and continuous movement toward the new and unknown, and on the partial visibility of the once-present past in bits and pieces of debris.”60 And 48

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implicit in this shift was a fi xation on the “bits and pieces of debris” themselves both as the only means of accessing what was lost and also, simultaneously, as figures for the new structure of temporality that so insistently produced the past only as a succession of fragments.61 The grave—the place so unpromising for any sense of continuity—came to seem the inevitable site of memory. And death was the instigator of that memory, the signal event that made its elaborate compensatory structures possible. For ultimately the question of Whitefield’s remains, like the question at the heart of the historical relic more generally, is not how a formerly sacred object devolved into a secular one but how meaning came to be attached to relics, remains, the merely left over. It is a question of how the retrospective became the repository of such intense investments, of how decay—precisely decay—became a site of enduring significance.

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THREE

The Sentimental Relic Whitefield’s remains are not the only things that have been compared to saints’ relics. Every passing reference to historical relics in the literature of our own time almost inevitably discovers—each one apparently for the first time—an uncanny linkage between religious relics and the whole lot of the nineteenth century’s historical things. And the comparison lies so ready to hand that anytime I have given a presentation on the historical relic, at least one member of the audience has raised the topic of the saint’s relic and insisted either that it is an indisputable and illuminating analogue to the historical relic or, more strongly, that historical relics continue the saint’s relic in secularized form. Like the comparison between saints’ relics and Whitefield’s body, however, the wholesale equation of historical relics with saints’ relics ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. Both do rely on an understanding that the material world is capable of transmitting the aura of its origins in its very substance, no matter what form that substance takes or how minutely it is divided. Both, in other words, are forms of homomaterial representation. Yet the homomaterial is a capacious category—including, for instance, bits of the ropes used to hang criminals, to which magical powers were attributed from at least the early modern period into the nineteenth century, rock star memorabilia offered on eBay, a prospective victim’s hair or nail parings used in certain kinds of sorcery, and the urns of World Trade Center debris that were presented to the families of 9/11 victims, to name just a few examples. There is no rea50

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son, in other words, why any object that is presumed to convey the intangible imprint of its origins should be construed as a saint’s relic in disguise or why the saint’s relic should be seen as the archetype of all other such objects. Rather than illuminating the meanings or origins of the historical relic, the comparison to the saint’s relic simply testifies to the ongoing power of an increasingly discredited narrative of secularization, in which the secular, while marking a decisive break from religion, also inevitably devolves from the religious and continues to draw its energies from an essential, unchanging religious essence that supposedly persists unacknowledged within it.1 Paradoxically, even the very term that suggests a continuity between religious and historical relics—the word relic itself—is evidence of the arbitrary nature of the linkage. Although to us “relic” may have inescapable religious connotations, originally it had a much broader range of meanings. The Latin reliquiae meant simply “residue,” “remainder,” “that left behind,” and the word relic was still used in this most basic sense well into the nineteenth century. Fossils, for example, were often referred to as “fossil relics”; in a variant of the word, “relict” was a synonym for widow, the legal and familial entity left behind by her husband; and the plural, “relics,” served in the same way that “remains” would come to be used, as a synonym for a corpse—the material remnant of a human being. The word could be applied—often pejoratively—to a concept or practice seen as a survival of an earlier time, as in “twin relics of barbarism,” the common midcentury characterization of the two ills of slavery and polygamy. But it also appeared in less rhetorical contexts as a synonym for any remnant of a larger entity or group. Writing in 1793, Philadelphian Elizabeth Drinker thus noted that a child who had been sick was “not free from the relics of the hooping cough,” while an 1802 account of the aftermath of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Wyoming spoke of the “broken parts and scattered relics of families” who had escaped to the woods.2 Perhaps most often, however, “relic” or “relics” simply identified the humble physical residue of an object that was no larger whole. An early nineteenth- century novel referred to the “relics” of a joint of meat that “were expected to serve us for the remainder of the week.”3 And in his 1838 account of his travels through the Midwest, the writer Edmund Flagg noted a fence that had fallen into decay so that “only a rotten relic remains.”4 By midcentury this use of the word to denote any physical remnant was becoming obsolete but could still be evoked on occasion. Writing to her daughters in 1857, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe playfully used a slightly archaic poetic construction when she 51

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told them she had “visited the old pond, and, if I mistake not, the relics of your old raft yet float there,” then deflated it with a more colloquial paraphrase—“at all events, one or two fragments of a raft are there, caught among rushes.”5 It was in the unadorned sense of “remains” that “relic” first entered historical usage. Although in eighteenth-century antiquarian writings things from the past were referred to by a variety of terms, including “antiquity,” “curiosity,” and “remains,” “relic” appears with some frequency, always clearly as a synonym for “remnant.” In the usage of British and early American antiquarians, as well as travelers and others interested in the historical past, the word served simply to denote the physical remains of the past and does not seem to have been accompanied by adjectives or metaphors that would suggest religious associations. And well into the nineteenth century the ruins of buildings, American Indian mounds and artifacts, and any number of superannuated things could continue to be called “relics” with no implication that they were somehow sacred.6 If the historical relic was not simply another version of the saint’s relic, however, it is also true that the recurrent link our own time has made between the two is not entirely arbitrary. For though antiquarians of the early modern period had identified their finds as “relics” without implying that those things were sacred, as a preoccupation with things from the past began to extend beyond the circle of learned antiquaries, the valence of the word shifted, and in such popular movements as the burgeoning Shakespeare industry, the religious connotations of “relic” were brought to the fore. Thus the poet William Cowper referred to the renowned mulberry tree that “supplied such relics as devotion holds still sacred, and preserves with pious care,” and at the celebration of Shakespeare’s life and work that Garrick staged in 1769, he apparently sang an ode to a goblet made from the tree, containing the line “as a relic I kiss it and bow at the shrine.”7 By the early decades of the nineteenth century, references to historical relics were increasingly embroidered with religious imagery. Responding to a question about exactly where he composed the Declaration of Independence, for instance, Thomas Jefferson piously noted that “small things may, perhaps, like the relics of saints, help to nourish our devotion to this holy bond of our Union, and keep it longer alive and warm in our affections.”8 Jefferson used the comparison several other times in commenting on the desk where he wrote the Declaration of Independence, averring in one instance that on the nation’s centennial it might be “carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the 52

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relics of the saints are in those of the Church.”9 And James Fenimore Cooper employed a similar metaphor when, on a visit to Mount Vernon in 1824, he and his friends were given a bouquet that happened to be wrapped in a page of a farming journal kept by Washington himself. “The precious morsel was divided,” he wrote, “and each of us took his portion like men who were well content with the possession of some sacred relick.”10 Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans, in other words, revivified the religious associations of the word relic and attached them to a term that already designated things from the past but heretofore had had no particular religious resonance. If commentators of our own time continue to insist on some relation between the two, it is thus not, as they themselves may think, because they are discovering some essential, transhistorical connection but because nineteenth-century devotees of historical relics implanted that connection to begin with. Far from offering a new vantage point on the historical relic, equating religious and historical relics is itself largely an artifact of the nineteenth century, and its seeming inevitability merely testifies to the way the category of the historical relic was constructed.

Although religious language and metaphor appeared with particular frequency in references to relics, the tendency to resort to a heightened, theologically infused language in contexts that were not obviously religious should not be thought of as peculiar to the relic. We can better understand the role religious imagery played in references to relics by considering the privileged status of religious language more generally in nineteenth-century America and the way it was extended beyond the realm of the specifically theological. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the vocabulary of the sacred was increasingly absorbed into the discourse of sentimentality—it became a means of sacralizing the Victorian language of feeling. Such adjectives as hallowed and holy—as well as metaphors of shrines, devotion, and also relics—infused sentimental language with new significance. No longer applied exclusively to overtly theological concerns, religious language became the pledge and surety of other deeply held beliefs. Among the religious terms drafted into sentimental discourse, “sacred” was particularly prominent. In poetry, novels, sentimental encomiums, and advice literature, as well as in public ceremonies and speeches, it became an all-purpose adjective that could be attached to 53

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virtually any object or emotion. Tears were routinely referred to as sacred, for example, as were promises and duties, affections, the dead, and the sites of one’s childhood memories. Not coincidentally, sacred was also the adjective most frequently attached to the word relics, so that “sacred relics” came to serve as obligatory shorthand for objects from the past. And precisely because “sacred” was indeed the almost inevitable accompaniment of “relic,” it is worth examining the meanings nineteenth-century Americans attached to that single word. “Sacred” was most obviously applied to any manifestation of deep and tender feeling. That was why tears, either of joy or sadness, were sacred, as were grief, tenderness, and other emotions of a profound and supposedly ennobling nature. However, nineteenth-century sentimentality was not, as so often portrayed, simply an excessive or saccharine emotionalism. In the past several decades of literary criticism, the sentimental has emerged as what Raymond Williams has defined as a “structure of feeling”—a highly determined means of channeling affect and thus of producing historically specific modes of feeling and selfhood.11 And what Glenn Hendler has termed “the narrative and affective core of a sentimental structure of feeling” was the experience of sympathetic identification.12 What sentimentality valued, in other words, was, in David Marshall’s formulation, “not just the capacity for feeling, but more specifically the capacity to feel the sentiments of someone else.”13 In sentimental discourse, then, “sacred” designated not simply deep or solemn emotion but the capacity for relatedness: the ties that bound selves to other selves and the feelings that articulated the sentimental self as what Joanne Dobson has called a “self-in-relation.”14 Thus, in a series of moral apothegms, the women’s periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book quoted Sir R. L’Estrange to the effect that “friendship is the most sacred of all moral bonds,” while a character in the 1870 novel The Shadow of Moloch Mountain averred that no relationship was “more sacred than a professed and accepted friendship.”15 Domestic and family relations were particularly invested with the quality of the “sacred,” as expressed in such phrases as “wedlock’s sacred bonds,” “the sacred title of mother,” “the most sacred and intimate relations,” and so forth. In this vein the middle-class home, in its role as sanctuary from the industrialized working world and with its carefully gendered division of labor, was also ipso facto sacred. In midcentury editions of Godey’s Lady’s Book, for example, the Victorian home was variously characterized as the “sacred precincts of domestic affection,” the “sacred resi-

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dence designed by divine goodness for the happiness of woman,” and a “sacred retreat” where a husband could “turn from the corroding cares and anxieties of life.”16 If the sentimental self was constructed around a core of intense affections, it was equally constituted around its abiding memories. In the sentimental construction of feeling, memory was not so much a cognitive faculty as an emotional and affectional one, since it was through memory that the self was linked to other selves, both living and dead. And it was in the deliberate and repeated return to its carefully preserved store of memories that the self could reclaim the totality of its relationships and lived experiences and thus constitute itself as a sentimental entity. Like tender feelings, then, in sentimental discourse memory was almost routinely glossed as “sacred” or a “sacred trust” or perhaps a “sacred treasure,” and the experiences it contained, as well as the locations and objects that prompted it, were inevitably “made sacred by” or “hallowed by” memory or perhaps “sanctified” or “enshrined as a sacred thing.” Tropes of the sacred figured prominently in the genre of popular verse that encapsulated moments of reverie and remembrance. Thus the 1856 poem “Where Charlie Died” by the sentimental poet Elizabeth Akers Allen referred to the room where a child had died as containing a “sacred presence” and being “hallowed” in its gloom and “sadly sanctified” by memory; an anonymous poem published in the 1840s spoke of the memory of a childhood home as shedding a “sacred halo”; and another poem from the same period identified a parent’s grave as that “one spot on earth, that’s dear and sacred” and could inspire memories in a child “like the feelings of a dying saint, when heaven seems opening on his closing eyes.”17 Finally, in addition to identifying particular feelings and experiences as possessing transcendent value, the word sacred could also suggest that their immense value rendered them inviolable. “Sacred” is used to mean “inviolable” in common nineteenth-century references to a time or place as “sacred to” a specific pursuit, or to a promise to be kept “sacred,” or to the “sacred” right of, for example, private property. Most relevant for our purposes, however, is that in designating a thing that should not be violated—and in a sense that is largely lost to our own era—“sacred” also functioned as an intense and highly charged synonym for “private.” This was how it was being used, for example, when a character in a play from the 1880s worried that a message would not be kept “sacred” but that all of New York would be “ringing with our humiliation” or in an 1859 article in Harper’s Weekly that

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referred to a domestic dispute as “a sacred secret, not to be whispered to the most intimate friend.”18 The notion of the sacred as the private exerted particular force in sentimental discourse in that that which was understood to demand privacy was precisely that which was related to the self’s deepest and most intimate emotional and affectional life. According to the Reverend Theodore Cuyler’s 1868 consolation manual The Empty Crib, for example, deep sorrow over the death of loved ones was “a sacred thing, on which a stranger has no right to intrude,” while a story of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s that was serialized in Harper’s in 1857 asserted, “Only, when man weeps he should be alone—not because tears are weak, but because they should be sacred.”19 Later in the century Charles Eliot Norton defended his decision to omit certain references from the published letters of John Ruskin with the argument that “there are sanctities in love and life to be kept in privacy inviolate.” And elsewhere he referred to “the sacredness of the private life” and to “the gross indelicacy of publishing the most private, sacred, and tender expressions” of love.20 In such usages Victorians mapped the older distinction between the profane and the sacred onto their own quintessentially nineteenthcentury distinction between the public and the private. The designation sacred thus identified not only a certain range and quality of feeling but the structuring principle that delimited the world of private affection and memory from the public world that was always threatening to encroach on it. In fact, the equation of the sacred and the private suggests the extent to which the sentimental self was necessarily defined as an interiorized self: it existed in the topographical metaphor that structured the difference between external and internal, that created the self as a subjectivity constructed around a hidden but supremely meaningful inner world.21 In this sense the “sacred” was not simply a casual or incidental attribute of a sentimental structure of feeling; it was what made the sentimental self what it was. The sacred was identified with the very sources of selfhood—that core of emotions, of affections, of memories to which the sentimental self incessantly returned, through which it repeatedly confirmed the hidden depth of its own being and its identity as a self.

It was this sacralized language of sentiment that nineteenth-century Americans drew on when they cast their objects from the past as “sacred relics.” When Jefferson averred that certain things could function 56

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like saints’ relics by helping “to nourish our devotion to this holy bond of our Union, and keep it longer alive and warm in our affections,” for example, he was using a religious metaphor, but his statement makes sense only within the context of sentimental discourse. Saints’ relics, after all, were primarily sought out not as a means of nourishing an “alive and warm” affection toward the saints themselves but in order to tap into the miraculous power of those holy remains. They were a conduit for divine force, not for human attachment. In contrast, Jefferson offered a definition of what might be called the sentimental relic—a “relic” whose primary function was to stimulate tender emotions and promote enduring affections. Jefferson’s gloss on the function of the sacred relic suggests that the model for the historical relic was not in fact the saint’s relic but an object much more integral to the processes of sentimental selfhood—the sentimental token or memento. And indeed, like the historical relic, the memento was often described in the language of the sentimental sacred. In a story in Harper’s Weekly in 1860, for instance, a young man is portrayed as holding a lock of his dead mother’s hair “as reverently as a pilgrim carries his relic.”22 An early poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s titled “On a Lock of Hair” begins by comparing the hair token to a relic a pilgrim might save from a shrine and asserting that the recipient would cherish it “with religious zeal.”23 And a story published in 1856 spoke of a bureau full of mementos as a site “consecrated to . . . holy and sweet remembrances, a sanctuary replete with tokens of family affection.”24 In fact the sacred was so routinely understood to be an attribute of sentimental memory that the bare adjective marked a thing as an object consecrated to remembrance rather than to any other purpose. Thus when a Richmond woman’s diary referred to a trunk that contained “valuable trinkets, sacred things” or another diarist lamented that Yankee soldiers had despoiled a collection of “things so sacred to me,” there was no question that they were referring not to possessions valued for their monetary or aesthetic worth or to interesting curiosities but to objects whose worth lay entirely in their ability to evoke treasured memories.25 The memento may seem a timeless form, something human beings have always collected and that thus lies beyond any attempt at historicizing. Yet there is no question that mementos played a particularly important role in the genteel middle-class culture that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. If people had preserved memento-like objects before that time and if they would continue to preserve such things long beyond it, the nineteenth century saw a 57

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particular focus on the small personal articles that were variously called mementos, tokens, keepsakes, remembrancers, and even relics and that could include virtually any object: locks of hair, flowers and bits of foliage, photographs, clothing, and other personal items. On the one hand, Victorians seem to have preserved such things much more widely and persistently than was done in other eras, as evinced by the repeated references to mementos in diaries, memoirs, and letters from the latter two-thirds of the century. On the other hand, they indisputably were uniquely conscious of the memento as a specific cultural form, developing not only a language and literature that described its effects but specific material practices that enabled it to mean.26 Since the scholarship on sentimentalism has emerged almost exclusively out of literary criticism, it has focused largely on the identifications promoted by sentimental literature and has dealt with mementos only in passing. Nonetheless, mementos were an integral part of sentimental culture. Indeed, as objects specifically selected for their personal histories and meanings and often cherished and repeatedly returned to for years, they were one of the primary means through which sentimental values were transmitted in daily life. To use Foucault’s apt phrase, mementos functioned as “technologies of the self”—as a set of objects and associated practices that worked to create and maintain sentimental selves. Mementos played a variety of roles in nineteenth-century Americans’ lives, but they were particularly prominent in the friendship and courtship rituals of young unmarried adults, especially during the middle decades of the century. Young women kept friendship albums, for which their acquaintances wrote bits of verse and sometimes contributed locks of hair, and they confirmed their friendships through exchanges of hair, flowers, and other small tokens.27 And the exchange of tokens was ritualized in heterosexual courtship, as men wooed women with small gifts, particularly flowers, and in return sometimes sought locks of hair from women they were enamored of. When members of the opposite sex took leave of each other before a long absence, they often exchanged tokens that could be carried on their persons throughout their separation. Such tokens might have some personal value, but equally they might be improvised from whatever materials lay to hand. When Louisiana native Kate Stone parted from the soldier who would eventually become her husband, they exchanged geranium leaves.28 And when a soldier beau of Sarah Morgan’s said good-bye to her, he gave her a sprig of jasmine and an old brass button “as a souvenir in case he should be killed in the coming as58

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sault,” while she gave him “a real for true silver five cents . . . which he promised to wear on his watch chain.”29 The transformation of such casual objects into cherished love tokens can be seen as yet another instance of cultural practices in evidence in Victorian women’s crafts and other pursuits—of the tendency, that is, to invest in the apparently trivial and incidental and to salvage the leavings of both the human and the natural world toward sentimental ends.30 But it also shows how mementos, like relics, were bound up with specific temporal moments. A particular bit of foliage or an item in a pocket was drafted as a token because it happened to be available, but its chance availability at just that time also meant it was indissolubly tied to that moment and served as its marker. Geranium leaves connected Kate Stone and her husband-to-be and also anchored the heightened emotional moment of their parting in a time-specific configuration of the physical world, preserving that moment through its material trace. Mementos assumed a particular status in young people’s rituals, but they also played an ongoing role in numerous other aspects of nineteenth-century life. Women friends sometimes continued to exchange tokens throughout adulthood; mothers preserved keepsakes from their offspring’s babyhood and childhood; and family members used mementos to emblematize their continuing relationships and the significant moments they had lived through together. Alongside courtship, however, the arena where mementos undoubtedly played the greatest role was in the memory rituals attached to the dead. As the author of a consolation manual put it, “In every home there is an enshrined memory, a sacred relic, a ring, a lock of shining hair, a broken plaything, a book, a picture, something sacredly kept and guarded, which speaks of death, which tells as plainly as words, of some one long since gone.”31 As with tokens of friendship or courtship, any casual object could serve as a memento of a dead loved one. “It is strange,” one essayist mused, what a change is wrought in one hour by death. The moment our friend is gone from us for ever, what sacredness invests him! . . . All he wore or touched, or looked upon familiarly, becomes sacred as relics. Yesterday these were homely articles, to be tossed to and fro, handled lightly, given away thoughtlessly—to-day we touch them softly, our tears drop on them; death has laid his hand on them, and they have become holy in our eyes.32

These articles saved after a death might mark the continuing business of loved ones’ lives—the clothing they had worn or the objects they had interacted with daily. But like tokens exchanged between the living, 59

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mementos of the departed sometimes also encapsulated a very specific moment in time, usually the moment of death itself. Sarah Morgan preserved “the teapot that [her brother] used as he lay dying”; Jefferson Davis sent his wife four chrysanthemum buds that his son Jefferson Davis Jr. was holding when he died; and Christian Sanderson, a teenager in late nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, saved the remnants of the last orange his father ate before his death.33 Sometimes such objects seem to have offered a particular intimacy with the dead even in their final suffering. Writing of a lock of hair from a beloved child, the author Caroline Gilman remembered how she watched “the dimpled hand grow thin, the blue eye become dim, and the smile that once lit his face beam slow and sickly.”34 And according to the novelist Mary Virginia Terhune, her grandmother had preserved a particularly strange and poignant keepsake—a cracker given to a dying child that still bore “the imprint of the tiny teeth he was too weak to set firmly in the biscuit.”35 At other times mementos bespoke a desire to remember and cherish not only the living being but the body itself, even after death. Thus Caroline Gilman remembered clipping the lock from the child’s head “as he lay beautiful in death; his perfect features still and fair as chiselled marble.”36 And Victorians routinely preserved not only hair from the corpse but memorials of the funeral rituals—objects such as mourning crepe, coffin plates, the flowers that had adorned the coffin, pieces of the grave clothes, and foliage from the grave site.37 Whether a token of a temporarily separated loved one or a final keepsake of someone long since dead, the memento’s raison d’etre was its link to memory—its ability to evoke the long vanished scenes and emotions it had been part of. Its powers in this regard are confirmed by the iconographic and literary traditions that described its proper deployment and the feelings it could generate. On the one hand there were the illustrations that portrayed individuals gazing intently at a portrait, a lock of hair, or some other token, lost in the memories it released. And on the other there was the subgenre of popular verse with titles such as “The Token,” “The Lock of Hair,” “On a Rose Pressed in a Book,” or “The Old Armchair,” which focused entirely on the sustained contemplation of an object from the speaker’s past and on the vivid memories and emotions that contemplation could summon up. The defining feature of the memento, however, was not simply that it had participated in the past and therefore could call up memories but that it had been in direct physical contact with one beloved person. As one bit of verse in a mid-nineteenth-century album put it,

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Touched by the magic hand of those we love A trifle does of magnitude appear, A pin, a fan, a blade of grass, A bit of paper, then becomes most dear.38

Thus the memento was nothing other than a means of reenvisioning a bit of the material world as a means of continuing contact with a body that was no longer present, either through a temporary separation or through death. It brought an absent body’s physical presence into a temporal or physical space where it could not itself be. Nineteenth-century accounts often called attention to the ways mementos could be not simply reminders of loved ones but a material means of engaging with them. Separated from Julia Dent, his future wife, Ulysses S. Grant described reading a book that she had read before him as literally retracing her actions. “How often I think of you whilst reading it,” he wrote. “I think well Julia has read the very same words that I am now reading and not long before me.”39 Grant and Dent also exchanged rings that, in the fashion of many nineteenthcentury couples, were not deliberately bought for each other, as our own era’s engagement or wedding rings conventionally are, but were rings they already owned and presumably wore. In his letters Grant showed himself acutely conscious that the rings thus served not simply as tokens or promises but as physical links between the two bodies—as pieces of the lovers themselves, entrusted to each other’s keeping and accompanying them during the forced absence of the complete bodily self. “To think too that while I am writing this the ring I used to wear is on your hand,” he wrote in one letter. “Parting with that ring Julia was the strongest evidence I could have given you (that is—in the way of a present) of the depth and sincerity of my love for you.”40 And later, “I very often look at the name in the ring I wear and think how much I would like to see again the one who gave it to me.”41 Similarly, after the death of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s first wife, an observer at the bedside noted that the poet drew the rings off his dead wife’s hand and placed them on his own, as if to transmit the jewelry’s ongoing contact with her body to his, encircling both their hands in the same circumference.42 The desire to maintain contact with the living body is dramatically evident in such tokens as the half-eaten orange or the tooth-marked biscuit mentioned above, which allowed mourners to engage with their beloved’s most intimate physical processes. And descriptions in letters and diaries suggest that locks of hair in particular

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offered physical contact with those no longer available to be touched in person. “It seems to me it would be a little comfort to me if I only had a lock of his soft hair,” South Carolinian Elizabeth Palmer Porcher wrote after her brother James’s death, implicitly suggesting that the tactile softness of her brother’s hair would be part of what she would find “comforting.”43 And Grace Brown Elmore more directly presented hair as a surrogate body when she noted that she wanted to press a chain of her dead mother’s hair to her heart and kiss it.44 Because the prototypical token was slight, even fragmentary, it could be interacted with at close range, brought near to the body, pored over, caressed, and wept over. And by physically encompassing these small simulations of absent bodies, Victorians not only remembered those they cherished but incorporated them into their own inmost being. The memento thus disrupted and merged bodily boundaries, and in so doing, it enacted sympathetic identification in the most literal way. For in sympathy, as Adam Smith’s influential Theory of Moral Sentiments had it, “we enter as it were into [another’s] body.”45 The memento’s ability to put selves in contact with each other, indeed to merge the bodies of the remembered and the rememberer, was the most salient of its functions, but mementos served a variety of other ends as well. When couples exchanged mementos at parting, for example, it was not only in the hope that those objects could help them remember each other but, more specifically, as a pledge of commitment. As a sign of faith, each surrendered something of their own into the care of the other, and they relied on the memento’s capacity to renew memory to ensure the lasting effects of that exchange. During their absence, the tokens they had bestowed would continually return each to the memory of the giver and the moment of the giving and in this way sustain their mutual commitment. The memento’s ability to ensure a commitment was perhaps most evident in courtship rituals, but that capacity could be put to use in other contexts too. When Southerner Tally Simpson sent his sister a ring, for example, he was not asking her simply to remember him for the sake of remembering. He was relying on the memento’s mnemonic capacities to redirect his sister’s otherwise obstinate will. As he heavyhandedly admonished her, When ever you become vexed or let your temper get the upperhand of you in any way, or when you see that you are about to perform that which you should not, or commit any sin of whatsoever nature, look at your ring, think of me, and curb and check the temptation of the Wicked One on all occasions. Let it be a 62

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souvenir, the sight of which shall recall to your mind my simple request under all circumstances.46

The idea that a memento could forcibly realign its viewer’s will was most elaborately dramatized in those stock scenes of sentimental tracts and literature in which the very sight of some slight but memory-laden article not only returned individuals to their most basic and enduring memories but confirmed a lapsed or forgotten commitment. The author of a religious tract from the 1870s thus quoted a letter from a soldier describing how receiving a flower from a favorite bush back home had reinvigorated his dedication to his country’s cause: It was a precious memento of home, and of a sister’s love. . . . I seized the rosebud, pressed it to my lips with a kiss, and sent up a prayer that God would bless my sister, my home, and all its dear ones who were brought so vividly before me. Ah! had I been called at that moment to draw the sword or shoulder the musket and repair to the field of battle, I would have fought with tenfold valor for my country; for my country is the home of my mother that I love, and the sister who had not forgotten me.47

And a character in William Caruthers’s 1845 historical romance The Knights of the Horse-Shoe has cast aside the woman he had once loved, but when his gaze happens to fall on the locket he had given her years before, he is instantly recalled to the self he had once been and the commitment he had made as if no time had intervened: His eyes were riveted upon the locket, the early memento of his youthful passion. What overwhelming recollections of days and joys gone by forever poured in upon his memory. . . . The long years which had intervened, with their sad and blighting experience and bitter memories, were rolled back, and he stood before the youthful beauty in his mental vision . . . as when he had first presented her with that picture.48

Finally, just as the memento could be physically manipulated to promote bonds and identifications, it could also be used to undo its original purpose: to forcibly expel what had been unwisely incorporated into the self, for example, or to break the bonds of a commitment that was no longer valid. Burning the letters of faithless lovers and turning their pictures to the wall were staple scenes of sentimental novels and poems, and diaries testify that the same punishments were sometimes meted out to mementos in daily life. When the man who had 63

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courted Isabella Rittenhouse married another woman, she recorded in her diary that she went to her room, kissed his picture for the last time, and then, in a ritual divestment of her affections and hopes, deliberately consigned “his letters and picture, and all his little tokens” to the flames.49 And though a departing soldier, one John Halsey, had given Sarah Morgan a ring that she felt obliged to wear for a time, she felt no corresponding loyalty to Halsey and promised herself that she would someday use the ring to symbolically renounce any ties to its giver. Once the war was over, she wrote, she would “throw it in the river just as I now throw to the winds all recollections of John Halsey.”50 What all these examples show—and what is crucial in understanding the memento’s relation to the relic—is that mementos were not simply repositories of unchanging memory but things that could be concretely manipulated to rework memories’ valences and meanings. The memento should be understood as the forerunner of those small, often fragmentary, often bodily artifacts that would eventually emerge in the literature of psychoanalysis—the fetish, the transitional object, the part object, and so forth. Like those more heavily theorized things, it existed as a means of channeling affect and renegotiating the self’s relational world. Mementos were first and foremost efficacious objects: things that could effect change that could not take place without their intervention. They were not, in Lévi-Strauss’s famous phrase, simply things that were good to think with, but things with which active psychic and emotional work could be done.

What is important for our purposes are not the uses sentimental tokens were put to in private, however, but the ways the memento’s role was extended into the public sphere. For if material objects were used to connect people with their own absent loved ones, they were equally used to create connections across the span of historical time. Recent discussions of how objects functioned in late eighteenth-century museums and in the cult of sentiment more generally have repeatedly returned to a striking example that appears in a travel journal written by the German author and woman of letters Sophie von La Roche. There La Roche described her encounter with ancient Roman artifacts and funerary urns on a visit to the British Museum in 1786: There are mirrors, too, belonging to Roman matrons, golden earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. With one of these mirrors in my hand I looked amongst the urns, 64

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thinking meanwhile, “Maybe chance has preserved amongst these remains some part of the dust from the fine eyes of a Greek or Roman lady, who so many centuries ago surveyed herself in the mirror, trying to discover whether the earrings and necklet before me suited her or not.” Nor could I restrain my desire to touch the ashes of an urn on which a female figure was being mourned. I felt it gently, with great feeling, between my fingers, but found much earth mixed with it. The thought “Thou divided, I integral dust am still,” moved me greatly, and in the end I thought it must be sympathy which had caused me to pick this one from so many urns to whose ashes a good, sensitive soul had once given life. This idea affected me, and again I pressed the grain of dust between my fingers tenderly, just as her best friend might once have grasped her hand, complaining that she had but ill reward for her kindness, or that her best intentions were misread. 51

What is notable about this passage—what indeed makes it an exemplary illustration of the historical relic’s capacities—is the way it envisions the physical substance of the past, in its very physicality, as the inevitable and most potent conduit to a more immaterial meeting of minds and sympathies. According to her description, La Roche first uses the remnants of the classical past to position herself in the physical space of the long-dead Roman women. Holding an ancient mirror, she imagines one of those matrons viewing herself in that same mirror; looking at the jewelry, she envisions that woman gazing at her reflection as La Roche now gazes at her own. But even this deployment of the things of the past to situate herself in intimate bodily relation to its inhabitants is finally not sufficient. In the end, like the visitors to Whitefield’s tomb, La Roche seeks access to the dead not simply through their possessions but through the material remains of the body itself. In a remarkable image, she “tenderly” presses the body’s dust between her fingers just as the woman’s “best friend might once have grasped her hand,” as if the dust—materially identical to the living body but otherwise so completely altered—could literally enable a sympathetic touch, hand to hand, across the centuries. Touching the long-dead woman’s dust, La Roche imagines herself as a confidante and friend, entering into a complete congruence of minds and sympathies. She uses the dust, that is, not simply to envision the past’s inhabitants but to form a one-on-one relationship with them. La Roche’s description is evidence of the way Americans’ sentimental identifications participated in the more general Western European cult of sentiment and the relation to the past that it fostered. And although it is a highly gendered account in that La Roche’s ability to enter so completely into the dead woman’s mind is based in good part 65

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on the identity of their concerns as women, we should by no means assume that only women used the remains of the past as a means of sentimental identification. Well into the nineteenth century, men too participated in sentimental values, and though they were less apt to place themselves in the more typically female position of intimate confidante and friend, their travel journals and historical writings evince a similar deployment of objects to achieve personal identifications with those who had lived before. Although I know of no American evocation of a historical artifact that is as dramatic as the example from La Roche’s journal or that offers as exhaustive a description of the powers of sentimental identification, like La Roche, nineteenth-century Americans clearly used objects from the past to reposition themselves in relation to the past. When John Fanning Watson had a chance to see the chair from which he believed John Hancock had declared the nation’s independence, for instance, he took pains to describe and sketch it, but he also sought more intimate contact than either viewing or drawing would allow. “I sat in it of course,” his account concludes matter-of-factly, as if the need to put himself in the place of its former user were simply beyond question.52 Similarly, as the examples in Allison Lockwood’s Passionate Pilgrims show, American tourists in the nineteenth century plopped themselves down in the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, defied their tour guides to sit in Walter Scott’s chair at Abbotsford, and paid extra to clamber up into Napoleon’s carriage.53 “I have seen it!” the American traveler Orville Dewey exulted after his visit to Abbotsford in the 1830s. “Before the desk at which he wrote, in the very chair, the throne of power from which he stretched out a sceptre over all the world, and over all ages, I sat down—it was enough!”54 And visitors to the revered sites of American history sought out similar connections. The journalist Anne Newport Royall sat “for some minutes” in a chair William Penn had used, “pondering over that success which crowned the enterprise of its former owner.”55 Walking through Mount Vernon, James Fenimore Cooper reported: “More than once, as my hand touched a lock to open some door, I felt the blood stealing up my arm, as the sudden conviction flashed on my mind that the member rested on a place where the hand of Washington had probably been laid a thousand times.”56 When the historian and author Benson Lossing visited Mount Vernon some years later, he “sat down in the very chair often occupied by the patriot, and gazed and mused with feelings not to be uttered.” And on leaving the building, he tried for one last moment

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of identification by seizing Washington’s spyglass, which still hung by the door, and surveying the countryside.57 The material object’s ability to bring the past into physical convergence with the present was made clear in descriptions of mirrors and other reflective surfaces—objects that, like La Roche’s ancient Roman mirror, could be imagined to create a liminal third space in which the world once reflected in them could be called back. In an 1827 letter to John Fanning Watson, John Jay Smith, the librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia, exulted over a desk with a mirror attached that had belonged to William Penn. “It would be something to view one’s self in the same mirror as he did,” Smith wrote, as if simply seeing his own image in the space that had once seen Penn’s would provide the ultimate form of contact with Penn himself.58 Drinking from a well at Mount Vernon in the mid-1860s, the journalist John Trowbridge peered “down, down into the dark shaft at the faintly glimmering water” and imagined George Washington himself coming up from the field, taking off his hat, and standing in that same place to take a drink.59 And when she visited Mary Stuart’s rooms in Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace, the author Sara Jane Lippincott described herself as similarly willing the mirror to project into the present the image it had once held: Looking at the bed on which her lovely limbs had once reposed, and on the mirror which had so often given back the fair reflection of her face, affected most powerfully my imagination and my sympathies. . . . [I] stood gazing at that faithless glass, as though hoping, by the mere force of my passionate desire, to evoke again to its cold surface one warm version of that rare royal beauty and stately grace it had so often imaged forth in times of gladness and grief.60

Like photographs, mirrors function as what Charles Sanders Peirce identified as indexical forms of representation—that is, even as they produce an image of the object they reflect, since that image is created by the physical properties of light itself, not by the human hand, they also mark its concrete presence in a straightforward relation of cause and effect. Mirrors were thus uniquely suited to encourage fantasies of a past reality suspended in the physical substance of matter and capable of being released intact into the time of the present. And yet, of course, that fantasy only literalized a capacity already understood to be inherent to the relic. When John Jay Smith imagined seeing his own image in the space where William Penn had once seen his, he was

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implicitly positing that the mirror, like any relic, held unaltered some trace of that earlier moment when Penn himself had interacted with it. And like the innumerable visitors who sat in the chairs once occupied by notable figures from the past, he could thus imagine himself standing in Penn’s place, in some sense becoming Penn, their two forms commingling in the shadowy depths of the mirror. If mirrors and other relics allowed their users to “enter into the past” or to “stand in the place of” its inhabitants, however, this repositioning was never about a merely material alignment, a literal insertion of the viewer into the space of the past. To stand in the place of a historical figure was emphatically not to pretend to be that figure in the manner of a historical reenactor, nor was it to participate in the physical particulars of a past environment as in our own themed environments. The difference between relics and these other forms of historical representation emerges clearly in another ritual specifically designed to access the past William Penn had lived in—this time a collective ceremony rather than an individual action. In 1824 when John Fanning Watson and seventeen other prominent Philadelphians gathered for a banquet and speeches commemorating the 142nd anniversary of the landing of William Penn, they used objects from the past as unobtrusive but ongoing participants in their ritual. Not only did they meet in a house associated with Penn, but they viewed such relics as a silver snuffbox “presented by William Penn, Esq. on his leaving the province of Pennsylvania, to Thomas Lloyd, 1684” and a crystal seal made from a stone “presented to Isaac Norris, by an Indian chief on the occasion of the treaty with the Indians, in 1710.” Moreover, the president of the day sat in a chair purportedly once used by Penn, while two other members sat in chairs made from the elm under which Penn had signed a treaty in 1684.61 In moving through the space Penn had moved through and interacting with the objects he had interacted with, they thus engaged with the past in very tactile and kinesthetic ways. At the same time, however, the ceremony’s participants were not playacting: they were not seeking to call up the past as evocative atmospherics or pretending to exist in another fully realized reality. Instead, their relics were understood to induce a state of reverie in which the past returned not to the physical senses but to an inner apprehension. Thus if the chair William Penn once sat in physically repositioned the viewer in relation to Penn, a sign affi xed to it instructed its readers to use that physical contact as a means of reflection rather than a means of literal reenactment or vicarious participation in the external particulars of the past. “FRUITFUL OF RECOLLECTIONS,” it read, “SIT AND MUSE.”62 68

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The process of sitting and musing to deliberately access recollections was of course precisely the process of sentimental memory. And indeed, nineteenth-century viewers often spoke of the thoughts historical objects gave rise to as “memories.” Gazing out the window of Lafayette’s home, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch reported that a series of “historic memories” of events he had never witnessed came “trooping up” one after the other—memories “of the French Revolution, of its horrors, and of the noble stand our host had taken; of his sufferings and imprisonment, his recent partial restoration to power under Louis Philippe, and present-shadowed future.”63 Likewise, the author D. W. Belisle described the “memories” that would overwhelm visitors to Independence Hall at the sight of Benjamin Franklin’s desk: “The incidents connected with the eventful life of Franklin . . . rush upon our memories, and we see him in imagination conning over his books and papers beside his old Desk, with all the gravity of a philosopher, a statesman, and a man of letters.”64 In fact, even when visitors to historic sites did not explicitly use the word memories, they still frequently used the objects they saw to conjure up imagined scenes described with all the detail and immediacy of personal memory. Sara Jane Lippincott had never seen Sir Walter Scott in life, but according to her travelogue the mere sight of the last set of clothes he wore brought the picture of the grand old man, worn down and broken before his time, with wondrous vividness before me. I could see him as he tottered about his grounds, or sat in the shade of some favorite tree, with his faithful Willie Laidlaw— the great soul light in his eye dimmed with deepening mists, and his gigantic genius shrunken into a babe’s bounded and bewildered capacity.65

Though we may be inclined to dismiss such passages as fanciful conceits, in fact they are evidence of a historically specific conception of how imagination and memory worked. Philosophically this conception can be traced back to the theory of associations as it was formulated by Locke, Hume, and others and later popularized in the United States, largely through Archibald Alison’s 1790 text Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste.66 Associationism was an understanding of the mind’s workings that emphasized its associative powers—the way an idea, view, object, or literary passage spontaneously prompted a sequence of related ideas and emotions that were not inherent to the inciting stimulus but were an inextricable part of the experience of it and were in fact what gave it its scope and subjective richness. It thus represented a challenge to aesthetic approaches that had emphasized absolute 69

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standards of taste or that saw art as a means of access to universal Platonic essences. As Edward Cahill has observed, “By both tempering the older tradition of taste with the claims of subjective experience and shoring it up with a demanding and comprehensive view of the mind as infinitely creative, [associationism] contributed to a new vision of criticism that was not only appreciative but imaginative.”67 When associationism’s influence beyond philosophy is discussed, it is usually portrayed primarily as a literary practice, one that emphasized the mind’s receptiveness to the literary text’s suggestions and images and the way the text quite naturally spurred the reader’s own imaginative flights. As David Perkins rightly notes, the openness to associations should be understood as part of a historically specific practice of reading—a series of mental operations that eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury readers collectively learned to perform, that superseded older modes of reading and, in its turn, was eventually superseded by the reading practices of modernism.68 However, if the theory of associations was much discussed as a mode of apprehending literature, there is no question that it was also understood as a mode of apprehending history. Although Archibald Alison, for example, obviously was not primarily interested in history, as Mark Salber Phillips has pointed out, “in developing his psychology of aesthetic emotions, Alison gives attention to history as a rich source of associational images.”69 Like the reading practices that the theory of associations fostered, its historical practices were specific to a given period and were quite at odds with the particular operations that would come to constitute historical thinking in a later era. Associationism emphasized the way history, like literature, could be accessed through a receptive reverie in which potential associations presented themselves to a properly attuned sensibility. And it tended to minimize distinctions between fact and fiction or personal, experiential memory and a more impersonal external history, emphasizing instead the similarity of the mind’s operations in all these instances and the quality of the experience it generated. The historical relic’s connection to the theory of associations persists even in the term association item that has so commonly been used to designate relics and that identifies them not simply as things associated with prominent individuals and events but as things that inspire associations of, connected to, those events. The designation association item refers not simply, that is, to the inert fact of an object’s physical and temporal positioning but to the processes it could set in motion in the minds of those who interacted with it. Alison’s summation of the role associations played in responses to art or nature is perhaps even more 70

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apt when applied to relics: “We are conscious of a variety of images in our minds, very different from those which the objects themselves can present to the eye,” he wrote. “Trains of pleasing or of solemn thought arise spontaneously within our minds; our hearts swell with emotions, of which the objects before us seem to afford no adequate cause.”70 Thus when Sara Jane Lippincott viewed the clothes Scott had worn in his final days, she was irrepressibly brought to the stories she had heard or read of those days. Those thoughts were not an irrelevant flight of fancy that led her away from the object before her or an imposition upon it but an impression, an association, that involved processes similar to memory and had all of its retrospective emotional power. During the first part of the nineteenth century, Americans often explicitly used the language of associations in explaining the claim made on them by remnants of the past. Writing about a visit to the home of George Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, Benson Lossing identified a silver salver that had belonged to the first president as an item that “possesses peculiar interest, because of its associations” and went on to enumerate the images it called up.71 On other occasions accounts of historical sites or objects did not use the word associations but clearly alluded to associative processes when they spoke of the “train” of thoughts an object inspired or to the successive “links” of memory it set in motion. An 1858 publication on Washington’s tomb, for example, instructed its readers that to “catch something of the spirit of the mighty dead” while at Mount Vernon, they should reflect on the “suggestions” of the past “as memory brings them up, link by link.”72 And a poem published in the American Literary Magazine a decade earlier exhorted visitors to Aaron Burr’s grave to call Burr’s good deeds to mind by “run[ning] o’er the links of memory’s pearly chain.”73 By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the overt influence of associationist theory had waned, and its conceptual vocabulary was no longer invoked. But the sense that things invariably and irresistibly conjured up emotions and sometimes images of the past they had been part of persisted. The theory of associations, after all, was not simply a philosophical concept but a phenomenological reality. Just as it involved culturally and temporally specific practices of reading, so it involved specific modes of interacting with the physical world, and individuals did not have to have read Archibald Alison, or indeed know anything about the theory of associations, to engage in those culturally prescribed practices. In fact, it could be said that the theory only enunciated on a literary and learned level a more generally accepted 71

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understanding of objects’ ability to offer imaginative engagement with the past. Relics could be approached with the same imaginative, associative faculties as literary works or paintings or landscapes, but relics did operate somewhat differently from those other entities in that rather than simply activating a generalized series of associations, they tended to be used like personal mementos to generate associations—“memories”—of individual dead. As D. W. Belisle wrote of the objects in Independence Hall, relics were tokens “uniting the present and the past with ligaments of inseverable affection”: they allowed users to feel their way into relationships with individuals they had never known in life and to create sympathetic bonds with them across decades or even centuries.74 Thus at the gathering on the anniversary of Penn’s landing, the president of the occasion, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, emphasized the opportunity the ceremony offered to sit in attendance on Penn himself: “We feel [Penn’s] spirit in the atmosphere that we breathe,” he is quoted as saying. “We see in imagination the spot where he used to sit while dictating laws to a virtuous and happy people, we have a right to fancy that we are sitting in the same place where he used to take his frugal repast.”75 In a similar vein, in his 1835 History of the Town of Plymouth James Thacher emphasized that, standing on Plymouth Rock, his readers could “fancy a magic power ushering us into the presence of our fathers. . . . In contemplation, we may hold communion with celestial spirits, and receive monitions from those who are at rest in their graves.”76 And William Sullivan, the speaker at the 1829 commemoration of the Pilgrims’ landing, offered a more elaborate description of the process of accessing the Pilgrim forebears when he asserted that, in moving through the physical space they had inhabited, his listeners were unconsciously drawn into the presence of the Pilgrims—they seem to have descended among us, to receive our tributes, with encouraging, and approving, smiles. We are transferred to the days in which they, and they only, were here. We touch the cherished relics, which were their own. We enter their humble dwellings; we are present with them in their sincere devotions.77

Contemplating the remains of the past allowed an internal reverie that was simultaneously an exclusive conversation with the heroes and great men who were no longer alive. Those who could do this, in John Fanning Watson’s words, were “enabled to evoke from the store-house of . . . memory the ideal presence” and, in an image of complete and 72

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mutual communion, were thus “at all times ready ‘to walk and talk with men of other days.’”78 That the relic’s primary purpose was to inspire memories and connection with the dead was strikingly evident in the way nineteenthcentury Americans often quite self-consciously cast their relics as mementos. They saved locks of Washington’s hair, just as they might have saved the hair of someone near to them, and after his death they bought mourning brooches bearing his image and mourning pictures portraying allegorical figures sorrowing at his grave.79 Similarly, nineteenth-century visitors to the graves of well-known historical persons and sites of famous tragedies sought out the kinds of mementos they would have preserved from sites connected with their own kin. Thus when Benson Lossing visited the grave of Jane McCrea, killed during the Revolutionary War some seventy years before, he took away a bouquet, as if McCrea had been a sister or sweetheart whose memory he wanted to preserve; on a visit to Paris in 1850 Massachusetts resident Maria Degen gathered withered leaves from the wreaths on the graves of Abelard and Heloise; and visitors to the graves of such prominent figures as Washington and Andrew Jackson gathered bits of foliage, just as they might have done at the graves of beloved family members.80 Even the prevalence of fragments among the nineteenth century’s historical objects suggests their links to the tradition of the sentimental token, since tokens were frequently improvised from whatever slight, contingent, and sometimes fragmentary objects lay to hand. The metaphor of the sentimental token determined not only the kinds of historical things nineteenth-century Americans preserved but the ways they framed them. Far from assuming that the unadorned artifact spoke for itself, Americans frequently reworked their bits of history into elaborate tokens. Individuals who owned a small relic of a famous person might have it incorporated into a piece of jewelry just as they might have done for mementos of loved ones. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, for instance, owned a lock of hair reputed to have come from Robert Burns’s lover “Highland Mary.” He carried it in his waistcoat pocket for years and eventually had it put in an engraved locket made especially for it.81 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a lock of Washington’s hair enclosed in a locket, and fragments of Washington’s original coffin were set in jewelry and accompanied by iconography intended to emphasize their significance.82 The fragment that passed into Lincoln’s ownership, for example, not only was enclosed in a ring but was shaped into a tiny coffin and adorned with thirteen stars.83 Other objects drew on the Victorian practice of assembling mementos into 73

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framed visual tableaus. A notice that appeared in the New York Times in 1883 described a wreath of flowers that had lain on Lincoln’s coffin and had afterward been “carefully preserved, put under glass, and framed in walnut.”84 The Philadelphia evangelist Yardley Warner owned a relic of the poet William Cowper: a square of cloth supposedly from the mantle Cowper had described in a poem, surrounded by twigs from the poet’s garden.85 And the historian Frank Etting preserved yet another fragment of Washington’s coffin, this one surrounded by a wreath of dried flowers and attached to paper cut in the shape of a coffin and inscribed “Sacred to the memory of Washington.”86 In fact, though for analytic purposes I have drawn a distinction between the public “relic” and the private “memento,” nineteenthcentury usage made no absolute separation between the two forms. Personal memorial tokens were often referred to as “relics”; objects that were part of the collective past could equally be called “mementos.” In the disquisition on relics in his magisterial Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay referred to such private tokens as locks of hair as “home-relics” and moved without interruption from discussing “these sweet domestic relics” to “the copy of Montaigne’s Florio, with the name of Shakspeare upon the leaf, written by the poet of all time himself; the chair preserved at Antwerp, in which Rubens sat when he painted the immortal Descent from the Cross; or the telescope, preserved in the Museum of Florence, which aided Galileo in his sublime discoveries.”87 Though Mackay clearly recognized some distinction between personal and collective relics, he also presented them as sharing an essential commonality of function and purpose. This conception of the historical relic as another manifestation of the sentimental memento positioned it to do a particular kind of work in the construction of national identity. Understood sentimentally, relics structured the nation-state on the model of the family—as a domestic circle bound by ties of sentiment, affection, and above all memory. Americans used relics of the nation’s forebears, its prominent citizens, and those who had died in battle as they would have used the relics of their own family dead—as a means of renewing the memory of those who preceded them and confirming their commitment to the project those earlier generations had begun. And in doing so, they also affirmed their bonds with their fellow citizens through their investment in a shared heritage that all members of the nation’s putative family supposedly experienced as their own.88 Relics thus grounded the community of the living in the solemn community of the dead and consti74

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tuted the nation through the mediation of a collective bond with those who had gone before. While the relic as sentimental memento thus promoted a heightened investment in its users’ collective past, it also implicitly circumscribed the circle of those who could lay claim to that past. American Indian artifacts, for example, were never included in the charmed circle of the sacred relic. Though located in the geographical space of the nation— and thus of interest to the much more topographically inclined antiquarians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—they were not part of the heritage that a predominantly white nation claimed as its own or part of the community it sought to include in its family bonds. If Indian remains and artifacts continued to be called “relics,” they were understood to be relics only in the sense that they were old things, not in the more deeply meaningful sense that they did sentimental work.89 Relics were symptomatic of a new investment in the past, but they were also one of the means by which that past came to be construed in exclusively national terms. They were part of the mechanism, that is, through which “history” came to be defined as the history of the nation-state and was accessed largely to validate the state’s projects and purposes.

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The Battlefield’s Remains Before the Civil War, collecting historical relics, if fairly widespread, was also somewhat rarefied. Few people would ever own a lock of Washington’s hair, and even more generic relics, such as pieces of Plymouth Rock and sprigs from Mount Vernon, seem to have circulated primarily among a rather elite group of sightseers, antiquarians, and collectors. Furthermore, collectors focused largely on objects associated with famous people or particular events related to those people—for example, the landing at Plymouth Rock—and thus on phenomena that most Americans had little contact with and that had no relation to their lived experience. Whatever patriotic attachment Americans felt to Washington, for example, even for the Revolutionary War generation his life was distinct from their own experience, and commemorations of Washington drew only tangentially on their own memories or life course. The events that did affect common people, such as wars or other major historical occurrences, were not necessarily a major focus of the early nineteenth-century relic tradition. Certainly mid-nineteenth antiquarians such as John Fanning Watson and the New England collector Benjamin Poore preserved artifacts from Revolutionary War battlefields as part of a more general interest in the past, and local collectors or individuals who lived near the battlefields seem to have assembled collections devoted specifically to the war.1 But the sheer number of Revolutionary War relics was obviously much more limited than the number the

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Civil War would leave in its wake, and their geographical range was more restricted. By the late nineteenth century some Revolutionary War relics were being exhibited in expositions and local museums, and eventually they would be displayed at historic houses that had served as Washington’s headquarters and later been opened to the public as museums. Those revamped headquarters offered perhaps the most visible permanent displays of Revolutionary War relics, but, in name at least, their avowed purpose was to commemorate Washington, not the common soldiers who fought the war and certainly not the civilians who might have been affected by it. The Civil War was a different matter altogether. In both North and South, objects related to it were preserved by soldiers, by their families and loved ones waiting at home, by those who lived near the battlefields, and by the American population more generally, whether or not the collectors had any personal relationship to the fighting. Collecting Civil War artifacts quickly became a mass pastime in a way that no American relic collecting tradition has been before or since, and it took such deep root in American culture that certain forms of it have continued to our own time.2 And if the collecting focused on the Civil War would become the most extensive and enduring of American relic traditions, it would also be the tradition in which the relic’s symbolic resources would be most thoroughly developed and explored. The relic had long relied on a metaphorical equation between history and memory—on an understanding that a collective history could be experienced as though it were personal memory and could thus be accessed through sentimental mnemonic forms. But the scale and intensity of the Civil War brought a new immediacy to the trope. In preserving private mementos of their own wartime participation and losses, individuals were inevitably also preserving a larger collective history. And, on the other hand, even when they collected souvenirs of the war’s best-known heroes or of battles they had no immediate personal connection with, they were not preserving an abstract and distant past but continuing an involvement in an event that had dominated public consciousness for four years, whose suffering had been a vivid and inexpungible part of everyday life, and that was to leave in its wake an irrevocably transformed political and social reality. The relics of the war were simultaneously personal and collective, things that could hold very private meanings but that also participated in very public understandings. Perhaps more obviously than any other type of relic, Civil War relics engaged their users at the most intimate emo-

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tional level while also binding them indissolubly into the fabric of the nation.

In thinking of how relics were used to commemorate the Civil War, it is first worth noting the sheer mass of objects the fighting left behind. Contemporary descriptions of the ravaged battlefields invariably described not only the unburied bodies but the tangled confusion of items littering the ground. Thus, according to Union soldier Frank Haskell, at Gettysburg, even after the bodies were buried, Great numbers of bent and splintered muskets, rent knapsacks and haversacks, bruised canteens, shreds of caps, coats, trowsers, of blue or gray cloth, worthless belts and cartridge boxes, torn blankets, ammunition boxes, broken wheels, smashed limbers, shattered gun carriages, parts of harness, of all that men or horses wear or use in battle, were scattered broadcast over miles of the field.3

A full four months after the fighting, another soldier described the grisly articles that continued to litter the battlefield: The ground is almost carpeted with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, hats, caps, blankets, in fact everything that goes to make up the horrors of a battlefield. The blankets that have been left on the fields [were] used to bear off the wounded and are dotted with blood. Many of the hats and caps are besmeared with brains.4

And visiting the site of the Battle of the Wilderness several years after the fighting there, the journalist John Trowbridge found the ground still strewn with “knapsacks, haversacks, pieces of clothing, fragments of harness, tin plates, canteens, some pierced with balls, fragments of shells, with here and there a round-shot, or a shell unexploded, straps, buckles, cartridge-boxes, socks, old shoes, rotting letters.”5 At least a portion of the material the war left behind was put to practical ends. Thus Trowbridge reported that horse bones—and perhaps occasionally human ones as well—were sold to bone factories, while clothing was stripped off the dead, laundered, and then sold or traded for food. The immense quantity of shot left behind at Gettysburg and Spotsylvania was harvested by the poor and sold to lead dealers, and the right to collect the spent shells and rusty cannonballs littering the beach at Fort Sumter was sold directly to a speculator.6 But the most

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enduring uses of the war’s refuse were not practical but symbolic. In effect, the bloody leavings served as a vast material reservoir through which the war’s meanings and memory were negotiated and reworked. Perhaps the first objects collected when the shooting ceased were the trophies that, as in any war, the army holding the field routinely appropriated in the wake of victory.7 Letters and diaries testify to the numerous household and personal articles plundered from civilians by soldiers on both sides. On a more grisly note, victorious troops regularly stripped the bodies of the enemy dead.8 Sometimes those bodies were looted for utilitarian reasons, such as to replace a ragged uniform or an inefficient piece of artillery with a better specimen. Other times the plundering was largely symbolic, intended to confirm the victors’ triumph over the enemy dead. Thus numerous accounts describe battlefields thick with corpses, all with their pockets turned inside out. Some accounts also refer to the victors’ practice of clipping off the uniform buttons of those they had killed and keeping them as souvenirs—an act that was obviously intended to humiliate the dead. Clipping buttons off uniforms was typically used, after all, to discipline soldiers, symbolically depriving them of their military status to emphasize their failure to perform their duties.9 By stripping those they killed of their buttons, soldiers asserted their enemies’ failure as soldiers and appropriated a token of their own prowess. Sometimes taking trophies involved actually desecrating the dead. In Northern minds, at least, such desecration was not random but a practice Southern troops routinely indulged in. Allegations that Confederate soldiers sought out bones as trophies, even using Yankee skulls as drinking cups, fueled Northern distrust of the South throughout the war. In their diaries and letters, Union soldiers occasionally reported discovering such artifacts, and the report of Southern atrocities at the First Battle of Bull Run, including not only the desecration of bodies but the massacre of black prisoners, prompted a United States congressional investigation.10 Though such accusations may be dismissed as Northern sensationalism and paranoia, Southern sources occasionally did refer to collecting Yankee bones as if it were an accepted practice. In a letter written after Bull Run, for example, Confederate soldier Dick Simpson told his family he could get them weapons and bullets as souvenirs of the battle and concluded by assuring them that “if you want it we can send you some yankee bones.”11 And Southerner Phoebe Yates Pember reported that during an evening spent among a “pious set” in Richmond, “One lady said she had a pile of Yankee bones lying around her pump so that the first glance on opening her eyes would rest upon 82

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them. Another begged me to get her a Yankee Skull to keep her toilette trinkets in.”12 Interestingly, whatever atrocities Southerners felt Northerners were capable of, they do not seem to have routinely accused them of this particular propensity. Not all the objects collected on the battlefield fell into the category of trophies, however. Though there is certainly no clear demarcation between trophies and souvenirs, many of the things soldiers carried off did not overtly assert their triumph or the humiliation of the enemy but seemed instead to reference their own experience of battle as a life-altering event and sometimes to affirm their connection to the larger forces of the country’s history. Soldiers saved reeds from sites where they had fought or where commanding officers had died, chips of wood from battle-scarred trees, and pieces of the apple tree under which Lee supposedly surrendered at Appomattox. Often their souvenirs had more personal meanings and spoke directly of their individual experiences and fortunes in battle. Thus Pennsylvanian John B. Cooke appended a tag to the canteen he had carried through the war that indicated that the knot in its strap had been made “when General Sheridan gave the command to charge at the Battle of Saylor’s Creek, Va., April 6th, 1865, where I was wounded for the 4th time.”13 And as he was assuming his position in the lines at Gettysburg, another soldier spotted a four-leaf clover, which he picked and later sent home “as a sort of relic of the fight” (and presumably a token of his own luck in surviving).14 Soldiers also saved personal items that showed the marks of being under fire and commemorated their own narrow escapes: coats and hats pierced by bullet holes, as well as dented belt buckles, canteens, and pocket testaments that had taken bullets in their owners’ stead. Perhaps the most common souvenirs soldiers kept were the bullets that had wounded them. Many veterans carried those bullets in their pockets for the rest of their service and often throughout their lives, sometimes as watch fobs or mounted in a piece of jewelry, thus keeping the evidence of their brush with death on them at all times. Acquiring trophies and souvenirs may have been the most visible collecting a battle set in motion, but more intimate and mournful objects were regularly gathered as well. Even as soldiers pillaged enemy dead, they also sought relics from the bodies of their own comrades, though these tokens were taken with a far different intent. When a soldier died, if conditions permitted, those who attended to his body almost routinely sent a lock of his hair to his family as a last memento. Sometimes fellow soldiers might perform the service. Attending to a group of the dead, Robert Gould Shaw, the Boston Brahmin who com83

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manded the all-black Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, wrote that he gathered “a lock of hair from each one, to send to their friends.”15 More often, the women who attended the dying in field hospitals performed this last rite of remembrance. Frequently they also sent a soldier’s loved ones the contents of his pockets and, if available, his other effects. In an inversion of their use as trophies, buttons clipped from the dead man’s uniform could be sent as final remembrances, and in a practice that may seem ghoulish to our age, sometimes the bullet that killed him was sent home as well. Though hair, clothing, and other objects connected with the dead had long served an important memorial function in American culture, in the face of wartime losses they assumed a heightened representational burden. As Gary Laderman has argued, the war’s mass deaths effectively abrogated Victorian mourning rituals, which typically centered on the corpse and used it to evoke memories and structure mourning.16 In an era when embalming was not widely understood or employed, most of the bodies of those who died in battle or in hospitals were not sent home. Moreover, in many cases the war dead were buried in anonymous graves, with their loved ones receiving little or no information on how they died. In such circumstances, whatever small articles were returned to the home front effectively served as the only remains of the dead and thus as the most potent material means of mourning. They performed the functions that mementos always had, but in concentrated form, standing in for those other sites of memory and mourning, the absent corpse and the grave. Contemporary sources testify to the continuing role these wartime mementos played in survivors’ lives. They might be displayed in the home, for instance, as a way of inculcating memory and enshrining wartime ideals. Thus Southern memoirs and literary accounts sometimes referred to the dead father’s sword hanging above the mantelpiece, haunting and inspiring the son throughout his youth. Other remnants were preserved in more intimate ways. For years after the war, Henry Bowditch of Massachusetts wore on his watch chain an “amulet” fashioned from a ring taken from his son’s body and a “cavalry button cut from his blood-stained vest.”17 And South Carolinian John Palmer requested that the bullet that killed his son eventually be buried with his own body.18 The collecting that followed a battle began with the soldiers involved in it, but it did not long stay confined to them. Numerous letters and diaries mention objects sent home to relatives and friends as a tangible connection to the fighting. Indeed, the desire for such souvenirs was so universal that combatants seem to have conducted an informal traffic 84

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in them. After the First Battle of Bull Run, for instance, South Carolinian Dick Simpson wrote to his sister that he had not yet been able to obtain any souvenirs of the battle but was looking “to get some things from the Fourth Regt such as sword, bayonet, pistol, balls.”19 And two years later his brother Tally sent home flowers that supposedly came from the heights where Southern troops had withstood the Union assault at Fredericksburg, with a note that he had gone into town “expressly to obtain something from Marye’s Hill.”20 Civilians did not merely wait to be sent souvenirs; they actively sought them out. From the First Battle of Bull Run on, the cessation of fighting invariably signaled an influx of noncombatants—newspaper correspondents and photographers reporting on the war, relatives seeking out their dead and wounded, and hordes of sightseers and souvenir hunters. Writing about the souvenir collecting in the wake of Bull Run in 1861, an Englishman who had fought for the Confederacy noted: Strangers poured into Manassas daily to see the “sights,” and carry off relics. Uniforms, arms, buttons, caps, and even skulls were seized with avidity, and where Bartow, Bee, Fisher, and other heroes had fallen, the woods were stripped of every branch that could be converted into a walking-stick or cane. . . . Even when, during warm weather, the effluvia from graves and unburied matter was unbearable, these relic-mongers might be seen, hovering over the fields like carrion crows, carrying off all kinds of trifles, including twenty-four pound shot and shell; any imaginable article, heavy or light, that could, with any show of reason, be called a “relic.”21

Similarly, two years later, after the Battle of Gettysburg, according to a reporter for the Gettysburg Compiler, “The country for forty miles around seems to have turned out to view the sad relics of one of the fiercest battles of the war.” He depicted the sightseers walking “about amid the horrid stench of that field unmoved. They turned over the rubbish, picked up bullets and fragments of shells for mementoes, but that was all.”22 In fact, the practice of taking souvenirs was so widely recognized that an account of the dedication of a Gettysburg monument that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1869 was accompanied by an illustration showing people digging bullets from logs and searching the ground for souvenirs, while another illustration showed them offering their finds to a buyer of relics.23 Such collecting continued for decades after the war and meant that relics were one of the principal ways the memory of the war was perpetuated—however informally—since even those who had never visited a battlefield had likely seen artifacts from the war in either a public place or a private collection. And whereas the 85

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souvenirs collected by combatants served the immediate purpose of remembering and negotiating their own experiences, the mass collecting of souvenirs deployed the battlefield’s objects in the service of larger cultural and political narratives. Although those who gathered relics from battlefields, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, were often portrayed as motivated only by a morbid curiosity, the motives for such collecting were wide-ranging and complex. Something of the intense and complicated emotions battlefield relics could induce is evident in Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s account of his visit to the battlefield of Antietam, where he had gone to search for his wounded son. In terms familiar from many other accounts, he described the scene before him as a promiscuous mixing of abandoned objects and the bodily substance of human beings. The ground, he wrote, was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat. I saw two soldiers’ caps that looked as though their owners had been shot through the head. In several places I noticed dark red patches where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the sod.

Amid this devastation, Holmes describes picking up two canteens as if perhaps he momentarily considered saving them as relics. But these objects so closely connected to the recent violence inspired an immediate revulsion: I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own,—but there was something repulsive about the trodden and stained relics of the stale battle-field. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy heel-taps.24

Holmes’s distaste at handling the objects spread out before him demonstrates that, in their most literal aspect, the war’s relics were nothing other than the leavings of violence. Like the bodies of the dead and wounded, they were the direct evidence of complete bodily undoing, and they transmitted the indelible impress of that violence. Ultimately, however, Holmes’s attitude toward the battlefield’s remainders seems to have been surprisingly ambivalent, for later in the essay he tells his readers that he took a few objects with him after all: “a bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a soldier’s belt,” and a letter

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that he determined to deliver to its intended destination once the war was over.25 But the things he decided to take home, he referred to not as “stained relics of the stale battle-field” but simply as “mementoes.” What he originally envisioned only as the raw leavings of violence he finally reconceived as things worth preserving, perhaps even, as the word memento suggests, as things that could foster ongoing memories and attachments. Holmes did not explain his rather abrupt transition from horror at the battle’s remains to a desire to preserve them. Yet in the context of Civil War collecting, his actions were not unusual. No matter what visitors to a battlefield had witnessed, they almost always seem to have taken away some reminder of what occurred there. And when they described their finds in letters, diaries, and memoirs, they cast them not simply as bloody remainders, or usually even as trophies, but as things that had more expansive personal and collective meanings. Holmes’s move from “stained relics of the stale battle-field” to “mementoes” is thus emblematic of the move that any collector of battlefield memorabilia enacted in some fashion in assimilating the objects into culturally sanctioned forms. At the same time, simply because the war’s objects were eventually classified as mementos or sacred relics did not mean they ceased to be the leavings of bloodshed. In fact, whatever else relics of the war might mean, on the most basic level they were always preserved because in fact they were the remains of violence. Whatever curiosity or fear or grief or triumph drew people to the battlefield, they were drawn by their knowledge of what frail human bodies had experienced there and by their understanding of what those bodies’ travails and suffering, their death and dismemberment, meant. And the things they collected were bits of matter that, like the bodies they accompanied, had been present in the extreme circumstances of battle and that in their very form and substance had perhaps even been irreversibly altered—pierced, flattened, fragmented, stained. Such relics, in other words, were both the evidence of violence and cherished relics. Indeed, perhaps the point of collecting them was precisely their dual nature— the way they embodied both meanings, the way in the act of collecting and preserving them the one could be subsumed into the other. In the context of the Civil War, in other words, the historical relic can be seen not simply as a means of entering into or identifying with the past but as a means of reframing the extreme violence of an ongoing event. Processed in culturally prescribed ways, the remainders of violence could be a means of channeling the strong affect that the experience of mass

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killing and maiming left in its wake. They could not simply mark the violence but actively rework it.

Holmes did not gloss the objects he took home from the battlefield in explicitly sentimental terms. Yet his use of the term mementos implicitly linked them to memory and to the sentimental tradition. Individuals frequently preserved mementos of loved ones who had died in the war, but foliage, photographs, letters, religious objects, and other personal articles were often preserved and even explicitly framed as mementos even when they did not commemorate anyone the collectors knew. And given that the memento was a clearly codified form in nineteenth-century culture and that one of its foremost purposes was to engage with the harsh realities of death and loss, the category offers a privileged vantage point on the war relic and can help us begin to think about how relics were used to negotiate the experience of mass violence and trauma. Foremost among the objects with sentimental connotations were the mementos that soldiers themselves had used to maintain a connection with their loved ones. In the wake of the fighting these things, like so many other personal objects, could be picked up from the ground or taken from the bodies of the dead, and both private and public accounts evinced a particular fascination with the painful stories they encoded. After the Battle of Chickamauga, for instance, Kate Cumming, a Confederate nurse, noted in her diary that she had remarked to a companion that she wanted a relic from the battlefield: As I said this, two young soldiers come out of the woods; one stepped up to me and remarked, he had a book that he had taken out of the pocket of a dead Federal, and that, if I would accept it, I could have it with pleasure. . . . The book was a small one, with a red cover, and was stained with blood. It is an allegory called the “Journey Home,” by Rev. E. A. Monro.

Not content with simply owning the relic, Cumming went on to project a standard narrative for which there was no evidence in the object itself but that conformed to sentimental expectations in envisioning the memento as an expression of a soldier’s relationship with his women kinfolk. As she continued, “It had likely been given to the poor fellow out of whose pocket it had been taken by a mother or sister, ere his de-

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parture from his home, with a prayer that it might help to prepare him for the journey which he had now taken.”26 When such mementos were singled out in published accounts, the details of their supposed back stories were often spelled out at length. “Touching Incident of the Battle-Field,” which appeared in the Gettysburg paper the Adams Sentinel, for instance, noted: One day last week, among the relics of the dreadful fight, there was picked up by a soldier, and presented to a lady of our acquaintance, a small paper, which contained two separate locks of hair attached thereto, directed to Mr. Wellerford, from Louisiana, by his wife, in a beautiful handwriting. Below one lock was Fanny Wellerford, below the other Richard Wellerford—and below both “Our darlings! These tender mementoes of his home and children had been sent to him by his attached wife, to cheer his heart in the far distant land to which the fortunes of war had brought him; and probably he wore the tender testimonials near his heart, when the fatal missile of death separated him from those he loved.27

The best-known account of such a memento was undoubtedly the story of Orderly Sergeant Humiston of New York. Humiston had died at Gettysburg, but his body was found after the battle clutching an ambrotype of his three children, on whom, as one account put it, “his last gaze had been fastened as, alone and unattended, on the dreary field of slaughter, his soul had departed to its God.”28 Not only was that picture of the children widely exhibited, but during the war itself, the Philadelphia branch of the United States Sanitary Commission apparently offered a prize for the best poem about the incident, and references to the relic and its story regularly appeared in guidebooks and other accounts of Gettysburg until at least the turn of the century.29 Such relics reaffirmed the values of sentimental culture even amid anonymous mass death. In allowing for the vicarious construction of wartime deaths as what Philippe Ariès has called “good deaths” and as deaths that could be eased and sustained by networks of domestic support, they asserted the centrality of ties between soldiers and their loved ones at home.30 At the same time, these objects did not simply transmit stories about the bonds between combatants and the home front; they actively worked to create such ties. Gathering up Bibles and prayer books, daguerreotypes, locks of hair, and other small personal items, battlefield collectors were preserving things that had served as tokens for others, but they were also creating tokens for themselves. Their collecting had an actively performative aspect: it made mementos

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out of what otherwise might be considered only trophies or souvenirs and thus created the material means for sentimental identifications. Some of the purposes such identifications could serve are suggested by a note Robert Gould Shaw sent to his sister, along with a letter he had found after the Battle of Antietam. “The enclosed letter I found on the breast of a dead Federal soldier, on the battle-field of Sharpsburg,” he wrote. “There was a Bible beside or on it, which I have kept. It looked as if he had been reading them both before he died.”31 In explicating these objects as things the soldier had been reading before his death, Shaw invoked the narrative of the sentimentally appropriate battlefield death, and in sending them to a woman on the home front, he treated them as final mementos of that soldier and his last moments. But since neither Shaw nor his sister appears to have known the soldier personally, these objects could hardly evoke memories or affirm personal ties. Instead, they activated sentimental identifications toward other ends. In preserving the dead soldier’s Bible, for example, Shaw could be seen to be contemplating the possibility of his own death. In projecting a scenario of the soldier reading his Bible and a letter from home as final consolations, he was perhaps using a sympathetic identification to consider how a soldier could experience a good death even on the battlefield. Similarly, when Shaw sent the dead soldier’s letter to his sister, he held up a mirror to their own relationship—“I too could be lying on a battlefield desperately wounded. I too could be reading a letter, perhaps your letter, for consolation.” He used the figure of the dead soldier to activate his sister’s sympathy for his own situation and to reinforce his bond with her. At the same time that Shaw used the letter to reinforce an existing tie, however, he also expanded the range of sentimental sympathy beyond the immediate circle of family or friends. In sending the letter to his sister, he created a bond not simply between his sister and himself but between his sister and the dead soldier. In effect, he offered her a personal memento of an individual she had never known. And in so doing, he asked her to experience a sympathetic identification not only with that soldier’s plight but presumably with the plight of all the Union dead. He reasserted the duty of women on the home front to sustain soldiers through their support and love, to mourn them in their deaths, and to cherish their memory as they had cherished the soldiers themselves in life. In the tradition of the sentimental historical relic, he used the trope of the personal memento to create collective national bonds.

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Like Kate Cumming’s devotional manual or Humiston’s ambrotype, Shaw’s letter came attached to a narrative indispensable to its meaning. Yet seeing these relics only as illustrations of narratives renders the relics themselves peripheral, handy but ultimately disposable vehicles for passing on stories. This construction of the sentimental relic fails, that is, to address the relic’s materiality and the responses it could generate as a physical object. As I argued in chapter 3, the memento’s capacity to evoke memory had always depended on its actively repositioning its user in relation to the past and the bodies that inhabited it. Sentimental relics of the war too relied on the memento’s ability to bring the remembered body into the user’s space. Looking back at the narratives accompanying the relics described above, we can see that they were often specifically designed to enable readers to imagine the racked body of the soldier who used them in his final moments. Thus the pictures of Humiston’s children had no meaning apart from the image of their father lying on the battlefield, fi xing his gaze on them and carrying their image into death. Likewise, we can grasp the meaning of the letter and Bible Shaw preserved only if we think of that anonymous soldier, wounded, dying, but deliberately taking them out to read even in his extremity. In fact, even relics not accompanied by a narrative could readily be experienced as a surrogate for a soldier’s body and a reminder of its suffering. Bullets, shot-pierced gear, bloody clothing, personal articles strewn on the ground, all could serve as the tokens of bodies’ piercing, bleeding, dismemberment, and death. Yet even as these relics of suffering brought their users into the space of an absent body, they situated them rather differently than historical relics typically had. For the most part, the relics revered earlier in the century—possessions of Washington, pieces of the Charter Oak, articles belonging to the Pilgrims—had been heroic relics. They called up the bodily being of illustrious historical figures as intact, numinous, and almost more than human presences. And in creating a relationship between the present and those bodies, such relics likewise translated their viewers into a more elevated space, allowing them to sit in counsel with, perhaps even assume the contours of, the august bodies of a previous age. In contrast, the sentimental tokens of the Civil War were what might be called pathetic relics. The bodies they evoked were wounded, broken, racked with pain, many finally left crippled or grotesquely dead and abandoned on the battlefield. Instead of being translated into a more elevated space, in gazing down on a pathetic relic, the viewer was brought into conjunction with a diminished body—a body

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in some sense less than their own presumably intact, alive, and painfree physical being. Sometimes, in the blood that saturated objects or in the bullets dug from shattered flesh and bone, that relic even displayed the body’s inner recesses—its helpless, horrific abjection—to view. The word pathetic is crucial to understanding how sentimental relics of the war functioned. Far from being simply a term of diminishment or dismissal, as it is in our own vocabulary, for nineteenth-century Americans it denoted a site of immense affective investment. It could be applied to anything that touched deep emotional chords: music, voices, and landscapes were often referred to as “pathetic,” for example, because of the profound emotional responses they could inspire. Most often, however, it was applied to spectacles of diminishment, helplessness, or unavailing suffering—to processions of the wounded, to lingering but noble deaths, to the suffering of children, animals, and other innocent and powerless beings. It designated a condition of powerlessness and abjection, but that abjection was neither a marker of impassable distance nor a spur to contempt. As Katharine Weber has noted, “pathetic” was “not an ironic judgment but a straightforward description of something that evoke[d] feelings of sympathy or sorrow at the difficulties or misfortunes of others.”32 It designated not only that which was wretched and abject, in other words, but that which inspired sympathy. And in indissolubly uniting those two meanings, “pathetic” implicitly asserted that wretchedness in itself was inevitably moving, that, by definition, the abjection of others could be experienced only as an overwhelming and incontrovertible claim on one’s own faculty of sympathetic engagement. Sentimental sympathy’s investment in the pathetic is what has rendered that sympathy so suspect in our own time. As numerous critics of nineteenth-century sentimentality have noted, the invariable link between sympathy and abjection meant that sentimental identifications almost inevitably operated across a divide: they proceeded from the more privileged to the less privileged, from the intact and undiminished to the partial and reduced.33 Yet it should also be said that sentimental sympathy was assumed to be possible precisely because it operated between individuals who in some sense were radically equivalent in their status as embodied—and therefore potentially suffering—beings. In the Victorian imaginary, sentimental sympathy was conceived of not as vague do-gooding or a concordance of hearts and minds but as a visceral claim that the body of one individual made on the body of another. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler has argued, even what might be seen as the disembodied act of reading sentimental fiction was understood 92

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to be intensely corporeal: a “bodily act” in which words were translated into “pulse beats and sobs.” And as the reading body was brought into congruence with the bodies in the text, a kind of merging occurred, a contraction of “the distance between narrated events and the moment of their reading, as the feelings in the story [were] made tangibly present in the flesh of the reader.”34 The sentimental rhetoric through which wartime losses were processed emphasized exactly this physical transmission of sensation from one body to another. Thus innumerable eulogies described Lincoln’s assassination as a blow sympathetically transmitted to the nation at large. As one sermon had it, the bullet that entered Lincoln’s brain “lodged in the heart of the people.”35 A hymn at a memorial service referred to the “ghastly, bleeding wound the Nation suffers from this day.”36 The assassination was a “thrill that pierced the great world’s heart” and “stopped its pulses.”37 It left all hearts “throbbing . . . with the impulse of a common sorrow,” and in its wake, the common condition of the American people was “slowness of speech, sadness of countenance, starting tears, oppressed respiration, a crushed heart, dark foreboding, anxious agonizing prayers.”38 The shock of Lincoln’s death occasioned the most concentrated outpouring of the language of bodily sympathy, but that language had long been used to describe the impact of the war’s losses on those left behind. As Alice Fahs has noted, in Northern popular literature, “A muchrepeated trope . . . was the idea that every bullet killed or wounded twice, once on the battlefront and once on the home front.”39 Fahs cites numerous literary examples in which women were “wounded” by the wounding and death of husbands and sons, but the trope also appeared in the memorial rhetoric that described the nation’s collective psychic desolation in the wake of the war. According to speakers and writers at various memorial occasions both during and after the war, for example, the shots that echoed on the battlefield “[tore] wounds in hearts that will bleed unseen for years,” resulted in “hundreds and thousands of hearts . . . bleeding,” and left those who remained behind “bleeding and bruised in the War’s desolation.”40 These images of sympathetic wounding dramatize the bodily nature of sympathetic identification, and they also show why abjection and pain should be the conditions making that identification possible. In her fine study of the role of pain in sentimental literature, Marianne Noble has argued that if pain stimulated sympathy, it was because pain dissolved the boundaries between selves, allowing them to flow into and merge with one another.41 In some sense the war’s wretched, vio93

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lated bodies only literalized the conditions of sentimental sympathy, offering the visible evidence of trauma that could potentially induce the dissolution of the viewer’s own corporeal boundaries and thus the sensation of bodily identification. To say that the battlefield’s remains could be cast as pathetic relics, then, is to say not only that they imaged the war’s abject bodies but that, in presenting that abjection, they called on other bodies to respond. The pathetic relic’s visceral claim on the viewer was epitomized in what might be called the “mute but eloquent” trope—a phrasing that appeared often in the war’s memorial rhetoric, contrasting an object’s literal silence to the eloquence with which it supposedly conveyed the war’s sad history. The graves of the war dead were sometimes described as dumb but eloquent, for example. Or the wounded might be described in the terms employed by a Southern woman who referred to a parade of wounded soldiers as “telling their mute tale of sickness and suffering, weariness and heartache.”42 The trope appeared most consistently, however, in references to war relics, where it became a kind of marker of the attempt to frame them as sentimental objects. The official record of the New York Sanitary Fair described the fair’s display of war relics as “many little objects, mute histories of the devotion, even unto death, of men whose names we had not known.”43 At a celebration staged at the Buffalo Historical Society on the donation of a collection of war relics in 1872, one speaker hoped the ceremonies would enable “the poor dumb mouths of these War-relics” to speak, and several speakers referred to their “silent but eloquent” presence.44 And within the space of one page, a lavish encomium to the flags in Springfield’s Memorial Hall returned again and again to the notion of silent speech: the “soiled and silent silk and bunting” spoke “eloquently” “to those who can read their wordless language”; “words cannot picture” the war’s suffering “as do these old voiceless banners”; gazing on the “tattered rags,” the viewer read “their silent and sorrowful stories.”45 The attribution mute most literally referred to the battlefield objects’ inert thingness. They were “mute” in that they were not verbal, or even pictorial, descriptions of the war’s events. They did not self-consciously represent the war in any codified expressive medium. And yet, since “mute” could logically be applied only to entities expected to have the capacity for speech, these objects were also implicitly anthropomorphized. The relics were humanlike, but at the same time they were diminished, impaired—humanlike things without full human capacity. They might be abject in their status as proxy wounded bodies, but they were also abject in their inability to speak of their wounding. Their 94

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muteness rendered them unable to transcend their suffering and isolation even through speech. If the invocation of mute eloquence called attention to the objects’ incapacity, however, the entire point of the figure was that in spite of their wretchedness, these relics did speak. Or better put, they were eloquent not in spite of their muteness but because of it. One Memorial Day speaker glossed his use of the mute but eloquent trope with a brief anecdote of a beggar stretching out his maimed arm to passers-by in silence: “Some one said: ‘Why don’t you ask for what you want? Speak!’ He lifted up his arm, and said, ‘So I do. My rags speak; my wounds speak; my crutches speak; my crooked limbs speak—every thing about me speaks!’”46 It was the mute thing’s very diminishment, its pathos, that addressed its viewers with a kind of eloquence. Its speech was not the verbal speech of language but the more direct speech of the traumatized body—the appeal that physical wretchedness made to another body that was equally capable of being reduced to such wretchedness. Relics of the battlefield brought the war’s wounded and dead into the presence of those on the home front, and submitted to the imperatives of a sentimental structure of feeling, those surrogate bodies could only trigger the deep corporeal identifications of horror, sorrow, and indeed pity. They reduced the viewing self to a condition of powerlessness through a vicarious, sentimental wounding. And, simultaneously, the sentimental relic and the suffering it incarnated were understood to be redeemed through that same identification and the proffered mutuality—the being with the other in suffering—implicit within it.

Personal articles were not the only wartime artifacts that could be assimilated into the category of the traditional sentimental memento. Flowers and bits of foliage also had obvious connections to the sentimental tradition and seem to have been among the most common objects gathered from the battlefield during the war itself. Souvenir collector John Linn, for example, saved a wild rose he found growing above a soldier’s grave.47 Emily Bliss Thacher, a nurse at Gettysburg, sent home “a few flower seeds and a blossom,” and when she later attended the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg she gathered “many little sprays and green leaves,” which she sent to friends “who might value such mementoes of the day and hour.”48 And Sophronia Bucklin, also a nurse at Gettysburg, collected such relics as “fragments 95

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of shell, battered bullets; mosses, which had held, among their tiny leaves, the lifeblood of a hero; scraps of curious stones, which had been loosened by the hail of shrapnel; and canister, solid shot, and tiny wild flowers, which sprung up in the rocky crevices.”49 Like the photographs, letters, and Bibles described above, these flowers and leaves and moss can most obviously be seen as a way of integrating the war dead into established rituals of sentimental mourning. When visitors to the scenes of the fighting took away foliage, they implicitly continued nineteenth-century mourners’ practice of preserving the flower sprays adorning a coffin or gathering flowers or leaves from a loved one’s grave. In this way they extended the pervasive linkage of graves and greenery and the insistence on seeing death as a prelude to rebirth.50 And they reframed wartime deaths as peacetime deaths, which—however painful—occurred individually and could be rendered meaningful by the attentiveness, memory, and sympathy of the living. But if foliage may strike us as the most conventional of tokens, absorbing horrendous suffering and violence into the most weakly palliative of sentimental forms, in their own way, flowers and leaves also referenced the reality of the violated body. Even as conventional a sentimental trope as Sophronia Bucklin’s reference to gathering “mosses, which had held, among their tiny leaves, the lifeblood of a hero,” is also a very bodily image. Taken literally, it suggests that Bucklin was gathering not only foliage but blood. Assembling the “fragments of shell” and the “battered bullets” that nestled among the foliage and thinking of the blood that had soaked it, she was also gathering the evidence of suffering. Her souvenirs preserved the physical remnants of violence even as they posited its eventual subsumption into the simultaneously annihilating and healing cycles of the natural world. This moss tinged with imagined blood only begins, however, to suggest how the war’s violence could be processed precisely through the most bucolic of souvenirs. Other descriptions of visits to the sites of the fighting made a much more direct link between dead bodies and battlefield foliage. When Union Captain Jesse H. Jones returned to Gettysburg in 1866, he claimed he found bright red berries growing exactly where individual members of his company had shed their blood three years before.51 Jones thus offered a highly metaphorical image for the outcome of the fighting, translating pain into beauty, death into symbolic regeneration. At the same time, however, his image drew its power from the fact that the berries were not merely a symbol, an analogue, for the blood, but that they supposedly occurred exactly where, and only where, the literal blood had splattered the earth—implying 96

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that the red saturating the berries was actual blood, that these plants fed on and made manifest the blood of the slain. Though the image was indeed redemptive, it was quite literally rooted in pain. It promised transcendence only by way of physical suffering, and its efficacy depended not on denying that suffering but on re-presenting and recoding it. Though we are apt to speak of the regenerative imagery so often applied to the war’s dead as “metaphorical,” in a society that was still largely rural and had not yet handed over the dead to the professional funeral industry and the process of embalming, the image of foliage as regeneration was never only a metaphorical conceit but a straightforward observation about what became of dead things in the natural world. If the blunt physicality of the image was sometimes held in check by, say, the rich symbolic meanings attached to blood or the suggestion of regeneration as resurrection, contemporaries’ readings of the flora that sprouted at the sites of death could also be surprisingly literal. Among the souvenirs that visitors to Gettysburg frequently took away, for instance, were peaches from the Sherfy family’s orchard, and jars of those peaches were even kept unopened in relic collections.52 Like many other objects, the peaches could serve as souvenirs because they were part of the landscape where the fighting had taken place. But their ability to signify what the battle meant went deeper than simple proximity. The peach orchard had been a site of heavy fighting, where much blood had been shed and numerous dead had fallen. Moreover, the metaphor of harvest—death swinging the sickle or God gathering the sheaves—was often applied to the mass deaths of the war, and that metaphor was literalized in the Sherfys’ peaches. “These are my trophies” one author quoted Mrs. Sherfy saying of her canned peaches, and he portrayed her as then pointing out a shrub in her yard that was “luxuriant with its crop of bright red berries” and urging him to take berries home to plant as “pleasant mementoes of Gettysburg.”53 John Trowbridge was more unflinchingly direct. The peaches, he said, “were large and juicy and sweet,—all the redder, no doubt, for the blood of the brave that had drenched the sod. So calm and impassive is Nature, silently turning all things to use.”54 By our own lights, these peaches may seem inappropriate and unsettling memorial objects. They are too sensuously appealing to induce reflection or mourning. They do not reinstate the body’s imagined integrity but frankly acknowledge its dissolution. And in fact—the ultimate obscenity—they invite the living to partake of the substance of the dead rather than respecting its inviolate sanctity. In our own time 97

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commentators have tended to see the nineteenth century’s emphasis on nature’s regenerative powers as denying or prettifying death and have argued that the rhetoric of regeneration allowed Americans to accept the mass death of the Civil War as somehow both beautiful and inevitable.55 Yet at the same time one could argue that our own distaste for references to the dead reappearing as foliage is at least in part discomfort with the nineteenth century’s willingness to acknowledge the physicality of death. If the Sherfys’ peaches are not what we might think of as typical sentimental relics, they are still of a piece with such sentimental memorial practices as postmortem photos or preserving tokens from the corpse in their engagement with the physicality of the dead body and its processes—in this case up to and beyond its dissolution. And because the peaches so obviously go against the grain of what we might think of as sentimental norms, they can also extend our sense of how more conventional bunches of flowers or leaves functioned and what it might mean to say that nineteenth-century Americans used foliage as an emblem of regeneration and rebirth.

Like foliage and personal articles, religious artifacts such as Bibles and prayer books were routinely drafted as sentimental relics of the war. And as some of the examples above suggest, religious and sentimental meanings often melded seamlessly in the evocation of good deaths in which the dying fi xed their sights simultaneously on memories of their earthly families and on hopes for a home in heaven. But religious artifacts could also evoke responses that had little to do with sentimental sympathy and framed the war’s dead and wounded bodies to quite different ends. They thus demonstrate that if the historical relic was most typically and obviously framed as a sentimental memento, it was also a protean form that could draw on a range of symbolic resources, not least the doctrines and rituals of Christian theology. Historical relics that drew on religious meanings also offer dramatic evidence of relics’ performative aspects. They were objects that could alter the psychological and even ontological reality of violence and turn that violence toward other ends. The differences between the meanings attached to a purely sentimental relic and the meanings a religious artifact might suggest are evident in an anecdote that the Baptist minister and former Confederate chaplain J. William Jones included in his faith-promoting account of the war years, Christ in the Camp, or Religion in Lee’s Army.56 There, 98

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among his many examples of wartime conversions, Jones told of a soldier, fatally wounded at Antietam, who regretted his negligence in religious matters and turned to his Bible as a means of repentance and solace. Though the man died, his bloodstained Bible was returned to his family, who supposedly traced the course of his reading and reflection through the bloody fingerprints he left. For example, Isaiah 1:18— “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”—exhibited “a large blood-stain, as though gory fingers had been tracing out every word.” And John 14:2, which offers the consolation “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” showed “the same stains of still broader and deeper dye.”57 In the manner of so many sentimental relics, the Bible thus offered direct access to the soldier’s physical suffering and even to the musings of his agitated spirit, literally traced in his wounded body’s markings. It functioned as a typical pathetic relic, since in gazing on it the viewer looked down upon the evidence of a weakened, abject body while simultaneously witnessing that body’s ennobling hope in an afterlife and the forgiveness of sins. Yet in placing such emphasis on the bloodstains, Jones also tapped into meanings beyond the range of the typical sentimental relic, with its ability to fold suffering back into the circle of domestic affections and the hope of an equally domesticated heaven. For while blood could serve as an index of the body’s torment, it also had deep theological resonance, particularly in a situation where a man was turning away from his past life and behavior and seeking forgiveness and the consolation of eternal life. In this aspect, the blood next to Isaiah’s words on the forgiveness of sins referenced both the scarlet stain of sin and the blood of Christ, by which those sins were made “white as snow.” Likewise, the stain next to Jesus’s words about the afterlife could be seen as a reminder of the price of that redemption. The bloodstains marked the course of a sentimental narrative of heartrending suffering and death, even as they simultaneously traced Christian theology’s foundational narrative of sin redeemed through Christ’s atonement. In highlighting the Bible’s stained pages, Jones was drawing on the long-standing significance of blood in Christian theology. His reference took on added force, however, in the context of the war. During those four years of protracted mass violence, blood assumed a significance far beyond its strictly theological meanings. If it continued to reference the hope of Christian redemption, it also alluded to the horrible reality of wartime destruction. And in yoking violence and redemption, images of blood participated in a discourse that extended concepts drawn from Christian theology to the realm of the nation-state, refiguring the 99

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meaning of mass pain and suffering, the role of the nation, and the ultimate purpose of the war. The full representational power of blood becomes evident only if we look at the range of ways it appeared in wartime accounts. In one aspect, of course, it was the most direct and graphic evidence of the war’s raw violence, and contemporary descriptions repeatedly emphasized its ubiquity in the aftermath of the fighting. At Gettysburg, for example, it was “inconvenient to walk without stepping in clots of Human blood,” and “every grassblade seemed to have been stained.”58 At Vicksburg the creek was “running red” with blood.59 And at Antietam the corn “looked as if it had been struck by a storm of bloody hail,” “blood pushed its way through the dust for some distance,” and for several weeks after the battle, residents slipped on blood as they walked up a road that ran through the midst of the fighting.60 Descriptions of this kind circulated throughout the country in letters, newspaper accounts, and eventually memoirs and gave particular force to the tendency to use blood as a shorthand for all the war’s violence. Thus “bloody” could be attached to almost any noun connected to the fighting and made frequent appearances in such terms as the bloody conflict, the bloody field, the bloody strife, and the bloody work. Images of blood circulated further in a variety of standard phrases that were routinely applied to the war, such as the statement that it had required a great sacrifice of blood and treasure, the declaration that the nation had been through a baptism of blood, or the frequent assertion that blood had been poured out like rain or like water. Moreover, in addition to such catch phrases, soldiers and civilians alike often resorted to graphic metaphors that defined the war as nothing other than the activity of breaching bodies and releasing their messy, life-sustaining fluids. “The floodgates of war are opened, and when the tide of blood will cease none can tell,” the poet Lucy Larcom wrote early on in the war.61 Confederate clerk John Beauchamp Jones averred that the first skirmishes of the war were “the pattering drops that must inevitably be succeeded by a torrent of blood,” while Mary Boykin Chesnut lamented that, like the Israelites, the South had to leave “across a Red Sea—but one made red by blood.”62 And the sense of the war years as an unremitting deluge of blood was dramatically literal in a dream that Louisiana resident Sarah Morgan recorded after the fall of Vicksburg, in which she and a companion “were standing in blood up to our knees, while here and there ghastly white bones shone above the red surface.”63 The particular horror of such images lay not merely in the breaching of an individual body or a series of bodies, but in the fact that this inti100

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mate evidence of extreme suffering flowed indiscriminately, that it had become an unstanchable mass quantity. What in any circumstances but mass warfare would be the poignant token of one life seeping away, here could not even be attached to any single person but mingled promiscuously: individual bodies vanished in this all-contaminating substance. Yet if, to our contemporary sensibility, the image of disembodied blood flowing like a river may be so horrific and so alien as to be beyond recuperation, for nineteenth-century Americans the disembodied nature of this flow rendered it ripe to be reclaimed through religious imagery. For in their religious observances they were quite accustomed to images of blood that flowed prodigiously and unceasingly and was understood to be a potent force in itself. In sermons and scripture readings they would have heard of the saving power of Christ’s blood; they would have sung hymns such as “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” which spoke of the “stream [Christ’s] flowing wounds supply”; and in the celebration of the Eucharist they would have been instructed to think of drinking blood like wine. And, of course, in such references streaming blood was not only a marker of horrific suffering but a means of redemption and healing. Wartime rhetoric drew on the redemptory meanings of blood as much as on its more obvious links to violence and suffering. The assertion that soldiers had sacrificed their life’s blood on the altar of their country appeared in innumerable diaries, letters, and official commemorations on both sides of the conflict. And many more sources referred to the blood shed in the war as having “baptized,” “consecrated,” and “hallowed” the land. Sometimes blood was explicitly linked to martyrdom. “Virginia has been again drenched with the blood of martyrs,” Kate Cumming wrote in 1862, and the author Augusta Evans lamented “the chrism of martyr blood” that Southern soldiers had lost in defense of their cause.64 At times the blood shed during the war was even implicitly equated with the blood of Christ. Thus in his eulogy to Confederate general Felix Zollicoffer, one poet wrote: For the blood that flowed from his hero heart, On the spot where he nobly perished, Was drunk by the earth as a sacrament In the holy cause he cherished!65

And a Northern poem about the war dead asked readers to see “in each blood-drop from each breast . . . the red tide that Calvary pressed.”66 In such references the blood shed on the battlefield unambiguously 101

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glorified and sanctified the cause it was shed for. Other references enunciated a more stringent vision, in which bloodshed was a punishment for the nation’s sins—in Northern formulations usually the sin of slavery.67 Such arguments often drew on biblical imagery. Thus in a sermon delivered early in the war, Northern minister Starr H. Nichols noted that if slavery was not done away with, the nation would “be plagued as were those oldest of slaveholders, the Egyptians, and the war shall rage till there be not a house North or South, where there is not one dead. There will be a passage of the Red Sea for us also; a deep red sea of blood.”68 The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child likewise drew on the story of Exodus, though her allusion was to the Israelites’ smearing their doorposts with blood as a sign that the destroying angel should pass them by. “God has given us these two years of sacrifice and expiation,” she wrote to a friend in 1863. “Many a lamb is slain, and many a doorpost is sprinkled with blood.”69 And in his “Hymn for the Fourth of July, 1863” the Philadelphia poet George Henry Boker also resorted to the image of the Israelites’ bloody doorposts to convey the extremity of the nation’s suffering: All our homes are red with blood; Long our grief we have withstood; Every lintel, each door post, Drips, at tidings from the host, With the blood of some one lost. Help us, Lord, our only trust! We are helpless, we are dust!70

In this description of bodies split open and hemorrhaging uncontrollably, Boker offered an indelible image of abjection (“We are helpless, we are dust!”). But that image did not simply represent the nation’s suffering; it also asserted that its citizens had suffered enough. Like the blood on the Israelites’ doorways, this display of blood asked the destroying angel to pass on by. It offered the spectacle of suffering in order to claim God’s pity and forbearance by showing that his people had suffered enough. Blood was thus presented not simply as the evidence of suffering but as the means of ending it. It was not simply an image but, potentially, an active, efficacious force. The efficacy of blood was deeply grounded in Christian theology and the concept of the saving power of Christ’s blood. During the Civil War, however, the Christian understanding of blood was often extended far beyond its doctrinal basis to include all the blood shed in 102

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the war. In many formulations, the blood of the war’s dead was thus envisioned not simply as a punishment but, like Christ’s blood, as a means of atonement—as a ritually efficacious means of expiation, propitiation, and remission of sins.71 Thus immediately before his death John Brown famously asserted that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.”72 In a letter published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Beecher Stowe too linked the war’s blood to expiation and redemption from sin. “God in this great day of judgment is making inquisition in blood,” she wrote, and Southerners must thus “give their blood in expiation” of the sin of slavery, while Northerners, whom she represented as being entirely innocent, “die to redeem the very brothers that slay them.”73 And Cyrus Bartol, the minister of Boston’s West Church, delivered one of the more extended disquisitions on the topic in his sermon “The Remission by Blood: A Tribute to Our Soldiers and the Sword.” In that address he asserted that “the shedding of blood, as the type and extreme instance of suffering, is necessary to the purging-away of human sin.” Although Christ had suffered for all mankind’s sins, “the few drops in his veins, though so rare and costly, were not enough,” Bartol argued; instead, the sins of the nation—slavery, yes, but also pride, self-indulgence, and material prosperity—required a more general bloodletting. “Our atonement by blood has come,” he told his listeners. “The nation bleeds, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of men . . . are the drops.”74 This conviction that the nation could be exonerated only through blood found its most famous and perhaps most anguished expression in Lincoln’s second inaugural address. There, musing on the costs of the war, the newly reelected president envisioned atonement as a literal balancing of the quantity of blood drawn in slavery with that drawn in battle. Perhaps it was God’s will that the war continue, he told his listeners, “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”75 This understanding of blood as physically efficacious is helpful in approaching a particularly dramatic example of a bloody Bible drafted as a war relic. In his Reminiscences of the War, published in 1884, Pennsylvania resident Jacob Hoke told of finding that Bible on the field at Gettysburg after the fighting. Lying next to a corpse whose leg had been shot off, the sacred text itself had been cut almost in half, evidently by the same shot that killed its owner, and its leaves were stained with blood. Hoke and the friends he was with were apparently much impressed with this Bible and, according to his reminiscences, appropriated it as a relic of the battle by dividing its bloody leaves among 103

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themselves. Some of the pages, he notes, were given to be sold at one of the series of fairs sponsored by the United States Sanitary Commission, where the proceeds would be used to aid wounded Union soldiers, and one was given to a minister, who, according to Hoke, “took it into his pulpit and took his text from it.”76 The phrase may literally mean that the minister took as his text a verse on the page he had been given, but it also suggests that the bloodstained object itself became his text. The blood textualized the artifact, imparting sacred meanings that could be read off it as clearly and definitively as if they had been written there, and overwriting the text’s written language with the immediacy of the body’s own substance. Since Hoke did not report the actual subject of the sermon, we cannot know exactly what meanings were attached to the bloodstained Bible, but Hoke’s account hints at some possibilities. Shot in half, its pages laid open and steeped in body fluids, the Bible imaged the body it lay beside, its integrity also violated, laid open to reveal all its messy innerness. It offered both an indexical connection to the war’s dead and an image of the corpse in another medium. To save its pages was thus to preserve pieces of the violated and abject body as a powerful source of fascination and meaning. It is perhaps significant too that Hoke, a Union sympathizer, identified the dead man as a Confederate soldier. In distributing the bloody pages among themselves, Hoke and his friends were symbolically dividing up the body of the enemy in what might be seen as a ritual gathering of trophies to affi rm their own survival and perhaps, by extension, the superiority of their cause. Yet while this book clearly generated interest because it was direct evidence of bodily violence, it also implicitly deployed that evidence toward redemptive religious ends. Given that the pages standing in for the body were those of Christianity’s most sacred text—the text containing the story of another abject body and of the redemptive meanings flowing from its blood—even distributing the pages assumed a sacred meaning. We “divided the leaves among us,” Hoke wrote, echoing the “Take this, and divide it among yourselves” attributed to Jesus as he distributed the wine at the Last Supper (Luke 22:17). In his imagery and verbal allusions Hoke suggested that in distributing the pages, he and his friends were performing a sacramental act—distributing the blood of the dead Confederate body to the community of Northerners. The disorienting encounter with the violently dismembered corpse was thus processed through a ritual derived from religious experience. In the form of the bloody pages, the abject body was incorporated, as the Eucharist would have been, into the bodies of those who divided it up. 104

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And the communal incorporation of that body and blood presumably assured ascendancy over abjection and confirmed the collective salvation and triumph of the community of believing Northerners. Although a Bible taken from a soldier killed in the war might most conventionally be considered a form of sentimental memento, the uses to which Jacob Hoke and his friends reportedly put this particular Bible can hardly be called sentimental. Instead of creating an intimacy between two bodies—one living, one dead—the bloody pages spectacularized the wounded body. Instead of promoting a sympathetic identification with the sufferer, the ritual ensured the unity of the participants at the expense of unity with the sacrificial victim. Yet though this Bible is not a typical relic, it dramatically foregrounds the ways relics of the war functioned. It graphically shows how those relics encoded the bodies of the dead and wounded and how, in so doing, they provided the symbolic means of reworking the war’s violence. And it also dramatizes that reworking, highlighting the relic’s performative possibilities. Unlike the objects that typically have inhabited our museums, the relic was not a thing whose meanings were exhausted in the viewing. Instead, relics were instigators of processes, objects that could be wielded in ways that transformed the conditions of reality, whether that reality was the users’ emotional state, their relationship with the body of the nation, the nation’s collective relationship with God, or even the outcome of the war itself.

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“In Memory of Our Beloved Confederacy”: Pathetic Relics of the Lost Cause Although the Civil War’s souvenirs implicitly linked their owners to a larger national history, during the war itself relic collecting remained haphazard and individual. Many civilians, and perhaps most soldiers, kept a memento or two, but most were stashed away in knapsacks or kept in private homes. When relics were exhibited in public, it was for the limited purpose of raising funds for the war effort. In the North this fund-raising took the form of the elaborate fairs sponsored by the US Sanitary Commission, where relics of the war were exhibited along with other historical relics, artwork, and commercial products. In the South exhibitions of war relics were also used to raise funds, but given the Confederacy’s more limited resources, they were generally smaller, local affairs.1 In the decades after the war, as I will discuss in the next chapter, war relics gradually began to be exhibited in more permanent Northern venues, and by the turn of the century such exhibitions were one of the principal means of transmitting a popular knowledge of the war. In contrast, there is little evidence that in the South relics were exhibited in any numbers in the first several decades after the war. Southerners were concerned largely with the immense task of recovering from the conflict’s devastation and had 106

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neither psychological nor financial resources to devote to museums or exhibitions. In fact, the late 1860s and 1870s have generally been recognized as the “bereavement phase” of Southern commemoration, since Southern memorial activities focused very directly on burying and honoring the war dead. In numerous Southern cities, memorial associations devoted their time to creating and expanding cemeteries, to erecting funereal monuments and gravestones, and to decorating soldiers’ graves on Decoration Day. It was during this period too that Richmond’s Hollywood Memorial Association undertook the mournful project of exhuming the nearly three thousand Confederate soldiers who had died at Gettysburg and reburying them in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery.2 In all these ways the South tended to its losses, but its public memory making seems to have been confined largely to rituals of mourning and bereavement and did not extend beyond the cemetery walls. If Southerners did not exhibit relics to any great extent in the years immediately following the war, that did not mean they did not preserve them. For decades many Southerners kept the uniforms they had fought in, the souvenirs they acquired on the battlefield, and the effects of loved ones sent home after their death as last mementos. And in the late 1880s and 1890s, when Southern commemoration had moved beyond its “bereavement” phase to its much more assertive “celebration” phase, the relics preserved in private collections or individual homes began to be brought into the public sphere, where they were deployed in ceremonies and exhibitions that reinforced a specifically Southern identity and memory in the ideology known as the “Lost Cause.” The celebration of the Lost Cause represented a new stage in the defeated South’s political identity and in its memory of the war. In the wake of Reconstruction, as the federal presence in the South waned, far from trying to move beyond the memory of the war, white Southerners began to assert that it was precisely the experience of the war that constituted the basis of Southern identity. No longer enmired in the resignation and powerlessness they had felt in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, they now overtly celebrated their bid for political independence, claiming that defeat did not diminish the intrinsic merit of their cause. The South, they argued, had fought valiantly in the service of a glorious ideal that was tragically and irrevocably doomed by Northern military might. By its very nature the Lost Cause was memorial, focused solely on commemorating and retelling the past. In our own time, discussions of this memorializing have been concerned largely with the forms of history making our own age is most familiar with: monuments, pub107

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lic ceremonies, historical publications, and textbooks. But relics also played a significant role in Southern commemorations—in many ways they figured more prominently than during the war itself. In wartime diaries and letters, mentions of relics tended to be brief and to the point. Soldiers matter-of-factly noted an article taken from a battlefield or promised a particular souvenir to someone on the home front; women’s diaries noted the mementos they had sent to a mother whose son had died in their care or referred to similar mementos they had received. Though such things were clearly considered meaningful, they were rarely described in any detail or made the object of extended reflection. But thirty years later, references to those same items surfaced in the rituals and publications of the Lost Cause as dense deposits of material significance. These old, apparently insignificant things appeared as the focus of reflections in autobiographical accounts, as the subjects of poems, and as centerpieces in Lost Cause ceremonial observances. Again and again they were lingeringly evoked, painstakingly described, and accompanied by repeated assurances of significance. The relic had come to mean in ways that it had not meant during the war, and if that was so, it was because its capacity to function as a sentimental memento was ideally suited to the retrospective investments of the Lost Cause. Examining the uses relics were put to in the postwar South is particularly helpful in thinking about how they functioned, because in some sense the Lost Cause maximized the resources of the historical relic. It turned the memento’s ability to express and reconfigure loss to overtly political use, putting it at the service of white Southerners’ quest to make good their wartime losses and to assert an identity that, paradoxically, could vaunt those losses as a form of gain.

Although relics played a role in a variety of Lost Cause commemorations, they were most obviously displayed on an ongoing basis in the relic museums established in a number of Southern cities in the late nineteenth century. During the war the soldiers themselves had preserved many of the objects that made their way to the home front, but by the latter decades of the century women’s organizations had come to serve as the guardians of social and cultural memory throughout the United States, particularly in the South.3 Women’s organizations oversaw most Memorial Day observances there, for example, and by the early twentieth century the United Daughters of the Confederacy had emerged as the guardians of Confederate memory through their 108

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sponsorship of monuments and other commemorative activities as well as through their single-minded campaign to promulgate Lost Cause sentiments in school textbooks. And though male veterans of the war were behind the large relic collection that the Louisiana Historical Association displayed in New Orleans’s Memorial Hall, it was also women’s organizations that undertook the task of organizing and maintaining most of the public relic museums that came into existence across the South in the 1890s and the early twentieth century. These museums included the United Daughters of the Confederacy Museum in Charleston; the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s South Carolina Confederate Relic Room in Columbia; the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Confederate Museum in Austin; and the largest and most celebrated of the collections, Richmond’s Confederate Museum, established by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society in 1896 in the home Jefferson Davis had occupied during the war.4 Unlike the professional museums of the twentieth century but like most local museums of their time, the Southern relic museums did not have formal collecting policies or acquisition budgets. Instead, they issued general calls to the faithful to donate the articles they had long preserved in their own homes. The founders of Richmond’s museum, for instance, appealed to “every man and woman in the South” to “rescue the fragments of individual heroism and endurance, fast floating away to oblivion, to gather in the tattered, rusty mementoes of our Lost Cause, and commit them to the keeping of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society.”5 To judge from the range of objects listed in the museum’s 1905 catalog, they seem to have established few criteria for what should be included in their collection, occasionally accepting even articles that had nothing to do with the war itself.6 Though these general calls for donations drew in a wide variety of objects, still the Lost Cause museums obviously did not represent the full range of Southern wartime experiences. The museums valorized the pervasive stereotype of the faithful slave by exhibiting a smattering of articles supposedly made by loyal slaves during the war. But it is highly unlikely that any of those objects were donated by former slaves, and it would have been inconceivable to collect objects from African Americans in any numbers or to represent their real wartime experiences in any way. Even the representation of white Southerners’ experience was certainly highly selective. Though participation in Lost Cause commemorations was by no means confined solely to the traditional Southern elite, the fact that individual donations were often funneled through the generally middle- to upper-middle-class members of the founding 109

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organizations meant that those members and their acquaintances must have been hugely overrepresented in the museums’ collections.7 At the same time, if these museums deliberately excluded the experiences of many Southerners, within their admittedly circumscribed parameters they did present a wider variety of objects and experiences than was typical of earlier relic displays. Most nineteenth-century exhibitions of relics had displayed articles associated with people prominent on a local or national level: presidents, statesmen, and founding fathers. The Confederate relic museums, however, were established at the height of the late nineteenth century’s cult of the common soldier, and though they gave special emphasis to articles belonging to such notables as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, the vast majority of their artifacts were possessions and mementos of officers and enlisted men who had no national reputation.8 As a memorial publication issued by the Confederate Memorial Society upon the opening of the Richmond Confederate Museum asserted, Let the faded cap of the Lieutenant, killed while leading a charge, be laid by the uniform of the peerless Lee; let the rough, wooden tray in which the coarse meal or flour was kneaded into bread, keep company with the knapsack of the dashing Stuart, thus proclaiming to the world that the private and the general stand side by side on the Confederate roll of honor in every Southern heart.9

Mementos of famous figures and events thus made cameo appearances—the coat Lee wore at Appomattox (CM 16), the iron used to press Stonewall Jackson’s clothes (TCM 14), locks of Jefferson Davis’s hair (TCM 15, 17), the blotting paper and pen handle used at the signing of South Carolina’s order of secession (CCM 28), objects made from the wood of the Merrimac or the flagpole at Fort Sumter or the apple tree at Appomattox. But these objects appeared alongside anonymous canteens, belt buckles, and cartridge boxes salvaged from the battlefield. Innumerable spent shells hobnobbed with generals’ regalia, everyday objects carried through the war consorted with one-of-a-kind things such as grasses gathered by Jefferson Davis while he was imprisoned at Fort Monroe (CM 80).10 Although the museums focused largely on the events of the battlefield, other wartime experiences were commemorated as well. The hardships of prisoners of war were illustrated by numerous buttons, spoons, combs, and trinkets carved in the prisons, as well as by the occasional more dramatic artifact such as the “saw made by Captain Cussons when at Johnson’s Island to make his escape” (CM 40). And 110

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as entities founded by women, the museums also gave ample space to the experiences of the home front. They displayed numerous examples of the homemade products—makeshift soap, candles, “Confederate homespun”— produced during the war years that illustrated both the hardships the Confederacy had faced and the ingenuity and resilience of its women. Occasional objects alluded obliquely to the painful separations from loved ones and the anxious experience of receiving communications from them. “Tobacco Tags sent to his little sister in a letter by S. Wellford Corbin while he was a prisoner at Point Lookout” (CM 36), one entry notes, encapsulating in one artifact both the experience of a prisoner of war and that of his worried family. The relic museums may have included a range of objects, but labels and catalog descriptions framed them in fairly selective ways. The period of the museums’ founding was a time of concerted, nostalgic reconciliation between Northern and Southern soldiers.11 Flags captured by Northern forces were being returned to the South, and publications such as the popular Confederate Veteran magazine contained notices from former Union soldiers offering to return articles to the relatives of Confederate soldiers if they would make themselves known. The museums participated in this atmosphere of reconciliation by downplaying the war’s aggression and avarice. In contrast to the North’s wartime sanitary fairs, which had displayed Confederate flags with labels identifying the regiments they were captured from, as well as weapons and other articles explicitly labeled “trophies,” by and large the Confederate relic museums did not call attention to the less noble passions of the battlefield or emphasize anything that could stigmatize its soldiers as aggressors rather than victims. Common trophies of victory such as buttons from enemy uniforms or articles from the pockets of enemy dead make virtually no appearance in the catalogs. Objects that clearly were originally preserved as wartime trophies do appear with some frequency: weapons and other objects belonging to Union soldiers who had died on the battlefield; pieces of captured Federal flags; a lemon from a Union supply train captured by Stonewall Jackson (CM 53). But the descriptions of these items are almost always brief and matter-offact. In contrast to the ways wartime letters sometimes described articles taken from the enemy, the relic museums seem to have presented such items without editorializing or gloating. Taking their place among the array of other wartime objects, they now appeared simply as poignant evidence of the war’s events—as historical relics among others, capable of inducing the same general sense of melancholy and reflection as the items around them. 111

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If the museums of the Lost Cause downplayed the variety of impulses that motivated wartime collecting, they emphasized instead the individual memories that each object encoded. Labels and catalog entries often listed the donor’s name, and objects’ links to specific wartime experiences were repeatedly offered as the guarantee of their significance: Minie Ball saved from the Crater at Petersburg while lying in the trenches at that place (CM 35). Twelve-Pound Conical-Cap Shell, shot by the Federals, July 21, 1861, at the battle of Manassas. It fell near Henry Stokes Neal, of Company C, Eighteenth Virginia Regiment, who lay wounded on the field. He drew it to him, took out the cap, extracted the powder, and carried it to his home in Lunenburg county, Va. (CM 38). Opera Glasses of Capt. C. E. Chichester. They were used during the war. The names of the different engagements he was in are scratched on the inner barrel with a pin (CCM 4). Flag of the Rockbridge Rifles, Twenty-Seventh Virginia Regiment Infantry. It went out and returned with the company, and was in the procession when General R. E. Lee was buried. Presented, through Miss Rose Pendleton, Lexington, Va., by Captain J. C. Boude. Captain Boude lost a leg at Chancellorsville, and made with his own hands the first wooden leg he wore (CM 52).

In presenting all these tokens of individual wartime experiences, each one treasured up and preserved over decades, these collections were carefully structured around the metaphor of the memory cabinet. What they apparently offered was simply a collection of mementos, the sum total of all the South’s private memories amassed together. And, in turn, they invited their viewers to participate in that collective memory of the war by using the objects on display to animate their own memories. In visiting the relic museums, white Southerners could find, if not the same items preserved in their own families, innumerable things to remind them of such objects, as well as things connected to their own experiences or to the wealth of stories and references to the war transmitted in their families and in Southern society at large. Something of how this appeal to memory was intended to work can be seen in the examples the Confederate Memorial Literary Society adduced as evidence that its artifacts were “striking object lessons of that 112

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memorable time.” The table on which the Ordinance of the Secession of Virginia had been signed, readers were told, “brings to mind those days when ‘civil liberty was in danger of being throttled by the mailed hand of military power’”; a private’s musket and canteen “tell of the ‘picket off duty forever’”; and the spent artillery shells must remind viewers of the “‘music in the air,’ so inspiring to the gallant artilleryman.”12 Each object was accompanied by a phrase that Southern readers were clearly expected to recognize as a commonplace, as a way the war continued to be present in literary references and in everyday language. Like the relics themselves, these phrases activated an impromptu and unofficial collective memory, referring back to the experience of the war but also to the myriad stories, commemorations, and passing allusions through which that experience had been embedded in Southern life over the course of three decades. Southerners could visit the museums not necessarily to learn about the war but to revisit the already invested-in signs of their collective loss—to call back the associations that had indeed become memories, whether or not they could be traced back to their own experience of the war. If the relic museums’ artifacts served as mementos of a collective memory, the fact that that memory was one of staggering losses suggests that these things might more specifically be characterized as tokens of mass mourning. The museums themselves sometimes explicitly framed their collections as sites of remembrance for the dead. The call for donations issued by Richmond’s Confederate Museum, for example, asked that “contributions be given as a memorial of some soldier, sailor, or patriot; some battle, siege, or march—the memory of which the donor desires to preserve.”13 And many donors took this advice, donating artifacts in the names of specific individuals who had died in the war. In a sense, then, the museum functioned as an analogue of the nearby Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, with each object, like a gravestone, commemorating a specific life. In fact, the published proceedings of the museum’s dedication begin with a picture of the memorial obelisk in Hollywood Cemetery and a brief history of the Hollywood Memorial Association—the Confederate Memorial Literary Society’s predecessor—and its involvement in tending the graves of the wartime dead.14 This association with loss was reinforced by the numerous artifacts that thematized an ongoing mourning for the Confederate dead. In the Confederate Museum’s collection, flowers and mourning paraphernalia from the funerals of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee made several appearances, as did pieces of a tree that grew near Stonewall Jackson’s grave. Lockets containing Lee’s and Jackson’s hair were also on exhibit 113

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(CM 19, 100, 210), along with a locket holding a piece of Jefferson Davis’s hair on a piece of the first Confederate flag (CM 100). And among the objects Louisiana’s Confederate Memorial Hall put on display were a cane cut on the spot where General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed (LHA 25), a brick from the grave of Jefferson Davis (LHA 31), and a piece of a candle placed at the head of General P. G. T. Beauregard’s coffin (LHA 43). The links with sentimental memory were even more pronounced in more highly fashioned relics. The Confederate Memorial Hall collection, for example, included an “oval, gilt framed Memorial to General Lee; dried flowers and crossed Confederate flags” (LHA 33) and a picture of Lee accompanied by leaves from his bier and a pin with a lock of his hair (LHA 16). The Museum of the Confederacy preserved an even more elaborate memorial, an ornament that brought together the hair of a number of Confederate generals and political leaders, binding the leaders of the Confederacy in the kind of wreath commonly used to link members of a biological family.15 Another relic in that collection used the tokens of intimate domestic memory to generate sympathy for John Yates Beall, executed as a traitor by the United States government: “Framed Photograph of John Yates Beale [sic],” the catalog entry reads, who was tried at Fort Lafayette in July, 1865, condemned and executed. . . . The frame, also, contains some pressed flowers from the garden of his home and two locks of hair, cut from his head when an infant and just before his burial. His last words were: “I protest against the execution of this sentence. It is murder! I die in the service and defence of my country” (CM 93).

Such tokens were the most stylized evocations of the traditions of sentimental memory and mourning. But the war’s losses were evident, too, in the many, many personal possessions sent home from the battlefield, which would have been the only tokens and means of mourning loved ones for decades after the war’s end: Button (Virginia) cut from the coat of Colonel J. H. S. Funk, Fifth Virginia Infantry, after he was mortally wounded at Winchester, September 19, 1864 (CM 26). Haversack of Mr. Diggs, sent to his wife with a letter telling her of his glorious end (CM 72). Portfolio, containing Confederate paper, envelopes, etc., found in the haversack of H. A. R. Stanfield, Company K, Warrenton Rifles, Seventeenth Regiment Virginia 114

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Volunteers. He was mortally wounded near Drewry’s Bluff, May 16, 1864. On May 20, 1864, his mother received the news of the death of this, her only son. Sent by his mother, Mrs. C. A. Stanfield Brandt, Richmond, Va., June 15, 1896 (CM 24). Cap worn by Cicero Bowman, who enlisted at eighteen years of age, and died of exposure in camp (CM 117). Sprig of Cedar, brought from the spot where the gallant Charles F. Fisher, of the Sixth North Carolina Regiment, was killed, at the first battle of Manassas (CM 210). Scarf knit by his sweetheart and worn (when he was wounded) by Captain G. N. Hammond, Company B, 1st Virginia Cavalry. He died of his wounds May 17, 1864 (TCM 8). Bible of Wm. R. Grey, 17th Ala. Regt., which he presented to Dr. Charles P. Marshal from his death-bed on the hospital boat “City of Memphis” (LHA 41). Soldier’s overcoat, belonging to Charles Pinckney Brown, a signer of the Ordinance of Secession of the State of South Carolina. He served from preference as a private on the coast of South Carolina and in Virginia, refusing anything that would make his lot easier than that of the majority around him. He was wounded severely at Secessionville June 16, 1861, and killed at Drury’s Bluff May 24, 1864. Aged 41 years (CCM 8). Hymn-Book and Testament, Pipe, Buttons, Spray of Box, and piece of Tobacco used during the war by Lieutenant B. W. L. Grasswitt. Presented by his mother, Mrs. S. H. Grasswitt, July 16, 1896 (CM 46).

Such objects had originally been passed on to families and friends specifically to preserve the memory of individual lives, and their power lay in their ability to evoke the ongoing mourning of those left behind as much as they did the soldiers’ deaths themselves. Other tokens offered explicit physical traces of the body’s breaching as the most tangible evidence of wounding and death: Jacket of John Blair Royal, First Company of Richmond Howitzers, wounded at Savage Station, and again at Chancellorsville; killed below Wilmington, N.C., in June, 1864. This jacket was worn by him at Chancellorsville. The left sleeve bears the marks of a shell fired from the enemy’s battery. The same shot killed Thomas Barksdale, who served at the same gun (CM 83). 115

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Bullet presented by Abel Preston, Company C, 6th Mississippi Volunteers, with the statement that he received it at the Battle of Shiloh and carried it ten weeks in his shattered arm (TCM 35). Hat of Peyton W. Pettis, Sergt. of 3d Co., Wash. Arty. Torn by fragment of shell which wounded him in the head, at Beverly Ford, 1862 (LHA, 36). Officer’s sash and Bible—Thos. Blair, 5th Co., Wash. Arty., killed at Battle of Chickamauga, Sept. 19, 1863. Bible stained with his blood (LHA 36). Silk Handkerchief, given to W. P. Smith by William Kean, both of First Company, Richmond Howitzers, on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and used by the former as a tourniquet to arrest the flow of blood from a desperate wound (CM 48). Confederate Bill, found in pocket of Morgan McCowan, of Florence, S.C., after battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, Va. Bill is saturated with his blood (CM 172). Powder Flask of Louis L. Giles, Company D, 8th Texas Cavalry, who fell with the gallant Col. Terry at Woodsonville, Kentucky, December 17, 1861, the shot bursting the flask at the same time (TCM 3). Ring, pin, ear rings made of bullets fired into the body of John G. Miller, Confederate Soldier in battle (TCM 32). Canteen and Ball of Lieutenant J. R. B. Wright, Company A, Fifty-Fifth Virginia Regiment. . . . The ball passed through his body, September 30, 1864, at the battle of Peebles’ Farm, Petersburg, Va. (CM 22).

This substratum of concrete loss was crucial to the relic museums’ claims to represent the Confederacy, since it presented the South’s loss in its most basic and irrefutable form. Yet in exhibiting the tokens of such intense personal loss, the museums also invited visitors to experience their mourning as having a collective significance beyond the deaths of their individual loved ones. For the wartime loss of lives was only the most obvious of the sufferings the Lost Cause museums put on display. In addition to the makeshift soap and candles that offered evidence of the material deprivations of the home front—what one of the Confederate Museum’s annual reports referred to as “the pathetic evidence of the straits our people were put to”16 —exhibits often included artifacts that summoned up the injustices white Southerners had supposedly experienced during the years of war and Reconstruction. Two 116

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stars had come from South Carolina brigade flags burned at the end of the war to prevent their being surrendered to Union troops. “I tore these stars off as the colors were burning,” the accompanying letter noted, “and they are all that is left of them as mementoes of two of the noblest commands that went out of our State” (CCM 27). A Bible was glossed as having been sent to a prisoner at Johnson’s Island, though “the Federals refused to give . . . [it] to him, fearing treason lurked between the leaves” (CM 156). And the uniform jacket of J. M. Hudgins had been divested of its buttons and gilt lace “under military order of the Federal Government, issued in 1865, prohibiting Confederate soldiers from appearing in public in military dress” (CM 85). The entry for an artifact belonging to Jefferson Davis labored particularly hard to generate a scene of pathos and undeserved suffering at the hands of the Federal government: “Cloth Mask made by Mrs. Davis to screen Mr. Davis’s eyes while he was undergoing tortures inflicted needlessly upon him by General Nelson A. Miles, United States Army, who kept a bright light burning in his eyes all night, which gave Mr. Davis great anguish” (CM 134). Like the personal belongings of those who had died in battle, such objects could also be seen as mourning tokens, but they solicited their viewers’ grief and tender regard not for the war’s individual casualties but for the indignities and sufferings visited on white Southerners and their cause. The locket that held a piece of the Confederate flag along with Jefferson Davis’s hair, for example, could be said to mourn the loss of that flag and the sovereignty it represented at least as much as it mourned Davis himself. Similarly, the “Fragment of Confederate Flag, taken from the Capitol in Richmond, Va., upon the surrender to the United States forces” (CM 139) and the many relics from Appomattox mourned wartime losses and defeats even as they marked those defeats as public historical events. Commemorating the Confederate past through mourning tokens continued a tradition that extended back to the immediate aftermath of the war and that consistently framed the lost Confederacy as the object of lamentation and longing. When Southerners were forbidden to display the Confederate flag after Appomattox, many donned black armbands or covered buttons in mourning cloth as a surrogate symbol of collective unity.17 This deployment of the symbols of mourning must have assumed a certain inevitability, given that so many of those tying on armbands or covering their buttons would already have donned mourning for more personal reasons at some time over the preceding four years. At the same time, by so directly substituting the 117

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insignia of mourning for the Confederate flag, Southerners affirmed a quasi-national identity that persisted, defiantly, in the very insignia of resignation and defeat. The South’s earliest monuments commemorating the war continued the tradition of memory as mourning. As Gaines Foster points out, they were usually built in cemeteries, and far from displaying the soldier on a plinth that we associate with Civil War commemoration, drew on traditional funereal imagery to commemorate the South’s wartime losses.18 Though by the 1890s such monuments had largely been superseded by more celebratory ones, the funeral persisted in commemorative iconography and imagery. Reproductions of a painting by C. A. David that circulated in the later part of the century, for example, imaged the Confederacy’s demise in a tombstone in the form of a broken column. The column was draped in a Confederate flag and surrounded by broken implements of war, and engraved on its plinth was the date “1865.”19 Again and again the no longer extant Confederacy was thus reconstituted as an entity by the focus on its loss, the practices of mourning asserting nationhood even in the absence of a sovereign state.

Relics of the war played a crucial role in the Lost Cause because, like relics more generally, they gave physical form to the perdurance of the past in memory. They came from the war years, they bore the indelible marks of those years, and they thus brought the memories of those years into the present, serving as the externalized correlatives of white Southerners’ inescapable, war-marked pasts.20 Yet to see the prominence of the war’s relics in the observances of the Lost Cause only as a sign of an irresolvable mourning that persisted unchanged over half a century is to ignore the ways these things were used. In the kinds of relics they exhibited and in the ways they framed them, exponents of the Lost Cause relied to an unprecedented extent on the tropes of sentimental memory. But this was not only because, conceived as a sentimental memento, the relic folded horrific wartime losses back into the familiar rituals of mourning, but because the memento’s ability to rework intimate internal states offered Southerners a means of negotiating their intense shame and debasement. Under the Lost Cause, in other words, the South’s war relics functioned not simply as emblems of immense loss passively endured but as active instruments through which white Southerners attempted to renegotiate the devastating experience of the war and the painful consequences of defeat. 118

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The war’s relics could be used to reframe Southerners’ wartime experiences because, whatever memories of the dead they evoked, these objects so closely identified with the cause, but which had survived in partial and defeated condition beyond that cause, also served as surrogates for living Southerners’ own defeated selves. Although many relics referenced the devastated bodies of the dead and wounded, allusions to violence and bodily abjection also had metaphorical overtones extending far beyond the actual losses on the battlefield. During the war itself, and particularly in defeat, white Southerners had resorted to images of violent breaching of the body’s boundaries to express their intense pain and sense of violation. Worrying that her two brothers might be slain in battle, South Carolinian Grace Elmore, for example, wrote that she had “held the wolf to my breast and it devoured my heart.”21 After her Lynchburg, Virginia, home had been burned by Yankee troops, Henrietta Lee wrote a personal letter to General David Hunter castigating him for having “hyena like . . . torn my heart to pieces” and accusing him of “tortur[ing] afresh the agonized hearts of widows.”22 And after her husband’s death, Mary Vaughn asked why “God would clutch my heart strings with his iron hand and tear them one by one asunder.”23 The word crushed appeared frequently, particularly in describing the experience of defeat. Writing in 1866, Augusta Evans, author of the immensely popular novel Macaria, noted that the failure of the Confederacy had “bowed down and crushed my heart as I thought nothing earthly had power to do.”24 Elsewhere she referred to the defeated South as “a crushed, mutilated, degraded ‘Niobe of Nations.’”25 And one writer lamented the humiliation of being “crushed beneath the oppressors’ might and made such things of shame as we”—explicitly casting the sensation of bodily violation as the outcome of painful and humiliating defeat.26 Other images of bodily breaching and debasement involved not violent rending but the forced ingestion of abhorrent or contaminating substances and the defilement of one’s innermost being. “We must sup on death and carnage or go empty,” the noted diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote in 1864.27 Echoing her sentiments, the Southern writer William Gilmore Simms told a friend that “we are made daily to sup on horrors,” while Mississippian Amanda Worthington lamented that she had drunk deeply from “the bitter waters of sorrow.”28 This image of physical distress and defilement persisted in Southern rhetoric long beyond the Civil War itself. Half a century after the war’s end, for example, a Southerner who had moved to New York alluded to the “pangs” and “stings” that have “filled the cup of all Southern men who have 119

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ventured in this City after the Civil War.”29 The author of a religious treatise referred to the generation “who drank to the dregs [the South’s] cup of greatest woe,”30 and in his account of his Civil War service Brigadier General David E. Johnston used the same phrase when he referred to “the humiliation of tasting the bitter cup of submission, of which we were to drink to its very dregs.”31 Such statements demonstrate how Southerners’ pain at their losses —of life, of property, of national sovereignty—was inseparable from an intense bodily sense of debasement. As Gaines Foster has pointed out, defeat did not lead to any reevaluation of the rightness of the Southern cause or to a repudiation of the institution of slavery. White Southerners experienced no guilt over their aspirations to nationhood or over the principles that inspired them. What they did feel ashamed of was the failure of those aspirations, their subjection to the will of Northern troops and politicians, and their perceived loss of status in a racial hierarchy that unambiguously endorsed white superiority.32 This sense of shame was expressed not only in Southerners’ laments over their own condition but also, more subtly, in Lost Cause descriptions of the war’s artifacts that seemed fascinated with the signs of frailty, neglect, and debasement. Even the most cursory descriptions of veterans’ processions, for instance, invariably stressed that the old swords were “rusted” and “dented,” the uniforms “faded,” the flags “tattered” and “bullet riddled.” Casual though such references may seem, they were invoked with such ritualistic frequency that it is clear that they were in some sense being offered as highly charged attributes. Similarly, descriptions of the war’s artifacts in poems, stories, and personal accounts took pains to emphasize their abject physical condition. A short poem published in the Confederate Veteran about a star saved from a regimental battle flag, for example, ultimately assured readers that this apparently worthless object would pass on the memory of the brave deeds of the Confederacy. But that assurance occurred only in the final line; in the meantime the poem lingered over the carefully detailed evidence of debasement: Only a piece of bunting; soiled by the weather and torn, Valueless, save to the worthy who followed where it was borne; Dirty, a term most contemptuous! tattered and gone to decay: No charm to present to the many; alas! it has served its day.33

Sometimes a relic’s debasement was explicitly presented as the result of its wartime defeat. The classic evocation of just such a shamed relic 120

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was Father Abram Ryan’s poem “The Conquered Banner.” Written in 1865, purportedly just after Ryan had learned of the surrender at Appomattox, “The Conquered Banner” became the signature piece of the Lost Cause. It was read at innumerable commemorations, quoted in as many speeches and articles, framed in museum cases, pasted in scrapbooks, and imitated by a flurry of other poems about the significance of old flags and uniforms.34 The poem begins by exhorting listeners to hide away what had once been the valued symbol of the South’s cause because, with defeat, it had become a source of ridicule: Furl that banner, for ’tis weary; Round its staff ’tis drooping dreary; Furl it, fold it, it is best; For there’s not a man to wave it, And there’s not a sword to save it, And there’s not one left to lave it In the blood which heroes gave it; And its foes now scorn and brave it; Furl it, hide it—let it rest!

The flag’s debased condition is evoked yet more starkly in the fourth stanza, where it is associated with the bodies of the dead and the wretchedness of a conquered people: Furl it! for the hands that grasped it, And the hearts that fondly clasped it, Cold and dead are lying low; And that banner—it is trailing! While around it sounds the wailing Of its people in their woe.35

The topos of secreting away the beloved objects of the Confederacy was a commonplace in Southerners’ postbellum accounts of the war years. Often that hiding away was portrayed as marking the extreme value attached to this one thing and as the essential precondition of its new status as a memory token. “I have the Confederate gray uniform which I wore at Gen. Lee’s surrender,” a former soldier wrote to the Confederate Veteran in 1894. “When I returned to my desolate home I laid this suit carefully away, intending to keep it so long as I lived as a relic of that devastating war. When I occasionally take a look at it it recalls to memory many days and nights of pleasure and sorrow—of 121

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days of trial and privation.”36 And “The Jacket of Gray,” a poem that appears in a number of Lost Cause publications, begins and ends with the following refrain: Fold it up carefully, lay it aside; Tenderly touch it, look on it with pride; For dear must it be to our hearts evermore, The jacket of gray our loved soldier boy wore.37

Such scenes followed the tradition of nineteenth-century sentimental memory in construing memory as a process that by definition was enacted in private with objects inspiring painful sensations, to be sure, but also the compensation of an attachment experienced and cherished anew even in the face of irrevocable loss. But the “Conquered Banner” and other contemporary accounts employed the image of secreting away toward much less conventionally nostalgic ends and rendered it considerably more ambiguous. Ryan’s poem did assert that eventually the Confederate flag would be remembered as the emblem of a glorious cause, but he portrayed the material banner itself as irrevocably compromised. When he adjured his listeners to hide the flag away, it was not to allow a revivified access to its meanings in memory but to decisively mark the termination of its possibilities and the absolute cessation of its narrative, even in the afterlife of memory. His poem concludes with the admonition, Touch it not—unfold it never, Let it droop there, furled forever, For its people’s hopes are dead!

“The Conquered Banner” imparted forceful new meanings to the act of hiding objects away and suggested the tensions at the heart of white Southerners’ memories of the Confederacy and the wartime years. To withdraw an object from its everyday use was to set it apart in a private space where it could be preserved, cherished, and cultivated through the continual renewal of the memories it prompted. It could equally be to consign it to oblivion and to renounce all hopes one had ever placed in it. Judith McGuire, a devout supporter of the Confederacy from a prominent Richmond family, concluded the diary she published in 1867 with a reference to a friend who “in her sadness, has put some Confederate money and postage stamps into a Confederate envelope, sealed it up, and endorsed it, ‘In memory of our beloved 122

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Confederacy.’”38 The gesture was both richly emblematic and highly ambiguous. In one sense it was of course the conventional gesture of sentimental memory, which treasures up the evidence of its losses so as to revisit them as memory. Yet it also conveyed a finality and a disengagement at odds with any sense of “treasuring up.” McGuire’s friend did preserve the money and stamps—as opposed to destroying or discarding them—but she did so by sealing them away. She did not preserve them as things she intended to return to or on which she might lavish the protracted attentions of concerted remembering. “In memory of our beloved Confederacy” she wrote on the envelope, using the language of the tombstone to convey the way she ambiguously treasured these remnants of the Confederacy and simultaneously consigned them to death. Memories of the Confederacy, both public and private, continued to be marked by extraordinary pain, shame, and ambivalence for decades after the war’s end, and much of the nominally celebratory rhetoric and ritual of the Lost Cause can be seen in part as an effort to rework that painful past. A story by the well-known Southern writer Thomas Nelson Page exemplifies the stubborn persistence of shame within Lost Cause ideology, as well as the way relics of the war were used to negotiate that shame. In the decades around the turn of the century, Page published a series of novels and short stories that nostalgically evoked the antebellum South, and his work enjoyed enormous popularity in both North and South. “The Gray Jacket of ‘No. 4,’” a short story published in 1894, is the account of an old Confederate veteran who fought valiantly and honorably in the war but who has since descended into utter degradation.39 His particular degradation is presented as a personal matter—he is an alcoholic who, in spite of all his protestations that he has sworn off drink, repeatedly succumbs to protracted sprees when he squanders his resources and frequently ends up in jail. Yet though this soldier’s debasement is not presented as a result of military defeat, it is striking that the concern with debasement and dishonor—as in several of Page’s other stories, which more closely link shame to wartime behavior—is played out in the figure of a Confederate veteran.40 The story is in fact preoccupied with honor and dishonor, shame and valor, and the apparently absolute yet all too quickly traversable distinction between the two. Indeed, its narrative trajectory is nothing but a series of dizzying oscillations between honor and debasement: The soldier protests his reformed character; in the next sentence he succumbs to another binge. His status as a veteran is adduced as justification for softening his various sentences; yet at every turn it is juxtaposed to his present behavior, 123

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which lands him back in jail. Ultimately, although the old veteran’s wartime service is cited as the one thing that redeems him—as if, however distant, it could still function as an irrefutable touchstone of his character—its claim to stand as an absolute standard can hardly seem unassailable in the face of his present dissoluteness. Significantly, in this story about the heritage of the war years and their relation to the present, a wartime relic—the eponymous gray jacket of the title—plays a crucial role. Page describes the jacket in the terms so repeatedly applied to the war’s relics: it is “old,” “worn,” “stained,” “faded,” and “patched.” And yet it is repeatedly described, too, as the emblem of the old soldier’s valiant service. It is his most prized possession, the one thing he will not part with even in the depths of debauchery. Even in its tattered state it stands apart from his current condition and inspires him with what he has once been. The old soldier eventually dies after a last drunken spree, and at the end of the story the narrator is confronted with his emaciated corpse. On the man’s chest, in a final ambiguous revelation, he discovers two “curious scars.” The scars render the body more abject—they are, after all, the marks of wounds, and they are discovered only because the body can no longer cover its own nakedness. But they are also described as marks of honor: “They looked almost like small crosses, about the size of the decorations the European veterans wear” (116). Earlier in the story the old wound on a Yankee’s face had been similarly fetishized as decorative by being described as “a beautiful scar” (89), but this is a more equivocal description. Whereas the word beautiful marked the scar as the embellishment of a healthy, virile figure, these scars adorn the pitiful, wasted frame of a derelict. The Yankee’s scars provoke only admiration and envy; these Confederate scars provoke not so much admiration as pathos—horror at what this once valiant body has become, an admiration stained by pity. Having been exposed to the sight of the dead body, the narrator then stumbles upon the soldier’s old uniform jacket in the secondhand store it has been sold to. It too bears the marks of its final degradation. It is in a store “of the meanest kind, in a poor, back street” and is “stained behind with mud, and in front with a darker color” (116). But an examination of the jacket reveals that the patch on the front covers two holes corresponding to the old soldier’s wounds. The jacket’s absolute correspondence with the old soldier’s body is thus revealed. It is a kind of alternative body that, despite its stained and faded condition, stands as an ennobled version of the body degraded by drink and death. The jacket arrests the soldier’s body at its most valiant moment 124

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when, we have already been told, its wearer had “ridden into the enemy and torn a captured standard from its captors’ hands, receiving two desperate bayonet-wounds in doing it” (96). And in the evidence of the two puncture wounds, it asserts itself as the self belonging to the old veteran. In the final paragraph of the story the speaker buys the jacket and takes it back to clothe the old soldier’s corpse. He removes the patch that has hidden the evidence of wartime valor, and in these memorial observances thus uses the jacket to return the corpse to its wartime self as if the intervening years had never occurred. Page’s story offers a particularly striking example of the intense emotions Southerners brought to wartime relics and the ways they used them to negotiate highly contradictory emotional states. On the one hand, objects such as the stained and faded jacket were the very things that had been humiliated on the battlefield. They were emblems of shame, surrogates for the dead and defeated bodies of Southerners themselves. And at the same time, these defeated things participated in the tradition of the historical relic, carrying within them the possibility that physical matter could somehow hold the luster of its originary moment intact, preserving some essential connection to that moment that persisted through the vicissitudes of time and history. “The Gray Jacket” can be read as an exercise that, like so many of the encomiums to relics of the Lost Cause, instructed its readers in the techniques of reading through the signs of abjection to the wartime glory that supposedly existed before defeat. But the story’s oscillations between asserted glory and evident debasement and its inability to posit an object that stood decisively beyond debasement testify to the uneasy status of white Southerners’ wartime memory during the postwar years.

The ability to call up the range of intense, conflicted emotions that characterized Southern memories of the war persisted as a latent potential in any artifact from the war years. This potential presumably could be activated by viewing the often humble and apparently insignificant objects in the relic museums, just as it could by private interaction with a personal memento. Yet, as I have argued in earlier chapters, the historical relic had never existed primarily in and for the museum. Indeed, it was not in the static memory cabinets of the museums that the war’s artifacts were most pervasively displayed, but in the Lost Cause’s many public ceremonies. It was in the innumerable parades, veterans’ reunions, and other commemorative observances that white Southern125

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ers would most frequently have encountered relics of the war years; it was in such public, ritualized settings that they would have participated in the collective meanings they evoked. Although Lost Cause rituals used a variety of media—movement, music, oratory, and so forth—they relied to a surprising degree on objects handed down from the war years. Of a typical procession at the 1896 convention of the United Confederate Veterans in Richmond, for example, the Atlanta Constitution noted, “In the line were numerous mementoes of the late war in the shape of bullet-holed and tattered confederate battle flags, uniforms that had been worn on many a bloody field, knapsacks, canteens, muskets and rifles that bore evidence of service in many a campaign.”41 And on such occasions the marching veterans were not the only ones who displayed their relics. Descriptions of processions noted the profusion of artifacts that adorned shop windows along the parade route. In the words of a newspaper account of the 1903 United Confederate Veterans’ reunion in New Orleans, The wealth of decoration in flags and bunting, national and confederate, interspersed with paintings and pictures of Davis, Lee, Jackson and the other confederate leaders far exceeds anything ever seen in New Orleans. . . . Nearly all the windows of the stores are filled with trophies and relics of the civil war, old flags, muskets, swords, etc.42

Relics were also self-consciously displayed as illustrations of speeches and readings and as components in pageants and tableaus. Thus, at an 1899 Confederate veterans’ reunion in Kentucky a young woman recited a poem titled “The Old Jacket of Gray” (“See this old jacket, faded and torn! / In Morgan’s raid it was proudly worn”) while wearing the uniform jacket her uncle had worn in General John Morgan’s raid.43 At a veterans’ reunion in Birmingham several years earlier, the old soldiers viewed a pantomime about the war years in which young women portrayed the individual states and that concluded with a symbolic “union of the gray and the blue”: the appearance of an old Union soldier in a blue uniform alongside a Confederate soldier “in an old, tattered Confederate uniform, resting his hand upon the stacked arms.”44 And at the unveiling of Richmond’s statue of Stonewall Jackson in 1875, visitors beheld an arch thirty-two feet high that featured “a painting representing a stone-wall, upon which was resting a bare saber, a Bible, and a Confederate cap.” In front of the arch “the most decided effect in any of the decorations was produced by the placing of two Confederate soldiers dressed in their genuine, old, tattered Confederate gar126

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ments. . . . They leaned upon reversed muskets, and were as immovable as statues.”45 The relics exhibited in such ceremonial displays were most obviously a means of evoking the supposed glory of the Confederacy’s vanished past. Yet the insistent emphasis on their worn and faded appearance suggests that, like any remnants of the war years, the responses they elicited were not unambiguously celebratory or pleasantly nostalgic. And because these compromised things could call up a range of conflicting meanings, and did so in explicitly performative contexts, they served not only to evoke emotions but potentially to transform them. Displayed in these public arenas, in rituals that large segments of the white Southern population took part in, the war’s relics could allow Southerners both to revisit the history they had lived through and to renegotiate their relation to it. The way Southern commemorative ceremonies used relics to evoke but also to stabilize complex emotional states is evident even in descriptions of that most common of Lost Cause rituals, the parade of Confederate veterans. “The Gray Jacket of ‘No. 4’” includes a description of a veterans’ procession, which if somewhat more elaborate than most accounts, is still fairly typical of the genre in its emphasis on the appearance of the veterans and the emotion of the crowd: Men wept; children shrilled; women sobbed aloud. What was it! Only a thousand or two of old or aging men riding or tramping along through the dust of the street, under some old flags, dirty and ragged and stained. But they represented the spirit of the South. . . . [The crowd] saw in every stain on those tattered standards the blood of their noblest, bravest, and best; in every rent a proof of their glorious courage and sacrifice. They saw in those gray and careworn faces, in those old clothes interspersed now and then with a faded gray uniform, the men who in the ardor of their youth had, for the South, faced death undaunted on a hundred fields and had never even thought it great; men who had looked immortality in the eyes, yet had been thrown down and trampled underfoot, and who were greater in their overthrow than when glory poured her light upon their upturned faces (110–11).

This passage asserts that the sight of the aging veterans in their faded uniforms reminded the spectators that these men “in the ardor of their youth had, for the South, faced death undaunted on a hundred fields.” Yet the emotional reaction the processions generated is more complex than a simple return to the past. Further along in the story Page describes an encounter between the aging soldier and his even more elderly mother that highlights this reaction. The veteran comes 127

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riding by bearing an emblem of the vanquished Confederacy: “In his hand, with staff resting on his toe, he carried an old standard so torn and tattered and stained that it was scarcely recognizable as a flag.” His mother, “a little old woman in a rusty black dress,” waits on the sidelines with her own token of the war years, “a little, faded knot of Confederate colors,” fastened to her dress. As the soldier passes the balcony where his mother sits, “His face lighted up, and, wheeling his prancing horse half around, he dipped the tattered standard, and gave the royal salute as though saluting a queen. The old lady pressed her wrinkled hand over the knot of faded ribbon on her breast, and made a gesture to him, and he rode on. He had suddenly grown handsome” (113). The scene’s effect clearly depends on the way it reenacts scenes from the early days of the war—the dashing young cavalier in his martial splendor paying his chivalrous obeisance to the woman who inspires his cause. The repetition of that sight has the power to reanimate the earlier moment: the soldier who reenacts it seems to regain his youthful vigor and “had suddenly grown handsome.” At the same time, even in its reanimation, the scene remains irremediably compromised by the intervening time. The participants are old; the objects from the original ceremonies have been subjected to the harsh punishment of the battlefield and rendered obsolete by the Confederacy’s demise. Like Judith McGuire’s Confederate note, which emblematized both her friend’s attachment to the Confederacy and her renunciation of it, the veterans’ processions called forth two separate moments in the history of the Confederacy. In one respect, by literally reenacting the processions of the Confederacy’s earliest days, they allowed access to the fervor and jubilation inspiring the enthusiastic crowds gathered to send off young, physically intact men to advance a cause they believed would triumph. On the other hand, they reenacted the heyday of the Confederacy under the sign of loss, reminding viewers of their cause’s harsh defeat in the same artifacts that had symbolized their hopes. In effect, the processions condensed the triumphant beginning of the war and its abject end into one image. Yet three decades after Judith McGuire’s friend resigned the hopes she had placed in her Confederate note and Abram Ryan urged that the defeated flag be hidden away, the processions now enacted a third moment in the history of the Confederacy. Page’s narrator encapsulates that third stage when he tells us that “to those who were of the South” the sight of the procession, far from being a spectacle of debasement, was “sublime.” It “passed beyond mere enthusiasm, however exalted,” he continues, “and rested in the profoundest and most sacred deeps of their being. There were many 128

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cheers, but more tears; not tears of regret or mortification, but tears of sympathy and hallowed memory” (109). Page’s description suggests that the observances of the Lost Cause had the capacity to shift the tears of mourning and humiliation into a new register, and he expresses this register in the familiar terms of sentimental feeling. The crowd’s emotion touches “the profoundest and most sacred deeps” of their being, and it is characterized not by shame or abasement but by those sentimental staples “tears of sympathy and hallowed memory.” What the observers of the procession access is the capacity to feel sentimentally—to process their wartime experiences through the structure of sentimental feeling and thus to redeem them as objects of tender regard rather than defiling abasement. The lost Confederacy, the suffering of the war, the anguish of defeat, all are revisited and repositioned in the cordoned psychic space of “hallowed memory” and “sacred” feeling. And though Page does not emphasize the role of relics in this transformation, it is in the “dirty,” “ragged” flags and the “faded gray” uniforms that the ceremony’s participants discover their own painful and persistent memories of the war. It is also in those things that they discover those other meanings available to the vanished Confederacy’s devotees: “In every stain on those tattered standards the blood of their noblest, bravest, and best; in every rent a proof of their glorious courage and sacrifice.” In Page’s description of the veterans’ procession, the sensations of sorrow and sublimity, of the shameful and the sacred, are presented as more or less simultaneous. Descriptions of other Lost Cause rituals, however, emphasize the participants’ passage from one emotional state to another and suggest that the very function of many of these rituals—and of the displays of relics that were sometimes the emotional catalysts at their core—was to transform their audience’s affective reality and perception of their collective state in the aftermath of loss. The basic outline of such a transformation can be seen in the brief description of a ceremony staged at the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s 1905 convention to recognize the return to the Florida legislature of the flags captured in battle four decades earlier. The passage describes the event as beginning in a deliberately ritualized way with a strategic use of silence and a carefully formalized series of procedures: The vast concourse was hushed and expectant. The tramp of marching feet was heard; the veterans filed slowly in, and stood, in two lines, about the speaker’s desk to receive the eight men, old and gray, clad in the faded uniform of the Confederacy, and bearing in their hands, sturdy and resolute, all that remained of Florida’s 129

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captured flags—tattered, hanging in shreds, some with a broken staff, all smokebegrimed, riddled with bullet-holes, blood-stained.

This ceremony initially aims to evoke a collective sensory memory of the vanished Confederacy: first the familiar martial sound of marching feet; then the sight of the assembled veterans; and finally the center piece of the ritual and the most tangible reminder of the heyday of the Confederacy, the flags themselves. Predictably, these flags bear what we can now recognize as the obligatory stigmata of Southern pain and abjection: they are tattered, smoke-begrimed, bullet-riddled, bloodstained. Displayed before the assembled multitude, they thus put on display all that multitude’s memories of the Confederacy and of its ignominious defeat. Yet whatever pain these articles may evoke, in this particular ceremony they are also exhibited as a triumph of sorts. After many years of debate and delay, Congress had finally authorized the return of captured Confederate battle flags to Southern states, an action that, at least in Southern eyes, confirmed the United States government’s acknowledgment of Confederate troops as an honorable foe and of the Confederacy as an entity that, though no longer having a legal or geopolitical existence, could still lay claim to the symbols of its nationhood. In this context, then, the humiliated flags embody two absolutely contradictory but completely simultaneous meanings: they suggest the humiliation and defeat of Confederate aspirations even as their bestowal by the victor asserts the honor of the Southern cause and those who espoused it. The ceremony does not simply assert the presence of these diametrically opposed realities, however. It works to move its audience from one status and one affective state to another. The display of the flags, with their dual significations of abjection and triumph, is succeeded by a particularly pregnant silence in which the effects of that display can be made manifest: “We rose to our feet and cast down our eyes. It seemed a sacrilege to break the stillness that made audible stifled sobs and sighs. Finally, out of the silence rose a voice of prayer, asking the God of Battles to bless a reunited country.”46 This stillness is perhaps most obviously an expression of grief—thus the suppressed sighs and sobs—at the sight of the wretched battle flags and their accompanying memories of suffering and defeat. But the sighs and sobs can also be construed as expressing gratitude and relief at the end of the South’s symbolic exile and the North’s recognition of its suffering and valor. Like mementos of the war years, pregnant collective silence was a me130

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dium for deploying individual emotions and memories toward larger political ends. Its very inchoateness accommodated a range of possible feelings. And by allowing participants to experience their individual emotions in the audibly silent presence of others, it formed an apparently intimately communing collective. It is no surprise, then, that in this account silence is superseded by the collective voice of the nation. The voice of prayer that concludes the scene both stands in contrast to the preceding silence and, as the account itself notes, rises out of it, emerging as its collective wish even as it ritually subsumes the multiple, unverbalized sorrows into the one authoritative voice of the now triumphant nation. In this way the passage from silence to speech works to transform the participants’ inarticulate shame, mourning, gratitude, and relief into unambiguous triumph, their compromised Confederate identities into a larger, uncompromised national whole.

Given that the ritual of the flags’ return was sponsored by a commemorative organization, not a church, and was focused on the emblems of nationhood rather than on more standard theological symbols, its heavy reliance on elements drawn from religious services is striking. Most obvious, of course, is the use of prayer to seal the ceremony’s meanings, but the strategic manipulation of silence would also have been intimately familiar and deeply meaningful to a churchgoing audience. As a number of authors have noted, Christian imagery and language suffused the rhetoric of the Lost Cause, and if this was true of its verbal expressions, it was equally true of its ceremonies and sometimes of its relics as well.47 The invocation of Christian beliefs served, as it has done throughout American history, to sacralize overtly nationalistic purposes, appealing to religion as the source of ultimate moral authority because religious belief participated in a transcendent realm supposedly outside politics. But if Lost Cause ideologues drew on religious concepts with unprecedented frequency and fervor, it was precisely because the Confederate state itself no longer existed. Its claims were of necessity couched as suprapolitical because they could exert no concrete political or military force. At the same time that Christian theology was used to assert the Confederacy’s standing in relation to other nation-states, it also served to manage white Southerners’ own psychic reality—to negotiate the legacy of defeat and humiliation. Thus, though Southerners sometimes deployed religious imagery in a triumphalist, overtly nationalist vein, 131

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perhaps they most often relied on it when they focused on their own suffering. And it was insofar as relics were evidence of that suffering that they most explicitly took on religious connotations. The specifically Christian associations that could inform even a relic not obviously religious in nature can be seen in a peculiar category of object that occasionally appeared in the South’s relic collections: the morsel of wartime food. The catalog of the Louisiana Historical Association, for instance, listed among its relics a “bottle of Confederate coffee and piece of army bread” (LHA 25), while the Museum of the Confederacy exhibited the last ration of coffee doled out before Appomattox, a mere two tablespoons for nine men (CM 27). These anomalous keepsakes, like so many Lost Cause relics, offered concrete evidence of the privations Southerners suffered during the later years of the war, since “Confederate coffee” refers to the many grain or vegetable substitutes they resorted to because of the blockade, while the paltry ration of coffee before Appomattox is evidence of Confederate forces’ depleted resources in the final months of the war. Yet carefully set apart and displayed in this way, these things also had undeniable religious resonance. As I noted above, images of being forced to drink in bitterness, sorrow, and shame featured prominently in Southern references to defeat, and all such references ultimately traced back to Christ’s plea in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Let this cup pass from me.” In fact, white Southerners frequently invoked Christ’s suffering as a figure for the travails of the war, particularly in its final days. Appomattox could thus be characterized as “the anguish-fraught hour of [Lee’s] Gethsemane,” the last days of Southern sovereignty as “the Gethsemane hours of the Confederacy,” and Southerners’ collective wartime experience as “the memories of your Gethsemane” and “the agonies of your Golgotha.”48 In this context the rations of bread and coffee associated with privation and defeat can be seen most powerfully as allusions to the Last Supper. As a remainder of the last meal before defeat, the pre-Appomattox ration of coffee calls to mind the final, sacramental breaking of bread before the Crucifi xion. And of course the pairing of army bread and Confederate coffee, two items with no obvious literal connection, is comprehensible only as a representation of the Last Supper’s iconic bread and wine. The religious connotations of such relics served very specific emotional and ideological ends. In their Christian beliefs Southerners found a model even more powerful than the structure of sentimental sympathy for transforming the apparently shameful into a thing of transcendent worth. For if relics of the war were analogous to the relics of Christ’s Passion, that comparison said that those relics were 132

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reminders of suffering and abasement, but also that that suffering was a holy and transcendent thing. The crucified Christ, after all, was the most abject of figures—barely clothed, body pierced and bleeding— and simultaneously the most revered. Through sacred language and metaphor, the Southern cause could become something other than shameful because its losses could be subjected to the transformation of suffering already adumbrated in Christian theology. The way religious forms could be marshaled to reframe the devastating experience of the war is evident in a ritual that the Confederate Veteran described as enacted by the Nashville Daughters of the Confederacy in 1897. According to the report filed by the chapter’s assistant secretary, the meeting began with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.49 That prayer was followed by exhibiting the overcoat of the executed Confederate scout and Tennessee citizen Sam Davis, which had recently been returned to the South by the Union chaplain Sam Davis had bestowed it on before his death. As reported in the Confederate Veteran, when the overcoat was shown, every heart was melted to tears, and there we sat in that sacred silence. Not a sound was heard save the sobs that came from aching hearts. It was a time too sacred for words, for we seemed almost face to face with that grand and heroic man, the noblest son of the South and our own Tennessee. Never have we seen hearts melted so instantaneously as were these the instant this treasure was revealed. In a moment, in “the twinkling of an eye,” with one accord we wept together; and then Mr. C quietly stole away, taking this sacred relic with him. It was some time before we could resume business and hear the business of the previous meeting.50

Like so many of the mementos preserved in the relic museums, the full-length overcoat that once enveloped Davis’s body was an evocative surrogate for the dead body itself. Returned from the scene of death, it would have had particular resonance for the assembled women, whose male kin had suffered and died at the hands of Union soldiers and whose bodies had perhaps never been returned. This semipublic observance thus assumed the form of the private mourning ritual structured around the relics of the dead. And this relic is described as doing just what one would expect those more private mementos to do: it calls up tears of loss from “aching hearts” but also enables a contact with the absent departed himself, who seems to appear to the assembled mourners “almost face to face.” While the ritual drew on the long-standing conventions of sentimental memory, however, it also relied on powerful religious allusions 133

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that were intrinsic to the rhetoric of the Lost Cause but may not be apparent to later readers. In fact, in the report’s half a dozen sentences, “sacred” is used no fewer than three times, and although that term must be understood primarily in its sentimental sense as a marker of the intensity and inviolable tenderness of the experience, it certainly foregrounds the ritual’s religious resonance as well. Indeed, if the insistent reiteration of “sacred” suggests anything, it is how thoroughly the sentimental and the religious are entwined here—how the sentimental is channeled through forms borrowed from Christian ritual and belief and how the use of those rituals in turn generates its own structure of feeling. The sense of the sacred would have depended mainly on the associations already attached to the figure of Sam Davis. By the 1890s Davis had been enshrined in the commemorative literature of veterans’ culture as the exemplar of the heroic common soldier, and his popularity could be said to rival Lee’s or Jackson’s. Because of his youth and because he reputedly faced his execution with unwavering bravery, refusing to name the individuals who had sent him on his mission, his story offered ample opportunity for pathos, and he was almost invariably characterized in imagery that compared him in his youthful innocence to Christ, his death to the Crucifi xion, and so forth.51 In his person Sam Davis merged the figure of the common soldier with that of Jesus himself and implicitly sanctified the supposedly innocent but unwaveringly noble sacrifice of all the Confederate dead. The religious associations that already hovered around the figure of Davis are heightened in the wording of the Daughters of the Confederacy report. In addition to repeating the word sacred, it contains two phrases that are clear biblical allusions referring to transformation or resurrection. The phrase “face to face” appears in the familiar passage I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” And the most obvious of the allusions, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye”—set off in quotation marks as an acknowledgment of its origins outside the text—comes from Paul’s famous passage on the resurrection of the dead: Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. . . . then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (I Corinthians 15:51–55)

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The association of Davis with Christ and the references to the Resurrection suggest that, at least in the assistant secretary’s telling, the ceremonial display of the overcoat contained the dim but unmistakable outlines of a pivotal biblical event: the appearance of the resurrected Christ to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. For years, references to Memorial Day had equated Southern women with the women who tended to Christ’s body and visited his tomb, as a way of emphasizing the duty to attend to and cherish the sanctified dead. “Where were Mary Magdalene and the other Mary after the crucifi xion?” queried a Daughters of the Confederacy publication on the history of Memorial Day observances. “At the sepulcher with sweet spices. So these women [Southern women] came to the soldiers’ graves with choice plants and bright flowers.”52 The Tennessee Daughters of the Confederacy ceremony built on that association by reenacting the biblical narrative of the visit: the women beheld the empty garment that had once encased the sanctified object of their adoration; that sight induced tears of anguish and bewilderment; and it was followed immediately by an encounter with the living being himself. Allusions to Christ’s death are evident not only in the references to the Resurrection but, even more potently, in the form of the ritual itself. For if the display of a transcendently meaningful object to an assembled group of worshippers references any specific religious ritual, it is of course the Eucharist. And if silence in a ceremonial context could evoke the moment before prayer, the most pregnant silence in Christian liturgy was the silence that accompanied the elevation of the host. This secular ceremony in which an object that had covered the body of the Christlike Sam Davis was displayed in a “sacred silence” thus dimly but unmistakably echoed the elevation of the body of Christ before his assembled followers. And the allusion to the Eucharist brought with it the notion of the body being displayed as a means of remembrance (“This do in remembrance of me”) and identification with suffering, as well as hope for its transcendence.53 These religious allusions are crucial to understanding the meanings this ceremony could have held for the assembled women. The intense— and to a contemporary reader unfathomable—emotion the report portrays them as displaying would have been complex and multilayered. In part it would have involved revisiting the grief of the wartime losses that still shadowed their lives. But the biblical allusions suggest that their reaction was compounded of an equally intense yearning for the joys of the afterlife or resurrection, prefigured and made possible by

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Christ’s suffering and Resurrection, when they would again see their long-dead loved ones “face to face.” The dual presence of mourning and hope is figured in the charged relic of Davis’s empty overcoat, which stands in for the bodies of the war dead even as it suggests the Eucharist and the risen Christ. Personal sentimental and religious emotions were the indispensable precondition of the ceremony’s collective cultural meanings, which extended the personal meanings in ways specific to the Lost Cause and its ideology. Sam Davis’s overcoat was obviously of particular significance to citizens of Tennessee because, under the Lost Cause, he was Tennessee’s most celebrated Confederate soldier. His death thirty years before could be construed as especially ignominious—occurring behind enemy lines, far from his fellow soldiers, at the mercy of his captors and unable to defend himself. Shorn of its heroic and religious rhetoric, it was a death that could offer only a spectacle of powerlessness and doomed submission to fate, and surely the thought of that death was the most immediate motive for the assembled women’s “sobs that came from aching hearts.” The restoration of Davis’s overcoat to his native state functioned, however, as a symbolic homecoming, undoing the ignominy of his death and surrounding him with kin and compatriots who could value his sacrifice and attend to his memory. Moreover, the return of the coat, like the restoration of Florida’s battle flags, represented the victors’ recognition of the defeated foe’s valor and the removal of the stain of dishonor and forced subjection. Like the emotions evoked by the sight of the flags, these tears of anguish thus also merge into sensations of relief, release, and gratitude. The reappearance of Sam Davis in his native state signaled the resolution of the crisis of honor that the defeat and subjugation of the South had inaugurated—a crisis that would have been experienced in a heightened form among Confederates in Tennessee, given that the state itself had been bitterly divided between Unionists and Confederates and that most of its territory had been conquered by Union troops relatively early in the war. In this charged context, even the religious concept of resurrection assumed a political valence. Lost Cause commemorations’ reliance on the imagery of mourning implicitly recognized that the Confederacy was dead and gone. At the same time, the commemorations did not necessarily work to reconcile participants to loss. In fact, it could be said that they perpetuated the practices of mourning precisely to avoid acknowledging irretrievable loss. Here again Christian belief, this time in the form of the doctrine of resurrection, offered ways to structure the experience of loss so that it could be resolved in transcendent tri136

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umph rather than in resignation or despair. On the one hand, white Southerners mourned their vanished political hopes; on the other, they repeatedly expressed a belief in the ultimate resurrection of those hopes, though the specifics remained somewhat vague. Like so much of the imagery of death and mourning in the postwar South, allusions to resurrection derived in part from the circumstance that Southern commemoration of the war began in funeral and burial ceremonies, particularly as those were translated into Memorial Day services from the 1860s on. References both to Christ’s Resurrection and to the final general resurrection of the dead would have been inevitable accompaniments of such services. These theological usages, however, merged insensibly into metaphorical usages. By 1896, when the memorial booklet issued to commemorate the opening of the Confederate Museum informed its readers that memorial services for the war dead served as reminders that “for our beloved Dead and their holy cause there is and ever shall be a Resurrection and a Life,”54 the resurrection of the dead soldiers had become inseparable from the final triumph of their cause. The merging of Confederate and Christian resurrections took a variety of forms. At veterans’ reunions speakers detailed homey scenarios in which the final resurrection would allow old soldiers, rising triumphant in their gray uniforms, to be united with Lee and Jackson.55 At other times the Lost Cause itself was spoken of as a kind of somber resurrection of the lost Confederacy. At the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in 1890, for instance, one observer noted that “Cheers such as we have not heard for a quarter of a century salute our noble chieftain, mingle with the thunder of artillery and the roar and rattle of musketry. It seems as if legions of heroes have risen from the dead and are fighting their battles again in defense of Richmond.”56 Such imagery imparted an eschatological edge to the Lost Cause, a fiery, apocalyptic assurance that the South would eventually rise triumphant—a tone that was particularly evident when the South of the Lost Cause or of an indefinite future age was compared directly to the risen Christ. “She was crucified,” Thomas Nelson Page wrote, “bound hand and foot . . . laid away in the sepulchre . . . sealed with the seal of government and a watch was set. The South was dead and buried, and yet she rose again.”57 And a former soldier speaking at a veterans’ gathering in 1879 asserted that, like any truth, the Confederate cause had been “subjected to mock trial and condemnation, scourged and spitted on, betrayed by secret foes, staggering under its Cross, and sealed to-day in its sepulchre.” Yet even so defeated, it “bursts to-morrow the 137

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gates of death, rises with the crown, triumphant reigns throughout the world.”58 Allusions to resurrection in the account of the Tennessee Daughters of the Confederacy’s ritual, then, had the potential to activate a complex web of associations, all vindicating the cause of the Confederacy and implying its divine sanction. If the assembled women beheld Sam Davis “face to face,” what they also beheld was the revivified and triumphant Confederacy. And—perhaps most potent of all— that Confederacy was inseparable from the triumphant Christ, whose appearance could serve multiple functions in Christian theology: to assuage grief, to announce the truth and power of the resurrection of the dead, to vindicate his people in his triumphant return in the last days. The display of Sam Davis’s overcoat gives some indication of the layered associations that individual relics could trigger and also of the way those associations brought structures of political, cultural, and religious meaning to bear on seemingly insignificant objects. Yet what is perhaps most suggestive about this example is that, like the flags returned to the Florida legislature, the relic that lies at its heart is not simply an inert object but the catalyst of transformation. In fact, the assistant secretary’s description lays particular stress on the overcoat’s transformative power: “instantaneously,” “in the twinkling of an eye,” the very sight of it moves its viewers into a space that is newly and suddenly “sacred.” The power to transform was of course intrinsic to the sentimental token. It was implicit in its status as a thing that could be used to negotiate psychological states and to bring individuals into the sacred territory where they were suffused with the power of their most tender emotions and memories. And the sentimental token’s power to effect transformation was dramatically heightened when it was metaphorically linked to the Eucharist, whose meaning inhered in its capacity to be transformed into sacred substance as well as in its ability to effect transformation in the community of believers. To pinpoint what was involved in the transformation generated by Sam Davis’s overcoat, however, we must understand not only the sentimental token’s intrinsic powers or the symbolism of the Eucharist but the change effected in the “sacred silence.” The report emphasizes that this silence makes evident a sense of deep and painful emotion. “Every heart” is “melted to tears,” and in that condition the women are collectively able to intuit the presence of the “aching hearts” of all their fellow participants. They are transported from a contained selfhood in which emotion is experienced as an individual and relatively regulated process to an altered state of apparently transparent access to each other’s emotional reality. The individual viewers experience their 138

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intense reactions to the overcoat—a complex of emotions proceeding from a particular set of historical experiences and a particular social construction of emotion—in the presence of those who are uniquely positioned to understand those sentiments, so that in the few minutes the ceremony lasts they come to constitute a collectivity of suffering. And this collectivity apparently is the ritual’s point, since it culminates in the women’s weeping together “with one accord.” It is not necessarily the acknowledgment of community in itself that is transforming, however, but the way that acknowledgment activates certain readings of the overcoat at the expense of others. In the display of the mute evidence of a Confederate soldier’s isolated death, in the dissolution of bodily boundaries in tears, and in the unveiling of the body’s internal reality in the “aching hearts,” the women display their mutual abjection in a carefully cordoned and “sacred” ritual space. They display it to the community peculiarly constituted by that abjection and, in doing so, not only affirm their ongoing attachment to what had been humiliated but also constitute it as something other than shameful. Contemplation of the objects that had survived from the war years allowed white Southerners to experience their collective debasement anew in the mode of what might be called the “pathetic sublime”: not as shame but as exaltation, as inexpressible shame transformed into the ineffably sacred. The sentimental token had developed as a technology of the interiorized self—a prime means by which that self was both cultivated and reflected back to itself. But the strategies of the Lost Cause show how a cultural form so intimately tied to private sentimental memory could, for that very reason, be efficacious in reworking a collective trauma. In bringing the forms of intense private emotion into the public arena, Southerners theatricalized the display of the “private.” They breached the ostensibly absolute boundaries between public and private and embedded the “private”—with its connotations of the sacred and the supremely cherished—as a discrete spectacle at the heart of the public. And this privately experienced collective was of course the analogue for the Confederate “nation” itself, which had no existence in the public world of nation-states but which, so the myth of the Lost Cause asserted, persisted intact in the collective memory of its survivors. In one sense the artifacts of the Lost Cause were highly anomalous examples of the relic tradition. In no other context do relics seem to have been described in such heightened terms or made the objects of such elaborate rituals; in no other context was their status as sentimental mementos exploited to anywhere near the same extent. But if Lost 139

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Cause relics were an extreme example of the sentimental relic, they also offer a particularly vivid illustration of the development of the memory object in the late nineteenth century. In the various ways they were used and in the emotions that were attached to them, Lost Cause relics signal the increasingly complex ways certain kinds of objects had become entwined with self. They had been “psychologized”—rendered capable both of reflecting back the viewer’s inner psychological reality and of being deployed in complex negotiations that reworked selfhood and the self’s relation to the past. And they also demonstrate that the relic’s implication in the self’s inner processes was what rendered it so pliable, so suitable, for overtly nationalistic ends. Lost Cause relics’ efficacy lay in their ability to mediate between multiple realities: between past and present, between the sentimental sacred and a more overtly Christianized sacred, and between the private, interiorized self and the public, overtly political realm. They suggest how relics sutured the self seamlessly into the nation, binding citizens at the level of their most intimate memories and attachments and allowing them to experience the state as that whereby and in whose service they were transformed.

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From Relic to Souvenir: Buffs’ Collecting of the War The Southern Lost Cause museums were by no means the only places in late nineteenth-century America where the Civil War’s many artifacts were put on display. Northern cities and towns too exhibited war relics in public buildings, historical societies, and war memorials. Relics were also frequently exhibited by organizations that served the war’s veterans. In 1888 the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, an early Union veterans’ organization, assembled one of the largest collections when it established the War Library and Museum of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States in Philadelphia.1 Individual posts of the Grand Army of the Republic and other veterans’ organizations often displayed selections of relics with particular significance for the history of that post, including articles belonging to dead comrades or objects the post’s members had preserved from their own wartime experiences. And the soldiers’ homes that served as retirement facilities for elderly veterans in both Northern and Southern states sometimes housed small displays of wartime artifacts as well.2 These exhibits in civic buildings and veterans’ organizations were augmented by a number of commercial museums, many located on the old battlefields to cater to the increasing number of tourists visiting them by the end of the century. As early as the 1870s, for example, the collector Joel A. Danner opened a museum at Gettysburg, the first of many at that battlefield. The noted battlefield 141

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guide Oliver T. Reilly had a museum in Sharpsburg, Maryland, site of the Battle of Antietam. Union veteran Leander Cotton and his partner William A. Hills opened one of the best-known relic museums at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the 1880s.3 And in what was perhaps the most lavishly funded of the relic displays, in the late 1880s the entrepreneur and former Confederate soldier Charles F. Gunther had the notorious Libby Prison, where so many Union soldiers had been confined, moved from Richmond to Chicago and put to use as a tourist attraction and museum housing his own extensive collection of wartime artifacts.4 Though all these museums commemorated the same historical event as the Lost Cause museums, and though at least in theory they drew on the same stock of battlefield artifacts, they also differed markedly from the museums established by the Southern women’s organizations. Although only a portion of the Lost Cause collections were traditional sentimental mementos, those collections were structured, as I noted in the previous chapter, by the controlling metaphor of the communal memory cabinet. They gathered their artifacts from a number of individual Southerners, acquiring objects from the battlefield as well as from the home front, and thus at least claimed to represent the collective Southern experience. And labels, catalog entries, and dedicatory speeches and publications all worked to frame the disparate objects on display as tokens of memory and mourning. Indeed, the reality of defeat made mourning tokens of objects that might otherwise have seemed to have few sentimental connotations. Any article that a soldier had carried through the war became a sad reminder of the futility of his struggle; objects from the home front were evidence of sacrifices made in vain; and Union weapons salvaged from the battlefield only underscored how poorly equipped Southern troops were and confirmed the victor’s power. Lost Cause museums thus invariably presented their collections under the sign of loss; in fact, the rhetorical triumph of the Lost Cause lay in its ability to invest in the signifiers of loss, to posit suffering and defeat as manifestations of nobility apart from any tangible results. Northern relic collections, on the other hand, certainly contained many reminders of lives lost and hardships suffered, but those losses did not serve as a figure for the overriding collective loss of the war, of national honor, and of political sovereignty itself. But the difference between Lost Cause museums and other collections of Civil War artifacts was not only a matter of the war’s final outcome and the way it recast everything that had come before. It was also a consequence of the inescapably gendered nature of Civil War

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relic collecting. Among the many relic displays dotting the postwar American landscape, the Lost Cause museums were a distinct anomaly in that their collections were assembled primarily by women. Southern women’s involvement in the museums was in accord with the prominent role women played in Lost Cause commemoration in general, overseeing the reinterment of the dead, organizing Memorial Day commemorations, and erecting monuments. In these memorial activities, they drew on the sentimental practices that had so long been the province of women and that were ideally attuned to the imperatives of the Lost Cause, which framed commemoration as the inevitable outgrowth of women’s unceasing devotion to the memory of the South’s lost and wounded men. In the North, on the other hand, as John Neff has pointed out, it was primarily the veterans themselves who took on the task of memorializing.5 In addition to organizing reunions, erecting monuments, and laboring to transform the battlefields themselves into commemorative sites, they were the ones who established Northern exhibitions of war relics. And as entities founded by men, those exhibitions drew heavily on an equally male culture of collectors and Civil War buffs. The culture of Civil War buffs as it emerged in both North and South in the 1880s and 1890s spanned a wide variety of undertakings, including documenting and debating the minutiae of battles and military strategy, visiting battlefields, and, not least, collecting the war’s relics. An individual buff’s interest in collecting sometimes arose from living near a battlefield or hearing about the war while growing up, but often it was a direct result of having fought in the war. Indeed, as David Blight has noted, the veterans were the original Civil War buffs.6 They were the ones who first started rehashing the war, revisiting the sites of battles, and sometimes, at veterans’ reunions, even reenacting them. In fact, most turn-of-the-century collectors seem to have been veterans who may have preserved some souvenirs from their own wartime experience but who also acquired artifacts by visiting battlefields after the war as well as through transactions with other collectors and with the various dealers who bought up surplus weapons and other remnants of the war.7 Most buffs’ collections were private collections assembled by one man for his own enjoyment and perhaps made available to the public at the occasional patriotic celebration or temporary exhibition in a local library or other setting. But their omnipresence meant they also were the source of many of the relics that made their way into

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more permanent public exhibitions. In contrast to the Lost Cause museums—which also contained objects from buffs’ collections but had many other objects as well—the North’s public collections rarely seem to have been gathered from the community at large but were built mainly from existing collections. A permanent exhibition of relics in a civic building might even have come from one buff who had contributed his entire collection for display. The war relics exhibited by the Buffalo Historical Society, for instance, had been assembled not by the society itself but by the collector Julius E. Francis.8 And the nucleus of the exhibition in Denver’s state capitol in the 1890s was the collection of Cecil A. Deane, although subsequent donors contributed many more artifacts.9 If buffs’ relics had a considerable presence in collections with a civic purpose, they figured even more prominently in the numerous commercial relic establishments, since such collections had almost invariably been founded by an individual buff who simply displayed the artifacts he had acquired over the years. The meanings these male buffs attached to the war’s relics were very different from the sentimental meanings ascribed by the women who founded the Lost Cause museums. For if at the time of the Civil War itself both men and women could subscribe to the forms of sentimental remembrance, by the 1880s and 1890s, when the war’s relics began to be exhibited in public, masculinity was being reconfigured as a strenuously heroic identity that was the very antithesis of female sentimentality and in which the old icons of sentimental memory had little role or meaning.10 As many commentators have noted, for veterans this new definition of masculinity found expression in a retrospective reconfiguration of their wartime memories.11 Thus, as Gerald Linderman has pointed out, several decades after the fighting, even veterans who had returned from the war cynical, disillusioned, or traumatized had begun to revisit their memories with a lingering fondness and to reconceive those years as the glorious apogee of their individual histories, as of the nation’s history as a whole.12 Looking back on the war, they remembered the camaraderie they had experienced and the bluff physical courage they supposedly had demonstrated. And the collections they assembled exemplified this view, portraying the war not as unresolved trauma best healed through the assiduous application of women’s care and mourning but as a largely male achievement that exemplified and validated late nineteenth-century ideals of manhood. If turn-of-the-century Civil War buffs were not concerned to perpetuate a sentimental memory of the war, what they were concerned with

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were the technical minutiae of buff culture: the particulars of individual battles, the convolutions of military strategy, the specialized knowledge of firearms. Though there was no absolute distinction between the kinds of things in the Lost Cause collections and those assembled by male collectors and battlefield museums, in general buffs tended to focus far more on military hardware—on weapons and ammunition. The catalog of the collection of the prominent Connecticut collector A. E. Brooks, for example, indicated that more than half of the display cases contained nothing but guns and swords, although not all these weapons came from the Civil War. The remaining cases contained Civil War ammunition, Native American artifacts, prehistoric stone implements, and the battered belt buckles, buttons, and other small items that collectors scavenged from battlefields. Objects that might be considered sentimental relics were virtually nonexistent, though the displays did include occasional bullets that had killed specific, named individuals, a watch that had stopped a bullet, a Union soldier’s coat returned to a mother after her son’s death, and numerous pieces of wood from Andersonville prison.13 But it was not only the kinds of objects buffs favored that distinguished their collections from sentimental Lost Cause collections. Equally important was the way they presented their artifacts. Entries for articles in Lost Cause collections identified the object and its donor, and if they offered anything more it was usually a personal story of the circumstances and memories that gave the object meaning, sometimes in the form of an abbreviated sentimental narrative. The catalog entries for buffs’ collections, however, tended toward a different kind of detail, focusing on statistics, tactical descriptions, and the minutiae of military hardware. Thus the catalog of the Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum frequently included the number of casualties incurred in a particular engagement alongside the description of a relic of that engagement.14 The catalog of the Thomas Espy Post introduced its collection of army corps badges with a short disquisition on how corps badges came into being and the administrative structure they designated.15 And the catalog of Virginia collector B. H. Jacobs’s collection concluded with a statistical summary of total Civil War deaths, broken down by Union and Confederate and by cause of death.16 Entries in the catalogs of buffs’ collections tended to be brief and to the point. If they provided more extensive information, it generally was not a sentimental narrative but a quasi-technical summary of the particular class of objects the artifact belonged to or the military

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engagement it was deployed in. A large projectile in A. E. Brooks’s collection was accompanied by a minutely detailed account of the circumstances of its firing: U.S. 8-Inch Parrot Shell, weight 145 pounds, which was fi red from the Swamp Angel into Charleston, S.C., August 22 or 23, 1863. The distance was 79,000 yards. At half-past one on the morning of August 22d the first shell was fired from the Swamp Angel. Sixteen shells were fired at that early hour, and on August 23d twenty more shells were fired; six of these shells exploded in the gun.17

The catalog of the small collection assembled by the Massachusetts collector Irving Heald provides similarly detailed information about a shell discovered at Gettysburg: “English Whitworth Shell. Very rare. This shell was used in the Whitworth gun. This gun was presented to the U.S. Government by loyal Americans in England. It was the only breech loading gun used at Gettysburg. It was captured by the rebels at ‘Bull Run’ and was used by them in this battle.”18 And Brooks evinced the buff’s concern to detail the provenance and history of a class of weapons in his description of a gun identified as a “Confederate Rifled B.L. Carbine, cal. 52, percussion-lock, paper cartridge”: This carbine is one of many that were made in Richmond, Va., in 1862 and 1863, by S. G. Robinson Arms Manufactory, which were used in the Civil War on the southern side. They are the same model as the Sharps carbine rifles that were made in Hartford, Conn., during the Civil War. This carbine with many others were buried just before the fall of Richmond, April, 1865. They were afterwards discovered by government officials, and taken up and sold by Mr. Hayes of Richmond, Va., by order of the U.S. Government.19

Alongside the facts of weapons’ manufacture and deployment, buffs’ descriptions reflected their fascination with the specifics of the weapons’ technology. The entry for a howitzer shell in the Lookout Mountain museum’s collections offered a long account of the way howitzer shells were fired and how they functioned.20 A stirrup was glossed with this explanation: “It is a self-acting stirrup. When a soldier is wounded or thrown from his saddle, his own weight opens up the stirrup and allows him to drop to the ground, thus preventing him being dragged to death by his horse over the battlefield. The old or plain stirrup caused many a wounded soldier’s death by his foot slipping through the stirrup.”21 Similarly, the entry for a homemade powder horn in New York veteran James W. Eldridge’s collection focused on the object’s 146

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components and the ingenuity that assembled them: “The brass ornament at the base is the top of a pair of tongs. The large brass ornament near the small end is made from an andiron. The brass powder measure and stopper is made from a candle extinguisher. A mighty interesting relic.”22 This fascination with mechanics effectively overrode any pity for the suffering flesh the projectiles struck or identification with the wounded. Thus the entry for “two minie-balls with brass caps and concave washer” in the Cotton and Hills catalog confined itself to a dispassionate detailing of the object’s function and effects: “The washer spreads when the ball is fired, which cleans the gun barrel,” and the parts “generally separate in the flesh, leaving the smaller ones there even if the balls pass through.”23 In addition to weapons, buff culture focused particularly on bullets and shot of various kinds—in good part, no doubt, because these objects could be gathered in such numbers at any battle site. Catalogs routinely contained lists of such shot, precisely classified by type and sometimes place of discovery or other identifying information: Spherical case shot for 12-pounder Rebel smooth-bore gun, caliber 4.62. Manufactured and used by the Rebels at the Battle of Gettysburg. This projectile was found near Little Round Top. It contains from twenty to twenty-five cast-iron bullets, besides the explosive charge. 10-pound Parrott shell for 10-pounder Parrott rifle gun, caliber 2.09. Found near Cemetery Hill, Gettysburg. A 3-inch Hotchkiss shell for 3-inch United States Ordnance rifled gun. Found near Seminary Ridge, Gettysburg. The fragment of a 6.7-inch James case shot, for 6.7-inch James rifled gun. Found at Gettysburg. Four musket explosive bullets, of Williams’s patent, caliber .57. Found near Little Round Top, Gettysburg. A grape shot found near Cemetery Hill, Gettysburg. A strand of grape is generally composed of nine such bullets bolted together in such a manner that when fired from a gun they separate, and are very destructive at short range. 24

Curiosities that sported some physical anomaly or striking feature were especially prized. Virtually every large collection had its “one of a kind” 147

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example of two projectiles that had fused in midair. A ramrod embedded in a bullet showed that “the soldier in the excitement of battle evidently forgot to withdraw his ramrod after loading his gun.”25 A ramrod found stuck fast in a tree allowed its viewer to deduce that a soldier had run out of ammunition and used his ramrod for his last shot.26 As collectors of Civil War artifacts focused on certain kinds of objects, they also developed specific modes of exhibiting their collections. In many the various pieces of shot were simply laid out for display en masse. But perhaps because so many similar objects fragmented visitors’ impressions and overwhelmed their focus on the individual pieces, collectors also sought to impose a visual or conceptual unity. One exhibit listed in the Cotton and Hills catalog consisted of shot from a number of battlefields mounted in a particular symbolic configuration: As the battle of Gettysburg was the pivotal act in the great drama of the war for the Union, and as all other battles look towards that as the high-water mark of the rebellion, therefore, everything here placed, whose position would signify direction, are pointing towards it, the centre, all other represented fields encircling it, from left to right.27

Another entry in the same catalog described 113 pieces found at Gettysburg that had been mounted in a fishhook configuration that showed “the line of battle and a part of the several regiments engaged in position as they stood from Round Top (the extreme left) via Cemetery Hill (the center) to Culp’s Hill (the right).”28 Such displays organized relics in schematics determined by the war’s history and topography, but buffs might also arrange their artifacts into patterns that had little informational value but were precise, orderly, and often visually arresting. In Brooks’s catalog, for instance, the list of the contents of each case of artifacts is accompanied by a photo showing a group of artifacts laid out in a striking pattern that subsumes individual relics into a larger layout. Thus pistols are arrayed in a symmetrical sunburst; rifles are neatly aligned in rows so that their outlines appear less as individual stocks and barrels than as a pattern of parallel lines; and cannonballs are laid out according to size, the largest in the center, smaller ones arrayed in rows of ascending size above it, with a chain (perhaps used to block access to a harbor or in some other military action) draped in two symmetrical loops at the top. Though most relic displays were not as highly structured as Brooks’s, photographs of other buffs’ collections and of military posts’ relic rooms show that at least a smattering of other collections were similarly arranged.29 148

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In addition to assembling their relics into such schematic layouts, collectors developed a display tradition in which they reworked their many smaller pieces into elaborate sculptural forms. The most popular were the large freestanding pyramids, obelisks, and other conventional monument forms that buffs fashioned from hundreds of pieces of battlefield hardware. Brooks’s catalog quotes a writer from the Hartford Daily Times describing a pyramid constructed by Brooks himself: In the construction of this unique object 1,833 bullets from the leading battlefields of the war, and 124 Union and Confederate buttons have been utilized. . . . Revolvers, epaulets, belt-plates worn by men and officers, bayonets, canteens, bowie knives used by the Louisiana Rangers, exploded shell from different fields, cavalry equipment, spurs, and buckles, have been incorporated in the design with great skill and intelligence. . . . The work is a recital in “lead and iron hail” of the war. Every bullet, every broken remnant of shot and shell, every belt-plate and epaulette could tell of inspiring scenes and events. The monument is not a patchwork of these relics. Instead it is the clearest and most instructive of designs.30

The pyramid was, of course, a form regularly used for nineteenthcentury funereal monuments, including memorials for the Civil War dead. Though many collectors’ pyramids were relatively unstructured, displaying assemblages of relics that seem to have been glued onto pyramidal forms more or less at random, Brooks’s creations in particular were meant to look like the monuments in cemeteries and battlefields. He painstakingly assembled bullets and other components into mosaics that imitated carved stone both in the rich, knobby texture of the densely clustered relics and in divisions into decorative bands and rows that framed dates, inscriptions, and various symbols, all outlined with shot and other small items. In this way Brooks fashioned objects as imposing and as carefully designed as any of the smaller regimental monuments at Gettysburg. At the same time, his homemade creations brought the popular tradition of vernacular craft into the public realm. They translated official commemoration into the demotic of the builder and hobbyist.31 Although these monuments took the physical form of memorials, however, they memorialized the war differently than collections of sentimental relics did. While the description of Brooks’s pyramid recognized the evocative power of each individual relic, it put greater emphasis on the impression they made collectively in their “clear” and “instructive” design. These sculptures took what might otherwise be considered the feminized form of the small, treasured memento and 149

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reworked it into the masculine forms of the massive and monumental. Displays of sentimental relics, in contrast, did not necessarily seek an overall coherence of form. The point was not visual impressiveness but the internal vista that each object was capable of unfolding. Objects were to be visited with the eyes of the mind and heart. They were to be individually contemplated and plumbed for the stories they could yield rather than being experienced as a larger aesthetic or informational whole.

Buffs’ relics were not intended to prompt sentimental reflection, but that does not mean they were incapable of encoding stories. The difference between the sentimental story and the buff’s story is summed up in a passage in Union veteran Harry M. Kieffer’s 1880s memoir Recollections of a Drummer-Boy. After offering a firsthand account of the Battle of Gettysburg, Kieffer duly noted the horrifying aftermath of the fighting and lamented the great loss of life. But he also described the conversations that supposedly took place after the battle: Scattered about irregularly were groups of men discussing the battle and its results, or relating exciting incidents and adventures of the fray: here, one fellow pointing out bullet holes in his coat or cap or a great rent in the sleeve of his blouse made by a flying piece of shell; there, a man laughing as he held up his crushed canteen, or showed his tobacco-box with a hole in the lid and a bullet among his “fine cut.”32

In Kieffer’s portrayal, immediately after the fighting soldiers impress objects into service as impromptu relics that encapsulate the experience they have just lived through. Significantly, they seek out not sorrowful mementos of the dead but things that, like themselves, have emerged triumphant from the fiery hail of battle. Although Kieffer’s brief image does not do justice to the range of things soldiers collected during the war, it does express something essential about a kind of object that many veterans preserved. As I noted in chapter 4, the quintessential soldier’s relic was a bullet—the very bullet extracted from his own wound. Like the bullet-punctured cap or tobacco box triumphantly shown to comrades, such a bullet was the antithesis of the sentimental relic. The bullets that appeared in displays of sentimental relics, like the ones cherished by families on the home front, had most often inflicted mortal wounds. They evoked the sorrow and the horror of war

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and served as the most intimate memorials possible of the dead soldiers whose flesh they had pierced. On the other hand, the bullets that living veterans carried in their pockets or wore on their watch fobs were not mementos but talismans—evidence that the bearers had cheated death once and perhaps could do so again. They were not invitations to sorrowful reflection or pity but precisely the opposite—assurance that their bearers were still part of the here and now. Kieffer’s brief sketch is significant, however, not only for the kinds of relics it envisions veterans collecting but for the way it imagines those relics as inevitably evoking stories. Though Kieffer sees the veterans’ stories as arising spontaneously from the experience of battle, his anecdote can more aptly be seen as an image of the role storytelling had come to play in veterans’ culture at the time he wrote his book. By the 1880s veterans were reliving their wartime experiences in commemorative gatherings, encampments, and self-published accounts. Collectively they were generating a story of the war, one that was made up of innumerable individual stories but was structured by a common set of imperatives about what constituted a meaningful war story and made it worth telling. Veterans’ posts and encampments were perhaps the arenas where collective storytelling was most self-consciously cultivated, but the genre of the personal war story also informed battlefield tours and the presentation of relics in catalogs and collections. The account of the battlefield of Antietam that Oliver Reilly published in 1906 illustrates how closely stories were linked to artifacts. Reilly’s booklet included a long section titled “Stories of Antietam as Told to Mr. Reilly by Veterans and Eye-Witnesses of the Battle.” The title announces the chapter as simply a collection of verbal anecdotes, and Reilly made no claim to any other organizing principle, merely stringing his stories together, one after the other, like objects in a collection. And just as each relic in a display might be accompanied by its own story, so these stories were often illustrated by objects. Thus Sharpsburg resident Ada Thomas preserved—and presumably could tell a story about—the couch that General Rodman had died on and a table, scarred with bullet holes, that had been used in amputations. Colonel Henry Hebb was standing at the rear of his house when a twelve-pound solid shot (“now in Reilly’s War Museum”) hurtled past him and lodged inside. “If he had been a few seconds later in moving he would have been hit by it.” A shell burst through the door of a house owned by Mr. Aaron Fry and buried itself in a chest of bedclothes, piercing a sheet “which,

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when it was unfolded, had a hole through every fold.” And out near the Dunkard church, Mr. Jacob Lair uncovered a large piece of grapeshot that just might have been the one that took off his arm.33 Though Reilly’s abbreviated anecdotes obliquely noted the war’s losses—death, limbs shot off—those losses were neither lingered over nor mourned, and they were certainly not the point of his narratives. Instead, from the events of battle his tellings distilled the piquant anecdote—the narrow escape, the remarkable coincidence, the thing that was precisely a “good story.” In general, veterans’ stories tended toward a certain jauntiness. Like Kieffer’s exuberant soldiers, they emphasized the adventure of battle without dwelling on its pain or trauma. They focused on the bullet survived rather than the bullet succumbed to. Such stories were very different from sentimental narratives. And, in fact, if the Lost Cause museums worked to frame their somewhat indiscriminate collections as a cabinet of sentimental mementos, buffs’ collections were more apt to downplay sentimental associations. The buffs’ collections were heir to a wide variety of things collected during the war itself and might easily include such standard sentimental fare as Bibles with bullets embedded in them or pieces of wallpaper from Ford’s Theatre. But the catalog entries for such artifacts typically confined themselves to factual enumerations and offered few descriptive adjectives or overt evocations of pathos, let alone elaborate narratives of suffering, sentiment, and loss.34 Thus in the catalog of James Eldridge’s collection, that most emotionally fraught of objects, the captured, bulletriddled battle flag, was summed up in a bare, unemotional description: the flag of the Fifth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry was “captured in the Chattanooga Campaign by the 4th Georgia Regt., C.S.A. Shows 37 bullet holes.”35 The listing for a bullet in the catalog of Wisconsin veteran “Doc” Aubery’s collection eschewed sentimental rhetoric in favor of a precise anatomical delineation of the ball’s trajectory: “A ball with a record. Hit Private Thomas Morang of A Co., 2nd Vt., in the right side, followed the fifth rib around and lodged in the back near the back bone where the surgeon, Dr. Baleau removed it.”36 In what could be the setup for a sentimental narrative, the catalog of the collection compiled by Leander Cotton and William Hills informed its readers that a combination dagger and pistol was given to a Mrs. Hicks by a soldier she had nursed back to health. But instead of dwelling on the pathos of the soldier’s illness or the nobility of his nurse’s sacrifice, the entry lingered on the mechanics of the unusual weapon: “The blade opens by means of a spring upon touching one of the knobs on the side of the handle. The pistol is within the handle. The arm is opened by the hand 152

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and sprung upon the cap by touching the other knob.”37 And though the listing of a board from the house where General Thomas Cobb was taken after being wounded might conceivably serve as an occasion for sentimental or patriotic reflection, the emphasis in the catalog entry was entirely on its attributes as a souvenir: it was pierced by eight minié balls; when it was removed, it was sold for a dollar.38 Buffs’ matter-of-fact annotations often seemed oblivious to objects’ potential sentimental associations. And where they did evoke those associations, the acknowledgment was sometimes ironic. An entry for a Bible in the catalog of Gunther’s Libby Prison War Museum, for example, ironically dismisses the narratives conventionally associated with the sacred book by labeling it a “Bible carried by Col. C. A. Stevens during a long imprisonment, and personally read by him more or less— perhaps less as it shows a remarkable state of preservation.”39 Similarly, one of the entries in Doc Aubery’s catalog sets up a stereotypical sentimental tableau only to deflate it. A photograph in Aubery’s collection is identified as a “Photo of Sergt. Stackhouse of 6th Wis Regt. He was wounded at Gettysburg, a ball passing entirely through his body. He is looking at his old shirt and cap with bullet mark and thinking of the time that tried men’s souls and sometimes the soles of their shoes.”40 Stackhouse is shown in the attitude appropriate to sentimental contemplation: he is using a memento of wartime suffering as an occasion for elevated reflection on “the time that tried men’s souls.” But the sly substitution of “soles” for “souls” effectively undercuts the sentimental stance. It debunks an earlier generation’s high-flown appeals to duty and its tendency to substitute rhetoric for unpleasant fact and offers the more prosaic and wryly humorous memory of the physical discomforts of a soldier’s life. The image of Sergeant Stackhouse meditating on the travails of soldiering illustrates another signal characteristic of Civil War veterans’ stories. Though the stirring account of battle would always epitomize the war story, by the final decades of the century veterans’ wartime remembrances came to focus as much on the daily routine of camp life as on the experience of battle.41 The catalog of the Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum illustrates the tenor of these memories when it glosses an old hatchet found at Chickamauga with the reflection, “If this little relic could but talk, would it not tell of many incidents of interest to us all?—of stories told and songs of the boys in camp; with its help many a boy’s cold body has been made warm, and by the fire they have slept, wrapped in their blankets, dreaming of wife, babies and old mother at home.”42 Like many contemporaneous evocations of camp life, this 153

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citation is remarkable for its ability to discover hominess at the heart of war. Cozy by the campfire, surrounded by male comrades, and securely ensconced in the collective retelling of what all have lived through, the soldier can immerse himself in dreams of home. And in the context of this passage, the reference to home does not so much suggest what the camp lacks as inject the signifiers of domesticity into camp life itself. Paradoxically, the entry presents the experience of war—or at least the experience of soldiering—as the final rediscovery of home. In these few lines we can glimpse something of the way that memories of the war and the emotional structures used to process them had changed since the 1860s. In revisiting their wartime experiences, veterans eschewed a sentimental structure of feeling, but in its place they erected the rather different structure of nostalgia. As the description of Sergeant Stackhouse contemplating his uniform shows, nostalgic memory was nominally truer to the humdrum reality of soldier life. It rejected extreme bodily and emotional conditions, heightened rhetoric, and the appeal of the pathetic. Instead it emphasized homey everydayness, hardship gamely endured, and a tone sometimes humorous but at any rate devoid of exclamations or overt appeals to readers’ sympathy. In place of sentimental conventions, nostalgia substituted its own conventions and its own constructions of selfhood. Crucially for our purposes, the veterans’ nostalgic take on the war also reenvisioned the role of memory and the meaning that pastness held for the present. A poem written for the 1886 presentation of a cabinet of war relics to the GAR post in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, nicely illustrates the shift in the construction of memory that occurred in the decades after the war. In that poem a fictional “Comrade Jimson” comes to view the post’s newly acquired relics. Each relic takes him back to the moments of his own wartime history: eating suppers of hardtack and pork, tramping with his canteen over his shoulder, firing his musket in battle, seeing a comrade die. And in accordance with the kinds of memories fostered among veterans, his reflections emphasize not only the courage required in battle but the trials of camp life and the bonding among comrades. Comrade Jimson does linger momentarily on sorrowful memories of his friend’s death, but overall his relation to the relics is not a sentimental one. The objects he views do not inspire pity or mourning, nor do they primarily connect him in memory with other living human beings or with his dead comrades. Instead, by bringing back the memory of his soldiering, they allow him to reconnect with

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his youthful self and reinvigorate his current life with the memory of his manly deeds. Whereas he has entered the post “deep in despair,” “soured in the struggle for life,” and “ready to give up, almost,” by the end of the poem Comrade Jimson was now a new man— His depression of spirits was gone; Those relics had brought to his mind, As the stories oft told, had not done, The glorious memories of war.

He determines to “brace up, and again be a man,” and concludes that, though he may be less than successful in the economic struggle that had become the proof of manhood in the late nineteenth century, his wartime deeds provided an adequate basis for pride and self-esteem. “Though I may not hoard up pelf,” he concludes, “in my country’s sore need, I was true.”43 Slight, occasional bit of verse though it is, “Comrade Jimson” exemplifies the shift in the meaning of the relic that occurred in veterans’ culture and in late nineteenth-century culture more generally. Unlike sentimental mementos, the objects Comrade Jimson views do not serve primarily to open the boundaries of his inner self to other selves. They do not affirm a self defined through connection with others but one defined by the continuity of its individual moments and by the position of its “before and after” in relation to each other. In viewing the collection of war relics, Comrade Jimson rejuvenates his sense of self by rediscovering his youthful memories held miraculously intact. What has seemed distant is made near. What was severed by the pressures of the new industrial era is rediscovered and is still the same. Identity is both confirmed and reinvigorated across the years. “Comrade Jimson” exemplifies the way veterans came to use their wartime experience to assert an authentic masculine self that stood outside the forces of market competition while also giving them status within the new economic conditions that prevailed toward the end of the century. At the same time, far from being peculiar to former soldiers, veterans’ nostalgia reflected the new role of nostalgia in defining male selfhood more generally. In late nineteenth-century memoirs and fiction, the youthful self was portrayed as a qualitatively different self that existed not only prior to but entirely outside the strictures of adulthood. At the same time, because it supposedly was unencum-

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bered by social strictures or economic hierarchies, the boyhood self was in some sense the only authentic self. Irrevocably separated from his youth by the stringent passage into manhood, the adult male yet yearned back to an earlier incarnation as the only confirmation of his authenticity. Nostalgia was both the acknowledgment of an irreversible loss at the core of selfhood and the indispensable means of rejuvenating that self.44 If in its humble fashion “Comrade Jimson” shows the way memories of youth were used to construct adult male identities, it also shows the essential role objects could play. “An hour in the flag-room, amidst such hallowed memories and inspiring relics . . . would not be misspent, and would only increase love and respect for the men who saved the Nation” a memorial published the same year as “Comrade Jimson” informed its readers.45 But even by the 1880s the view that the war’s relics could usher one into the “hallowed” space of hushed memory and communal veneration of the dead was being superseded. When Civil War soldiers revisited the relics of their youth, they did not necessarily seek to commune with the dead or be enfolded in the larger body of the nation and its sacred purposes. Instead they wanted to relive in imagination the exploits of their youth.

Comrade Jimson’s use of the war’s relics to generate autobiography was not an arbitrary imposition on the relic, nor was it simply one way among others that the late nineteenth-century relic could be used. The connection between artifact and autobiography was in fact increasingly integral to Civil War relics and was reflected both in the kinds of things collected and in the meanings attached to them. It can be seen in veterans’ tendency to assemble collections that in part referenced their own wartime experiences. In Aubery’s catalog, for instance, artifacts are often accompanied by references to “the newsboy of the Iron Brigade”—Aubery’s sobriquet for himself—or by allusions to autobiographical events. One picture is an “original tintype of the newsboy of the Iron Brigade”; another is of one Horace Baker, “a prisoner in Libby prison who slept with me under my saddle blanket for six weeks.” A metal plate from Libby Prison “marked the place where the newsboy of the Iron Brigade was confined,” and a small volume is a “testament given to the Iron Brigade newsboy in New York City and carried by him during the war, ’61 to ’65.”46 Similarly, when veterans visited battlefields, they often explicitly sought out evidence of their 156

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experiences there. Thus in the later decades of the century entire regiments revisited the sites they had fought at and scoured the landscape for any physical features or artifacts that had survived from that time.47 Sometimes, even years after the battle, soldiers diligently searched for a very specific bullet or other object that had particular significance to them. A veteran who visited Gettysburg in 1888 left disappointed because he could not find a fragment of the shell that injured him in 1863.48 Other battlefield visitors, however, did unearth bullets that they at least believed were the ones that had wounded them or killed a fellow soldier. Visiting the spot at Gettysburg where the metal tip of a regimental flagstaff had been shot off fifty years before, a member of the regiment reported that he had found that same tip buried in the accumulated leaves and debris.49 Another elderly visitor to Gettysburg took home two suitcases of soil from the spot where he had fought as a young man.50 The relic’s increasing tendency to reference autobiographical experiences was most marked, however, in buffs’ inclination to focus as much on the process of collecting relics as on the relics themselves. Catalogs often noted the circumstances of a relic’s survival and how it came to be found—that is, not only the moment when an artifact was used in battle but its rediscovery and acquisition by the collector. Of a pair of pistols in the Cotton and Hills catalog, readers are told that “Mr. Samuel Beale, who was then a small boy, picked them up and buried them in a box in the cellar to his mother’s house, where they remained three years.”51 And a horse’s feedbag in the same collection was “found on the Chancellorsville, Va., battlefield, in 1864, by Mr. Wm. Haislop. Used by Mr. H. 24 years as a receptacle for small seeds. Purchased from him, Nov. 14, 1888.”52 Sometimes the fact of a relic’s discovery could be elaborated into an entire narrative. A canteen in the Thomas Espy Post’s collection that had been found at Gettysburg in 1884 was accompanied by a notation from W. H. H. Lea giving the circumstances of its discovery: While standing at the stone wall at the High Water Mark of the rebellion, a small boy from Philadelphia, in company of his father, while walking on top of the wall, noticing the canteen down in the wall, reached down and secured it. A few minutes later, owing to its being so dirty, [it] was, by the father, turned over to me. The canteen has no doubt rested in this stone wall from July, 1863.53

A. E. Brooks offered an even more detailed account of a relic’s provenance in a catalog entry describing how he acquired one particular Springfield rifle: 157

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This rifle was dug up by Alex McCalvery of Sharpsburg, Md., near Antietam Bridge, September 17, 1889. There is no doubt that this rifle was dropped by some soldier at the battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862. It was found about eight rods below Antietam Bridge in the sand which makes land from the flow of high water in the river. It was about eighteen inches below the surface. I happened to be there some fifteen minutes after it had been unearthed. Mr. McCalvery said that it was not an uncommon thing to dig up guns and many other war relics in that locality where they were digging for sand. The rifle is very rusty, having been buried just twentyseven years to a day.54

As Brooks’s final comment demonstrates, in addition to being narrated in labels or catalog entries, a relic’s history beyond the battlefield was also often evident in its physical appearance. Its degree of decay, the rust that covered it, or perhaps the fact that it had fused into a mass of metal suggested the years elapsed between the time it was left on the battlefield and the time it was rediscovered. And the way an object was displayed could deliberately evoke the moment when the collector spotted his find more than the battle that left it behind. As the catalog entry for the remnants of a canteen noted, this particular relic had been “found at Chickamauga under an oak tree. Leaves have been dropping in this half canteen for the past 28 years, and have decayed there. The dirt and leaves are just as they were picked up.”55 Such displays were the outcome of a culture of buffs that found their own forays onto the battlefield and the hunt for the souvenir as enthralling as the historical event it supposedly referred to. The souvenir’s travails as souvenir—the circumstances connected with its survival, the process of searching for it, the moment of its discovery—became a valued narrative in its own right. The guns and bullets and dented belt buckles that thronged the shelves of turn-of-the-century battlefield museums and private collections continued to be called relics, but in fact they served a somewhat different purpose from the objects I have been describing as relics typically did. The historical relic had always marked a person or an event of historical importance: the Connecticut charter being hidden away in an oak tree, Washington in his life at Mount Vernon, Lincoln reeling from the assassin’s bullet. It was significant because it had participated in the material reality of that other time and place and brought that reality intact into the present. But preserving relics had grown in conjunction with another practice that was closely related but certainly not identical. From the late eighteenth century on, tourists had often engaged in the sentimental practice of creating emotional connections 158

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and memories through small tokens gathered on their travels. One might thus collect pebbles or twigs or flowers from a pleasant natural site, and one might collect similar tokens from a historical site. Fragments from historical sites were relics: the chip from the tombstone of a historically significant person, the piece of an old fort or battlement, the sprig from a tree planted by a revered hand. But such things were not only relics—they were also souvenirs. They marked not only a historic person or event but individual visitors’ own contact with that event and their pilgrimage to the site. As Elaine Kuncio has defined the difference between the relic and the souvenir, “While a souvenir is a memento of someplace one has been, a relic serves as a memento of someplace one was not—at least not at the vital moment of historical significance. . . . [Relics] symbolized to the Victorians more than just a place, more than an experience. Relics symbolized a surviving bit of the past.”56 Or more succinctly, the relic, by definition, was a mode of historical representation, while the souvenir, though it certainly could have been taken from a historical site, was not primarily or even necessarily a historical form. In the antebellum era, the souvenir aspect of the relic was comparatively muted. Bits and pieces from historical sites often served as souvenirs of travels, but equally often they were preserved by people who had never visited the sites and thus had no personal connection to them. One could grow a tree from a cutting taken from Mount Vernon without ever visiting the first president’s residence, just as one could own a piece of the Charter Oak without having gouged it from the trunk of the tree oneself. Unlike a contemporary tourist’s collection of souvenirs, a collection of historical relics was not necessarily an autobiography spelled out in the medium of objects, and even to the extent that it was, that was certainly not its primary purpose. It served mainly to mark a history that existed apart from the individual relic collector and whose aura, whose otherness, was what the collector wanted to participate in. While the things Civil War buffs collected were indisputably relics, at least in the sense that they were actual physical remains of Civil War battles, their collecting also significantly shifted the relic tradition in the direction of the souvenir. For the soldier who had lived through the battle, the souvenirs collected years later, whether or not they were from the events he had participated in, implicitly referenced his own experience of the war. For the buff, or indeed the veteran turned buff, the objects also referenced the hours spent on the battlefield and the concerted probing for the battle’s tangible remains. In Susan Stewart’s 159

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words, the collection replaced “the narrative of history with the narrative of the individual subject—that is, the collector himself.”57 Such objects—still homomaterial fragments of the historical past rather than, for example, mass-produced miniatures of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty—were the beginning of a more general transition away from the historical relic to the s experiential tourist souvenir. This transition was linked to many changes in late nineteenth-century culture: the consignment of sentimental culture and its attachments to the marginalized sphere of women’s culture; the rise of mass tourism; and the transition from the ideals of a genteel middle class that held its sacred attachments apart from the marketplace to the mass culture and collecting of the twentieth century. And if such changes were marked in a variety of dramatic shifts in social and economic relations, they were also marked in the interactions with material objects that turn-ofthe-century Americans used to structure selfhood and their relation to their individual and collective pasts.

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The Waning of the Relic The late nineteenth century was a pivotal era in the history of museums and collecting in the United States. In the decades after the Civil War, many of today’s large museums were established in major American cities: Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1866, the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1869, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1876, the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1885, Chicago’s Field Museum in 1893, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1895, and so forth. Although the Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846, it only gradually began acquiring collections for its National Museum, and it did not systematically exhibit them until its new Arts and Industries Building opened in 1881. Over the course of the 1880s, however, it began to display large numbers of artifacts, each one assigned to one of the four divisions—anthropological, geological, zoological, and botanical—that together covered the whole of the physical, natural, and human sciences. The establishment of such institutions was accompanied by a rationalization and professionalization of the museum field itself. Discussions of the new museums’ role and prescriptions for their policies on collecting and exhibiting began to appear in such publications as Science magazine and the Smithsonian’s annual reports. And the field entered a new phase of professionalization when the American Association of Museums was formed in 1906, uniting professionals from museums of all types. The new museums defined themselves in good part in opposition to the local museums, private collections, and 163

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mass entertainments that preceded them. In particular, as Tony Bennett has noted, they defined themselves against collections of “curiosities,” which, from the vantage point of their own rationalized modes of collection and display, seemed indiscriminate assemblages of sensational and ultimately meaningless objects.1 As the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences’ Museum News put the matter, “If there is any word that a museum man fairly loathes, and any object, for which he has a well-grounded, deep-rooted and undying aversion, it is a ‘curiosity,’ a comprehensive term that embraces a vast and miscellaneous category of objects, including the familiar and ever-present petrified potato and four-legged chicken.”2 The Scotsman David Murray’s dismissal of the curiosity in his authoritative history of museums published in 1904 was less vituperative but equally decisive. “Museums are often crowded with what are popularly known as curiosities,” he wrote. “When huddled together in cabinets or on shelves such objects are useless for scientific purposes.”3 Murray’s implicit contrast between curiosities and objects fit for “scientific purposes” is telling. For what turn-of-the-century museum professionals repeatedly asserted as the antithesis of the curiosity cabinet was the “scientific” museum. The word scientific referred, in the first place, to the museum’s function. As Steven Conn has argued, in the late nineteenth century museums were not simply aimed at educating a larger public but were in fact seen as research institutions whose collections provided material for study and contributed to the expansion of knowledge in their field.4 In defining their institutions as scientific, the early museum professionals were also stipulating the kinds of objects they found suitable for collection and display. In contrast to the much maligned curiosity, the proper museum artifact was what might be called an evidentiary object. It was the concrete manifestation of specific processes—geological, biological, historical—that could in turn be deciphered from its physical characteristics. Finally, museums based their claim to the scientific not only on the kinds of things they collected but on how they exhibited them. Displaying their artifacts row on row in glass cases let their viewers study them closely and grasp the physical characteristics that made them meaningful. And the overall organization—the relative positioning of the objects—was also of the utmost importance, since it was through conceptual groupings that objects’ relationship to larger bodies of knowledge was revealed.5 As the Smithsonian’s influential curator and administrator George Brown Goode put the matter in an often-quoted dictum, a museum “should be

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much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system.”6 The ideal of the scientific model may have originated in the hard sciences, but the prestige accorded the sciences in the late nineteenth century meant that that model was expanded to include social and cultural artifacts as well. In fact the most widely touted schema for exhibiting cultural artifacts was drawn directly from the hard sciences. That schema had originally been developed by the British amateur archaeologist Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, who, after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, conceived the idea that technological development must parallel the course of organic evolution. He thus undertook to reconstruct the entire sequence of technological evolution in a quasi-biological manner, focusing on the way forms were generated from the forms that had preceded them and on the incremental evolution by which successive adaptations and alterations were introduced. This mode of exhibition was evidence not only of the dominance of evolutionary theory but of the racism that imbued that theory in the context of late nineteenth-century imperialism. According to Pitt Rivers’s own explanation, the purpose of his displays was “to trace out, by means of the only evidence available, the sequence of ideas by which mankind has advanced from the condition of the lower animals to that in which we find him at the present time, and by this means to provide really reliable materials for a philosophy of progress.”7 And if Western civilization was the pinnacle of that progression, earlier stages in human development were represented by objects that were not necessarily chronologically earlier but that had been made by non-Western peoples and thus supposedly belonged to more primitive stages of human development.8 Among American museums, the Smithsonian became the foremost advocate of Pitt Rivers’s modes of display. By the 1890s, under George Brown Goode’s leadership, the United States National Museum began to stage displays of artifacts exemplifying what Goode called “cultural history”—artifacts of archaeological, anthropological, and historical interest—in what were known as “synoptic series.” Each series traced the development of a particular kind of implement through time and across the boundaries of culture and geography.9 In Goode’s summation, “The series should begin with the simplest types and close with the most perfect and elaborate objects of the same class which human effort has produced.”10 In this way, everything from spoons to lighting implements to bows and arrows to spindles and shuttles to timekeeping

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mechanisms could serve as concrete illustrations of the development of the human race. In providing an organizational and disciplinary structure, synoptic series rendered scientific what would otherwise have been only a mélange of individual objects. But the synoptic series was not simply a means of structuring individual disciplines. The conceptual power attributed to it lay in the fact that it could not only unite history to anthropology and archaeology but tie those disciplines in turn to the progressive sequences of biology, geology, and even chemistry. In theory at least, the ideal museum could trace the entire course of material and human development: a visitor could begin with the coming into being of the earth itself, proceed through its geological stages to the beginning of life, then trace the evolution of the various species and finally human cultural evolution. In this totalizing schema, all disciplines would be presented as extensions of one grand narrative—a narrative whose explanatory principles and unifying themes were ultimately drawn from the hard sciences.11

Although the new professional museums of the late nineteenth century were predominantly art and natural history museums, historical collections were consistently advanced as yet another arena that could and should be brought into accord with the dictates of the scientific museum. And like the advocates of other types of scientific museums, the advocates of scientific historical museums defined their museums in good part in opposition to popular collecting practices. In this way the historical relic came to serve as history’s version of the curiosity. Like the four-legged chicken or the two-headed calf, it was the decidedly unscientific thing that had to be repudiated so the properly historical object could come into being. If association items had once been the sole aim of historical collecting, they were now revealed as things that, though they pretended to be about history, in fact negated the most basic principles of historical representation. The distinction between the pseudohistorical relic and the legitimate historical artifact was firmly in place by the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1918 the archaeologist and gentleman scholar Henry Chapman Mercer rejected those “comparatively unimportant objects, whose interest is merely decorative or derived from chance association” and asserted that if a museum classified and displayed its objects appropriately, “everybody will see that such a thing as a pebble 166

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labeled ‘found on the beach at Ticonderoga,’ or a cane ‘made from the doorsill of Penn’s brewhouse’ will have no scientific value whatever.”12 In a similar vein, at the 1910 meeting of the American Association of Museums, Paul M. Rea, a professor of biology and director of the Charleston Museum, drew a distinction between a traditional association item—a piece of a tree under which Columbus supposedly said mass—and a scythe blade used as a sword by Marion’s soldiers during the Revolutionary War: To my mind as a scientist this tree under which Columbus said mass is of little value except as showing the distribution of a certain species of tree, or as indicating the religious practice of Columbus. The use of a scythe blade as a sword, however, is a very interesting indication of the conditions under which Marion operated in the Revolution, and as such it seems to me to have a very distinct historical significance.13

As the tenets of the historical museum were developed further, what Rea had identified as a personal opinion crystallized into an axiom that defined the historical collection’s meaning and purpose. In his 1927 Manual for Small Museums, Laurence Vail Coleman, the executive secretary of the American Association of Museums and a prolific writer on museums and historical sites, sternly distinguished between mere relics and the objects proper to a historical museum: Many museums suffer as a result of the common belief that to be of historic interest and value an object must have been used by or otherwise associated with a celebrity or have played a part in some notable event. This is a misapprehension. A towel on which George Washington dried his hands is probably a good towel of its time. Its chief historic value arises from its character, and not from the fact that it was used by the first President. As a towel it is an object of history, but as a souvenir of Washington it is a so-called “relic.”

Relics, he continued, are fetishes, and so blind is the worship of them that the very word relic has fallen into disrepute among museum workers. Most of such objects are set up as targets for stupid staring and idle sentimentality.14

In fact the renunciation of the relic so defined the professional museum that it continued to be a staple of museum handbooks until late into the twentieth century. In a standard manual published, like Cole167

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man’s, by the American Association of Museums and reissued as late as 1982, the archaeologist Carl Guthe warned curators of local museums: The age and apparent associations of an object cannot be used as the only criteria for establishing historical value. A fist-sized pebble, taken from the fields of Gettysburg and placed in a museum case, is certainly old and was definitely associated with the site of a great historic event. However, it is clearly incapable of throwing any light upon the battle it witnessed.15

And farther on, the same manual admonished its readers: When a portion of an historic object is so fragmentary or mutilated that it can be identified only by reference to the documents which accompany it, it has become a relic. . . . Examples of relics are: a piece of wood from a naval vessel that saw action in the War of 1812; a badly rusted section of a bayonet blade picked up on a Civil War battlefield; a lock of hair from the head of a famous person; a piece of stone or plaster taken from an historic building. All of these and similar relics may have some interest as curiosities, but most definitely do not have any historical value.16

In place of the relic, the proponents of a new kind of historical museum asserted the value of things that, as Guthe said, “threw light on” specific features of the past—of artifacts that could function as evidentiary objects. These new kinds of historical things exemplified what Steven Conn has aptly called an “object-based epistemology”—the belief that “objects, at least as much as texts, were sources of knowledge and meaning.”17 They were history’s own version of the scientific specimen, and borrowing from the prestige accorded the written word, their advocates also spoke of them as texts, as things that encoded concrete information about the past’s mores, technology, and social conditions that could be deciphered by a well-trained eye. Indeed, in their tangible reality and their ability to connect the viewer to the physical basis of the world, evidentiary objects were often understood to offer a means of perception that circumvented conventional text-based modes of instruction and was even superior to them. Though the dismissal of the relic in favor of the evidentiary object may seem merely common sense to those of us who have inherited the scientific museum’s view, it depended on a very particular conception of what history was and why it was an object of human concern. By definition, the relation between the relic and the historical personage or event it represented was entirely material. It was preserved solely because it had been in physical contact with a given entity in the past, 168

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and any other object in the vicinity could have served as well. As a form of representation, the relic was constrained by no rules beyond simple contiguity. Moreover, it did not stand for anything beyond the simple fact of one person’s or event’s existence. Relics were simply fragments torn out of the flow of time. They testified to particular circumstances—to the lives of auratic individuals, to the occurrence of momentous events—but those events existed only as unique moments. In fact, it was only the conception of the historical event as sui generis—as a uniquely marked moment different from all other moments of time— that gave the relic its meaning, that made an apparently generic sliver of wood, for instance, refer to this particular moment and no other. The evidentiary object, in contrast, obviously had a material relation to the past it represented, but it also had a necessary relation—one that depended on a conception of history as a rationalized pursuit with a distinct object of study, also called history. As proponents of evidentiary objects repeatedly insisted, an object did not have historical value simply because it was old. In fact things that were unusual, eccentric, or unrepresentative of their time could hardly be said to have any historical value at all. Instead, an object was a properly historical artifact only insofar as it was typical. Like any good scientific specimen, it had to serve as a synecdoche for a whole range of similar objects. And its representative status allowed users to read through the object itself to reveal the social, economic, and technological forces encoded in its physical form. Instead of presenting time as a series of isolated fragments, collections of evidentiary objects mapped a unified sequence of moments that were given order through underlying historical processes and series of cause and effect. They thus illuminated the larger object of study, which was not simply the relic’s lost past but the rationalized field of history itself. In reframing objects from the past as evidence of historical processes, the new breed of museum professionals also effectively abrogated any possibility of equating the historical object with the memento. The past induced not a longing to identify or connect with it, but the impulse to examine it. It was not an entity one continued to be enmeshed in but an object that stood apart and distinct from those who studied it. And this new relation to the artifacts of the past was exemplified and facilitated in the ways the new historical museums made objects available to their visitors. Whether we think of the celebrants of the anniversary of William Penn’s landing sitting in Penn’s chair, the Daughters of the Confederacy communing with Sam Davis’s coat, or the innumerable individuals who held and wept over personal Civil 169

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War relics, the engagement with relics had never relied on a disinterested visual inspection.18 Relics had always been things to be touched, pored over, and interacted with. In contrast, in establishing the viewer on one side of the glass and the object viewed on the other, the new museums institutionalized the “pervasive separation of the senses” and the “disassociation of touch from sight” that Jonathan Crary has identified as one of the principal tendencies of the nineteenth century.19 Carefully labeled, systematically laid out, the scientific historical object nominally was made entirely accessible to its viewers. It was there to be completely and absolutely understood—“read”—through a careful examination of its physical particulars. But under the guise of transparency, of being made fully available, the museum’s object was also circumscribed. Its meaning was limited to its observable characteristics: it was utterly available to perception—rather than to the faculties of, say, sentiment or imagination.

The notion of a historical museum organized according to scientific principles and taking its place among the other scientific museums was repeatedly advanced as a brave new ideal. Yet realizing that ideal in practice proved elusive. Not only were the professional museums established in the United States in the late nineteenth century overwhelmingly art and natural history museums, but by and large the historical institutions already in existence—historical societies, heritage organizations, and local museums—did not necessarily participate in professional activities or subscribe to the ideology of the professional museum. “I am of the impression that the historical museums have been far less represented in [the American Association of Museums] than any other kind,” lamented Frank Severance, the secretary of the Buffalo Historical Society, in 1920.20 And a perusal of the association’s early proceedings confirms his observation. Meetings were dominated by representatives of natural science museums, along with a smattering of art and ethnology curators, and presentations on historical museums were rare. It was not until the 1920s that a literature addressing the issues facing historical museums began to appear, and Arthur C. Parker’s Manual for History Museums, the first widely disseminated manual focused entirely on history museums, was not published until 1935. When historical museums were discussed, professionals generally agreed that their state was lamentably unscientific. “The art of museum administration is still in its infancy,” George Brown Goode averred in 170

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1889, “and no attempt has yet been made to apply it systematically to the development of a museum of history.”21 Two decades later Frank Severance noted that “to a scientifically trained mind, most museums of historical societies must appear, I think, hopelessly heterogeneous.”22 And as late as 1925 Theodore Belote, the Smithsonian’s curator of history, was still arguing that although the work of most types of museums “has been more or less carefully defined and well understood for a long period of time . . . this has not been done with an equal degree of success in the case of the historical museum.” “I am well aware,” he continued, “that the accusation has been made, I greatly fear with some degree of justification, that the average historical museum is neither scientific nor historical.”23 Historical museums’ lack of integration into the scientific model is evident if we turn from the Smithsonian’s rhetoric to the artifacts that were actually housed in its historical section. The historical collections had their beginnings in the assemblage of objects donated to the federal government and held in the Patent Office until the Smithsonian took them over in 1883, and this core collection was supplemented by donations of additional old things over the years. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most of these articles, though eminently familiar to any connoisseur of objects from the past, could by no stretch be called scientific. Thus the categories the 1891 report grouped acquisitions into could have been taken from the holdings of any nineteenth-century historical society: “Portraits of Eminent Men,” “Medals and Monuments,” and of course “Personal Relics of Eminent Men” and “Relics of Important Historical Events in the History of America.” And the list of articles the historical section acquired in 1891 included such by now familiar kinds of things as “a silver watch carried by Thomas Cheyney during the Revolutionary war,” a “cannon ball from Fort Sumter, and pistol from field of battle at Battery Wagenner,” “a brick from the house at Wakefield Va., where Gen. Washington was born,” and “a piece of wood of the historic ‘Old North Bridge,’ at Concord.”24 By 1899 the annual report could note that the historical displays now included relics of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, donated by the Daughters of the American Revolution; a case of artifacts on loan from the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America that included items associated with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Lord Fairfax; one case of articles related to Lincoln; and “seven cases devoted to the relics of General Grant.”25 In fact, association items featured so prominently that when visitors entered the Smithsonian’s historical hall, the first sight greeting them 171

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was Washington’s uniform, enshrined in its own exhibit case, standing erect as if to suggest the presence of the man who had once worn it, and flanked by large cases labeled “Relics of Washington” that contained dishes and other artifacts associated with the first president. Whatever the pronouncements of the Smithsonian’s curators might seem to portend, the historical collections were little more than a conglomeration of traditional relics. Unjustified by any larger collecting philosophy, they were preserved by an entity that as the official national museum was still seen as the repository for all the objects Americans had traditionally used to represent the past. The Smithsonian’s own uneasiness with its historical collections is implied by the fact that the original plaster model for the Statue of Liberty and the papers and relics of George Washington, listed early in the Smithsonian’s 1891 report as the year’s most important historical acquisitions, reappeared much later in the report under the heading “miscellaneous”—suggesting a confusion within the museum itself about whether the historical constituted a category in its own right or was simply a holding pen for things outside the museum’s real concerns. As Gary Kulik has pointed out, in the late nineteenth century the history hall of the Smithsonian remained a reliquary, a hall of disconnected personal items and stray oddments where the Washington relics coexisted beside a section of oak tree shot down at the Battle of Spotsylvania. . . . In Goode’s Smithsonian, history had become a residual category, the repository for collections that did not fit the elaborate natural-science model that Goode championed. 26

The Smithsonian was not alone in its confusion. The publication Museum Work was the official journal of the American Association of Museums, but even into the 1920s its notices of historical acquisitions and exhibits touted objects that had come over on the Mayflower, relics of Lincoln’s death, and articles that had belonged to such famous historical figures as Millard Fillmore, David Farragut, John Hancock, and Dolly Madison. Those who saw themselves at the forefront of the museum movement railed against the practices of local museums and historical societies, yet these various institutions continued to exist alongside each other.27 Moreover, as both museum catalogs and the pages of Museum Work show, by the early decades of the twentieth century any given historical collection might contain a variety of kinds of objects and modes of representation, few of them rigorously “scientific.” The continuing presence of association items in historical museums certainly occurred partly because, as I noted above, the content of col172

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lections was not entirely within their curators’ control. For the most part, the artifacts museums displayed were donated by local collectors and prominent families or by heritage-minded organizations. Such donors sought to memorialize their own contributions or the causes they were attached to and might be offended by museums’ refusing or deaccessioning their gifts. Yet the staying power of these blatantly unscientific objects also speaks to a contradiction at the heart of the concept of the scientific history museum. The fact was that, although the model of the scientific museum had been extended to collections of cultural artifacts, the original scientific museum was the natural history museum, with its botanical, zoological, geological, and paleontological specimens. The template for the scientific museum, in other words, was the museum whose corresponding discipline had been formulated over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the painstaking examination and classification of individual physical specimens. With their artifacts laid out in taxonomic groupings under transparent glass, such museums exemplified the absolute fit between the scientific disciplines and their objects. Applied to science as well as to art, to anthropology and geology as well as to history, the term museum suggested that this one capacious category was ideally suited to explicate all branches of knowledge. But in fact it was ideally suited to explicate only those branches of knowledge that had already incorporated physical objects in certain determinate relations into their conceptual structure. It was suited, that is, to explicate precisely the scientific, objectbased disciplines within which it originated. The discipline of history, however, had not come into being through examining and classifying objects. Particularly in the form it existed in in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not an object-based discipline at all. As many commentators have pointed out, the professionalized history of the late nineteenth century defined itself as a discipline by the rigorous methods it had developed for analyzing written documents and, concomitantly, by the rejection of such popular modes of preserving the past as recording verbal reminiscences and collecting material artifacts.28 History was not based on the careful examination of objects; it was based on their repudiation. It not only had no body of things it could call its own, it had no obvious way of incorporating things into its disciplinary structure. In this sense Kulik’s comment that in the Smithsonian history had become nothing more than a “residual category” speaks not simply to a deficiency in that institution’s collections but to the status of the historical museum more generally. Whatever rhetoric was used to justify 173

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including old things within the museum’s walls, at base there was no room for history in the concept of the museum. Certain kinds of objects, notably tools and machines, whose function could be deciphered from their physical characteristics and that could be placed in developmental sequences could be incorporated by way of structures borrowed largely from archaeology and anthropology. But the bulk of things from the past remained unaccounted for by the logic of the scientific museum. Insofar as they formed a category, it was ultimately made up only of those things left behind once the properly scientific objects had all been assigned their place. The fact that historical museums had little disciplinary justification inevitably raises the question of why the early museum professionals continued to speak of history as an entity that, however lamentably short it now fell, still belonged within the fold of the new museum profession. After all, there were many other fields of study—chemistry, physics, or on another front sociology, to name only a few—that were not based on the study of relatively substantial, fixed objects, and, not surprisingly, most such disciplines never developed museum traditions. In history’s case, however, there was already a long tradition of collecting and displaying objects—albeit not “scientific” objects—before the advent of the new museums. The relic tradition thus was perhaps not just an obstacle to the birth of the new historical museum but the very thing that brought it into being. The idea that the past could be represented in the new museums must have owed a good deal to the fact that there were already so many solidly three-dimensional objects that indisputably did represent it. In this sense, though discussions of the history of the history museum have tended to focus largely on the rise of the professional museums—thus reiterating the early museum men’s own foundational narrative—the nineteenth century’s tradition of popular historical museums and collecting can be seen as the indispensable prerequisite for the professional museums that would follow. In fact, the relation between relics and the new museum professionals was considerably more complicated than many of the early twentieth-century museum manuals and professional associations’ pronouncements suggest. Alongside their denunciations of relics—and sometimes almost in the same breath—the scientific museum men also revealed an enduring attachment to at least certain kinds of association items. Immediately after distinguishing between the legitimate artifact, as exemplified by the scythe blade used by Marion’s soldiers, and the piece of the tree under which Columbus said mass, for instance, Paul Rea conceded that hard evidence was not all the historical artifact 174

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had to offer. Reflecting on the value he himself would attach to a copy of The Origin of Species that had been owned by Charles Darwin, he acknowledged that Darwin’s ownership would not increase the book’s value “except by way of sentiment.” Still, he concluded, he was “perfectly prepared to recognize the value of objects which serve as points of focus for sentiment and historical interest.”29 In unselfconsciously equating “sentiment” and “historical interest” Rea was only repeating a commonplace of his time. Yet coming from a proponent of scientific museums and in the midst of a defense of the evidentiary object, the linkage is striking and suggests how inevitably the past was seen to be of interest precisely because it generated sentimental, affective investments. Indeed, as strenuously as museum professionals might assert the need for objects to generate tangible data, when they turned to discussing historical museums, they repeatedly showed that they could not conceive of a historical object that stood entirely apart from sentimental associations. Speaking to an early meeting of the American Association of Museums, Frederick A. Lucas, the curator-in-chief of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, even suggested that museums of history are exceptions to the general rule that objects should show something . . . for these differ from other museums in the fact that their value does not lie so much in the character of the objects displayed as in the associations connected with them. . . . A large portion of the “relics” of great men, considered by themselves would find their way to the junk shop, or ash heap.30

Lucas’s words are a remarkable admission of the historical object’s contradictory status. Rather than trying to make history fit the paradigm of the scientific museum, he bluntly asserted that historical objects were in fact the exception to that paradigm—that they did not meet its most basic evidentiary criterion of “showing something.” And this inability to serve as evidence made them, at least in the museum’s terms, only debris—secondhand junk. Still, rather inexplicably, Lucas also assumed that objects from the past were worth preserving, and worth preserving for exactly what had supposedly disqualified them in the first place—their associations. The historical museum’s things were simultaneously treasures and refuse. By and large, they were failed scientific specimens, things that could not live up to the stringent standards of the museum’s rightful objects, yet they could not be discarded. For if the past’s artifacts exerted any power whatever, they did so not in their neatly denotative capacity but in their intangible wealth of 175

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connotations—the awareness they prompted of all they had lived through, even if those events had left no visible mark. In the end, the early museum professionals rejected not the association item per se but certain kinds of association items. Though many of their pronouncements seemed to dismiss association items en masse, sometimes they even explicitly distinguished between those that could be properly collected by a museum and those that could not. Thus, having acknowledged his own attachment to at least some relics, Rea went on to draw a distinction between what he called “trivial” and “respectable” relics. Darwin’s copy of The Origin of Species was of course a respectable relic, whereas Columbus’s tree was presumably a trivial one, as was another token Rea described in his remarks—a hobnail from Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather’s shoe.31 By the 1920s and 1930s, when the historical museum was consolidated as a distinct entity, its proponents tacitly came to accept Rea’s distinction between “trivial” and “respectable” relics as an article of the profession—with the significant difference that, since the term relic had been so devalued, “respectable relics” were simply removed from the category of the relic altogether. Laurence Vail Coleman’s 1927 discussion of the role of relics in the museum pointedly outlined the logic of this rhetorical move. After dismissing most relics, as I noted above, as “targets for stupid staring and idle sentimentality,” he went on to argue that some select relics were exempt from this accusation: “Some relics are essentially biographical material, and it would be wrong to underestimate their importance. Washington’s coat expresses the man. Its value is not just that of chance association. The coat is a record; it is a muniment of history.”32 And in accordance with that distinction, Coleman went on to advocate that museums change their terminology, effectively disguising relics by interspersing them among the real historical artifacts that should form the bulk of a history museum’s collection. “Any museum may gain by eliminating the more insignificant relics, calling the rest objects and keeping in mind that history is represented largely by humble objects of daily use,” he wrote.33 In effect, what twentieth-century museum practitioners did was to denounce “relics” in general while purging their collections only of certain association items, notably the fragment, the bit of nature used as a historical marker, and the item that had had only incidental or momentary contact with a historical person or event. It is true that these were the objects least capable of providing information about the events and persons they supposedly referenced, but the truth was that

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Washington’s coat and other such “respectable” relics were seldom explicated to yield information about the events and times they came from. They were offered not as evidence of the life of the past but as articles of self-evident worth that provided an indisputable connection with that past—just as Lincoln’s grandfather’s hobnail or the piece of the tree under which Columbus said mass presumably had for the people who valued them. The continuing presence of certain kinds of association items within the professional museums suggests that what was at issue in the dismissal of “trivial” relics was less a matter of associations versus evidence or sentiments versus science than a distaste for outmoded Victorian practices and structures of feeling. Not coincidentally, the objects that came to be classed as trivial relics were also those most deeply enmeshed in sentimental forms: they were the things, that is, that most closely resembled and functioned as mementos. Their banishment from the museum can thus be seen as part of the more general delegitimizing of sentimental practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though sentimental forms would persist for decades—in some ways even into our own time—in the decidedly middlebrow culture of women’s private affectional and memorial practices, the sentimental was no longer accorded a public function or thought to contribute to a national identity. The nation had ceased to be conceived of as a community constituted by its shared sentimental attachments and its core of common memories, and sentimental forms were effectively marginalized in political rhetoric and in public ceremonies and commemorations.34 As sentimental forms came to seem increasingly irrelevant and indeed incomprehensible, the slightness of many relics came to be read as a sign not of their hidden interiority but of their paltriness, their insignificance. Like so many sentimental things—hair wreaths, shadow boxes, and postmortem photos, to name a few—they had even become unseemly, bringing with them the whiff of increasingly stigmatized modes of feeling and apprehension. “Respectable” relics may have been association items, but they were often such substantial objects as clothing and furniture; they were articles of daily life rather than things whose sole purpose was to spur remembrance; and they were intact, asserting their place among the robust specimens of the contemporary museum rather than the pale remnants of the Victorian past. The small partial objects and intimate association items that had once been the accepted form of representing the past, on the other hand, had been

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rendered meaningless, as alien to future generations as the curiosity cabinets’ freakish natural specimens and unicorn horns.

The shift away from the association item was not confined to elite museums. In fact, the trivial relic gradually disappeared from the collections of most historical institutions, until by the mid-twentieth century it was nothing more than an occasional oddity, still sometimes seen in the collections of filiopietistic heritage organizations or, most pervasively, in displays of Civil War artifacts, but for the most part a decided anachronism.35 So-called respectable relics did continue to be exhibited in state historical societies and local museums, no less than in such august settings as the Smithsonian, and they were sometimes even featured prominently, particularly if connected to a figure of national significance or an illustrious local hero. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the bulk of the things American historical museums exhibited were no longer association items of any kind. Instead, as perusing the catalog of almost any local museum or historical society will show, collections of objects from the past increasingly focused not on the singular tokens of auratic persons or events but on the furniture and implements of daily life. These museums thus echoed the collecting practices of the scientific museums, though they generally presented their artifacts simply as attempts to honor earlier generations or to demonstrate old-time ways and modes of living rather than as evidence of larger historical processes. This new interest in the generic old was manifested in various social strata and in a number of collecting arenas. On one end of the social spectrum, Americans with money and connections began to collect high-end antiques. Such antiques were usually of colonial origin, were often highly decorative, and tended to originate in New England or the mid-Atlantic states.36 Although, as old things, antiques could certainly be considered historical artifacts, the rare and more highly crafted objects were separated from the field of history altogether and were collected instead by art museums financed and patronized by the country’s elite. Thus the noted collector and connoisseur of early American art R. T. H. Halsey opened his elaborate period rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1924, and although these were by no means the first museum period rooms in the country, they were highly influential in establishing American, as opposed to European, antiques as worthy of attention.37 During this same period Henry Francis du Pont was also 178

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installing his own collection of high-end antiques in the rooms of what would become the Winterthur Museum, and similar efforts were under way in Philadelphia, Boston, and Brooklyn. Given this new class of elites’ preoccupation with establishing a connection to earlier elites, associations with Washington and other colonial leaders enhanced the value of any antique. In his address at the opening of the American Wing, for example, Halsey dwelt more on the rooms’ historical associations than on their material or aesthetic characteristics, pointing out a room from a house that had once served as Washington’s headquarters, a ballroom where both Washington and Lafayette had been entertained, and a room from a house near the tavern where “The Star-Spangled Banner” had first been sung.38 Still, age and a supposedly timeless aesthetic value were usually assumed to take precedence over more specific associations. As one early twentiethcentury manual put the matter, antique collecting “in which the interest is dependent upon some personal association, can never be of the highest class and is certainly not at all of the kind that fills one’s home with things intrinsically worth while.”39 On the other end of the social spectrum were the everyday objects that were too humble and often too recent to be designated antiques. These things usually marked the history of the early settlers of a region; they tended to be working implements rather than decorative objects; and they were typically assigned not to the art museum but to the historical display. The early twentieth century saw a proliferation of manuals and studies on the history and material culture of various areas of the country, and everyday objects from the daily life of the past began to appear in innumerable local collections. “There are thousands of towns where a spinning-wheel and an ox-yoke may be found,” one advocate of historical museums noted. “Care for these things, label them with cards explaining their uses, and put them where they can be seen, and you have an historical museum.”40 And many communities did exactly that. In 1910 the historical collection of the Fairbanks Museum of Natural Science in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, included china from colonial days; an exhibit of colonial methods of lighting; exhibits showing the implements used in making wool, cotton, and linen clothing; and another exhibit of articles used to prepare food.41 A decade later the Pennsylvania State Historical Society was exhibiting artifacts “illustrative of the early life of the inhabitants of Pennsylvania,” which included a number of quaint and intricate articles of daily life, such as “the old fashioned hand rakes with spreading teeth, the different types of stoves with their queer ornamentations and biblical texts, the 179

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various forms of candle molds, fat lamps and lanterns, the hand-made baskets, kitchen utensils of unusual and often very beautiful shapes,” as well as early sausage stuffers and “contrivances for taking the cores out of apples and producing delectable hard cider.”42 Meanwhile, although the Chicago Historical Society was known primarily for its collection of relics, it began to assemble articles for a new department intended to illustrate “pioneer household manners and customs.”43 And even the venerable Rhode Island Historical Society, whose collections included such relics as the hilt from one of Washington’s swords, a piece of the pine tree under which Jane McCrea was killed, and coffin nails and hair taken from Roger Williams’s grave, assured readers of its 1916 catalog that “it is necessary to discriminate in selecting materials for such a museum” and offered the fairly standard justification that “objects should not be shown simply because they are old, but because they . . . illustrate some mode of life now changed or forgotten.” And alongside the long-cherished relics, the catalog listed numerous items that simply demonstrated old-time lifeways and material culture, including warming pans, “an old-time cider press,” items from an early nineteenthcentury doctor’s medicine chest, implements used in manufacturing cotton cloth and in carding wool, and “an assortment of lighting accessories of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” The interest in articles of daily life was so pervasive that even historical figures and events that had once been quintessentially identified with relics began to be represented in much more generic ways. A 1904 proposal for exhibits to be staged in the log cabin where Lincoln was supposed to have been born advocated not the assemblage of relics that had evoked Lincoln’s life for the preceding four decades—logs he chopped, pieces of wood from homes he lived in, his bloody bandages, and the foliage from his casket—but the now de rigueur display of pioneer artifacts. The proposed “Nancy Hanks Lincoln Section,” for instance, would contain a full exhibit of the domestic side of the back-woods woman’s life; the Dutch oven, the old spinning wheel, the outdoor kettles, the wooden ladles, gourd dippers, samples of rustic manufacture from the home-made knitted socks and mittens up to the wonderfully constructed log cabin and basket patterns of bedquilts.

And the “Thomas Lincoln Section” would include the contrivances and “contraptions” of the pioneer farm, the barnyard and the chase . . . the old flintlock rifle, powder horns, bullet molds and the fishing spear, 180

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the axe in all its developments, the ox-yoke and chains, plows and hoes, coonskin caps and buckskin breeches, and all such things as will help young America to understand the conditions under which their brave fore-elders lived.”44

The widespread collecting of such humble artifacts demonstrates that the shift from the relic to the generic functional object was not the isolated project of a handful of educated men but a more pervasive cultural shift in how objects were experienced and how the past was embodied in things. Unlike the leaders of the professional museum movement, those who created period rooms or assembled collections in local pioneer museums did not typically make grand pronouncements about what objects could appropriately be used to represent the past and what could not. Certainly they did not necessarily think of themselves as advancing a scientific agenda. But in the objects they chose to collect and the meanings they evoked in their displays, they demonstrated that they no longer assumed association items could offer the connection to the past that they had offered their nineteenthcentury forebears. Without the fanfare or ideological pronouncements of the scientific museum professionals, they too tacitly testified that nineteenth-century cultural forms and modes of representation were being superseded.

The passage from the association item to the evidentiary object and from the singular and auratic to the generic and everyday marks a decisive shift in the meanings attached to old things. But if we move outside the museum to other sites of history making in the early twentiethcentury United States, we can glimpse still other shifts in how the past was coming to be represented. And these sites too illuminate the particular ways the relic meant, as well as the ways its modes of representing the past persisted or were eclipsed in the historical objects of the twentieth century. Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, is a particularly striking example of how various historical objects could merge in a single project. In many ways it participated in the traditions of collecting cultivated by museums of local history and pioneer heritage while continuing to preserve some items that were clearly relics. And on another front, it was one of the first of the themed environments that would become more and more prominent over the twentieth century. It can thus stand as a useful example both of the polyglot nature of historical collecting in the early to middle 181

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twentieth century and of the new modes of representation that increasingly structured individual and collective relations to the past. It was in the early 1920s that Ford began collecting the prodigious number of old things that would eventually be absorbed into Greenfield and its accompanying museum, and by 1923—at least according to Greenfield’s own account of its history—he was “the primary collector of Americana in the world.”45 In the early twenties he also developed an interest in old buildings, purchasing and restoring both the Wayside Inn, an establishment in South Sudbury, Massachusetts, that dated back to the seventeenth century, and the century-old Botsford Tavern near Detroit. By the late 1920s Ford had begun moving old buildings to Dearborn, the town he grew up in, and was arranging them into a simulated village built around a central commons. At the same time he also built an immense museum to exhibit his extensive collection of artifacts. In 1929 the museum and village were officially dedicated in a lavish ceremony that included a reenactment of Edison’s invention of the electric light. The complex was far from completed, however, and Ford continued to add buildings and artifacts until his death in 1947.46 However popular an attraction Greenfield was to become, early accounts of the village, and particularly of the projected museum that Ford called “my Smithsonian Institute,” portrayed it as a serious historical endeavor, being developed according to the highest professional standards. In 1931 the American Historical Review devoted several pages to a description of the articles Ford had accumulated and stated that the collection had “every promise of becoming one of the most notable collections in the world of relics of the everyday life of the past.”47 The article was clearly using “relics” only in the general sense of “old things,” for it went on to point out that, in accord with the ideology of the professional museum, Ford was not simply accumulating heaps of the reviled association items: Most historical museums emphasize “association pieces”—in other words, articles which are important chiefly because of their connection with notable people or great events. Mr. Ford is by no means averse to including these in his collection, but he has been far more interested in the acquisition of the things which portray the doings of the mass of men as they went about their daily routine of living and working.48

A 1931 article in the New York Times Magazine emphasized the same distinction when it described Ford’s view of history as one

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in which the Missouri Compromise, the Mexican War, the firing on Sumter, those thousand events that make up the whole web and woof of our story as the schoolboy learns it, are noticed, if at all, only as incidental interruptions of the main advance of national life—the progress in general conditions of living. . . . It is a view, moreover, in which a pewter bowl from the humblest kitchen in the Colonies would be of equal interest with one from that of George Washington.49

Ford himself seems to have looked to the concept of the scientific museum as a model, at least in his schemes for organizing his exhibits. By the 1930s the synoptic series, though still used to some extent, was considered antiquated in professional circles and certainly was no longer regarded as a means of presenting an all-encompassing historical narrative. Accounts of the plans for Ford’s museum, however, repeatedly stressed that the synoptic series would be its organizing principle. Both the American Historical Review and the New York Times Magazine quoted Ford as saying he intended to assemble “a complete series of every kind of article used or made” in America.50 The author of an article that appeared in the Michigan History Magazine in 1925 only saw Ford’s artifacts in storage waiting to be assembled into exhibits, but he enthusiastically reported that the collection had come to include more or less completed lines of specimens illustrating the progress of mechanical invention and achievement in almost every department of human interest . . . [and] will in the progress of time become so multifarious as to present when properly classified and displayed a stupendous, progressive, panoramic exposition of mechanical achievement in the entire industrial, agricultural and domestic life of our people. 51

When the museum opened, it did display its artifacts in sequential series. These series included the kind of lighting exhibit that had become the synoptic model in many museums—an exhibit that Greenfield’s 1937 guidebook described as a “great historic collection of lighting and illuminating devices . . . which dates back to Egyptian and Roman times” and that included Eskimo lamps, bayberry candles, chandeliers, and many other forms of illumination. Other series alluded to in the guidebook included one that traced the evolution of spinning and weaving “from prehistoric times through primitive spindles, wheels and distaffs to modern instruments”; series that showed the development of plowing, reaping, and threshing; and in a decidedly contemporary, commercial twist on the usual collection of basic

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implements, series that portrayed “the evolution of the vacuum cleaner” from “the corn brooms and brushes of the Colonists,” as well as the evolution of such articles as refrigerating equipment, mimeographs, and dictaphones.52 Ford’s debt to learned versions of how objects told history was evident as well in his repeated invocation of the trope of the object lesson. He viewed the things in his museum and village as a means of historical instruction, what he called a “living textbook of human and technical history . . . an illustrated course in comparative civilization.”53 And this instructional purpose was possible because things themselves could convey history as forcefully as any written narrative. “A piece of machinery, or anything that is made is like a book, if you can read it,” one biographer quoted him as saying, and the American Historical Review credited him with the assertion that “I do not collect antiques as such. I am collecting the history of our people as written into the things their hands made and used.”54 In the tradition of the object lesson, Ford clearly thought artifacts offered a version of the past superior to anything the written language could possibly convey. “By looking at things that people used and that show the way they lived, a better and truer impression can be gained than could be had in a month of reading,” he told the New York Times Magazine.55 The figure of the object lesson asserted the educational value of Ford’s project and aligned his purpose with that of professional museum educators. But in the mouth of this relatively uneducated man from the rural Midwest, it also articulated a distinctly populist view of what history should be. In contrast to a history of elites transmitted through the historian’s abstract written language, Ford asserted a history of daily life written in the medium of the tangible artifacts that people built and used. And in opposition to the rare and delicately crafted objects that Halsey’s American Wing, Du Pont’s Winterthur Museum, and Rockefeller’s Colonial Williamsburg exhibited in careful period reconstructions, Ford was assembling the implements that common people used in their daily labors.56 Ford had once said that history was bunk, but as he himself said, he had been referring only to a certain kind of history: When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the lands, I discovered that the historians know nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history that excluded harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk and I think so yet.57 184

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Ford’s allegiance to less elite forms of history making was evident in the things he collected, but it was also marked, albeit perhaps less consciously, in the modes of his supposedly scientific displays. Though his efforts to display his collections in series seem to show he wanted to emulate the scientific museum, in truth his passion had less to do with a scientific interest in ordering the world than with popular modes of collecting that hoarded articles from the old days in attics and barns because they were interesting and sometimes quaint and because their owners were too frugal to throw them away. Although Ford’s staff could be somewhat dismissive of his collection, referring to the vast warehouse where he stored his finds as “the curio shop” and “the chamber of horrors,”58 his secretary remembered that Ford adamantly refused to dispose of anything there, even articles his associates considered to have no value.59 Moreover, once the collection was opened to the public, Ford violated one of the scientific museum’s cardinal precepts by insisting on displaying every one of his specimens, even those that were duplicates. In short, though Ford’s plans for organizing the collection seem to have advocated rational synoptic series, like most collectors outside professional museums, he was more interested in a profusion of things than in the clearly defined ideas that museum professionals believed things should be subordinated to.60 Ford’s roots in traditional modes of collecting can also be seen in the range of things he did not exclude. Although Greenfield’s displays focused primarily on the accoutrements of daily life, the list of relics Ford assembled there and in his earlier restoration projects is long and diverse, including Sir Walter Scott’s pony phaeton; furniture belonging to Lincoln, fence rails he had split, and the rocking chair he sat in at Ford’s Theatre; a chest of drawers owned by George Washington’s mother, Mary; Washington’s camp chest and folding bed; a table owned by John Hancock; a chair owned by General Joseph Warren; a table Lafayette had dined at; a coach that had carried Daniel Webster and Lafayette to the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument; a bucket owned by Calvin Coolidge’s grandfather; a guitar used by Stephen Foster; and a motorcycle owned by Charles Lindbergh.61 In addition, many of the buildings Ford preserved at Greenfield were chosen because of their association with famous men and so were essentially huge, walk-in relics brought together in the vast outdoor exhibition space of Greenfield Village. Thus he preserved a courthouse where Lincoln had practiced law; a summer cabin built by the electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz; the supposed birthplace of Stephen Foster; the house where William McGuffey, the originator of the McGuffey Readers, was born; 185

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the Wright brothers’ birthplace and machine shop; the house where Noah Webster produced his dictionary; and the house where Luther Burbank was born. Ford lavished the most painstaking attention, however, on the reconstructed Menlo Park laboratory of his friend and hero Thomas Edison. In 1928 his employees began excavating the New Jersey site of the laboratory, most of whose buildings had long since fallen to ruin and been used by neighboring farmers for lumber. Ford’s workers dismantled the remaining buildings, bought back any of the original lumber they could find, and excavated Edison’s old dump to uncover the useless and broken objects the lab had discarded. All these remnants were then shipped to Dearborn, where they were assembled into a facsimile of Edison’s laboratory compound, as painstakingly reproduced as any of Rockefeller’s reconstructions at Williamsburg. The entire enterprise blended archaeological precision with an unadulterated veneration of the relics of the great man. In addition to gluing together some of Edison’s broken artifacts, Ford preserved the stump of a tree from Menlo Park in a glass case and had his crew blanket the ground of the reconstructed complex with boxcar loads of red earth from the original site. Nothing better illustrates Ford’s immersion in the nineteenthcentury cult of the auratic object than the use he made of the one remaining window shutter from Edison’s original office building and library. Rather than simply using this intact shutter as a model for entirely new reconstructions, he had it carefully disassembled, and one slat from the original shutter was inserted into each of the reproductions, violating the integrity of the object in favor of dispersing its potent substance more widely. The reverence for original substance was echoed in the reconstruction of a Revolutionary-era clock from the Wayside Inn. Ford had the broken mechanism replaced so that the clock ran again, but instead of discarding the old parts, he turned them into relics by gathering them together in a case that he fastened inside the newly functioning clock.62 Such objects offer evidence that Ford had internalized the sentimental culture he grew up in. Yet, other than the pieces of the shutter, the clockwork, the Menlo Park earth, and the tree stump mentioned above, he seems never to have preserved any of the partial objects and tokens that were so overwhelmingly important in the nineteenth century. Moreover, even these few partial objects were gathered early on in his preservation efforts and were mostly tokens of his extreme veneration for his fellow inventor Edison. Ford did continue to bring association items to Greenfield throughout his life, but they remained a very small 186

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proportion of his collection. And in the museum’s publications, as well as in its endless rows of artifacts, they were effectively subordinated to the innumerable things that were simply old. In this way Ford’s collection exemplified the history making of many of his generation. Americans in the first half of the twentieth century evinced a lingering attachment to the relic, but over time, even in the smallest and most provincial local museums, that attachment was superseded by other ways of accessing the past. If Greenfield stands as a paradigm of the way the generic everyday object was coming to replace the singular relic, it also exemplifies other changes in the twentieth century’s relationship with historical time. These changes can most readily be glimpsed in Ford’s first preservation effort—the restoration of his childhood home in Dearborn. When the building was threatened with demolition in 1919 by the proposed expansion of a nearby highway, the Ford family had it moved, and Ford then determined to restore it to the way it had looked in 1876, the year his mother died. To ensure the most accurate reproduction possible, he had his employees conduct an amateur archaeological dig at the house’s original site—effectively using the tools of archaeology to excavate his own personal memories. Various pieces of hardware and household items were unearthed, including bits of the Ford family’s original dishes, which Ford then used to have the dishes exactly reproduced.63 Simultaneously, he deployed employees to scour the countryside for items identical to the ones surrounding him in his childhood. So insistent was his desire to reproduce his childhood environment exactly that, according to an account published by the Henry Ford Museum, an employee visited “almost every antique shop between Detroit and Cincinnati before he found the correct shade of worn, red carpeting for the homestead stairs.”64 The popular versifier Edgar A. Guest visited the house in 1923 and recorded his impressions and his conversations with Ford in an article for the American Magazine. Guest portrayed Ford’s old homestead as being maintained exactly as it been half a century before—down to the fire in the hearth and slippers under the bed. He even described the drawers filled with paisley shawls that Ford admitted had not belonged to his mother but that he said she would have liked and that reminded him of the one shawl he owned that had been hers.65 Ford’s drive to re-create the physical particulars of the past thus had its beginnings in his attempt to recapture his own history, and when he expanded his preservation project to a more general American past, he continued to enfold his and his family’s history into the structure 187

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of his idealized village. Among the mélange of buildings preserved at Greenfield were a number that had personal associations for Ford: the house of boyhood friends where he sometimes spent the night; a oneroom school he attended; the carding mill to which he and his father brought their raw wool; a lunch wagon he patronized as a young man; a jewelry store where he repaired watches; a replica of the shed where he built his first car; and a one-quarter-scale reproduction of the first Ford factory. The church at Greenfield, the Chapel of Martha-Mary, was named after both Ford’s mother and his wife’s mother, and the name Greenfield itself was the name of the small town Mrs. Ford grew up in. The personal artifacts Ford assembled in his reconstructed family home and later at Greenfield can be seen as forms of the sentimental token. In fact, Guest’s description of Ford’s attempt to evoke his mother’s presence clearly continued the nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity and of the home as an extension of the mother. However, the reason Ford preserved his personal mementos was a significant departure from the mode of the sentimental token in that, like the things treasured by Civil War veterans, the objects were not used primarily to connect with others or with the past more generally but specifically to connect with an earlier self. Though in popular parlance we may routinely call this fi xation on the past sentimental, if sentimentality is considered as a very specific structure of feeling dominant throughout the better part of the nineteenth century, Ford’s attempt to re-create his childhood was something rather different. Like Civil War veterans’ efforts to evoke the exploits of their youth, it might best be called not a sentimental structure of feeling but a nostalgic one. If Greenfield was linked to Civil War collections because it too evoked its collector’s youth, its nostalgia was more obviously bound up with larger social and economic developments. The interplay of temporal loss and idealization of the past that characterizes nostalgia was not unique to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As discussions of the concept routinely note, the word nostalgia itself made its first appearance in the late seventeenth century as a medical designation for homesickness.66 And, as Raymond Williams has outlined in his classic The Country and the City, manifestations of a longing for a simpler personal or collective past can be traced back many centuries in English literature.67 Nonetheless, the nineteenth century had a particularly integral relation to the experience of nostalgia, since nostalgic longing then came to encode the historically specific phenomenon of industrialization. The large-scale industrialization and urbanization

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that characterized the decades after the Civil War was accompanied by an idealizing of a preindustrial past that took many forms, be it local museums’ interest in collecting and classifying the farm implements of an earlier age, the widespread fascination with quaint artifacts and other evocations of the colonial era, or the interest in viewing images of sentimental rural scenes and vacationing in locales that industrialization had passed by.68 It was this longing for modes of production and forms of social organization that had been decisively superseded that differentiated nostalgia from the sentimental structures of feeling characterizing Victorian society. Sentimentality participated in the nineteenth century’s new sense of the pastness of the past and of that pastness as a form of loss. It sought to bridge that loss by seeking out and ritually cultivating material connections with that which was no longer present. But it did not perceive past time as essentially different from the present. Time was lost only in the sense of being past; it was not lost through a qualitative shift in the nature of time itself. The nostalgia that became a dominant structure of feeling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the other hand, was a longing for a qualitatively different time. It was a longing, first, for the individual’s lost childhood with its particular childish pleasures and attachments. But distinctive to the structure of nostalgia was the fact that this narrative of individual, developmental loss was also mapped onto a larger collective social loss. One could say that in the relic time had remained unhistoricized: the relic marked time only as passage, encoded only its irreversibility. Nostalgia, however—whatever we may think of its clearly compensatory project—encoded a rather more complex notion of historical development. It historicized the trajectory of time itself, crystallizing the social changes of the late nineteenth century in a sense of historical process defined by a decisive before and after: first, a kind of time before time, unchanging, rural, agrarian, supposedly childlike in its freedom from industrial work rhythms, and then the after-time of unceasing change, a time of mechanization, urbanization, and routinization— the time turn-of-the-century Americans found themselves increasingly enmeshed in. Greenfield was one of the most fully developed realizations of nostalgic time, primed to activate its audience’s highly developed sense of both personal and social loss. In many ways it was set up to evoke Ford’s personal past, but his rural past was so representative of the past of innumerable other Americans that early visitors to Greenfield must

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have discovered versions of their own memories at every turn. Visiting Ford’s warehouse of artifacts in 1925, for example, the author Hamlin Garland described the images of his early life that it evoked: As I walked among work-worn relics I saw the kerosene lamp round which my family used to gather and the stove under which I was wont to lie as a child. Here was the reaper which my father drove whilst I, a boy of eight, rode the lead horse. As I jingled long strings of sleigh-bells, pictures of snowy prairie farms came back to me. I laid my hand on the curved dashboard of a duck-bodied cutter such as I drove along the Iowa lanes, and when I came back to the office I was filled with the nostalgia which these familiar but almost forgotten objects had aroused.69

Greenfield’s claim to be a historical site, however, depended on the fact that in discovering their own past visitors also discovered the nation’s past and were schooled in how it should be apprehended. As has often been noted, in Greenfield Village the man who was perhaps most responsible for the mechanization of American life and for the breakdown of the isolation of rural communities presented a version of the America he himself had destroyed. Ford supposedly did this in the name of progress. His public pronouncements repeatedly emphasized that Greenfield and its museum could teach Americans about the present’s superiority to the past and maintain the impetus of progress into the future. In a 1934 article that appeared over his name in American Magazine, for example, he protested that Greenfield was not “just a kind of antiquarian hobby of mine” but was intended “to remind the public who visit it . . . of how far and how fast we have come in technical progress in the last century or so.”70 But the flip side of Ford’s belief in the unceasing forward movement of time was an unceasing longing for what had been left behind. As he supposedly told an interviewer, “A demonstration of the old living conditions will help us to find out what it is we have lost which would be worthwhile to get back again.”71 If Greenfield illustrates a shift from the sentimental to the nostalgic, it also offers evidence of another historical change that was equally central in the waning of the relic as a historical form. As the earlier discussion of period rooms suggests, by the early twentieth century the practice of offering access to the past through discrete individual objects had begun to yield to flashier modes of exhibition involving complete simulated environments. Re-creations of spaces from the past had some precedent in, for example, eighteenth-century follies or selected antiquarian collections, and the historical cycloramas that were so popular throughout the nineteenth century certainly aimed to im190

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merse their viewers in the illusion of a three-dimensional space.72 But in the United States it was only in the late nineteenth century that fully realized re-creations of the past emerged as a concerted method of display. Perhaps the earliest such environments were the colonial kitchens that were introduced at the Civil War’s sanitary fairs and later appeared at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. These kitchens were created when the relic was still the predominant form of historical representation, and they sometimes included articles that, for example, supposedly had come over on the Mayflower. But overall, they were cast in the mode of the complete historical re-creation, not the collection of individual objects.73 The period room soon moved beyond the expositions to become a standard mode of exhibition in both art and historical museums. As early as the 1880s, the antiquarian George Sheldon’s Memorial Hall in Deerfield, Massachusetts, included both an old-time kitchen and a re-creation of an early nineteenth-century bedroom. And by the 1920s and 1930s period rooms had become de rigueur in exhibitions of period furniture, implements, and decorative arts in the country’s most illustrious museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Art Institute, and the Chicago Historical Society.74 In the period room museum visitors could peer into the past, but they could not necessarily enter it. The past was fully dimensional but also just out of reach—like the objects in their glass cases, a thing to be gazed on rather than interacted with. In other popular modes of display, however, visitors could wander through entire historical settings, immersing themselves in the past rather than viewing it from a distance. The earliest of these environments were the historic houses that various historical societies, heritage organizations, and state and local governments began to acquire and open to the public in the late nineteenth century. Mount Vernon and several of Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters were among the first of these refurbished houses, and they were quickly followed by innumerable residences of founding fathers, authors, and prominent local citizens, along with typical pioneer cabins, Southern plantations, and old colonial houses.75 So popular were such historic houses that, according to Laurence Vail Coleman’s Historic House Museums, between 1895 and 1910 the number of house museums rose from about twenty to almost a hundred.76 The presentation of the past as an environment one could enter and move around in had its fullest realization in the reconstructed villages and townscapes that began to appear in the twentieth century. As has 191

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often been noted, these can be traced back to the late nineteenth-century Scandinavian open-air museums. There peasant homes from different areas were brought together in a kind of simulated village where visitors could stroll from one house to the next, the unity of the artificially created space blurring and patching over the disunities of circumstances, geography, and time periods.77 In the United States immersive historical environments became firmly established in the 1920s and 1930s with Greenfield Village and also with the construction of John D. Rockefeller’s Colonial Williamsburg. Post–World War II America saw the appearance of innumerable other such environments, among them Old Sturbridge Village, Plimoth Plantation, the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, Mystic Seaport, and Old Deerfield Village. And these more self-consciously didactic historical environments merged into those we think of not as historical reconstructions but as theme parks, including the Ghost Town in Knott’s Berry Farm and, most notoriously, the reconstructed small-town America of Disneyland’s Main Street.78 Over the twentieth century, these re-creations of the past would increasingly eclipse the display of isolated objects as a mode of historical representation in refurbished historical towns, in theme parks, in historic districts and downtowns, and even in evocative walk-in environments in museums themselves. Unlike rows of objects, they supposedly brought the past in all its totality into the present as a fully immersive experience that the viewer could participate in. Moreover, often their creators asserted that experiencing the past this way was essential to understanding it. “We ought to know more about the families who founded this nation, and how they lived,” the American Historical Review quoted Ford as saying. “One way to do this is to reconstruct as nearly as possible the conditions under which they lived.”79 And the museum’s official program eventually asserted that one of its purposes was “to demonstrate, for educational purposes, the development of American arts, sciences, customs, and institutions by reproducing or re-enacting the conditions and circumstances of such development in any manner calculated to convey a realistic picture thereof.”80 This notion that the past was best understood through a “realistic picture” situated historical representation in the realm of the mimetic. History could most effectively be accessed through a faithful imitation of the past “as it was”—by what Umberto Eco, speaking of the simulated environments of our own time, has called “hyperreality,” in which historical information “has to assume the aspect of a reincarnation” and the past can only “be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy.”81 In offering a very different mode of access to the past than the relic 192

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did, mimetic re-creations asserted a fundamentally different proposition about the grounds of historical authenticity. As we have seen, the relic based its claim to authenticity on sheer material continuity. Authenticity resided in matter as a kind of invisible essence, and it was matter’s stability over time, its ongoing identity with itself, that rendered it efficacious in the present. If relics were indisputably authentic in this sense, however, period rooms and historical environments were much more tenuously so. Period rooms usually displayed objects that had come from the past, but a smattering of the things on display might well be reproductions. Moreover, the entire ensemble could hardly be considered “authentic,” since the objects had a variety of provenances and were brought together in entirely new configurations, often in newly constructed rooms. Similarly, entire environments presented as historic might indeed be spruced-up versions of villages or streetscapes that had survived more or less intact from the past, but they might also have been re-created out of whole cloth. Thus, although many of the buildings present in Williamsburg in the colonial era had been torn down decades before, John D. Rockefeller created a historical environment by rebuilding them—reproducing the structures’ exact lineaments in painstaking detail in brand new bricks and mortar. In the logic of the relic, Williamsburg’s new buildings would have had no ontological validity because they shared no substance with the earlier buildings they so aptly mimicked. They could not represent the past because they were not of it. Yet to those who conceptualized the rebuilding of Williamsburg, its newly minted historic structures exerted their own claim to authenticity. They were “authentic” in a redefined sense of exactly replicating the earlier buildings—their appearance, their measurements—not in the sense that they had any material connection to them. Williamsburg thus reconfigured the grounds of historical representation. Not only did it summon up the past as an all-encompassing sensory totality rather than as the fragmentary evocation of sentimental memory, but the necessity of experiencing the past “as it was” completely superseded an earlier understanding that a connection to the past required some material remnant.82 Other historical environments went even further in rejecting the necessity of a physical link to the past. For if the authenticity of rigorous, professionally supervised reproductions such as Williamsburg was supposedly secured by the accuracy of their physical appearance, environments such as Greenfield or other open-air museums were not intended as literal duplications of any previous reality at all. Instead, they were evocative pastiches of elements from a number of periods—some 193

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of them perhaps original, some of them completely made up—that collectively offered not a literal re-creation but only an impression of past-likeness. The metaphor that structured the relation between these settings and their users was that of the tourist—the individual who seeks immersion in endlessly new environments solely for the imaginative experiences they offer. They thus exemplified what Hilde Hein has called a “shift from ontological to phenomenological value,” from a mode of historical representation whose authenticity was grounded in matter to a mode in which the intensity of subjective experience served as its own authentication.83 In the themed environments and museums of the twentieth century, the object would become, in Paul Williams’s words, “not so much the truth from an earlier time, as a prop in the larger dramatization of the story.” Objects would be valuable “primarily in the staging of experience.”84

Finally, though this chapter has emphasized how the relic was succeeded by other forms of historical representation, it should also be acknowledged that, even as the relic was repudiated, it did not disappear. We have already seen, for example, that although the new museum professionals vociferously rejected the relic, they tacitly accepted certain types of relics into the fold of the modern museum. And many of the things the nineteenth century collected have continued to be displayed in museums down to our own time. The Smithsonian’s ongoing American Presidency exhibition, to cite one example, includes among its artifacts a series of the standard nineteenth-century relics we have already encountered, including the desk where Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence; Lincoln’s top hat; charred timber from the White House burned in the War of 1812; the framed display of the first fourteen presidents’ hair that was among the historical objects transferred from the Patent Office in the early years of the Smithsonian; and, featured prominently, Washington’s uniform, shown on a headless mannequin and looking very much as it did when it was the centerpiece of the museum’s historical collections in the 1890s.85 And outside museums, certain traditional relics continue to be preserved in large numbers by collectors and aficionados. The collection of Lincolniana belonging to the Columbia urologist John Lattimer, put up for auction after his death in 2007, included such prototypical relics as fragments of the hearthstones from cabins Lincoln lived in as a boy, his rail-splitting maul, a thimble said to have belonged to Nancy Hanks 194

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Lincoln, fabric from the sofa on which Lincoln courted Mary Todd, a pen made from a twig of an elm tree he planted, strands of his hair, a pair of his spectacles, the tablecloth on which he ate his last meal, bloodstained bits of his pillow slip, bandages, and shirt collar, and handles from his coffin.86 The relic’s continuing significance is evident not only in individual nineteenth-century relics that have persisted to the present but in the fact that, as I noted in my introduction, in the latter part of the twentieth century museums and other historical venues again began resorting to association items to convey the mass traumas of our own time. Many of the items preserved in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; in exhibitions devoted to the events of 9/11 at the Smithsonian, the New York Historical Society, and other venues; and in the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, to name only a few examples, could be called contemporary relics. And they are relics not only in being association items but also in that they are often partial, damaged, or fragmented, and above all in that they serve not only as a means of representing the past but as a means of remembering and mourning the dead.87 Like the Lost Cause museums or displays of Lincoln relics, exhibitions of historical artifacts have again come to serve as memorials as much as sources of knowledge about the past.88 We can consider the many association items now being collected by both museums and private individuals as a reemergence of the relic into the space of contemporary historical representation. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that in some ways the relic never left us, that it has remained a continuing presence within our conglomerate tradition of historical representation from the nineteenth century on. Relics were the earliest popular form of historical representation—the first kind of historical objects to find acceptance beyond learned circles of antiquarians—and they exemplify some of the most enduring aspects of the way we as a culture have constructed the historical. They were the objects, for example, in which the concept of history became inextricably intertwined with the history of the nation-state, and they were also the things that transmitted the understanding that the historical object is constituted by the emotional investments it invites and by the way it connects its users to those who have lived in the past. Above all, the relic epitomized the understanding that the past resides in the physical substance of things. Many of the relics that the nineteenth century lavished attention on have lapsed into mere oddities, and the term relic itself has become a synonym for the antiquated and irrelevant. But the assumptions that 195

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crystallized in the relic remain essential to many of our own understandings of historical representation. And in this sense the relic should not be thought of as a form that characterized one period and decisively ended when that period came to a close but as a continuing potential within the Western tradition of historical representation. Nothing allows us to engage with the past like the substance of the past itself, materially identical to what it was in that other time and yet equally here and participating in our present. These small bits of foliage and locks of hair and things that Washington once touched are perhaps just other enough that we can see how strange that impulse is and just familiar enough that we can recognize it as thoroughly our own.

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Notes INTRODUCTION

1.

2.

3.

For discussions of Sanderson and his collecting, see Teresa Barnett, “Tradition and the Individual Memory: The Case of Christian C. Sanderson,” in Acts of Possession, ed. Leah Dilworth (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); John D. Dorst, The Written Suburb: An American Site, an Ethnographic Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Rachel P. Maines and James J. Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” Public Historian 15 (1993): 8–25; and Thomas R. Thompson, Chris: A Biography of Christian C. Sanderson (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1973). See, for example, Lorraine Daston, “Preternatural Philosophy,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 11–69; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Boston: Polity Press, 1990); and Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Discussions of association items as a category of things worth attending to can be found in Seth C. Bruggeman, Here George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument (Athens:

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4.

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University of Georgia Press, 2008), 37–50; Beverly Gordon, “The Souvenir: Messenger of the Extraordinary,” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 135–46; Brooke Hindle, “How Much Is a Piece of the True Cross Worth?” in Material Culture and the Study of American Life, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick, Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 36–47; and Maines and Glynn, “Numinous Objects.” Susan Stewart’s study of what she calls “souvenirs” is also applicable to relics and is highly suggestive for thinking about any kind of memory-invoking things, though it is resolutely ahistorical and does not differentiate between kinds of mnemonic things (e.g., mementos and souvenirs) or make any attempt to document their actual appearance and use in popular practice (Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993]). For rich and sensitive discussions of contemporary association items see Nuala Hancock, “Virginia Woolf’s Glasses: Material Encounters in the Literary/Artistic House Museum,” in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. Sandra H. Dudley (London: Routledge, 2010), and Andrea Liss, “Artifactual Testimonies and the Stagings of Holocaust Memory,” in Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma, ed. Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). The scholarship on museums and collecting is voluminous. Among the works on the history of these subjects that I have profited from are Stephen Bann, “Clio in Part: On Antiquarianism and the Historical Fragment,” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in NineteenthCentury Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Stephen Bann, “‘Views of the Past’: Reflections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History,” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Simon J. Bronner, “Object Lessons: The Work of Ethnological Museums and Collections,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); David Jenkins, “Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994): 242–70; Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon

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5.

6. 7.

8.

and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Lubar and Kendrick, Legacies; and Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980). In the extensive scholarship on nineteenth-century sentimental remembrance, the works I have found most useful include Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69 (1997): 263–88; Katherine C. Grier, “The Decline of the Memory Palace: The Parlor after 1890,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Blanche Linden-Ward, Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989); Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gillian Silverman, “Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” American Studies 43 (2002): 5–28; and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “The Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image,” in Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Dudley, Museum Materialities, 13. It would be impossible to summarize the recent literature on materiality with any claim to comprehensiveness. Prominent and stimulating theorists include Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Alfred Gelb, Tim Ingold, Webb Keane, Bruno Latour, Daniel Miller, Marilyn Strathern, and Christopher Tilley, among many others. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6. A copy of Douglass’s letter can be found on the University of Houston’s Digital History site at www.digital.history.uh.edu/exhibits/douglass_ exhibit/transcript.html. The site indicates that the original is in the Gilder Lehrman Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The text of Keckley’s letter comes from Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 366–67. In chapter 3 I discuss the role the word sacred played in sentimental ideology. See Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 203, 366–68. Keckley’s relics were never given to Wilberforce but instead made their way to relic collector Charles

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Gunther’s museum in Chicago and eventually became part of the Chicago Historical Society’s collection of Lincoln relics. 9. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time (Hartford, CT: Park, 1883), 350. 10. In addition to Liss’s “Artifactual Testimonies and the Stagings of Holocaust Memory,” cited above, see Edward Linenthal’s book on the establishment of the Holocaust Museum for a discussion of artifacts exhibited there and the representational issues involved (Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001], 145–65, 189–92, 210–16). CHAPTER ONE

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

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Julia Paxton Barrow, “William Bentley: An Extraordinary Boarder,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 97 (1961): 137. Ibid., 139. “A Biographical Sketch of Rev. William Bentley from the Historical Address by Judge Joseph G. Waters Prepared for the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the East Church, Observed November 8, 1868,” in The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., 4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), 1:xviii. Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3. Though I am not aware of any comprehensive discussion of the American antiquarian movement, British antiquarianism has been the subject of a detailed and probing literature. See, for example, Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Parry, Trophies of Time; Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004); Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 97–148; Daniel Woolf, “The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500–1730,” Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992): 5–28; and Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). C. J. Delheim, “Medievalism in Modernity: The Victorians’ Encounter with Their Own Inheritance” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1979), 53. Quoted in Levine, Amateur and the Professional, 60. Bentley, Diary, 3:176. Ibid., 4:39. Ibid., 4:597.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 15 – 19

10. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1812–1849 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1912), 104–22. 11. Bentley, Diary, 4:605. 12. This biographical information on Watson is taken largely from Deborah Dependahl Waters, “Philadelphia’s Boswell: John Fanning Watson,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1974): 3–52. Other sources on Watson and his historical endeavors include Lois Amorette Dietz, “John Fanning Watson: Looking Ahead with a Backwards Glance” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 2004); Benjamin Dorr, A Memoir of John Fanning Watson (Philadelphia: Collins, 1861); Gary B. Nash, “Behind the Velvet Curtain: Academic History, Historical Societies, and the Presentation of the Past,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 114 (1990): 6–9; David J. Russo, Keepers of Our Past: Local Historical Writing in the United States, 1820s–1930s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 63–74; and Frank Sommer, “John F. Watson: First Historian of American Decorative Arts,” Magazine Antiques 83 (March 1963): 300–303. A particularly elaborate box that Watson had made to hold a number of his relics is discussed in Yvette Piggush’s “Fancy History: John Fanning Watson’s Relic Box,” Common-Place 10, no. 1 (October 2009), www.common-place.org. 13. For a discussion of New Englanders’ assertion of their own history and traditions as the basis for a national identity in the early republic and antebellum period, see Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 123–202. 14. Hans Christoph Ackermann, “The Basle Cabinets of Art and Curiosities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 62. 15. Arthur MacGregor, “Collectors and Collections of Rarities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, ed. Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 93. 16. Michael Hunter, “The Cabinet Institutionalized: The Royal Society’s ‘Repository’ and Its Background,” in Impey and MacGregor, Origins of Museums, 161. 17. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 18. 18. David Murray, Museums: Their History and Their Use (Glasgow, 1904), 1:172–73. 19. See Sweet, Antiquaries, xiv–xvi, 347–48. This is not to say, of course, that antiquarian studies should be understood only as the precursor to our own preoccupations. In Stephen Bann’s words, “The ‘antiquarian’ attitude is not an imperfect approximation to something else—which would be

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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the maturity of scientific, professionalised historiography. It is a specific, lived relationship to the past, and deserves to be treated on its own terms” (Stephen Bann, “Clio in Part: On Antiquarianism and the Historical Fragment,” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 102. For discussions of the Shakespeare industry, see Ivor Brown and George Fearon, Amazing Monument: A Short History of the Shakespeare Industry (London: William Heinemann, 1939), and R. B. Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: J. Ward, 1806). See also the most detailed fi rst-person account of Stratford-on-Avon and its souvenirs, Washington Irving’s “Stratford-on-Avon,” in his Sketch Book, ed. Mary E. Litchfield (Boston: Ginn, 1901). For a sense of the longevity of these collecting traditions and the voracity with which American tourists, at least, pursued them, see Allison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveler in Great Britain, 1800–1914 (New York: Cornwall Books, 1981). For a discussion of the interest in relics in both England and France in the early nineteenth century, see Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1–7, 85–109. On relics related to John Bunyan, see John Thompson and Sidney Robjohns, Bunyan Home Scenes (Bedford, UK: J. Thompson, 1900); for a discussion of what relics related to Rousseau meant to his admirers, see Claire Brock, “Rousseauvian Remains,” History Workshop Journal 55 (Spring 2003): 144–51; and on the collecting of relics of Waterloo, see Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo,” Representations 69 (2000): 9–37. For a discussion of the process by which Plymouth Rock suddenly became the most celebrated link to the Pilgrim fathers, although written sources before the 1770s never even alluded to it, see John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 23–40. See also Conforti, Imagining New England, 171–96, on the “invention” of the Pilgrims. For descriptions of the objects housed at Pilgrim Hall in the nineteenth century, see William S. Russell, Public Memorials, and Guide to Plymouth (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, 1860), 102–10, and Catalogue of the Historical Collection and Pictures in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth (Plymouth, RI: Pilgrim Society, 1906). On the connection between trees and memory and the use of trees as memorials in the nineteenth century, see Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 92–93. On the veneration and collecting of pieces of the Charter Oak, see Robert F. Trent, “The Charter Oak Artifacts,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 49 (1984): 125–39.

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26. Sylvester Bliss, “The Charter Oak,” Historical Magazine, January 1857, 5. 27. For a listing of relics related to Roger Williams that the Rhode Island Historical Society owned by the early twentieth century, see Rhode Island Historical Society Museum, Illustrating the History of the State (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Historical Society Museum, 1916). 28. For a discussion of the rehabilitation of Independence Hall as a national shrine in the 1850s and the relics housed there, see Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 101–5. A contemporaneous account can be found in D. W. Belisle, History of Independence Hall from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Philadelphia: James Challen, 1859). 29. Robert Gould Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 318. 30. The correspondence related to this request can be found on the Maine Historical Society’s Maine Memory Network website at www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/191/page/450/display. 31. For an account of the founding of historical societies in the United States, see David D. Van Tassel, Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 32. From the list of artifacts donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society before the Civil War. Sent to the author by Curator of Art Anne E. Bentley. 33. William Meade, Old Churches, Ministers, and Families in Virginia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857), 2:237–38. 34. Belisle, History of Independence Hall, 384; Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 438. 35. For discussions of relic furniture, see Elaine Will Kuncio, “Relic Furniture in Victorian America” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1993), and Rodris Roth, “Pieces of History: Relic Furniture of the Nineteenth Century,” Magazine Antiques 101 (May 1972): 874–78. 36. Trent, “Charter Oak Artifacts.” 37. A drawing of this cabinet with all the woods labeled is featured in Julius E. Francis, The Lincoln Memorial Collection: Relics of the War of the Rebellion (Buffalo, NY: Northrup, 1887). 38. Belisle, History of Independence Hall, 361–63. 39. Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick, Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 42. This particular relic was eventually given to the Smithsonian, where it is still prominently displayed. 40. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 136.

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41. For an interesting discussion of a culture that does not assume that the persistence of memory can be assured only through the persistence of objects, see Susanne Küchler, “The Place of Memory,” in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (New York: Berg, 1999). 42. Peirce’s discussion of the icon can be found in Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 10–12. For discussions of history collections as collections of paintings, see Edward Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1979), 79–81, and Germain Bazin, The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill (New York: Universe Books, 1967), 51, 56, 65, 103–5. 43. Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1901), 224. Baldwin’s comments and the history of suspicion of the historical artifact deserve a much more extended explication than I can give here. In short, he argues that admitting “objects of curiosity or antiquity” into a collection will inevitably lead to attempts “to gull somebody with the ‘Shield of Achilles’ or ‘Malbrino’s helmet.’” He thus illustrates how, at least in certain circles, artifacts from the past had long been equated with popular superstition and viewed not as irrefutable material confirmation of the past but as inherently inauthentic and unreal—as objects that must culminate in that staple of pre-nineteenth-century attacks on curiosity collecting, the shield of the fictional Achilles. 44. The most influential examination of the way historical modes of thought characterized the nineteenth century and the way such modes represented a decisive break from earlier modes of apprehending and organizing the world is undoubtedly Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970). For a foundational discussion of what was involved in the nineteenth century’s new sense of historical time, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Other notable contributions to this discussion include Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995), and Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 45. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 53. CHAPTER T WO

1. 2.

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J. T. Headley, Chaplains and Clergy of the Revolution (Springfield, MA, 1861), 93. Minton Thrift, Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee with Extracts from His Journals (New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, 1823), 156.

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3.

Robert Philip, The Life and Times of the Reverend George Whitefield (London: George Virtue, 1837), 550–51. The bone was apparently returned to the tomb in 1837. For an account of its return see J. B. Wakeley, Anecdotes of the Rev. George Whitefield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1879), 388–89. 4. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 42–43. 5. Robert E. Cray Jr., “Memorialization and Enshrinement: George Whitefield and Popular Religious Culture, 1770–1850,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 350. Although I disagree with some of Cray’s arguments, my own arguments depend heavily on his research, since the contemporary accounts of Whitefield’s body that I cite are virtually all drawn from sources he identifies in his article. 6. Cray, “Memorialization and Enshrinement,” 351. 7. Jesse Lee, A Short History of the Methodists in the United States of America (Baltimore: Magill and Clime, 1810), 38. 8. L. Tyerman, The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1877), 2:602. 9. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 10. On the finger in Peale’s museum, see Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 42. For a mention of the arm of Tom Trouble, see Sights and Wonders in New York (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1849), 15. 11. Nineteenth-century science’s extreme and often rapacious fascination with the skulls of Native Americans is described in Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Fabian discusses Samuel G. Morton’s collecting at length, and another account of it can be found in Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 55–103. For a discussion of the emergence of a biological conception of race early in the century, see Bronwen Douglas, “Climate to Crania: Science and the Racialization of Human Difference,” in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940, ed. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (Canberra: Australian National University, 2008), 33–96. 12. For a sense of the contents of such collections, see Catalogue of Phrenological Specimens Belonging to the Boston Phrenological Society (Boston: John Ford, 1835), and A Poetical Sketch of Fowler and Wells’ Phrenological Museum (New York: n.d.). Discussions of the practice and tenets of phrenology include Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); John

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13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 147–71; and Madeleine B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971). For discussions of the interest in famous men’s skulls, see Folke Henschen, The Human Skull: A Cultural History, trans. Stanley Thomas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), and also Michael Hagner, “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture: On Cerebral Biographies of Scientists in the Nineteenth Century,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 195–218. Quoted in Joseph Belcher, George Whitefield: A Biography (New York: American Tract Society, 1857), 458. A detailed discussion of the disinterment of well-known American corpses, some of which I discuss here, can be found in Michael Kammen, Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Historiographer to the United States: The Revolutionary Letterbook of Pierre Eugène du Simitière, ed. Paul G. Sifton (New York: Vantage Press, 1987), 108. Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian B. Miller, 5 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), vol. 2, pt. 2, 946. The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., 4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), 2:253. Ibid., 3:425–26. For a discussion of this exhumation, see Allen Walker Read, “The Disinterment of Milton’s Remains,” PMLA 45 (December 1930): 1050–68. James Buchanan, “Narrative of the Exhumation of the Remains of Major André,” United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine, pt. 3 (London 1833): 305–7, 310. Cited in Michael Meranze, “Major André’s Exhumation,” in Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, ed. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 127–29. Rhode Island Historical Society Museum, Illustrating the History of the State (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society Museum, 1916), 8. On the disinterment itself, see Kammen, Digging Up the Dead, 174–77. Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo,” Representations 69 (2000): 12. The practice is evident in the occasional “tooth of Jane McCrea” that appears in the catalogs of nineteenth-century historical collections and is also discussed briefly in Robert O. Bascom, The Fort Edward Book (Fort Edward, NY: James D. Keating, 1903), 45. Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 1:64n2. Ibid., 2:290. A contemporaneous account of this exhumation can be found in Joseph Ayloffe, “An Account of the Body of King Edward the First, as It Appeared on Opening His Tomb in the Year 1774,” Archaeologia 3 (1775): 376–413.

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27. Henry Halford, “An Account of What Appeared on Opening the Coffi n of King Charles I,” Essays and Orations Read and Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians (London: John Murray, 1833), xii. For an American account of both of these exhumations see Jacob Bigelow, “On the Burial of the Dead,” in Nature in Disease, Illustrated in Various Discourses and Essays (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854). 28. Quoted in Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 70. 29. William Strickland, Tomb of Washington at Mount Vernon (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1840), 29–36. The well-preserved condition of Washington’s body is also emphasized in at least one other account. In his Annals of Philadelphia John Fanning Watson notes that John Struthers, the Philadelphia marble cutter who had made the sarcophagus and who was present at the opening of the tomb, had reported that the body “was still in wonderful preservation; the high pale brow wore a calm and serene expression, and the lips pressed together, had a grave and solemn smile” (John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Times [Philadelphia: Elijah Thomas, 1857], 1:581). 30. Although there is no evidence that any pieces of Washington’s body or clothing were taken from the tomb, the story circulated that a Mount Vernon gardener had plotted to steal the first president’s bones and sell them “as relics, to the disciples or the fanatics of freedom in the Old World.” See Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 75. 31. The preserved corpse’s status as a privileged conveyor of memory in this period deserves much more extended discussion than I can give it here. I will note only that Jeremy Bentham’s striking concept of the “auto-icon,” publicized in his treatise of that name, involved erecting the embalmed corpse itself, rather than a gravestone or other monument, as the marker of an individual’s life (Jeremy Bentham’s “Auto-Icon” and Related Writings, ed. James E. Crimmins [Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003]). Independently, Charles Willson Peale arrived at a similarly startling proposal, though this one was intended as a means of perpetuating historical, not simply personal, memory. In an announcement he issued to prominent citizens of Philadelphia in 1792, he outlined his desire to mount an exhibit that would “hand down to succeeding generations, the relicks of . . . great men, whose labours have been crowned with success in the most distinguished benefits to mankind. The mode I mean, is the preserving their bodies from corruption and being the food of worms. . . . Altho’ perhaps it is not in the power of art, to preserve these bodies in that high perfection of form, which the well executed painting in portrait, and sculpture can produce; yet the actual remains of such men as I have just described, must be highly regarded by those, who reverence the memory

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of such luminaries as but seldom appear” (Miller, Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale, vol. 2, pt. 1, 15). In particular, Peale wanted to exhibit the bodies of those who had distinguished themselves during the American Revolution and expressed regret that he had not notified Benjamin Franklin of his desire before Franklin’s death, since he believed that Franklin’s “liberality of soul,” and presumably also his scientific leanings, would have prompted him to agree to the proposition. For a discussion of the way the preserved corpse of Turenne was used as a means of invoking a very particular past in France during this same period, see Suzanne Glover Lindsay, “Mummies and Tombs: Turenne, Napoleon, and Death Ritual,” Art Bulletin 82 (September 2000): 477–502. See also Matthews, Poetical Remains, for an explication of how the bodies of nineteenth-century poets served as a privileged means of access to their genius and the corpus of their work. 32. In his exhaustive and fascinating study of British antiquarianism, Daniel Woolf similarly differentiates between the antiquity and the religious relic. “The relic,” he says, “valued for sacred, medicinal, and prophylactic qualities, connected its owner or worshipper with the original object or person to whom it had putatively belonged, and by extension with God and eternity: it was fundamentally timeless rather than historical. In contrast, while the antiquity often had some intrinsic monetary value— jewels, weapons, and coins could be sold—it typically had little practical use, and it connected its collector not with eternity but with temporality, mutability, and social change” (Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 196). 33. This linkage between antiquarians and decay goes back to at least the seventeenth century, when John Earle in his 1628 Microcosmographie described the antiquarian as “one that hath that unnaturall disease to bee enamour’d of old age, and wrinckles, and loves all things (as Dutchmen doe cheese) the better for being mouldy and worme-eaten. . . . Beggars coozen him with musty things which they have rak’t from dunghills, and he preserves their rags for precious Reliques. He loves no Library, but where there are more Spiders’ volums than Authors, and looks with great admiration on the Antique works of Cob-webs. . . . His chamber is hung commonly with strange Beasts’ skins, an is a kind of Charnel-house of bones extraordinary” (John Earle, Microcosmographie, ed. A. S. West [London, 1897], 57–58). For some suggestive observations on antiquarians’ investment in “beneficent decay” as a kind of olfactory and even gustatory pleasure, see Stephen Bann, “Clio in Part: On Antiquarianism and the Historical Fragment,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 23 (1987): 33–35. 34. Quoted in Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 79.

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35. Excerpt from the Historical Magazine quoted in Benjamin Dorr, Memoir of John Fanning Watson (Philadelphia: Collins, 1861), 78. 36. Deborah Louise Dependahl, “John Fanning Watson, Historian, 1779– 1860” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1971); Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2:12; Deborah Dependahl Waters, “Philadelphia’s Boswell: John Fanning Watson,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1974): 51. 37. For evidence that the equation between the corpse and history was not confi ned to American antiquarians, see Göran Blix’s discussion of the way French Romantic historians and authors used the image of reviving or reassembling dead bodies as a metaphor for writing about the past (Göran Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009], 140–54). 38. Joshua Coffi n, A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport and West Newbury (1845; repr. Hampton, NH: Peter E. Randall for the Sons and Daughters of the First Settlers of Newbury, Massachusetts, 1977), iii. 39. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2:9. 40. Ibid., 2:13–14. Watson’s citation actually cobbles together lines from two separate stanzas of Smith’s poem, or at least of the version that appears in Smith’s collected Poetical Works. 41. Bentley, Diary, 2:372. 42. Ibid., 2:142. 43. Thrift, Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee, 156. 44. Bentley, Diary, 2:142. 45. Dorr, Memoir of John Fanning Watson, 39–40. 46. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2:692. 47. D. W. Belisle, History of Independence Hall: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Philadelphia: Challen and Son, 1859), 358. 48. Sylvester Bliss, “The Charter Oak,” Historical Magazine, January 1857, 5. 49. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2:395. 50. Ibid., 2:539. 51. Ibid., 1:389. 52. Henry Woodman, The History of Valley Forge (Oaks, PA: John U. Francis Sr., 1921), 154–56. 53. Henry P. Tappan, A Step from the New World to the Old and Back Again (New York: D. Appleton, 1852), 1:208; Grace Greenwood [Sara Jane Lippincott], Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854), 134; Mrs. A. E. Newman, European Leaflets for Young Ladies (New York: John F. Baldwin, 1861), 185. All cited in Allison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveler in Great Britain, 1800–1914 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 76. 54. For discussions of this change, see James A. Hijiya, “American Gravestones and Attitudes toward Death: A Brief History,” Proceedings of the Ameri-

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

can Philosophical Society 127 (1983): 339–63; Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 51–62; Blanche Linden-Ward, Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989); and Robert V. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors,” 5. Abel Stevens, Sketches and Incidents, or A Budget from the Saddlebags of a Superannuated Itinerant, ed. George Peck (New York: G. Lane, 1845), 2:120. Quoted in Tyerman, Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, 2:607. J. B. Wakeley, Anecdotes of the Rev. George Whitefield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1879), 397. Andrew Reed and James Matheson, Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, by the Deputation from the Congregational Union of England and Wales (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), 1:296. Peter Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Alon Confi no and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 64. On the particular importance that came to be attached to fragments of the past, see Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 92–159.

CHAPTER THREE

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2.

3. 4.

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The literature that revisits and immensely complicates both the narrative of secularization and the relation between the religious and the secular is extensive. Among the most cogent and influential discussions are Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Russell T. McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, ed. Elaine Forman Crane (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 1:766; Affecting History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim’s Family to Which Are Added the Sufferings of John Corbly’s Family (Bennington, VT: Collier and Stockwell, 1802), 32. The Miser and Enthusiast (Washington, DC: Apollo Press by W. Duane and Son, 1802), 18. Edmund Flagg, The Far West (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838), 1:270.

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals, ed. Charles Edward Stowe (New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1891), 325. For a breakdown of the many meanings of “relic” from the medieval period onward, see the Oxford English Dictionary. Though the examples given there are taken primarily from British sources, they correspond generally to the meanings I outline in this chapter, with the qualification that, as dictionary definitions do, they separate out the series of separate definitions much more rigorously than was done in practice. My sense of the nineteenth century’s use of the word is that the connotations of “remains,” of “marker of the past,” of “cherished memento,” and of “sacredness” flowed freely through its various appearances and that any one use might draw on any or all of those senses. The Cowper quotation can be found in Ivor Brown and George Fearon, Amazing Monument: A Short History of the Shakespeare Industry (London: William Heinemann, 1939), 50. The ode Garrick sang appears in R. B. Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: J. Ward, 1806), 199. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1905), 16:123. Ibid., 18:349–50. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, ed. Gary Williams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 411–12. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. For discussions of nineteenth-century sentimentality as a specific structure of feeling, see, for example, June Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?” American Literary History 11 (1999): 63–81, and Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). I single out these two authors because of their conscious awareness of their work as contributing to the study of the history of emotion, but the scholarship on sentimentality—and on its eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century predecessor, the cult of sentiment—is voluminous and far more extensive than I can discuss here. For summaries of the developments and debates in this area in the scholarship on American literature, see Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?” and Hildegard Hoeller, “From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of American Sentimentality,” ESQ 52 (2006): 339–69. Hendler, Public Sentiments, 11. David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3. For other discussions of the concept of sympathy as it developed from the

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

212

seventeenth century through the nineteenth, see Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Jonathan Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2009); Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (New York: Anthem Press, 2007); Thomas J. McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1997); and Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69 (1997): 267. “Treasures,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 49 (August 1854): 111; Jane G. Austin, The Shadow of Moloch Mountain (New York: Sheldon, 1870), 57. “Editor’s Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 46 (June 1853): 559; “Editor’s Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 39 (November 1849): 366; “Thoughts on Married Life,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 34 (January 1847): 6. Elizabeth Akers Allen, “Where Charlie Died,” in Forest Buds, from the Woods of Maine (Boston: Brown, Bazin, 1856), 95; “Poetry,” Huntress 4 (April 11, 1840): 3; “The Parent’s Grave,” Rural Repository Devoted to Polite Literature 18 (January 29, 1842): 136. Henry Churchill De Mille and Charles Barnard, The Main Line, or Rawson’s Y: An Idyl of the Railroad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 50; “Dirty Matrimonial Linen,” Harper’s Weekly 3 (January 1, 1859): 2. Theodore L. Cuyler, The Empty Crib: A Memorial of Little Georgie (New York: R. Carter, 1868), 77; Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, “What Will He Do with It?” Harper’s Weekly 1 (August 22, 1857): 538. Quoted in Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 40, 41. On the way interiority is defined by the spatial metaphor of an essential self residing inside the subject, see Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago Press, 1995), 12. Discussions of the development of interiority as a defi ning attribute of the modern self can be found in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

University Press, 1989), and in Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Fitz Hugh Ludlow, “The New Partner in ‘Clingham and Co., Bankers,’” Harper’s Weekly 4 (January 28, 1860): 61. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “On a Lock of Hair,” in Longfellow’s Boyhood Poems: A Paper by the Late George Thomas Little Together with the Text of Hitherto Uncollected Early Poems and Bibliography, ed. Ray W. Pettengill (Saratoga Springs, NY: R. W. Pettengill, 1925), 51. “A Leaf from a Family Journal,” in The Wedding Guest: A Friend of the Bride and Bridegroom, ed. T. S. Arthur (Chicago: Keen and Lee, 1856), 197. Diary of Emma Mordecai, Memoirs of American Jews, 1775–1865, ed. Jacob Rader Marcus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955), 3:336; The Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, ed. Charles East (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 213. Though innumerable studies of sentimentality and of nineteenth-century mourning rituals allude to collecting mementos, there has been surprisingly little sustained discussion of how they functioned or how collecting them participated in larger cultural meanings. Starr Ockenga’s On Women and Friendship: A Collection of Victorian Keepsakes and Traditions (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1993) gives a sense of the rich visual reality of memento culture. Geoffrey Batchen’s equally striking Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004) and his “Ere the Substance Fade: Photography and Hair Jewellery,” in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004) are both about photography, but they include discussions of photographs that are accompanied by locks of hair, hair wreaths, and hair jewelry, and his sensitive discussion of the meanings ascribed to photographs offers a suggestive starting point for thinking about the memento. For a complex and nuanced discussion of how mementos functioned in a specific context—in this case the Brontë siblings’ mourning for their dead sisters—see Kate E. Brown, “Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality, and Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Never-Ending Story,’” ELH 65, no. 2 (1998): 395–421. A detailed discussion of the role hair and hair work played in the nineteenth century can be found in Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868, ed. John Q. Anderson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 347. Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, 430–31. On mid-Victorian women’s handicrafts and the aesthetic of salvage, see Talia Schaffer, “Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and ‘The Cranford Papers,’”

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31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

214

Victorian Periodicals Review 38, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 221–23. Schaffer is talking about nineteenth-century Britain, but her points are relevant in an American context as well. Thomas Baldwin Thayer, Over the River, or Pleasant Walks into the Valley of Shadows and Beyond (Boston: Tompkins, 1864), 249. T. S. Arthur, ed., Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing (Philadelphia: H. C. Peck and Theo. Bliss, 1856), 24–25. Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, 213; Jefferson Davis: Private Letters, 1823– 1889, ed. Hudson Strode (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 491; Thomas R. Thompson, Chris: A Biography of Christian C. Sanderson (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1973), 30. Caroline Gilman, The Poetry of Travelling in the United States (New York: S. Colman, 1838), 168. Marion Harland [Mary Virginia Terhune], Marion Harland’s Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), 30–31. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling in the United States, 168. For examples of the ways coffin plates and flowers in particular were often incorporated into elaborate memorial objects, see Maureen DeLorme, Mourning Art and Jewelry (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2004), 175–85. Ockenga, On Women and Friendship, 15. Letter from Ulysses S. Grant to Julia Dent, October 1845, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 1:60. Letter from Ulysses S. Grant to Julia Dent, August 31, 1844, in Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 1:35–36. Letter from Ulysses S. Grant to Julia Dent, September 14, 1845, in Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 1:55. The Diary of Clara Crowninshield: A European Tour with Longfellow, 1835– 1836, ed. Andrew Hilen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956), 184. Letter from Elizabeth Palmer Porcher to Esther Simons Palmer, September 7, 1862, in A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881, ed. Louis P. Towles (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 342. Heritage of Woe: The Civil War Diary of Grace Brown Elmore, ed. Marli F. Weiner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 145. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 9. Letter from Taliaferro N. Simpson to Mary Simpson, April 5, 1863, in “Far, Far from Home”: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, Third South Carolina Volunteers, ed. Guy R. Everson and Edward W. Simpson Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 210. A. S. Billingsley, From the Flag to the Cross, or Scenes and Incidents of Christianity in the War (Philadelphia: New-World, 1872), 375–76.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 63 – 6 8

48. William Alexander Caruthers, The Knights of the Horse-Shoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion (Wetumpka, AL: Charles Yancey, 1845), 166. 49. Isabella Maud Rittenhouse, Maud, ed. Richard Lee Strout (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 144. 50. Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, 500. 51. This translation is from Sophie in London 1786, Being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 107–8. The German original can be found in Sophie von La Roche, Tagebuch einer Reise durch Holland und England (1788; repr. Karben: Verlag Petra Wald, 1997), 243–44. For discussions of this passage and issues related to it, see Constance Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History 40 (Summer 2007): 902–3; Constance Classen, “Touch in the Museum,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 277–78; Marcia Pointon, “Materializing Mourning: Hair Jewelry and the Body,” in Material Memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Marcia Pointon, “The Lure of the Object,” in The Lure of the Object, ed. Stephen Melville (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005); and Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 174. 52. Frank Sommer, “John F. Watson: First Historian of American Decorative Arts,” Magazine Antiques 83 (March 1963): 303. 53. See Allison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveler in Great Britain, 1800–1914 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 76, 343–44, 366, 367. 54. Orville Dewey, The Old World and the New, or A Journal of Reflections and Observation Made on a Tour in Europe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 1:74. 55. Anne Newport Royall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States (New Haven, CT, 1826), 221. 56. Cooper, Notions of the Americans, 410–11. 57. Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 2:415–16. 58. Quoted in Deborah Dependahl Waters, “Philadelphia’s Boswell: John Fanning Watson,” Philadelphia Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1974): 37. 59. J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), 96–97. 60. Grace Greenwood [Sara Jane Lippincott], Haps and Mishaps of a Tour of Europe (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854), 130. 61. Proceedings of a Meeting Held in Philadelphia on the 4th of November, 1824 to Commemorate the Landing of William Penn on the Shore of America, on the 24th of October, 1682, Being the 142d Anniversary of That Memorable Event (1824).

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62. Ibid., 14. 63. Vincent Y. Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (Boston: Houghton, Miffl in, 1902), 2:67–68. 64. D. W. Belisle, History of Independence Hall from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Philadelphia: James Challen and Son, 1859), 360. 65. Greenwood, Haps and Mishaps of a Tour of Europe, 134. 66. For a thoroughgoing discussion of associationist psychology, see Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England: A History of a Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). 67. Edward Cahill, “Federalist Criticism and the Fate of Genius,” American Literature 76 (December 2004): 707. 68. David Perkins, “Romantic Reading as Revery,” European Romantic Review 4(1994): 183–99. 69. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 327–28. Phillips’s discussion of William Godwin’s Sepulchres in the same chapter offers a valuable discussion of the associative power exerted by burial sites or by the locations where events had occurred (324–27). 70. Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 1:5. 71. Benson J. Lossing, “Arlington House, The Seat of G. W. P. Custis, Esq.,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 7, no. 40 (September 1853): 440. 72. J. A. Wineberger, The Tomb of Washington at Mount Vernon (Washington, DC: Thomas McGill, 1858), 5. 73. “The Grave of Aaron Burr,” American Literary Magazine 1 (August 1847): 76. 74. Belisle, History of Independence Hall, 82. 75. Proceedings of a Meeting Held in Philadelphia. 76. James Thacher, History of the Town of Plymouth (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1835), 29–30. 77. William Sullivan, Discourse Delivered before the Pilgrim Society, at Plymouth, on the Twenty Second Day of December, 1829 (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830), 43–44. 78. John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time; Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants, and of the Earliest Settlements of the Inland Part of Pennsylvania, from the Days of the Founders (Philadelphia: Elijah Thomas, 1857), 2:13. Watson’s reference to “ideal presence” shows how interactions with the historical past were conceptualized in the terms of associationist philosophy. The phrase is taken from Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, where it designates the impressions produced by particularly vivid memories or literary or historical descriptions, so that the reader or rememberer is “insensibly transformed into a spectator” and “forgetting himself, is totally occupied with the ideas passing in his mind, the objects of which he conceives to be really existing in his presence” (Henry Home, Lord Kames,

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79.

80.

81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Elements of Criticism, ed. Peter Jones [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005], 1:92–93). For discussions of the mourning pictures produced after Washington’s death, see Anita Schorsch, Mourning Becomes America: Mourning Art in the New Nation (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1976), and Schorsch, “A Key to the Kingdom: The Iconography of a Mourning Picture,” Winterthur Portfolio 14 (1979): 41–71. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, 1:102; Maria Kittredge Whitney Degen, Diary of a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East, 1850–1852 (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2002), 46. Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, 1:61. For a description of how the lock of hair came into the Wadsworth family and a picture of the locket, see the Maine Historical Society’s Maine Memory Network website at www.mainememory.net. For a description of the ring Lincoln owned, see the letter from Henry W. F. Jones and James H. Currie to Abraham Lincoln, July 12, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ alhtml/malhome.html. “A Memento of Lincoln,” New York Times, June 21, 1883. “A Cowper Relic,” Times Literary Supplement, September 23, 1955, 557. For a description and picture of this relic see Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, 1986 Annual Report, 31, 34. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852; repr. London: George G. Harrap, 1956), 695. For further discussion of the nation as an entity united by bonds of family feeling and sympathy, see Barnes, States of Sympathy. For a discussion of how white collectors used American Indian artifacts to validate white stewardship of the continent, see Curtis M. Hinsley, “Digging for Identity: Reflections on the Cultural Background of Collecting,” American Indian Quarterly 20 (1996): 280–95.

CHAPTER FOUR

1.

On the collections of Benjamin Poore and his more famous son Benjamin Perley Poore, see Jane C. Nylander, “‘This Quaint Abbotsford-like Residence’: Indian Hill, West Newbury, Massachusetts,” in New England Collectors and Collections, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2004). For references to the collecting undertaken by those who lived near Revolutionary War battlefields, see, for example, Henry Woodman, The History of Valley Forge (Oaks, PA: John U. Francis Sr., 1921), 91, 144, and Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 1:64n2. An extensive account of tourism and collecting at battlefields in the early republic can be found in Thomas A. Chambers, Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bone-

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fields in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 2. By far the most comprehensive account of Civil War relic collecting is Stephen W. Sylvia and Michael J. O’Donnell’s The Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics (Orange, VA: Moss, 1978). 3. Frank A. Haskell, The Battle of Gettysburg, ed. Bruce Catton (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1957), 147. 4. Frank M. Stoke, letter dated October 26, 1863, Special Collections, Gettysburg College Library. Quoted in Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, the Aftermath of a Battle (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas, 1995), 60. 5. John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), 125. 6. Ibid., 33, 115, 121–22, 141, 518. 7. I should note that the distinction I am making between trophies, souvenirs, and mementos is for analytical purposes and does not necessarily reflect nineteenth-century collectors’ own usage. They certainly made some distinction between the words and would have been unlikely, for example, to label an object stripped from an enemy’s body a “ memento” unless they were framing it as an object of sentimental connection and memory. But in general these terms were highly elastic, and any given object might be designated interchangeably as “trophy,” “souvenir,” “memento,” or “relic.” 8. On the practice of looting the corpses of enemy troops, see Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 185–91. For accounts of looting in addition to those cited by Linderman, see Thomas A. Ashby, The Valley Campaigns, Being the Reminiscences of a Non-combatant While between the Lines in the Shenandoah Valley during the War of the States (New York: Neale, 1914), 320–22; W. R. Houghton and M. B. Houghton, Two Boys in the Civil War and After (Montgomery, AL: Paragon Press, 1912), 70–71, 109–18; David E. Johnston, The Story of a Confederate Boy in the Civil War (Portland, OR: Glass and Prudhomme, 1914), 129–30, 160, 180–81; “Scenes and Incidents at Gettysburg,” Harper’s Weekly, January 16, 1864, 39; A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War: The Diaries of David Hunter Strother, ed. Cecil D. Eby Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 20, 108; and Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 35. 9. For clipping buttons as discipline, see Linderman, Embattled Courage, 56–57. 10. See US Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1863). A discussion of the investigation of the atrocities can be found in Bruce Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (Lawrence: University

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Press of Kansas, 1998). For a more thorough discussion of bone collecting in the Civil War see Simon Harrison, “Bones in the Rebel Lady’s Boudoir: Ethnology, Race and Trophy-Hunting in the American Civil War,” Journal of Material Culture 15 (2010): 385–401. Letter from Richard Wright Simpson to Anna Tallulah Simpson, August 22, 1861, in Far, Far from Home: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, 3rd South Carolina Volunteers, ed. Guy R. Everson and Edward W. Simpson Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 64. Letter from Phoebe Yates Pember to Eugenia Levy Phillips, September 13, 1863, in A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, ed. Bell Irvin Wiley (Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1959), 168. Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 72. Letter cited by Emily Bliss Thacher, Leaves from the Battlefield of Gettysburg: A Series of Letters from a Field Hospital; and National Poems (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1864), 68. Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 231. Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 96–116, 123–35. See also Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 9–10, and John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 22–23. For a discussion that expands Laderman’s points specifically in regard to the commemorative practice of postmortem photographs, see Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 103–31. Cited in Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 169. Letter from Esther Simons Palmer to Elizabeth Palmer Porcher, August 1870, in A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818– 1881, ed. Louis P. Towles (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 661. Letter from Richard Wright Simpson to Anna Tallulah Simpson, August 22, 1861, in Everson and Simpson, Far, Far from Home, 64. Letter from Taliaferro N. Simpson to Caroline Virginia Miller, June 3, 1863, in Everson and Simpson, Far, Far from Home, 242. An English Combatant, Battle-Fields of the South, from Bull Run to Fredericksburg (New York: John Bradburn, 1864), 57–58. Gettysburg Compiler, July 20, 1863. Harper’s Weekly 13 (July 17, 1869): 457. For a discussion of the ongoing collecting of relics at Gettysburg in the decades after the war, see Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 40–41, 70–72, 102–3.

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24. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “My Hunt after ‘the Captain,’” in Pages from an Old Volume of Life: A Collection of Essays, 1857–1881 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 41–42. 25. Ibid., 42. 26. Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 155. 27. Adams Sentinel (Gettysburg), July 28, 1863. 28. J. Howard Wert, A Complete Hand-Book of the Monuments and Indications on the Gettysburg Battle-Field (Harrisburg, PA: R. M. Sturgeon, 1886), 179. 29. Ibid. 30. For a discussion of the concept of the “good death” and its application in the context of the Civil War, see Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 6–31. 31. Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 249. 32. Katharine Weber, “The Family She Always Wanted,” review of Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, ed. Elaine Showalter, Los Angeles Times Book Review 6 (March 2005): R3. 33. See Lori Merish’s observation that in sentimental literature sympathy “conventionally operates across a status divide” (Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 3) or Gillian Silverman’s comment that sentimentalism “can imagine alignment of hearts only when it imagines disparity in circumstance” (“Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” American Studies 43 [Fall 2002]: 6). For discussions of the way sentimental forms not only depended on status inequities but actively enforced the oppression of blacks, Native Americans, and working-class whites, see, for example, Elizabeth Barnes, Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Carolyn Betensky, Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 52–126. 34. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” in Samuels, Culture of Sentiment, 100. 35. Sermon by Robert Lowry, “Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln,” in Voices from the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn (New York: Tibbals and Whiting, 1865), 314. 36. Edward P. Nowell, “Funeral Hymn,” in Adoniram J. Patterson, Eulogy on Abraham Lincoln Delivered in Portsmouth, N.H. April 19, 1865 (Portsmouth, NH: C. W. Brewster and Son, 1865), 30.

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37. Mary B. Sibley, “The New Song,” in The Lincoln Memorial Collection: Relics of the War of the Rebellion (Buffalo, NY, 1887), 30. 38. William A. Snively, “The Nation’s Bereavement,” memorial sermon on the death of President Lincoln, St. Andrew’s Church, Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: W. S. Haven, 1865), 5; Frederick Starr, “The Martyr President”: A Discourse Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, Penn Yan, N.Y., Sabbath Morning, April 16th, 1865, on the Death of Abraham Lincoln (St. Louis, MO: Sherman Spencer, 1865), 4. 39. Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 135. 40. Address by Geo. C. S. Southworth Delivered before the Citizens of West Springfield and the Delegates of the Grand Army of the Republic on Decoration Day, May 30, 1870 (Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles), 6; William G. T. Shedd, “The Union and the War”: Sermon Preached November 27, 1862 (New York: C. Scribner, 1863), 8; Julia Ditto, “Presentation Hymn,” in Sibley, Lincoln Memorial Collection, 20. 41. Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 106–7. 42. The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864–1865, ed. Spencer B. King Jr. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1908), 138. 43. A Record of the Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the United States Sanitary Commission Held at New York (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867), 35. 44. Sibley, Lincoln Memorial Collection, 7, 8, 11. 45. H. B. Reed, The Back-Bone of Illinois in Front and Rear, from 1861 to 1865, and Memorial Hall, Springfield, Illinois (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1886), 5. 46. Reverend J. Walker Jackson’s address, Glenwood Cemetery in Pennsylvania, in Frank Moore, Memorial Ceremonies at the Graves of Our Soldiers (Washington, DC, 1869), 277. 47. For a picture of this relic and its accompanying note, see Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, 95. 48. Thacher, Leaves from the Battlefield of Gettysburg, 27, 140. 49. Sophronia E. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp (Philadelphia: J. E. Potter, 1869), 190. 50. The emphasis on nature as a site of consolation and rebirth found its most concentrated form in the rural cemetery movement. A history can be found in Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989). See also Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 70–96. For discussions of the way wartime deaths were portrayed as part of a redemptive natural cycle, see Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, 71–102, and Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990),

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

222

11–45, 117–28. An analysis of Lincoln’s use of such imagery in the Gettysburg Address can be found in Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). Jesse H. Jones, “Saved the Day,” National Tribune (Washington, DC), March 7, 1895, 2. Cited in Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, 17–18. For a picture of such a jar see Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, 47. George J. Gross, The Battle-Field of Gettysburg (Philadelphia: Collins, 1866), 12. Trowbridge, South, 29. See, for example, Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, 72, and Sweet, Traces of War, 9. For a discussion of Jones and his book, see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 119–38. J. William Jones, Christ in the Camp, or Religion in Lee’s Army (Richmond, VA: B. F. Johnson, 1888), 412. James Houghton journal, 16, archives of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, quoted in Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, 58; Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 189. A Soldier’s Story of the Siege of Vicksburg: From the Diary of Osborn H. Oldroyd, ed. H. W. Rokker (Springfield, IL, 1885). John B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 84; Oliver Reilly, The Battlefield of Antietam (Sharpsburg, MD: O. T. Reilly, 1906), n.p. Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary, ed. Daniel Dulany Addison (Boston: Houghton, Miffl in, 1894), 90. John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), 55; Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Isabella D. Martin and Myrta L. Avary (New York: D. Appleton, 1905), 201. Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girl’s Diary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 83. Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, ed. Harwell, 81; Augusta Evans to J. L. M. Curry, October 7, 1866, in Curry Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 171. Harry Flash, “Zollicoffer,” in Thomas C. De Leon, South Songs: From the Lays of Later Days (New York: Blelock, 1866), 83. Reprinted in Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Righteous Armies, Holy Cause: Apocalyptic Imagery and the Civil War (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002), 210–11. W. F. L., “Redemption” in “Poetry, Rumors and Incidents,” the Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, etc., ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861), 1:104.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 102–3

67. For discussions of Northern conceptions of the war as a divine judgment, see Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), passim, but especially 222–39; David Rolfs, No Peace for the Wicked: Northern Protestant Soldiers and the American Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 125–43; Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006); and Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 187–214. 68. Starr H. Nichols, Our Sins and Our Repentance (Mansfield, OH: Sturges and Pritchard, 1861). Quoted in James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 100. 69. Letter from Lydia Maria Child to Henry I. Bowditch, in Memorial of Nathaniel Bowditch (Boston: J. Wilson and Son, 1865), 85. 70. George H. Boker, “Hymn for the Fourth of July, 1863,” in Poems of the War (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 156–57. 71. The many discussions of the way the Civil War was framed in theological terms almost invariably note the importance of the concept of sacrifice or atonement, and many offer at least passing references to the significance of blood. In such discussions, however, shedding blood has usually been discussed as a relatively abstract theological concept rather than as a literally efficacious ritual. Shedding blood has been portrayed as a ritual observance in discussions of lynching in the Jim Crow South, which some recent scholarship has discussed, not entirely convincingly in my opinion, as the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat that depended on and enacted Christian notions of blood atonement. See Peter Ehrenhaus and Susan A. Owen, “Race Lynching and Christian Evangelicalism: Performances of Faith,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24 (July/October 2004): 276–301; Donald G. Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Journal of Southern Religion 3 (2000), http://jsr.fsu.edu; and Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Basic Books, 1999). For a discussion of the role blood sacrifice has played in American nationalism more generally–a discussion that does not explore the concept’s links to Christian theology—see Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 72. Louis Ruchames, John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969), 167. See Franny Nudelman on the meanings blood held for John Brown (John Brown’s Body, 23–24, 35–36). 73. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Reply to an Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters

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the Women of the United States of America,” Atlantic Monthly 11 (January 1863): 132–33. 74. Cyrus Bartol, The Remission by Blood: A Tribute to Our Soldiers and the Sword (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1862), 4, 8–9. 75. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:333. 76. Jacob Hoke, Reminiscences of the War, or Incidents Which Transpired in and about Chambersburg, during the War of the Rebellion (Chambersburg, PA: M. A. Foltz, 1884), 172. CHAPTER FIVE

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2.

3.

4.

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For a discussion of the Civil War fund-raising fairs, see Beverly Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 58–115. For more extensive discussions of this “bereavement phase” and the memorial activities that were a part of it, see William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 23–105; John M. Coski and Amy R. Feely, “A Monument to Southern Womanhood: The Founding Generation of the Confederate Museum,” in A Woman’s War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy, ed. Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. and Kym S. Rice (Richmond: Museum of the Confederacy and University Press of Virginia, 1996), 134–37, and Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 36–46. For discussions of the role women played in commemorative work in the South, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 12–54; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880–1920,” in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, ed. Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). For in-depth discussions of Richmond’s Confederate Museum, see Coski and Feely, “Monument to Southern Womanhood”; John M. Coski, “A Century of Collecting: The History of the Museum of the Confederacy,” Museum of the Confederacy Journal 74 (1996): 2–24; Amy R. Feely, “Southern

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Lady Meets New Woman: Women of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and the Lost Cause in Richmond, Virginia” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1983); and Reiko Hillyer, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” Public Historian 33 (November 2011): 35–62. For a discussion of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room, see Rachel Wynne Overton, “Girls of the Sixties: The Wade Hampton Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Founding of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Museum” (master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 2003). 5. In Memoriam Sempiternam (Richmond, VA: Confederate Museum, 1896), 29. 6. These included objects from the early 1860s that had no connection to the war beyond having been in existence when it occurred (a cologne bottle given as a bridal present during the war, Catalogue of the Confederate Museum of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society [Richmond, VA: Ware and Duke, 1905], 39; a receipt to the city gasworks for three months in 1864, Catalogue, 70), as well as things that had nothing to do with the 1860s but were tokens of some other historic event or individual (“Chair Round taken from the debris after the calamity in the State Capitol, April, 1870, in which many were killed and injured,” Catalogue, 50; “Envelope addressed by Queen Victoria with her private seal,” Catalogue, 149). Note that, contrary to the practice of contemporary museums, the Confederate Museum seems to have displayed all the objects donated to it. In the summary of museum officials’ duties outlined in the catalog itself, the vice regents in charge of the individual state rooms not only are charged to “receive and collect funds, relics, memorials” but are enjoined that they “shall place all articles where they will be plainly exhibited and carefully protected” (Catalogue, 7). This would also have been in keeping with the practice of local history and nonprofessional museums in general, which have never cultivated research collections. 7. For a discussion of the class background of Lost Cause participants and organization members, see Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 6–7, 93, 106–10, 171. 8. For a discussion of the celebration of the common soldier during this period, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 162–208. 9. In Memoriam Sempiternam, 29–30. 10. Throughout this chapter the numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the catalogs published by Southern relic museums. CM refers to the Catalogue of the Confederate Museum of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (Richmond, VA: Ware and Duke, 1905); LHA to the Catalogue of the Louisiana Historical Association (New Orleans: Memorial Hall, 1935); CCM to the Catalogue of Articles of Historic Interest Connected with the War

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

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Between the States in the Collection of the Daughters of the Confederacy, of Charleston, S.C. (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans and Cogswell, 1902); and TCM to the Catalogue of the Confederate Museum Maintained by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Texas Division (Austin, TX, ca. 1935). For discussions of the reconciliation between North and South, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 171–210; Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 63–75; Patrick J. Kelly, “The Election of 1896 and the Restructuring of Civil War Memory,” in The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, ed. Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); and Joan Waugh, “Ulysses S. Grant, Historian,” in Fahs and Waugh, Memory of the Civil War, 22–23, 30; and Joan Waugh, “‘Pageantry of Woe’: The Funeral of Ulysses S. Grant,” in Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction, ed. Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 228–34. For a reminder of the way strong sectional tensions and antagonisms continued despite this rhetoric, see John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). In Memoriam Sempiternam, 30. Catalogue of the Confederate Museum of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, 6. In Memoriam Sempiternam, 13–14. For a picture of this artifact see Campbell and Rice, Woman’s War, 116. Annual Report of President Sally Archer Anderson, January 1920. Quoted in Coski and Feely, “Monument to Southern Womanhood,” 152. See Kym S. Rice and Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., “Voices from the Tempest: Southern Women’s Wartime Experiences,” in Campbell and Rice, Woman’s War, 110, and Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 15. For a more extensive discussion of mourning as a form of resistance in the postwar South, see Blair, Cities of the Dead, 87–97. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 40–41. For a picture of a lithograph based on this painting, see the back cover of Patricia R. Loughridge and Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., Women in Mourning (Richmond, VA: Museum of the Confederacy, 1985). Compare Timothy Brown’s comment on the relation between historical artifacts and the past: “The artefact is an analogue for traumatic repetition; it is symbolic of trauma’s literal return” (Timothy P. Brown, “Trauma, Museums and the Future of Pedagogy,” Third Text 18 [2004]: 250). Grace B. Elmore diary, South Caroliniana, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 1989. Quoted in George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 46.

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22. Southern Historical Society Papers 8 (1880): 215–16. 23. Letter from Mary Vaughn to her sister, February 22, 1863, Sunny Side, Boddie Family Papers, Mississippi State Archives. Quoted in Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 113. 24. Letter from Augusta Evans to Mrs. J. H. Chrisman, February 3, 1866, Augusta Evans Wilson File, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. Quoted in Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 193. 25. Letter from Augusta Evans to J. L. M. Curry, October 7, 1865, Curry Papers, Library of Congress. Quoted in Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South, 194. 26. Untitled poem in James I. Metts Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Quoted in Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 25. 27. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 670. 28. Letter from William Gilmore Simms to Paul Hamilton Hayne, September 19, 1864, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary Simms Oliphant (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1955), 463; Amanda Worthington, Worthington Collection, Mississippi State Archives, quoted in Clinton, Tara Revisited, 113. 29. Roger and Sara Pryor to Virginia Clopton, October 27, 1908, C. C. Clay Papers, Manuscript Department, Perkins Library, Duke University. Quoted in Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 114. 30. Victor Irvine Masters, The Call of the South: A Presentation of the Home Principle in Missions, Especially as It Applies to the South (Atlanta: House Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1918), 17–18. 31. David E. Johnston, The Story of a Confederate Boy in the Civil War (Portland, OR: Glass and Prudhomme, ca. 1914), 332. 32. See Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 23–26. 33. Confederate Veteran 2 (1894): 273. 34. Old flags are of course a very particular kind of relic, since they function not only as links to the past but as the most potent symbol of the nation. From early on the Confederate flag prompted particularly strong identifications that persisted and even intensified in the wake of defeat. For an in-depth discussion of the meanings attached to the Confederate flag both during the war and after the South’s defeat, see Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 35. Ryan’s poem exists in several versions, although they seem to differ only in minor wording and punctuation. The version I cite here is taken from Abram J. Ryan, Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous (Baltimore: Balti-

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more Publishing, 1888), 232–34. The complete text of the poem runs as follows: Furl that banner, for ’tis weary; Round its staff ’tis drooping dreary; Furl it, fold it, it is best; For there’s not a man to wave it, And there’s not a sword to save it, And there’s not one left to lave it In the blood which heroes gave it; And its foes now scorn and brave it; Furl it, hide it—let it rest! Take that banner down! ’tis tattered; Broken is its staff and shattered; And the valiant hosts are scattered Over whom it floated high. Oh! ’tis hard for us to fold it; Hard to think there’s none to hold it; Hard that those who once unrolled it Now must furl it with a sigh. Furl that banner! furl it sadly! Once ten thousands hailed it gladly, And ten thousands wildly, madly, Swore it should forever wave; Swore that foeman’s sword should never Hearts like theirs entwined dissever, Till that flag should float forever O’er their freedom or their grave! Furl it! for the hands that grasped it, And the hearts that fondly clasped it, Cold and dead are lying low; And that banner—it is trailing! While around it sounds the wailing Of its people in their woe. For, though conquered, they adore it! Love the cold, dead hands that bore it! Weep for those who fell before it! Pardon those who trailed and tore it! But, oh! wildly they deplore it, Now who furl and fold it so. Furl that banner! True, ’tis gory, Yet ’tis wreathed around with glory, And ’twill live in song and story, Though its folds are in the dust:

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For its fame on brightest pages, Penned by poets and by sages, Shall go sounding down the ages— Furl its folds though now we must. Furl that banner, softly, slowly! Treat it gently—it is holy— For it droops above the dead. Touch it not—unfold it never, Let it droop there, furled forever, For its people’s hopes are dead!

36. Confederate Veteran 2 (April 1894): 119. 37. For the complete text of this poem see Confederate Veteran 2 (March 1894): 1. 38. Judith W. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 360. 39. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Gray Jacket of ‘No. 4,’” in The Burial of the Guns (New York: Scribner’s, 1894). Page numbers for quotations from this story will be inserted in the text. 40. For an example of the linkage between shame and wartime behavior, see particularly “Little Darby,” in Burial of the Guns. 41. “Sixth Annual Convention of United Veterans Adjourned,” Atlanta Constitution, July 3, 1896. 42. “For Grizzled Veterans of Dixie Crescent City Gates Are Ajar,” Atlanta Constitution, May 17, 1903. 43. Confederate Veteran 8 (1900): 275. 44. Confederate Veteran 2 (1894): 131. 45. J. W. Jones, “Appendix,” in John Esten Cook, Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 570. 46. Minutes of Twelfth Annual Convention, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Held in San Francisco, October 3–7, 1905 (Nashville, TN: Foster, Webb, and Parkes, 1906), 235. 47. See, for example, Lloyd A. Hunter, “The Sacred South: Postwar Confederates and the Sacralization of Southern Culture” (PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 1978); Lloyd A. Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at Lost Cause Religion,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); W. Scott Poole, “Confederate Apocalypse: Theology and Violence in the Reconstruction South,” in Blum and Poole, Vale of Tears; and Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). 48. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 48; “Battle Abbey Site,” Augusta Chronicle, May 16, 1871, quoted in Feely, “Southern Lady Meets New Woman,” 48; Address of Reverend Carter Helm Jones, Minutes of the Seventeenth Annual

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49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

230

Meeting and Reunion of the United Confederate Veterans Held at Richmond, VA on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, May 30th and 31st, June 1st, 2d and 3d, 1907 (Schumert and Warfield), 114, quoted in Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 195. According to Charles Reagan Wilson, the Daughters of the Confederacy’s observances were “saturated” in religion. The organization’s official protocol stipulated that meetings should begin with a statement that invoked the Lord’s aid in the organization’s task “to strengthen the bonds that unite us in a common cause; to renew the vows of loyalty to our sacred principles; to do homage unto the memory of our gallant Confederate soldiers, and to perpetuate the fame of their noble deeds into the third and fourth generations.” This exhortation was to be followed by a hymn, the reading of a prayer, and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 32). Confederate Veteran 5 (1897): 358. It should be noted that under the leadership of its editor, Tennessean S. A. Cunningham, the Confederate Veteran was the prime purveyor of the cult of Sam Davis, and thus it is not surprising that this particular notice should appear there. (For a discussion of Cunningham’s investments in Davis, see John A. Simpson, S. A. Cunningham: The Confederate Heritage [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994], 146–53.) Though the report is offered as the account of an eyewitness, one cannot help wondering how Cunningham’s own obsessive interest played into the published version—whether in the simple fact of its appearance or in actual doctoring of the text. Nonetheless, the text should not be dismissed out of hand. The ritual surrounding displays of relics, the strategic deployment of silence, and the extreme emotion the ceremonies generated are amply attested in numerous descriptions of Lost Cause observances. Our tendency to dismiss such accounts as excessive, improbable, and insincere may say more about our own emotional norms than about nineteenth-century accuracy or sincerity. Victorian structures of feelings strike us as improbable precisely because they were Victorian feelings, not our own. For discussions of the cult of Sam Davis and the abundance of religious imagery it inspired, see Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 53–54, and Simpson, S. A. Cunningham, 152. Anna Caroline Benning, “Preface,” in A History of the Origins of Memorial Day, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Georgia Division, Lizzie Rutherford Chapter (Columbus, GA: Thomas Gilbert, 1898), 6. Quoted in Hunter, “Immortal Confederacy,” 190. Though it is difficult to know exactly what religion these members of the Daughters of the Confederacy subscribed to, what form of the sacrament they were used to observing, or their exact theological beliefs about the Eucharist, it is worth noting Charles Reagan Wilson’s view that Lost Cause

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54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

ceremonies were influenced by Episcopalian High Church rituals. Wilson bases this view on the fact that Episcopalianism had traditionally been the religion of the Southern elite, who had been leaders in the Confederacy and continued to be in the Lost Cause (Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 35– 36). It is worth noting, too, that in Catholic belief, saints’ relics and the host could be said to be similar, differing only in their degree of sanctity. As Patrick Geary has noted, “The eucharist was itself a relic differing only in its being ‘the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ rather than the body and blood of one of his saints” (Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978], 39). See also G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), 359. Though most nineteenth-century Americans may not have subscribed to the belief in transubstantiation per se, the metaphorical links between a substance made sacred through its participation in the body of a saint and this other substance, rendered sacred through divine intervention and equally representing a holy body, remain suggestive and hint at additional overtones in the equation between the historical relic and the Eucharist. In Memoriam Sempiternam, 14. For examples of poems and orations in this vein, see Hunter, “Immortal Confederacy,” 195–96, 204. “Washington Artillery,” offprint from Daily Picayune, June 20, 1890, William H. Ellis Papers, Manuscript Department, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Quoted in Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 102. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South: Essays Social and Political (New York: Scribner’s, 1892), 4–5. “The Cavalry—Remarks of Private James N. Dunlop, at A.N.V. Banquet, October 29th, 1879,” Southern Historical Society Papers 8 (1880): 16. For a discussion of apocalyptic themes as they appeared in violence against blacks in the postwar South, see Poole, “Confederate Apocalypse.”

CHAPTER SIX

1.

2.

For a history of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion that includes some references to their collecting, see an article on their website written by Robert Girard Carroon (http://suvcw.org/mollus/art015.htm). See also Stephen W. Sylvia and Michael J. O’Donnell, The Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics (Orange, VA: Moss, 1978), 122–24. For a survey of the variety of places where Civil War relics were exhibited in both North and South, see James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 139–46.

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

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13. 14.

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On the Cotton and Hills collection see Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 96–97. The history of Gunther’s collection is recounted in Clement M. Silvestro, “The Candy Man’s Mixed Bag,” Chicago History: The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society 2 (Fall 1972): 86–99, and in Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 112–15. John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 147. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 182. On the veterans as relic collectors see Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 92–95, and on the large commercial relic dealers, see ibid., 116–18. Sylvia and O’Donnell’s book offers a comprehensive survey of buffs’ Civil War relic collecting from the nineteenth century to the present. See 26–127 for an overview of collections from the conclusion of the war to the turn of the century. See Lincoln Memorial Collection: Relics of the War of the Rebellion (Buffalo, NY: Matthews, Northrup, 1887). Catalogue of War Relics, State Capitol Building, Denver, Colorado (Denver, CO: Smith-Brooks, 1898), 3. Among the most detailed discussions of the shift in defi nitions of masculinity toward the end of the nineteenth century are Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80–124; John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 194–283. For two of the most extensive discussions of this change, see Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 279–97, and Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 166–205. See especially the discussion of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Ambrose Bierce, and William Tecumseh Sherman in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 281–84. Illustrated Catalogue, A. E. Brooks’s Collection of Antique Guns, Pistols, etc. (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood and Brainard, 1899). Descriptive Catalogue of Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum (Chattanooga, TN: Bradt, n.d.).

N O T E S T O PA G E S 14 5 – 52

15. Catalogue of Relics in Memorial Room, Capt. Thos. Espy Post No. 153 G.A.R. (Carnegie, PA, 1911), 17. 16. Inside of back cover, Union and Confederate War Relics of Every Description from Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Salem, Church, Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House (Fredericksburg, VA: R. A. Kishpaugh, n.d.). 17. Illustrated Catalogue, A. E. Brooks’s Collection, 105. 18. A Collection of Relics from the Battle of Gettysburg, W. Irving Heald, West Somerville, Mass., n.d. Located at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 19. Illustrated Catalogue, A. E. Brooks’s Collection, 32. 20. Descriptive Catalogue of Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum, 4. 21. Ibid., 5. 22. Catalogue of a Remarkable Collection of Relics and Trophies of the American Civil War Formed by Lieut. James W. Eldridge, 127th N.Y.S.V. (New York: William H. Murray, ca. 1910) 42. 23. Catalogue of War Relics, Curiosities, etc. Gathered from the Battlefields of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland by the Owners Personally Cotton and Hills (Richmond, VA: Wm. Ellis Jones, 1888), 28. 24. Lincoln Memorial Collection, 15–16. 25. Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, State of Missouri, Catalogue of Relics and Trophies Contained in Library Room of the Commandery, St. Louis (St. Louis, MO: Gottschalk, n.d.). 26. Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 95. 27. Catalogue of War Relics, Cotton and Hills, 10. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. For displays showing configurations that clearly echo Brooks’s displays, though they are not nearly as meticulous, see the photos of military surplus suppliers’ displays reproduced in Shadows of the Storm: The Image of War, 1861–1865 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 403, and in Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 116. For a particularly impressive example of such display techniques, see the picture of the West Milton, Ohio, GAR post on the 48th Ohio Veteran Volunteer Infantry website (www.48ovvi.org/oh48vets.html), which shows an entire wall lined with rifles mounted in symmetrical rows just the way Brooks mounted his. (Thanks to Joan Waugh for alerting me to this photo.) 30. Illustrated Catalogue, A. E. Brooks’s Collection, 201–2. 31. For pictures of pyramids made by Brooks and others, see Sylvia and O’Donnell, Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, 108, 109, 123. 32. Harry M. Kieffer, The Recollections of a Drummer-Boy, 6th ed. (Boston: Ticknor, 1889), 121. 33. Oliver T. Reilly, The Battlefield of Antietam (Sharpsburg, MD: O. T. Reilly, 1906). 34. It is true that many of the catalogs of buffs’ collections were apparently printed to help sell the artifacts after the collectors’ deaths and thus were

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35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

234

probably not assembled by the collectors themselves. But the detailed information on objects’ provenance, as well as the occasional asides to readers, suggests that catalogs were usually compiled from whatever documents accompanied the artifacts when they were acquired or from the labels the collectors themselves had attached. Catalogue of a Remarkable Collection of Relics Formed by Lieut. James W. Eldridge, 27. Catalogue and Index of the Doc. Aubery Collection of War Relics, Curios and Historical Books and Papers in the Public Library, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, ca. 1904, 10. Catalogue of War Relics, Cotton and Hills, 19. Ibid., 7. Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of the One Hundred Thousand Objects of Interest in the War Museum (Chicago: Libby Prison War Museum, 1899), 16. Catalogue and Index of the Doc. Aubery Collection, 5–6. For a discussion of the nostalgia for camp life among Union veterans, see McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 174–79. Descriptive Catalogue of Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum, 12. Edward P. Tobie, “Comrade Jimson” (Central Falls, RI: E. L. Freeman and Son, ca. 1886). For a discussion of the psychological and economic factors that shaped late nineteenth-century men’s nostalgia for boyhood, see Richard S. Lowry, “Domestic Interiors: Boyhood Nostalgia and Affective Labor in the Gilded Age,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). H. B. Reed, The Back-Bone of Illinois in Front and Rear, from 1861 to 1865, and Memorial Hall, Springfield, Illinois (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1886), 12. Catalogue and Index of the Doc. Aubery Collection, 2, 5, 12, 13. See Jim Weeks’s work on tourism at Gettysburg for a discussion of veterans’ experiences in returning to the battlefield (Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003], 98–108). New York Times, July 3, 1888. Quoted in Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, the Aftermath of a Battle (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas, 1995), 355. D. M. Gilmore, With General Gregg at Gettysburg (St. Paul, MN: H. L. Collins, 1898). Quoted in Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, 354. Elsie Dorothea Tibbetts, From Maine to Gettysburg, 1863–1913 (Bangor, ME: Bangor Co-operative Printing, 1913), 103. Catalogue of War Relics, Cotton and Hills, 4. Ibid., 36. Catalogue of Relics in Memorial Room, Capt. Thos. Espy Post, 6.

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54. Illustrated Catalogue, A. E. Brooks’s Collection, 47–48. 55. Descriptive Catalogue of Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum, 26. 56. Elaine Will Kuncio, “Relic Furniture” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1993), 39. 57. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 156. CHAPTER SEVEN

1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–2, and Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics,” Configurations 6 (1998): 355. “Museums and Their Purposes,” Museum News 8 (March 1906): 110. David Murray, Museums: Their History and Their Use (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), 265. Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15–16. The systematizing tendencies of the modern museum have been amply discussed elsewhere. For a cogent summary see Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 33–58. Goode was apparently so attached to this pronouncement that he repeated it in at least three papers: “Museum-History and Museums of History” (1888), “The Museums of the Future” (1889), and “The Principles of Museum Administration” (1895). All three are collected in the memorial for Goode published in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1897 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901); see 72, 220, 249. A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, “Principles of Classification,” in The Evolution of Culture and Other Essays by the Late Lt.-Gen. A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, ed. J. L. Myres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 10. For a summary of Pitt Rivers’s work and approach, see William Ryan Chapman, “Arranging Ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking Jr., vol. 3 of History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See also Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 195–201, and Myres, The Evolution of Culture and Other Essays by the Late Lt.-Gen. A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers. For discussions of the early development of the Smithsonian, see Edward P. Alexander’s chapter on George Brown Goode in Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1983); Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “History in a Natural History Museum: George

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

236

Brown Goode and the Smithsonian Institution,” Public Historian 10 (1988): 7–26; and G. Carroll Lindsey, “George Brown Goode,” in Keepers of the Past, ed. Clifford L. Lord (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965). For discussions of the Smithsonian’s synoptic series, see Goode’s own account in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1884, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 14–15, and Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick, Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 128–33. Note that the synoptic series was not universally endorsed by those who sought to exhibit historical and cultural artifacts. Franz Boas, for one, insisted that cultures could be understood only as individual entities and not simply as sequences in an abstract evolutionary development, and he strenuously objected to the National Museum’s synoptic series, which removed objects from their cultural contexts. For discussions of Boas’s objections and of the National Museum’s attempts to incorporate groupings by ethnographic regions into its exhibits, see David Jenkins, “Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994): 261–67, and Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 97–100. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1884, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 54. For a discussion of turn-of-the-century museum theorists’ interest in creating unifying narratives that continued across disciplines, see Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 180–82. Henry Mercer, Museum Guide, 1918, collection of Bucks County Historical Society. Quoted in Donna Gail Rosenstein, “‘Historic Human Tools’: Henry Chapman Mercer and His Collection, 1897–1930” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1977), 27. Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, May 31–June 2, 1910, 69. Laurence Vail Coleman, Manual for Small Museums (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), 149. Carl E. Guthe, “The Management of Small History Museums,” Bulletin of the American Association for State and Local History 2 (October 1959): 274–75. Ibid., 277. Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 4. See also 4–9 and 22–24 for further explication of this concept. The comparison between objects and texts and the emphasis on what a close reading of an object could yield was not unique to turn-of-the-century historians. Indeed, historians borrowed the trope of the object as text and the emphasis on its power to instruct from contemporary anthropologists, folklorists, and educators. See Simon J. Bronner, “Object Lessons: The Work of Ethnological Museums and Collections,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display

N O T E S T O PA G E S 16 8 – 7 2

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), and Bronner’s introduction to the folklorist Stewart Culin’s “‘Object Lessons’: A Folk Museum and Exhibit of Games in the Columbian World’s Exposition,” in Folklife Studies from the Gilded Age: Object, Rite, and Custom in Victorian America, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987). On the prevalence of sensory modes other than the visual in early museums and the rise of more or less exclusively visual modes in the nineteenth century, see Constance Classen and David Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford: Berg, 2006), and Constance Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History 40 (Summer 2007): 895–914. For discussions of the rationalizing of sight in the scientific museum see Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects,” and Jenkins, “Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays,” 247–49. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19. Crary is only one of a number of scholars who have charted the increasing prominence of exclusively visual modes of apprehension in the nineteenth century. For a summary of the ascendancy of sight in the Western sensorium since the Enlightenment, see Constance Classen, “The Senses,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000, vol. 4, ed. Peter N. Stearns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001). An overview of the extensive literature in this area can be found in Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Frank H. Severance, “The Small Historical Museum,” Museum Work 3 (December 1920): 81. Goode, “Museum-History and Museums of History,” 76. Frank H. Severance, “Historical Museums,” Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, May 31–June 2, 1910, 67. Theodore T. Belote, “The Field of the Historical Museum,” Museum Work 8 (May–June 1925): 9. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1891 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 155–57. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1899 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 21–22. Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” in History Museums in the United States, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 10.

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27. For a revealing example of museum professionals’ contempt for historical societies’ collecting, see Arthur C. Parker, “Unhistorical Museums,” Museum Work 6 (January–February 1924): 155–58. In only four pages, Parker manages to characterize historical societies’ holdings as “a melange of curiosities,” “discarded bric-a-brac,” “monstrosities,” “glittering junk,” “a kind of sideshow ballyhoo,” “a monument of confusion and a mosaic of individual conceits,” and “the promoter of confusion and the repository for rubbish.” 28. See, for example, Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 151. 29. Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, May 31–June 2, 1910, 69. 30. F. A. Lucas, “The Evolution of Museums,” Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, June 4–6, 1907, 89. 31. This distinction between trivial and respectable relics is interesting on several counts. It shows that for Rea the term relic encompassed any kind of association item, but also that it was applied only to association items. This usage, however typical for the museum men of Rea’s own time, was different from earlier nineteenth-century usage, in which “relic” had not designated a particular kind of historical representation but had referred to any remains from the past—Indian artifacts, ruins, and generic old things as well as association items. Since the objects from the past the nineteenth century valued most were usually association items, the term relic de facto came to refer primarily to association items, but it did not single them out as a distinct form of representation. It was turn-of-thecentury museum practitioners like Rea who began to use to use “relic” to refer exclusively to a certain kind of historical artifact—the association item—in distinction to all other kinds of historical objects and thus to stigmatize anything so classified as, by defi nition, pseudohistorical. 32. Coleman, Manual for Small Museums, 149. Muniment is an interesting term that was not typically applied to historical artifacts. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it refers to a document such as a title deed or charter that serves as evidence of the possession of an estate or of a claim to rights and privileges. It is a significant word choice in this context because it enables Coleman to evoke a number of associations that all support the value of the coat, albeit from different angles. By equating the uniform coat with such things as deeds and charters, he effectively merges the relic into its opposite—the written document that has indisputable evidentiary value. At the same time, a muniment is not simply a standard form of evidence used by professional historians but an object that is often passed down in families and that connects later generations to earlier ones. In that sense it is also a kind of relic, at least as the relic was often understood in the colonial revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During that period, colonial relics, particularly relics of Washington, were often treated as a subspecies of the heirloom. They confirmed not sentimental connections as much as lines of family

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

descent and, extending the metaphor of the family to the nation, most often the hereditary rights of Anglo-Saxons over immigrants. In identifying the coat as a “muniment,” Coleman thus presents it as the embodiment and assurance of certain values and rights that it transmits as an inalienable inheritance to Americans in the present. Ibid., 149–50. Not coincidentally, at the same time that sentimental memorial practices were being marginalized, women themselves were being edged out of the historical arena altogether. The new museum profession was made up almost exclusively of men, and whereas women had spearheaded the preservation of historic homes in the nineteenth century, as Patricia West has argued, by the first decade of the twentieth century they were also being edged out of historic preservation by the professionalized cadres of male preservationists. (See Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999], 147–50.) The persistence of relics in exhibitions related to the Civil War is a marked fact of Civil War commemoration. It speaks to the way the memory of the war has continued to be constructed sentimentally and also to the way the relic continues to be the form that most readily evokes dramatic, singular events. Finally, it also speaks to the way we continue to experience the past in part through the history of its various representations. The representation of the Civil War is in some way inseparable from the relics of that war because those relics were one of the fi rst vehicles for encoding that history, and when we revisit the Civil War as history, we do so—inevitably, indissolubly—through the forms in which it has come down to us. Accounts of the development of antique collecting in the early twentieth century can be found in Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), and Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980). For a discussion of the characteristics that distinguish the antique from other artifacts, see Leon Rosenstein, Antiques: The History of an Idea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 10–37, 159–88. For a discussion of Halsey and the ideology behind his rooms, see Wendy Kaplan, “R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture 17 (Spring 1982): 43–53. Addresses on the Occasion of the Opening of the American Wing (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1925), 13, 15. On the continuing value ascribed to associations among early twentieth-century antique collectors, see Greenfield, Out of the Attic, 31–32. Robert Shackleton and Elizabeth Shackleton, The Charm of the Antique (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1913), 200.

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40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

240

Severance, “Small Historical Museum,” 82. Museum Work 1 (June 1918): 10. Museum Work 1 (April 1919): 201. Museum Work 1 (June 1918): 10. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, A Neglected Shrine: Souvenir of the Memorial Service Held at Hodgenville, Ky., Feb. 11, 1917 (Chicago: Unity, 1917), 4–5. Reprinted from Unity, March 24, 1904. Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929–1979 (Dearborn, MI: Henry Ford Museum Press, 1979), 3. Accounts of Ford’s successive restoration projects and the development of Greenfield Village can be found in a number of sources. See particularly William Greenleaf, From These Beginnings: The Early Philanthropies of Henry and Edsel Ford, 1911–1936 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), and Upward, Home for Our Heritage. For discussions of Greenfield that place it in the context of the development of the historical museum, see Steven Conn, “Objects and American History: The Museums of Henry Mercer and Henry Ford,” in Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, and Mike Wallace, “Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States,” in Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). J. G. De Roulhac Hamilton, “The Ford Museum,” American Historical Review 36 (July 1931): 773. Ibid. “Ford Builds a Unique Museum,” New York Times Magazine, April 5, 1931, 1. Ibid.; De Roulhac Hamilton, “Ford Museum,” 772. Henry A. Haigh, “The Ford Collections at Dearborn,” Michigan History Magazine 9 (1925): 17–18. A Guide Book for the Edison Institute Museum and Greenfield Village (Dearborn, MI, 1937), 10, 11, 14. Quoted in Upward, Home for Our Heritage, x. Greenleaf, From These Beginnings, 97; De Roulhac Hamilton, “Ford Museum,” 773. “Ford Builds a Unique Museum,” 1. The museum did include decorative arts galleries that contained furniture and other home furnishings arranged in ways that evoked period rooms. But the decorative arts were never Ford’s main interest, and the bulk of his collection was made up of more utilitarian artifacts and machines. Upward, Home for Our Heritage, 2. Ibid., 7, 11. Ibid., 7. Something of the difference between the modes of display Ford favored and those endorsed by museum professionals can be glimpsed in Geof-

N OT E S TO PA G E S 18 5 – 8 8

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

frey Upward’s summary of the way Ford’s displays were revamped in the 1970s. See Upward, Home for Our Heritage, 172. This list is compiled from Henry Ford, “Why I Bought the Wayside Inn,” Garden and Home Builder 43 (July 1926): 433–34; “Ford Builds a Unique Museum”; William Adams Symonds, Henry Ford and Greenfield Village (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1938); and Upward, Home for Our Heritage. Ford, “Why I Bought the Wayside Inn,” 434. Greenleaf, From These Beginnings, 75. Upward, Home for Our Heritage, 8. Edgar A. Guest, “Henry Ford Talks about His Mother,” American Magazine 96 (July 1923): 11–15, 116–20. For discussions of nostalgia as a medical diagnosis see Michael S. Roth, “Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la Mémoire in Late NineteenthCentury France,” Representations 26 (1989): 49–68, and Roth, “Returning to Nostalgia,” in Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Suzanne Nash (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). There is an extensive literature on nostalgia, mostly criticizing it as a form of spurious history making and a symptom of false consciousness. For a sample of this literature (not all of which fits that characterization), see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), esp. 1–55; Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” and David Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,” both in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989); Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday (New York: Free Press, 1979); Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 130–40; Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107–22; John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), esp. 212–39; and Suzanne Vromen, “The Ambiguity of Nostalgia,” YIVO Annual 21 (1993): 69–86. Many of these discussions make little attempt to historicize nostalgia or to discuss its development as a particular structure of feeling that has changed over time. Yet, as Kerstin Barndt has noted in an article on the nostalgia purveyed at the Henry Ford Museum, “The fluid simultaneity of various retro-modes that seem to undermine our current sense of a grounded present” is very different from the nostalgia of Ford’s era, which “focused on one particular transition: the transition from pre-industrial ways of living to industrial society” (Kerstin Barndt, “Fordist Nostalgia: History and Experience at the Henry Ford,” Rethinking History 11 [2007]: 379–410). And late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Americans’ nostalgia, in turn, was very different from the more generalized melancholy and sense of loss that preceded it—what I have called a sentimental sense of the past.

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67. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 68. For a discussion of the tourism that developed around the image of a romanticized preindustrial New England in the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 105–67. 69. Hamlin Garland, Afternoon Neighbors: Further Excerpts from a Literary Log (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 364. 70. Henry Ford, “Thinking Out Loud!” American Magazine 118 (October 1934): 19. 71. “Henry Ford: Why I Bought the Wayside Inn, an Interview with Samuel Crowther,” Country Life, April 1925, 45. 72. For a subtle and provocative analysis of what must surely be one of the very earliest attempts to evoke the actual space of the past, see Stephen Bann’s discussions of the French collector Alexandre du Sommerard, whose artfully arranged displays were opened to visitors in the 1830s (Stephen Bann, “Poetics of the Museum: Lenoir and Du Sommerard,” in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France [London: Cambridge University Press, 1984], and Bann, “‘Views of the Past’—Reflections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History [1750–1850],” in Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations, ed. Gordon Fyfe and John Law [London: Routledge, 1988]). Bann rightly notes that Du Sommerard’s collections owed much to the example of Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, though Abbotsford remained more a collection of objects than a fully realized slice of the past brought into the present. Similarly, in the United States the collection of the midnineteenth-century antiquarian Benjamin Perley Poore alluded to historic structures by displaying paneling and other furnishings, but without ever coalescing into a fully fledged re-creation. In-depth discussions of the history of the panorama in both Europe and the United States can be found in Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), and Stephan Oetterman, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 73. A thorough discussion of these colonial kitchen displays can be found in Rodris Roth, “The New England, or ‘Olde Tyme’ Kitchen Exhibit at Nineteenth-Century Fairs,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985). 74. For discussions of the history of period rooms in American museums, see Dianne H. Pilgrim, “Inherited from the Past: The American Period Room,” American Art Journal 10 (May 1978): 5–23; Michael C. Batinski, Pastkeepers in a Small Place: Five Centuries in Deerfield, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004): 138–40; Anne Farnam, “George Francis Dow: A Career of Bringing the ‘Picturesque Traditions of Sleep-

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75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

ing Generations’ to Life in the Early Twentieth Century,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 121 (April 1985): 77–90; and Melinda Young Frye, “The Beginnings of the Period Room in American Museums: Charles P. Wilcomb’s Colonial Kitchens, 1896, 1906, 1910,” in Axelrod, Colonial Revival in America. The history of the establishment of the early house museums can be found in West, Domesticating History. For a more extensive history on the beginnings of historic preservation in the nineteenth century, the standard work remains Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: A History of the Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg (New York: Putnam, 1965). Laurence Vail Coleman, Historic House Museums (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1933), 18. For a fascinating discussion of the establishment of the Scandinavian open-air museums and their modes of representation, see Mark B. Sandberg, “Effigy and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Mark B. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 145–260. For a more in-depth discussion of the development of historical environments in the United States, see Wallace, “Visiting the Past.” De Roulhac Hamilton, “Ford Museum,” 772. An American Invention: The Story of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (Dearborn, MI: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, 1999), 14. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 6, 7. For critiques of the idea that recreations offer greater access to the historical past than other modes of representation, see, for example, Michael J. Ettema, “History Museums and the Culture of Materialism,” in Past Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences, ed. Jo Blatti (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 62–85, and Smith, Sensing the Past, 117–19. Smith links this particular mode of historical representation to the rise of consumerism, arguing that “the desire to ‘experience’ the sensate past . . . tells us more about our modern conceits and attitudes toward consumption” than about the past itself (117). The transition from authentic historical objects to re-created historical environments can be compared to the contrast between the genuine work of art and its reproduction that Walter Benjamin discusses in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). In Benjamin’s account the loss of the artwork’s authenticity, or aura, was a result of mass mechanical reproduction, and his analysis is suggestive in thinking about historical reproductions as well. Period objects and historical environments would

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83.

84.

85. 86.

87.

88.

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come to be created ex nihilo in good part because the technologies of mass production enabled their creators to do so and also, one could argue, because of the perceptual habits mass production fosters—that is, attachments to the immaculately new and the spontaneously re-created and the sense that there is thus nothing incongruous in remaking the past from scratch, as we do so many other objects and environments. For a discussion of how what Hillel Schwartz has called “the culture of the copy” has affected not only what count as authentic historical objects but what count as authentic archival documents, see James M. O’Toole, “On the Idea of Uniqueness,” American Archivist 57 (Fall 1994): 632–58. Hilde S. Hein, Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 16. Hein’s entire book is devoted to the shift away from objects in contemporary museums. For another examination see Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), particularly 20–57. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 99. For another discussion of the preeminence of experiential modes in our current representations of history, see Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 50–52. The online exhibition for this exhibition can be found at http://american history.si.edu/presidency. This list of items is taken from the auction catalog of the collection, which can be found at http://www.ha.com/common/auction/frontmatter/6014 _catalogpdf.pdf. One would have to examine the actual language used to describe these objects and the display techniques used in presenting them to begin to understand their meanings and the political and psychological functions they have served. My own sense is that if in one aspect they continue late nineteenth-century uses of the relic to represent mass tragedies such as the Civil War and the Great Chicago Fire, they do so in an altered context in which the challenge they present to the forms of consumer culture, on one hand, and state-sponsored memorials, on the other, is paramount to their meanings. Similarly, current relics’ fragmentation perhaps serves less to equate them with the memento or to denote the inexorable encroachments of time than as a means of imaging the psychic disintegration of mass trauma. The tradition of the relic persists, but in an altered historical context. See Williams, Memorial Museums, for a discussion of the way museums have come to serve a memorial function that for most of the twentieth century was delegated to monuments. For a survey of the many manifestations of the culture of memorialization in the contemporary United States, see Doss, Memorial Mania.

Index Abbotsford, 45, 66, 242n72 Abelard, Peter, relics of, 73 Adams Museum (London), 19 Alison, Archibald, 69, 70–71 Allen, Elizabeth Akers, 55 Alliance (ship), relics of, 43–44 American Antiquarian Society, 13, 15, 16, 26 American Association of Museums, 163, 167, 168, 170, 175; Museum Work, 172 American Indian artifacts and burials, 13, 14, 15, 52, 68, 75 André, John, body of, 34 antiquarianism, 14–18, 19, 38–39, 75, 201n19, 208n33 antiques, 178–79 Ariès, Philippe, 89 Armistead family, 25 associationism, 69–71, 216n78 association items, 2, 26–27, 70; collecting of, before the nineteenth century, 18–20; in scientific museums, 166–68, 171–72, 174–77, 182, 238n31. See also relics Aubery, Cullen B., “Doc,” Civil War relic collection of, 152, 153, 156 authenticity of historical objects, 192–94, 243n82 Baldwin, Christopher Columbus, 26 Barnum’s American Museum, 31 Bartol, Cyrus, 103

Battle of Waterloo, relics of, 20 Beall, John Yates, relics of, 114 Beauregard, P. G. T., relics of, 114 Belisle, D. W., 44, 69, 72 Belote, Theodore, 171 Benjamin, Walter, 243n82 Bennett, Tony, 164 Bentham, Jeremy, 207n31 Bentley, William, 13–16, 17, 33, 41, 43 Bibles as relics, 90, 91, 98–99, 103–5, 115, 116, 117, 126, 153 blood, significance of in Civil War, 96–97, 99–105, 223n71 Boas, Franz, 236n9 Bodleian Library, 19 Boker, George Henry, 102 Boleyn, Anne, relics of, 19 Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, 69, 73, 84 British Museum, 64 Brooks, A. E., Civil War relic collection of, 145, 146, 148, 149, 157–58 Brown, John, 103; relics of, 6 Buchanan, James, 34 Bucklin, Sophronia, 95–96 Buffalo Historical Society, 24, 94, 144, 170 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 56 Bunyan, John, relics of, 20 Burns, Robert: body of, 35; relics of, 73 Burr, Aaron, 71 Butler, Jon, 31

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INDEX

Cahill, Edward, 70 Carroll, Charles, relics of, 171 Caruthers, William, 63 Carver, John, relics of, 21 Charles I, body of, 35 Charles II, relics of, 19 Charles of Swedeland, relics of, 19 Charter Oak, 21, 44; relics of, 1, 21, 23, 24 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 100, 119 Chicago Historical Society, 180, 200n8 Child, Lydia Maria, 102 Christ Church (Philadelphia), 44–45 Civil War collecting, 7, 8, 80, 239n35; African Americans and, 6; on the battlefield, 81–90, 95–97, 103–5, 157–58; bloody objects, 96–97, 99, 103–5; bones, 82–83; buffs and, 143–49, 152, 157–58, 159–60, 233n29; flags, 94, 111, 112, 117, 120–21, 122, 126–28, 129–30, 227n34; foliage, 83, 85, 95–98; gendered nature of, 142–45, 149–56; modes of display, 148–50; museums and collections, 106, 108–17, 141–50, 152–55, 157–58; pathetic relics, 91–92, 94–95, 99; religious associations of relics, 98–99, 103–5, 132–38; sentimental mementos, 83–85, 87–91, 95–99, 112–17, 133–38; souvenirs, 83, 157–59; trophies, 82–83; weapons and shot, 145–49. See also Lost Cause: relics and Civil War veterans: commemorative activities of, 126, 127–28, 129–30; masculinity and, 144, 155; memories of the war, 144, 151, 153–56; posts, 141; relics collected by, 83, 109, 150–51, 156–57. soldiers’ homes, 141. See also Civil War collecting: buffs and Cobb, Thomas, relics of, 153 Coffi n, Joshua, 38 Coleman, Laurence Vail, 167, 176, 191, 238n32 Colonial Williamsburg, 193 Columbus, Christopher, relics of, 24 “Comrade Jimson” (poem), 154–56 Confederate Memorial Literary Society (Richmond), 109, 112, 113 Confederate money as relic, 116, 122–23 Confederate museums. See Lost Cause: museums Confederate Veteran magazine, 111, 120, 121, 133, 230n50

246

Conn, Steven, 164, 168 “Conquered Banner, The” (Abram J. Ryan), 121–22 Constitution (ship, “Old Ironsides”), relics of, 24 Cook, James, relics of, 15, 22 Cooke, John B., 83 Coolidge, Calvin, relics of, 185 Cooper, James Fenimore, 53, 66 corpses: exhumations of, 34–37; fascination with degree of decay of, 30–31, 32–33, 35–37, 39–43, 207n29; as figures for history, 38–40, 209n37; George Whitefield’s, 29–31, 32, 33, 42–43, 47–48; relics taken from, 29–30, 34–35, 43, 207n30; as vehicles of memory, 47–48, 84, 207n31 Cotton and Hills’s museum, 142, 147, 148, 152, 157 Cowper, William, 52; relics of, 74 Crary, Jonathan, 170 Cray, Robert, 30 Cumming, Kate, 88, 101 Cunningham, S. A., 230n50 curiosities and curiosity cabinets, 3, 18–19, 164 Custis, George Washington Parke, 71 Cuyler, Theodore, 56 Danner, Joel A., 141 David, C. A., 118 Davis, Jefferson, 60; relics of, 110, 113, 114, 117, 126 Davis, Sam, 134, 230n50; relics of, 133–39 Dawson, Sarah Morgan, 58–59, 60, 64, 100 Deane, Cecil A., Civil War relic collection of, 144 Declaration of Independence, relics related to, 21, 52–53, 194 Degen, Maria, 73 Dewey, Orville, 66 Dobson, Joanne, 54 Donop, Count Carl von, body of, 35 Don Saltero’s Coffee House (London), 19 Dorr, Benjamin, 43 Douglass, Frederick, 6 Drake, Francis, relics of, 19 Drinker, Elizabeth, 51 Dudley, Sandra, 4 Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen, 72 du Pont, Henry Francis, 178–79

INDEX

Du Simitière, Pierre Eugène, 14, 32–33 Du Sommerard, Alexandre, 242n72 Eco, Umberto, 25, 192 Edison, Thomas, relics of, 186 Edward I, body of, 35 Edward the Confessor, relics of, 19 Eldridge, James W., Civil War relic collection of, 146–47, 152 Elizabeth I, relics of, 19 Elmore, Grace Brown, 62, 119 English, Philip, relics of, 15 Erasmus, relics of, 18 Etting, Frank M., 74 Eucharist, 101, 104–5, 132, 135, 138, 231n53 Evans, Augusta, 101, 119 evidentiary objects, 164, 168–70, 236n17 Fahs, Alice, 93 Fairbanks Museum of Natural Science (Saint Johnsbury, Vermont), 179 Faneuil Hall (Boston), relics of, 24 Faunce, Thomas, relics of, 21 Fawkes, Guy, relics of, 19 Flagg, Edmund, 51 flags as relics, 25, 94, 111, 112, 117, 120–21, 122, 126–28, 129–30, 227n34 flowers and foliage as relics / sentimental mementos, 21, 22, 23–24, 58–59, 60, 63, 73, 74, 83, 85, 95–98, 113, 114, 159, 202n24, 221n50 Ford, Henry: attitude toward progress, 190; historic preservation projects before Greenfield, 182; interest in objects of everyday use, 182–84; preservation of buildings related to his personal history, 187–88; relics collected by, 185–87; veneration of Thomas Edison, 186. See also Greenfield Village Foster, Gaines M., 118, 120 Foster, Stephen, relics of, 185 Foucault, Michel, 58 Francis, Julius E., Civil War relic collection of, 144 Franklin, Benjamin: body of, 208n31; relics of, 21, 22, 44, 69 Fritzsche, Peter, 28, 48 Galileo, relics of, 74 Garland, Hamlin, 190

Garnet, Henry Highland, 6 Garrick, David, 20, 52 Gell, Alfred, 4 Gilman, Caroline, 60 Goode, George Brown, 164, 165, 170–71 Grand Army of the Republic, Thomas Espy Post, 145, 157 Grant, Julia Dent, 61 Grant, Ulysses S., 61; relics of, 17 “Gray Jacket of ‘No. 4’ ” (Thomas Nelson Page), 123–25, 127–291 Greenfield Village: buildings related to Ford’s personal history at, 188; Edison’s laboratory at, 186; Henry Ford Museum at, 182–85; nostalgia and, 189–90; as themed environment, 192–94. See also Ford, Henry Guest, Edgar A., 187 Gunther, Charles F., 142 Guthe, Carl, 168 hair: George Washington’s, 18, 22, 73; Highland Mary’s, 73; John André’s, 34; John Marshall’s, 24; John Milton’s, 34; Josiah Winslow’s, 22; in Lost Cause museums, 110, 113, 114, 117; as personal mementos, 34, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61–62, 74, 83–84, 89; presidents’ in Smithsonian, 23, 194; Roger Williams’s, 34, 180 Halford, Henry, 35 Hall, David D., 31 Halsey, R. T. H., 178, 179 Hancock, John, relics of, 21, 66, 185 Haskell, Frank, 81 Heald, W. Irving, Civil War relic collection of, 146 Hein, Hilde, 194 Heloise, relics of, 73 Hendler, Glenn, 54 Henry, Patrick, relics of, 171 Henry VIII, relics of, 19 historical consciousness, nineteenth century’s new sense of, 28, 46–47, 48–49 historical societies, 22, 141, 170; professional museum curators’ dismissal of, 171, 172, 238n27 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 16, 179–80 Hoke, Jacob, 103–5

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Hollywood Memorial Association (Richmond), 107, 113. See also Confederate Memorial Literary Society (Richmond) Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 86–87 Holocaust, relics of, 9, 195 house museums, 80, 191, 239n34 Hudson, Henry, relics of, 19 Humiston, Amos, 89, 91 Hutton, William, 39 Independence Hall, 21, 44, 69, 72; relics of, 24 Jackson, Andrew, relics of, 73 Jackson, Stonewall, relics of, 110, 111, 113, 126 Jacobs, B. H., Civil War relic collection of, 145 Jefferson, Thomas, 52–53, 56–57; relics of, 171, 194 Johnston, Albert Sidney, relics of, 114 Johnston, David E., 120 Jones, J. William, 98–99 Jones, Jesse H., 96 Jones, John Beauchamp, 100 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 216n78 Keckley, Elizabeth, 6 Key, Francis Scott, 25 Kieffer, Harry M., 150–51 Kulik, Gary, 172 Kuncio, Elaine, 159 Lafayette, Marquis de, 69; relics of, 185 Larcom, Lucy, 100 La Roche, Sophie von, 64–65 Lea, W. H. H., 157 Lee, Henrietta, 119 Lee, Jesse, 30, 42 Lee, Robert E., relics of, 110, 112, 113, 114, 126 Libby Prison War Museum, 142, 153, 199n8 Lincoln, Abraham, 73, 93, 103; relics of, 1, 6, 7, 23, 74, 171, 185, 194–95 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 6 Lindbergh, Charles, relics of, 185 Linderman, Gerald F., 144 Linn, John, 95 Lippincott, Sara Jane, 67, 69, 71 Lockwood, Allison, 45, 66

248

Logan, Deborah, 38 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 22, 57, 61, 73 Lookout Mountain War Relic Museum, 145, 153 Lossing, Benson J., 35, 38, 66–67, 71, 73 Lost Cause, 8, 107–8, 118; Christian theology and, 131–39, 230n49, 230n53; commemorative rituals in, 126–27, 129–31, 133–39, 230n50; cult of common soldier in, 110; mourning tokens as form of resistance in, 117–18; museums, 109–17, 132, 142–43, 145; relics and, 108, 110–17, 118, 120–40; shame and debasement as components of, 119–25, 128–33, 139; social class of participants, 109–10; women’s involvement in, 108–9, 142–43 Louisiana Historical Association Memorial Hall (New Orleans), 109. See also Lost Cause: museums Lucas, Frederick A., 175 Mackay, Charles, 74 Madison, James, relics of, 171 Marshall, David, 54 Marshall, John, relics of, 24 Mary, Queen of Scots, relics of, 20, 67 Massachusetts Historical Society, 22 McCrea, Jane, relics of, 35, 73, 180 McGuire, Judith, 122, 128 mementos. See sentimental mementos Memorial Day, 107, 108, 135, 137, 143 Memorial Hall (Springfield), 94 Mercer, Henry Chapman, 166–67 Merrimac (ship), relics of, 110 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 178, 179 Military Order of the Loyal Legion, 141 Milton, John, body of, 34 mirrors as relics, 64–65, 67–68 Morgan, Sarah, 58–59, 60, 64, 100 Morton, Samuel G., 31 Mount Vernon, 22, 53, 66, 67, 71, 191 mummies. See corpses Murray, David, 164 museums, 64; Civil War buffs’, 141–49, 152; contemporary, 9, 194, 195, 244n88; early American, 21, 22, 26, 31–33; gendered nature of, 108–9, 142–45, 149–50, 177, 239n34; historical at turn of the twentieth century,

INDEX

166–77; Lost Cause, 109–17, 132, 142–43, 145; objects of everyday use in, 8, 176, 179–81, 182–84; “scientific,” 2–3, 8, 163–70, 236n9 Museum Work, 172 Napoleon, relics of, 20, 66 Neff, John, 143 Nichols, Starr H., 102 9/11, relics of, 9, 195 Noble, Marianne, 93 Norton, Charles Eliot, 56 nostalgia, 154, 155–56, 188–90, 241n66 object lessons, 168, 184, 236n17 Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, 195 Old North Bridge (Concord), relic of, 171 Old South Church (Boston), relics of, 24 Page, Thomas Nelson, 137; “The Gray Jacket of ‘No. 4,’ ” 123–25, 127–29; “Little Darby,” 229n40 Palmer, John, 84 Parker, Arthur C., 170, 238n27 Parry, Graham, 14 Patent Office, United States, 22, 171 Peale, Charles Willson, 33, 207n31; museum of, 14, 26, 31 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 26, 67 Pember, Phoebe Yates, 82 Penn, William, 16, 17; relics of, 18, 24, 66, 67, 68, 72 Pennsylvania (ship), relics of, 24 period rooms, 178–79, 191, 193 Perkins, David, 70 phrenology, 32 Phillips, Mark Salber, 70 Pilgrim Hall (Plymouth), 21 Pilgrims, relics of, 21, 22, 24, 72, 191 Pitt Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane-Fox, 165 Plymouth Rock, 21, 72 Poore, Benjamin, 79 Poore, Benjamin Perley, 242n72 Porcher, Elizabeth Palmer, 62 Quincy, Josiah, III, 22 Rea, Paul M., 167, 174–75, 176, 238n31 Reilly, Oliver T., 142, 151–52 relic furniture, 24

relics: among African Americans, 6; contemporary, 9, 194–95, 198n3, 244n87; as efficacious objects, 4–5, 105, 118, 138; as a form of representation, 3–4, 23–28, 43–46, 168–70, 195–96; fragments and, 23–24, 46, 49, 73, 169, 176, 195, 244n87; as heirlooms, 238n32; homomateriality and, 25–26, 39, 40, 50; meanings of the word, 51–52, 211n6; memory and, 68–73, 80; origins of, 18–20, 23; pathetic relics, 91–92, 94–95, 99; religious associations of, 52–53, 98–99, 103–5, 132–38; “sacred” and, 54, 134; saints’ relics and, 30–31, 37, 50–51, 56–57, 231n53; scientific museums’ relationship to, 2–3, 8, 166–68, 171–72, 174–77, 238n31; as sentimental mementos, 6, 8, 57, 64–65, 73–75, 87–91, 95–98, 112–14, 133, 138, 139, 142; souvenirs and, 158–60; sympathetic identification and, 64–68, 89–95. See also names of individual people and historical events Resolution (Cook’s ship), relics of, 15 resurrection, 39, 97, 134–38 Revolutionary War, relics of, 17, 18, 21, 24, 35, 43, 52, 66, 73, 79–80, 171, 194. See also names of individual founding fathers Rhode Island Historical Society, 34, 180 Rittenhouse, Isabella Maud, 63–64 Rodman, Isaac P., relics of, 151 Royall, Anne Newport, 66 Rubens, Peter Paul, relics of, 74 Ryan, Abram J., “The Conquered Banner,” 121, 122 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 92–93 Sanderson, Christian, 2, 60 Sanitary Commission, United States, 89; fairs, 94, 104, 106, 111, 191 Scott, Walter, relics of, 45–46, 66, 69, 71, 185 sentimentality in the nineteenth century, 4, 9, 129; interiority and, 56, 212n21; memory and, 55, 60, 68–69, 122, 123; “sacred” and, 53–57, 134; sympathetic identification and, 54, 62, 64–66, 89–95, 220n33; waning of, as dominant structure of feeling, 144, 160, 177 sentimental mementos: of the Civil War, 83–84, 87–91, 95–99, 112–17, 142,

249

INDEX

sentimental mementos (continued) 150–51; difference from trophies and souvenirs, 218n7; as efficacious objects, 62–64, 138; as material means of connection, 60–62; as model for the relic, 57, 64–65, 73–74, 112–14, 133, 138, 139, 142; practices connected with, 58–60 Severance, Frank H., 170, 171 Shakespeare, William, relics of, 20, 52, 74 Shaw, Robert Gould, 22, 83–84, 90–91 Sheldon, George, 191 Simms, William Gilmore, 119 Simpson, Richard Wright, 82, 85 Simpson, Taliaferro (Tally), 62, 85 skulls, 31–32, 34–35, 47–48, 82, 83, 85 Smith, Adam, 62 Smith, Horace, 40 Smith, John Jay, 67 Smithsonian Institution, 23, 163, 164, 165, 171–72, 194 Society of Antiquaries (London), 35 souvenirs, difference from relics, 158–60, 198n3 Spring, Samuel, 29 Standish, Miles, relics of, 21, 22 “Star-Spangled Banner,” 25, 179 Stevens, Abel, 47–48 Stewart, Susan, 25, 159–60 Stone, Kate, 58 Stonehenge, relics of, 20 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 51–52, 103 Strickland, William, 36, 41–42 Sullivan, William, 72 Sweet, Rosemary, 19 sympathy. See sentimentality: sympathetic identification and synoptic series, 165–66, 183–84, 236n9 Terhune, Mary Virginia, 60 Thacher, Emily Bliss, 95 Thacher, James, 72 themed environments, 8, 9, 68, 190–94, 242n72, 243nn81–82 Tradescant collection, 18–19 trees as relics, 1, 24, 83, 85, 172, 202n24; of Abraham Lincoln, 195; of Appomattox, 83, 110; Charter Oak, 1, 21, 23, 24, 44; of Faneuil Hall, 24; of Independence Hall, 24; of Jane McCrea, 180; of

250

John André, 34; of Roger Williams, 34; Royal Oak, 19; of Stonewall Jackson, 113; of Thomas Edison, 186; of William Penn, 24, 68; of William Shakespeare, 20, 52 Trent, Robert F., 24 Trowbridge, John, 67, 81, 97 Turenne, body of, 208n31 Turner, Jacob, body of, 43 United Confederate Veterans, 126 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 108–9, 129, 133, 135, 230n49. See also Lost Cause: museums United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), 9, 195 Vaughn, Mary, 119 Vincent, Henry, 48 Wadsworth, Peleg, 22 Wakeley, Joseph B., 48 War Library and Museum of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion (Philadelphia), 141 Warner, Yardley, 74 War of 1812, relics of, 24, 25, 194 Warren, Joseph, relics of, 185 Washington, George: body of, 36–37, 41–42; relics of, 1, 18, 22, 24, 53, 65–66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 80, 171, 172, 176, 185, 194, 238n32 Washington, Martha, 22; relics of, 1 Waterloo, relics of, 20, 34 Watson, John Fanning, 16–18, 24, 38–40, 43, 44–45, 66, 67, 68, 72, 79 Webster, Daniel, relics of, 185 Wells, Robert V., 47 Whitefield, George, body of, 29–31, 32, 33, 42–43, 47–48 Williams, Paul, 194 Williams, Raymond, 54, 188 Williams, Roger, relics of, 21, 34, 180 William the Conqueror, relics of, 19 Wilson, Charles Reagan, 230n49, 230n53 Winslow, Josiah, relics of, 22 Winterthur Museum, 179 Woodman, Henry, 45 Worthington, Amanda, 119