“Sectional feeling,” the author writes, “could weave in and out of strong expressions of both reunion and reconciliation” (170). Responding directly to historian Nina Silber’s appeal for a more capacious framing that treats Civil War memory as “the imagined reconstitution of the nation,” Purcell demonstrates that “rival, seemingly mutually exclusive, themes of Civil War memory commonly coexisted and conflicted” in ritualized mourning (5). Much of the existing scholarship has approached Civil War memory as an “either or” proposition: either the “romance of reunion” consolidated cultural and political power to triumph over its dissenters, or grizzled veterans, grieving widows, and the formerly enslaved kept “the real war” in view of Americans. Janney similarly suggested the “limits” of reconciliation in her magnum opus, Remembering the Civil War. Gannon pointed to the coherence and persistence of both Union and emancipation narratives. To the contrary, in their important monographs, historians John R. In Race and Reunion , David Blight argued that white supremacist and reconciliationist memories-together with the cloying tributes paid to equally heroic Union and Confederate soldiers-eclipsed the war’s emancipation legacy. Scholars have debated the degree to which reconciliation seized hold of the national dialogue about the Civil War in the decades after Appomattox. Across five chapters, Purcell analyzes nine public funerals for what they reveal about Civil War memory and national identity in the late nineteenth century. Funerals became key terrain in the pitched battles waged over the meaning and legacy of the Civil War (218). As Sarah Purcell notes in this deeply researched and well-argued monograph, grief supplied an “important political language” for Civil War Americans (9). Public funerals were high stakes events in the nineteenth century. In death no less than in life, Benjamin Butler would make a ruckus. With no small effort, “the people were beaten into lines,” and a semblance of order was restored. Still, men “bowled over the police” to gain entrance, and “shouts and cries” rent the air. The huge crowds “did not diminish,” and hundreds were left standing in the cold when the hall was sealed at five o’clock. “When the crowd was admitted to the hall,” one observer remembered, “they almost carried the doors off their hinges.” Mourners surged into the stately meeting hall throughout the afternoon, congesting the auditorium where Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler’s flag-draped casket lay in state. Led by grizzled veterans donning Grand Army of the Republic uniforms, the long column of grievers extended down Dutton Street and reached into the mill town on the Merrimack. $34.95.Įarly on the morning of Sunday, January 15, 1893, several thousand people huddled outside of Huntington Hall in Lowell, Massachusetts, undeterred by the biting winds that squalled across New England. University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J.
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