Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era

Spectacle of Grief

Civil War America

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

Spectacle of Grief

Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era

SARAH J. PURCELL

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2022 Sarah J. Purcell

All rights reserved

Set in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Purcell, Sarah J., author.

Title: Spectacle of grief : public funerals and memory in the Civil War era / Sarah J. Purcell.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2022. | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049358 | ISBN 9781469668321 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469668338 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469668345 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Funeral rites and ceremonies—United States—History—19th century. | Death—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. | Collective memory—United States. | United States—History—19th century. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Public opinion.

Classification: LCC GT3203 .P87 2022 | DDC 393/.93097309034—dc23/eng/20211022

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049358

Cover illustration: Detail of Joseph Becker, The Late Senator Sumner. Ceremonies in the Capitol—Colored People of Washington, Headed by Frederick Douglass, Viewing the Remains, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, March 28, 1874. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Portions of this book were previously published in a different form. Chapter 1 includes material from All That Remains of Henry Clay: Political Funerals and the Tour of Henry Clay’s Corpse, Commonplace: the Journal of Early American Life, http://commonplace.online/article/remains-of-henry-clay/.

To my family and to my students

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Death of Compromise

Henry Clay’s Funeral

Chapter 2 The Death of Union and the Martyrdom of Elmer Ellsworth and Stonewall Jackson

Chapter 3 George Peabody, Robert E. Lee, and the Boundaries of Reconciliation

Chapter 4 Charles Sumner and Joseph E. Johnston

Mourning, Memory, and Forgetting

Chapter 5 Extraordinary Demonstrations of Respect

Frederick Douglass, Winnie Davis, and Standards of Public Grief

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Maps

Illustrations

Charles Sumner cartoon,2

Death of Honl. Henry Clay,15

The Clay Statue. A Model of a Man cartoon,19

Henry Clay’s funeral procession in Lexington, Kentucky,25

Funeral Service over Col. Ellsworth at the White House East Room,50

Death of Col. Ellsworth after hauling down the rebel flag,56

Remember Ellsworth! envelope featuring the colonel standing on a Confederate flag,57

Matthew Brady cartes de visite photograph of Lieut. Francis Brownell standing on the Confederate flag,71

The Grave of Stonewall Jackson: Lexington, Virginia engraving,91

Funeral of Mr. Peabody in Westminster Abbey,103

Reception of Mr. George Peabody’s remains in Portland, Maine,111

Carol M. Highsmith photograph of Recumbent Lee statue by Edward Valentine,123

The late Senator Sumner. Ceremonies in the Capitol—Colored People of Washington, Headed by Frederick Douglass, Viewing the Remains,154

Frederick Douglass Funeral March sheet music cover,179

Frederick Douglass monument, Rochester, New York,194

Confederate monument, State Capitol, Raleigh, North Carolina,208

Winnie Davis memorial, Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia,217

Maps

Henry Clay funeral route, 1852,22

Col. Elmer Ellsworth funeral route, 1861,51

Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson funeral route, 1863,78

Transatlantic journey of George Peabody’s remains, 1869–70,105

Frederick Douglass funeral route, 1895,189

Varina Winnie Davis funeral route, 1898,213

Acknowledgments

I extend thanks to everyone I have talked to for more than a decade who managed not to look too distressed when they asked, So, what’s your book about? and I answered, Funerals. So many people have aided me in researching and writing this book that a true accounting of my thanks would fill volumes. If I am able to convey even a shred of the gratitude that I feel, it will be remarkable. If I forget to mention someone, please forgive me. It has taken almost an army of people to get me to the finish line of this project.

I have been blessed to have been a faculty member at Grinnell College during the entire duration of this project, and the institution and its people have given me measureless support at every turn. Funds from the Committee for the Support for Faculty Scholarship, the Furbush Faculty Fellowship, the L. F. Parker Endowed Chair in History, and other sources supported my research and writing time. My colleagues in the history department give me strength every day not only to raise my level of teaching but to continue being an engaged scholar and friend. Grinnell College Libraries staff and librarians hold me up and nurture my scholarship. Special thanks must go to Richard Fyffe (gone way too soon), Mark Christel, Chris Jones, Catherine Rod, Julia Bauder, Allison Haack, Kevin Engle, Liz Rodrigues, Rebecca Ciota, Katie Dunn, Sharon Clayton, Leslie Gardner, Kim Gilbert, Karla Harter, Betty Santema, Amy Babb Brown, Micki Behounek, and Chelsea Soderblom. Other amazing Grinnell College colleagues who deserve acknowledgment include Susan Ferrari, Laura Nelson-Lof, Lisa Mulholland, and De Dudley.

Kathy Kamp spent years convincing me I could try GIS technology; then, when she founded Grinnell’s Data Analysis and Social Inquiry lab, she launched a thousand research ships, the maps in this book among them. For additional help with mapping, Emily Hackman and I would like to thank Justin Erickson, Leif Brottem, Eric Carter, Sarah Sanders, Bonnie Brooks, all the folks at the first Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILIADs) conference, Katie Walden, and Jeremy Atack (for generously sharing railroad shape files before they were public). For help in formatting the final maps, we also thank Stephanie Peterson for her skill and friendly help with Adobe Illustrator.

At UNC Press, I have received expert editorial advice and patience from the editorial director, Mark Simpson-Vos, and I thank the very able assistant editors Dominique Moore and María García. Immense thanks go to series editors Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Carline Janney, each of whom in different ways had great influence on this project and my ability to complete it. I also thank the anonymous readers for UNC Press, whose insights made this a richer and more significant work.

I benefited greatly from trips to and fellowships from archives and libraries all around the country. In its early stages, the research for this book was spurred by month-long fellowships at the Newberry Library and the American Antiquarian Society, both (in their own ways) models of scholarly community and support. I would especially like to thank Paul Erickson, Caroline Sloat, Philip Lampi, and Georgia Barnhill for guidance and help at AAS. B. J. Gooch, the special collections librarian at Transylvania University, was also very encouraging in early stages of my research and provided guidance about Henry Clay. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, Conrad Wright and Kate Viens offered direction and encouragements. Thanks also to librarians and archivists at the Virginia Historical Society, the College of William and Mary, the Library of Virginia, the New York Public Library, the Monroe County (NY) Public Library Special Collections, the Peabody Institute Library Archives (Peabody, MA), the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Washington and Lee University, Rice University, the University of Kentucky, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Army Medical Museum, the National Library of Medicine, Old Dominion University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, Harvard University, Brown University, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Other scholarly colleagues have encouraged this work, organized panels where I tried out ideas, and provided intellectual support. A faculty-student summer fellowship for the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Mellon seminar got me started on initial ideas for this project and provided research time in Philadelphia. Friends and colleagues from SHEAR have watched this work develop for well over a decade and cheered me on; I have special gratitude for Rosemarie Zagarri, Martha King, Patrick O’Neil, Steve Bullock, Catherine Denial, and John Brooke. Thanks also go to Volker Depkat, Megan Kate Nelson, Michael McDonnell, Fitzhugh Brundage, Clare Corbould, Frances Clark, Laura Free, Catherine Kelley, and Marvin Bergman for being so collegial and inspiring.

Students are at the center of my life, and without them this project would have been so much poorer. Over the many years I worked on this book, I was blessed to be able to conduct related independent, collaborative research with a slew of talented Grinnell College students, most of them as part of Grinnell’s Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) program. Many summer MAP students provided intellectual community, research help, and good spirits. They have gone on to be successful lawyers, CPAs, museum professionals, journalists, ministers, musicians, businesspeople, librarians, data scientists, parents, and a few historians in their own right, but I have never forgotten the support and insight of any one of them, and they have a special place in my heart forever. First and foremost I must thank Emily Hackman, who is the cocreator of the maps in this book, for her creativity, calm intelligence, and drive. Other MAP students who provided assistance with parts of this book and who deserve eternal thanks are Sam Jones, Katy Alexander, Amy Drake, Becky Bessinger Bobba, Holly Lutwitze Rapp, Sean Warlick, Justin Erickson, Katharine Dean, Jon Richardson, Tom Elliott, Ethan Drutchas, Amanda Borson, Sara Lowenburg, Christian Snow, Evan Ma, Eric Mistry, Connor Schake, Hayes Gardner, Irene Bruce, Peter Bautz, Joey Kathan, Liz Sawka, Anthony Fitzpatrick, Sam Nakahira, Liz Stepp, Abby Doudna, Katie Orsund, Charun Upara, and Vince Reilly. All the students who have taken my U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction courses at Grinnell (and even earlier at Central Michigan University) let me try out ideas on them and have given me great inspiration, and I thank them.

In addition to the greatest students, I am beyond blessed to have the most wonderful friends who constantly support my work and my career as a historian and teacher. To all my friends who talked over this book on endless occasions, took me out to dinner, and provided places to stay when I was giving talks and traveling on research trips, I say, Thanks, and keep it up! Worthy of special appreciations are Dave Iaia, Sarah Leavitt, Jay Chervenak, Marie Myers, Ed Rafferty, Laura Prieto, Rich Canedo, Susie and Bill Hansley, Chrissy Cortina, David and Evelyn Krache Morris, Tom and Yancy Ackerman, Gary and Martha Anderson, Ed Senn, Elizabeth Prevost, Mike Guenther, Vance Byrd, and Ida Casey. Al Lacson’s friendship and accountability lunches fueled me, especially during long summers. Laura Prieto has been my close friend and academic inspiration for almost thirty years, and without her crucial push in the summer of 2019, I would not have finished this book. Also key to the completion of this book was the newer (but essential) friendship and writing partnership of John Garrison, whose dedication and own scholarly accomplishments raise my horizons. I also thank Elaine Marzluff, Laureen VanWyk, Joyce Stern, Laura Sinnett, and all my potluck and church friends for their friendship, laughter, and constant support.

My family makes me who I am, and I rely on their love for every part of life. Scholarship is no different. No one could be more fortunate than I am in having a family who provides support in all the ups and downs of scholarly life. Before his death in 2020, my father, Ed Purcell, talked over every idea in this book with me, reading draft upon draft and giving me the same kind of affirming analysis and emotional balm that has sustained me all my life. He was simply the best, and my mourning for him will be eternal. My mother, Mary Purcell, gave constant love and care, as she has my whole life. My dear husband, Hugh Sheridan, whom I married not long before I started this project, sustains me with his love and support every single day. He has also given me additional great joy in my stepdaughter, Frances Beavers, and son-in-law, Brian Beavers, and the two best grandkids, Avery and Evelyn Beavers. When it is time for my own death and funeral, I know that I will rest easy, having lived a full and meaningful life because of my family.

Introduction

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper portrayed national mourning with a particular emphasis on Black grief in its extensive coverage of the March 13, 1874, public funeral for Sen. Charles Sumner, who had died of a heart attack on March 11. The cover of the issue featured a full-page visual tribute by Frank Leslie’s head cartoonist Matt Morgan that aptly expressed the scale of the public mourning for Sumner that had filled the pages of newspapers and magazines for the two days prior. The cartoon showed a mourning female allegorical figure of Columbia placing a laurel wreath on Sumner’s shrouded coffin, while a group of Black men and boys weep and pray reverently at its head, and overhead an angel descends bearing a banner reading Equal Rights to All! Instead of depicting Sumner as a foe of President Grant and radical Republicanism, as Frank Leslie’s had so frequently done during its support of the Liberal Republican movement in the 1872 presidential election, the popular periodical now highlighted Sumner’s long-term advocacy for Black rights and equality and posed him as the subject of national mourning—the nation personified as a woman crying over his remains. The same issue of Frank Leslie’s contained a smaller amount of coverage of the funeral of former president Millard Fillmore, who died the same week, but it was Sumner who received the most extensive coverage as the true subject of national grief.¹ It was Sumner, after all, who was the fourth person to lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building as Fillmore was more quietly buried in Buffalo, New York.

Other news coverage of Sumner’s public funerals, especially his tributes in Washington, D.C., included the national grief mixed with special Black mourning for the dead senator that the Frank Leslie’s cover so literally depicted. The Chicago Inter-Ocean newspaper headlined its coverage of Sumner’s D.C. funeral A Nation’s Honor and stressed how the proceedings were characterized by a general sorrow and a universal sense of the national loss in every circle and among all classes. But the paper also especially noted the presence of Black mourners and reported, as did other papers, that Sumner’s body was transported from his home to the U.S. Capitol in a procession headed by a great assemblage of colored men, headed by Fred. Douglass.² The Associated Press dispatch about Sumner’s D.C. funeral noted that Frederick Douglass and P. B. S. Pinchback (at the time waiting in vain to see whether he would ever be seated as the Senate’s first Black member) headed the procession, and also reported that thousands of Black men and women viewed Sumner’s body as it lay in state. The Associated Press noted that Black observers packed the outside steps of the Capitol during Sumner’s congressional funeral, since they were mostly excluded from the gallery that would have allowed them to personally observe the service in honor of their departed friend. Charles Sumner, vilified for decades by proslavery southerners, was now even mourned by some former Confederates like Rep. Lucius Q. Lamar of Mississippi, who eulogized him inside the Capitol that day.³

Charles Sumner by Matt Morgan, cartoon from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 28, 1874. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-139439.

As part of the extended ritual of national mourning, on March 17, prominent African American leaders in Washington, D.C., gathered at the Sumner School (renamed Sumner Memorial Hall) to add honors to the dead senator on the day he was buried in Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass eulogized Charles Sumner, and he also emphasized that Sumner’s death was both a national calamity worthy of extraordinary tokens of sorrow and a special cause of Black grief. Douglass argued that Sumner was dear to every colored man’s heart because he believed simply that each individual man belongs to himself. Sumner had been willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of antislavery before and during the Civil War, and he opposed every step towards reconstruction without a full, clear, complete recognition of the rights of the colored man. Invoking emancipationist Civil War memory and declaring himself not one of the forgetting and forgiving kind, Douglass expressed no surprise that Sumner’s public mourning was so much greater than narrow funeral rituals for President Fillmore because Sumner’s antislavery and pro-equality work constituted a more important legacy for the nation than did Fillmore’s proslavery capitulation. Douglass emphasized in his eulogy for Sumner that taking part in public mourning for Senator Sumner was an important civic act for Black Americans: We do well to be here this evening; these meetings do us credit, which no other meetings have ever done us. It may have been an exaggeration, in honor of Sumner, to say that no other meetings of Black D.C. citizens had ever honored them so much, but in the exaggeration Douglass expressed that taking part in national rituals of collective public mourning for a great man who had fought so hard for Black freedom and political equality could be a powerful way to take part in the American nation itself.⁴ Frederick Douglass, like many other people who took part in universal public mourning, used the occasion to advocate for a particular vision of racial justice, politics, and Civil War memory.

Public funerals, as cultural practices of collective mourning, helped to define American national identities in the second half of the nineteenth century, and they provide a lens for examining anew debates over competing strands of Civil War memory. Public funerals for major figures like Sumner—both Northern and Southern—formed an important aspect of the public memory of the Civil War, creating an opportunity for commemorative rituals that enabled many different Americans to argue about their own opinions of and relationships to the American nation itself. Funerals encompassed and connected a wide range of ritual mourning practices stretching far past simple burial ceremonies. Public funerals—and the press coverage, eulogies, material culture, monument-building efforts, and reverence for bodily remains that went with them—put mourning at the center of what Nina Silber has called the imagined reconstitution of the nation during and after the U.S. Civil War.⁵

Silber has called on historians to focus on the imagined reconstitution of the nation as a way to move forward from the decades-long debate about the trajectory of Civil War memory and its meaning, and this study of public funerals takes inspiration from her urging. Scholars of Civil War memory have taken off from Silber’s earlier pathbreaking work and work by David Blight to explore how Civil War memory framed regional, racial, and individual identities between 1861 and 1913. Generally, historians have emphasized the contests between different strands of Civil War memory (reconciliationist, white supremacist, Lost Cause, emancipationist, Union Cause), but they disagree about which strand dominated the national discussion at any particular time during and after Reconstruction. Did reconciliation overtake simple reunion as a theme in Civil War memory by the 1880s? Was emancipationist public memory silenced by white supremacy by the turn of the twentieth century? Did the Union Cause or the Lost Cause persist more robustly for the long term? Silber suggested in 2016 that studying, instead, how competing memories of the Civil War all contributed to the imagined reconstitution of the nation could move us past just asking whether reunion, reunification, healing, or justice alone dominated postwar memory.⁶

This book takes up Silber’s call and uses public funerals as a lens to examine just how competing memories helped different individuals and groups of Americans contribute to their own versions of the imagined American nation by participating in commemorative rituals for significant figures related to the American Civil War. The process began in the run-up to the Civil War when the massive funerals for Sen. Henry Clay in 1852 amplified previous public mourning traditions in the United States as Clay’s death heightened anxiety about the possible fracture of the union. Then, public funerals during the Civil War contributed to belligerent versions of Union and Confederate national identities fueled by vengeful mourning. After the war, public mourning rituals for figures as different as Robert E. Lee and Charles Sumner continued to provide cultural battlegrounds over how the war ought to be remembered, and their funerals provided opportunities to praise the accomplishments of dead heroes while trying to reconstitute the American nation in ways compatible with rival political interests. Mourning rituals seemed consensual, but they often showcased contesting ideas about the dead and what they stood for. Public funerals show how the imagined reconstitution of the nation often contained, for example, sectional competition and ideas of reconciliation right alongside one another. At the turn of the twentieth century, new kinds of public heroes like Frederick Douglass and Varina Winnie Davis became the subjects of public grief, and their funerals proved that conflicting national identities were still being imagined alongside competing ideas of Civil War reconciliation and resistance.⁷

Public funerals provide an especially good opportunity to examine the imaginative process of contested American national identities. In a classical tradition stretching back to Pericles, the forms of mourning for great public figures emphasized, by their nature, unity and consensus. Community mourning—funeral processions, eulogies, and burial services—were designed to emphasize the positive virtues of the deceased public figures, and, as political theorist David McIvor reminds us, the most prominent voices in public mourning were often officials who sought to use memories of the past to reinforce common or binding traditions within the polity.⁸ Public mourning hyperbolized positive qualities of the dead and exaggerated unity among mourners. Praising a dead hero was exactly the kind of occasion that was designed to prompt a community to reflect on memories of the past and to decide on some version of agreed-upon meaning—in this case, the meaning of the Civil War past. But, actually, public funerals show that in the context of Civil War memory, those meanings were always contested. The notions of consensus that leaders invoked in public funerals were fractious, and dissenters used public funerals as a chance to advocate for alternative visions of the past. Rival, seemingly mutually exclusive, themes of Civil War memory commonly coexisted and conflicted in public funerals that bore all the trappings of consensus building.

This book examines public funerals and mourning rituals for nine prominent figures related to the Civil War—starting with Henry Clay and ending with Frederick Douglass and Winnie Davis—to show how American identities were built out of competing and sometimes opposite ways of thinking and being. The already-contested nationalism imbued in Clay’s funeral splintered during the war and then continued to be expressed in fractured forms after the war as both the Lost Cause and the Union Cause contributed to the imagined reconstitution of the nation. For example, participants in public mourning valorized both white supremacy and Black liberation and used funerals as moments of public visibility to attach themselves to very different visions of what the United States stood for. Frederick Douglass, for example, advanced a particular version of Black progress when he praised the deceased Charles Sumner for his work to liberate Black Americans and praised the power of Black mourners themselves.

This book is about both memory and mourning. Public mourning is a form and an aspect of public memory that was important in particular ways during the very special circumstances of nineteenth-century America. By showing how public mourning contributed to the imagined reconstitution of the nation, my work contributes to the overall debate about Civil War memory, but it is not wholly contained within that debate. Public funerals relied on deep traditions and simultaneously constantly introduced innovation and change in this period because people shaped public mourning to their own current political and ideological needs. Very different people engaged in the ritual practices of mourning: draping their homes in black cloth, marching in processions, publishing cartoons, giving and listening to speeches about the virtues of the dead, producing and purchasing images of dead heroes to hang in their homes, raising funds to build funerary monuments, bringing flowers to coffins and graves, writing and reading thousands upon thousands of newspaper articles that telegraphed their grief to a wider community of participants.

Engaging in these processes helped create an imagined community of American national belonging, but even as it did, not everyone agreed on what that community meant or what it should look like. American national identities were forged out of the desire for unity alongside the reality of division and contest. Public funerals followed general patterns but developed different mixtures of rituals and ideas in particular cases, as elaborate rites of mourning contained public eulogies and rituals that attributed nationalistic values to the deceased. Americans projected often conflicting ideas about the nation onto famous figures whom they mourned, and they explored their divisions and commonalities in public mourning as a form of collective memory and their imagined community of grief.⁹ Collective memory has been recognized by historians and sociologists as one of the most important factors in national identity formation, and this book charts how public funerals played a specific role in the memory process.¹⁰

The book also contributes to the larger conversation on the meaning of death in U.S. history, especially by providing a bridge between scholarship that examines the period of the American Revolution and early Republic and scholarship that focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Thomas J. Brown reminds us that scholars in these two fields often work in too much isolation from one another.¹¹ My work shows how Americans who mourned public figures in the nineteenth century did so using forms, rituals, and symbols that began in the era of the American Revolution.¹² Civil War era and postwar eulogies, processions, visual culture, and news coverage of funerals often echoed public culture from pre–Civil War America, but they used new technologies and injected new political meanings with a modern twist.

Civil War America was not the only time or place in which public funerals played an important role in culture and politics, but public mourning rituals did play a particular role in shaping late nineteenth-century U.S. society. Public mourning took on special importance because the scale of death in this period was enormous; the U.S. Civil War was, as J. David Hacker has so effectively put it, the nation’s most destructive war by a wide margin.¹³ A number of other scholars, most notably Drew Gilpin Faust, Mark S. Schantz, Caroline Janney, John R. Neff, and William Blair, have recently established ways that the culture of death in Civil War America contributed to politics and national identity.¹⁴ Spectacle of Grief furthers that discussion by turning the analytical focus onto specific ritualized funerals. Many of the meanings of death in personal or family life were politicized when writ large in the civic rituals of public funerals. Americans engaged their bodies and their minds in politicized mourning as they cried and read about their heroes, gazed on bodily remains and the material culture of mourning, listened to songs and sermons, and engaged in public discourse.

Funerals have been taken seriously for some time as an object of cultural, social, and political history in a number of contexts. Historians of Europe, Latin America, and China have charted the ways that state funerals have often helped to consolidate monarchies and/or state power from the thirteenth century until today.¹⁵ Other historians have analyzed Indigenous and vernacular funeral traditions in early America, the material culture of cemeteries, and the growth of commercialized funeral directing at the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁶ Scholars of anthropology and religion have plumbed the ritual and liturgical meanings created by funeral rituals in many times, places, and cultures.¹⁷ Cultural historian Thomas W. Laqueur has argued that the treatment of and meanings assigned to human remains have much to tell us about how the dead make social worlds for the living.¹⁸

This book, while drawing on these previous areas of scholarship, focuses more on how public funerals functioned as politicized rituals in the very specific context of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Public mourning brought together political anxiety, racialized politics, Civil War memory, and material culture to give a whole variety of Americans the tools to imagine where they fit into a fractured and reconstituted nation.

These public funerals have not been taken seriously enough as a group by historians. Although all of the individuals discussed in this book are quite important to American politics, warfare, and public life, their funerals and the public mourning in their honor receive spotty treatment by their biographers. Although some of the individual funerals to be examined in the chapters, such as those for Elmer Ellsworth and Robert E. Lee, have received brief discussion in larger works, and a few, like George Peabody’s funeral, form the topic for scholarly articles, no existing work considers deeply enough how the funerals relate, as a historical phenomenon, to Civil War era political and social issues.¹⁹ Even biographies of individuals who had large and important funerals, like Henry Clay, treat them lightly, if at all.²⁰

Generally, American public funerals, as a specific lens onto issues surrounding the U.S. Civil War, have not been studied enough. Important works that deal with the funerals of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant provide key scholarly context for this work, but the focus on presidential funerals has, perhaps, blinded us a bit to the many other important public funerals that defined American politics and society.²¹ The point of this project is to look beyond presidential funerals to see how commemorations of the deaths of other political leaders, social reformers, and activists were all important to American culture and national identities.

The trajectory of my argument in this book follows the path of the particular funeral case studies; the details of the public funerals themselves reveal how the rival versions of Civil War memory competed for attention behind a facade of consensual national ritual. Each chapter uses public funerals for particular figures as a lens onto the ways that disparate Americans asserted their versions of American national identity: the fragile identity of a fracturing union, rival versions of wartime Union and Confederate identities based in bellicose mourning, and, after the Civil War, a search for ways that public mourning could reunify and reconcile the nation, whose fictitious bonds were still always contested. Public funerals show how, even during cultural rituals that were meant to be the most universal, Americans often imagined their nation in contradictory terms.

Chapter 1 explains how Henry Clay’s huge public funerals in 1852 both built upon the past and created a new scale, and new forms, of public mourning that would echo through the rest of the nineteenth century—setting the pattern for public mourning that would be so important as an expression of Civil War and post–Civil War civic identity. The outpouring of public grief as Clay’s remains went on an extensive tour gave mourners the opportunity to imagine national unity, even as they battled over what American national identity meant and expressed anxieties over an imperiled union and deep disagreements over abolition and slavery.

Chapter 2 argues that both Union and Confederate mourners picked up on these forms of public grief to impel the fight and imagine their rival wartime identities as the war pitted them against one another. Public funerals during the Civil War, especially monumental public mourning rituals for Elmer Ellsworth (1861) and Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson (1863), reinforced opposing Union and Confederate national identities. But public funerals also—even as they reinforced competing values—demonstrated the common cultural and political power of collective mourning. Public tears valorized dead, manly, white heroes; moved Americans and Confederates to fight one another; and also created common sets of rituals that could strengthen rival political identities.

Chapter 3 examines how, after the war and during Reconstruction, public funerals for the transatlantic philanthropist George Peabody (1869–70) and Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1870) created powerful scenes of reunification—both sectional and Anglo-American. Both men’s public funerals—Peabody’s in England and New England and Lee’s in Virginia—promoted visions of national reunion that favored Confederate forgiveness. Funeral rituals showed that many former Confederates wanted to rejoin the American nation on pro-Southern terms and that many Northerners let them. As always, not everyone agreed, and some resisted the pro-Confederate themes in national grief, but it was also clear in these public funerals that some versions of U.S. national identity could make room for the nascent Lost Cause.

In chapter 4, public funerals for Charles Sumner (1874) and Joseph Johnston (1891) show the complex relationships between Civil War memory and forgetting, reconciliation and sectional grievances. To promote reconciliation, Sumner and Johnston each wanted to silence some aspects of Civil War memory near the time of their deaths, but public mourning for them proved that no major figure could control either his own mourning or Civil War memory itself as sectional memories persisted. Both emancipationist memory and the Lost Cause helped shape the imagined reconstitution of the nation; even national identity found no consensus in reconciliation.

Chapter 5 examines innovations in public grief, as public funerals for Frederick Douglass (1895) and Winnie Davis (1898) showed how the ritual forms of public mourning could stretch to include new subjects of public grief: a Black man and a white Southern woman. Douglass’s and Davis’s funerals also demonstrated contested versions of the national reconciliation that characterized overall Civil War memory at the turn of the twentieth century. Public mourning for Douglass evidenced the vigor of emancipationist memory in the face of intensifying Jim Crow segregation, but his funerals also prompted white supremacist backlash. Winnie Davis, in contrast, personified whiteness and the Lost Cause, but her large public funeral also showed how vitriolic Lost Cause ideas could sometimes coexist with visions of national reconciliation.

Public funerals were an important part of American culture in the nineteenth century, and they especially shaped national memory in the era of the U.S. Civil War. Walking alongside processions of mourners, peering over their shoulders to read newspaper articles about the dead, listening to eulogies, and gazing upon grave markers will allow us to see some of the most important ways that Americans expressed values that were important to them and how they imagined and contested their relationships to one another. Public grief was an important political language that was available to many different Americans, who shaped it to their own needs.

Chapter 1

The Death of Compromise

Henry Clay’s Funeral

On the evening of July 8, 1852, a beautiful and affecting scene greeted the U.S. mail boat Benjamin Franklin as it steamed down the Ohio River past the town of Rising Sun, Indiana.¹ The citizens of Rising Sun gathered to pay their respects to Sen. Henry Clay, whose corpse rested in an elaborate coffin on board, and they enacted a pageant of mourning intended to show how the states in the union themselves mourned the dead senator. At Rising Sun, about 200 ladies stood upon the quay, of whom thirty were arrayed in a snowy white, draped with funereal black, wearing black veils and holding banners representing the states.² The thirty-first young woman, representing Clay’s home state of Kentucky, was dressed in deep mourning.³

The women waved their handkerchiefs and small flags, which they had purposely made for the occasion, while men and boys stood a short distance off with their heads uncovered.⁴ One of the party aboard the boat noted that the beautiful patriotism of the scene reflected a large amount of credit upon the young ladies of Rising Sun.⁵ The symbolic mourning of the women—their allegorical embodiment of the states and homemade patriotic emblems—resembled previous female participation in Clay’s Whig Party political campaigning, but this time the Whig hero, Henry Clay, was not on a campaign swing; he was on his way to be buried.⁶ The citizens of Rising Sun expressed their patriotism and their politics not at a rally but at a funeral ritual.

The Benjamin Franklin had been specially chartered to carry the senator’s remains from Cincinnati to Louisville, where they would be transferred to a train for the last leg of their circuitous, ten-day journey from Washington, D.C., to burial in Lexington, Kentucky. The boat was draped in black cloth, and a large black canopy was stretched over the deck to protect the remains held within a metallic burial case, exquisitely ornamented with suitable drapery and placed inside a mahogany coffin. The metal burial case, a Fisk’s patent coffin, was intended to preserve Clay’s remains with its hermetic seal. The Cincinnati Daily Gazette reported that the coffin was thus the most prominent object seen from shore, presenting, as it moved down the Ohio, the grandest and most solemn pageant ever borne on its bosom.⁷ The congressional committee that accompanied Clay’s remains and dignitaries from several cities that had already hosted the senator’s corpse to great public fanfare sat beside the coffin on board the Benjamin Franklin and acknowledged the women at Rising Sun as they expressed their public regard for the genius and services of the great man departed.⁸

This moment of public mourning—rural men and women gathering to create a tribute to honor politician Henry Clay in 1852—might seem like a strange place to begin a book that centers on how public funerals intervened in the memory of the U.S. Civil War to create American national identity. But any consideration of politicized Civil War funerals must start with Henry Clay. Clay’s immense public funerals bridged the rituals of the eighteenth century and the Civil War era and cemented the close relationship between public mourning and contests over how to define the nation and the union. The public mourning rituals for Clay in 1852 set the pattern that would make public funerals a key tool in the politicization of Civil War memory for the rest of the nineteenth century. Just as we could never understand the Civil War and Reconstruction without any reference to antebellum context and conflict, we will not be able to understand how the funerals for figures like Robert E. Lee or Charles Sumner intervened in key debates about Civil War memory without first understanding how Henry Clay’s funeral related to the breakdown of the union.

The public mourning for Clay connected the mid-nineteenth century to an eighteenth-century culture of mourning great men that had been an important part of U.S. national identity since the Revolutionary War. In 1799, George Washington, for example, had been mourned all over the nation and in mock funerals, funeral sermons, and print culture, although his actual remains were interred relatively quietly at Mount Vernon.⁹ In 1831, Washington’s family moved his body to a new tomb on the estate, in part because it attracted so many nationalist visitors.¹⁰

Henry Clay’s public funerals echoed many of the nationalist themes in mourning for George Washington, but they took place on a scale never before seen and involved the widespread veneration of his remains, which traveled through much of the nation. Clay’s public mourning altered previous American ritual tradition and amplified the power of the public funeral to communicate a broad cultural and political message. Technology, transportation, print media, material culture, and even consumer goods all amplified the tradition of national mourning and gave it new power—suddenly in 1852.

This new-scale outpouring of public grief took place in a particular political context and as part of the crisis of the 1850s. The sudden amplification of funeral rituals in honor of Clay did not happen only because technology and travel made such a funeral celebration possible—it happened because mourning Clay met a societal need for an outlet for political anxiety and debate. In mourning Clay, the Great Compromiser, Americans expressed concern about the possible death of compromise itself. Political rivals—Democrats and Whigs, abolitionists and proslavery forces—battled over how best to remember Clay or whether he was worthy of the huge spectacle at all because his funeral rituals provided a very public outlet to battle over the nature of the union. Arguing over the propriety of Henry Clay’s funeral was a way to argue over the sturdiness of the American nation itself. Supposedly universal mourning actually provided opportunities for contests over clashing visions of American national identity and politics.

Clay’s funerals set the pattern that would repeat time and again over the next five decades: mourning a great man (or perhaps, later, even a great woman) provided a safe but high-stakes way to claim a part of national memory and a place in the American nation itself. Henry Clay’s mourning established the ritual context for many of the most important contests that would mark battles over Civil War memory in decades to come: slavery, race, region, section, compromise, union, and the meaning of national identity. Also contained in the 1852 funeral rituals are many instructive details and questions about how funerals could function to preserve national memory: Who got to claim a role in the national dialogue by playing a key role in the mourning ritual, and how? How could Americans as far apart as San Francisco and Boston, New Orleans and Indianapolis grieve together and imagine themselves as part of a national community of mourners?

The travels of Henry Clay’s remains foreshadowed Civil War corpses traveling before burial, and most of all, the funerals for Clay presaged the funerals for the assassinated Civil War president, Abraham Lincoln. The tour of Clay’s remains, and the celebration of the man both during and after, set the form and precedent for Lincoln’s even longer and larger funerals in 1865. Yet scholars really have not taken enough notice of Clay’s funerals or of how important they were as a model for Lincoln and for the American tradition of public mourning more generally.¹¹ Once the union was fractured and the Civil War resulted, the occasions for such ritualized funerals would multiply. But for a time in 1852, the looming crisis over the strength of the union focused especially on public grief for Henry Clay, the politician whose brokered compromises had held the union together for decades, for better or for worse.

Mourning for Henry Clay provided an opportunity for ritualizing national unity, but reactions to Clay’s death did not establish consensus. His funeral became a contest over how to express grief for the failing union itself. The funeral rites also demonstrated that the Whig Party was shaky. Clay had created the Compromise of 1850 as a way to preserve national unity, but public and political support for the Compromise was patchy, and its constituent parts, especially the Fugitive Slave Act, quickly became wedges that exacerbated threats of disunion. The Compromise could not even be passed as an omnibus bill, as Clay wished, because it was too controversial as a whole.¹² Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans followed Clay’s funerals and the tour of his remains in person and in the press, they sometimes disagreed about the meaning of the unprecedented national grief. Rival visions of national identity came to be defined as Clay’s funerals allowed Americans to argue about the nature of union and compromise, while simultaneously agreeing about other aspects of national grief. The forms of mourning—processions, eulogies, material culture—seemed unifying, but Whigs and Democrats, abolitionists and proslavery advocates would ultimately bitterly contest what they should be said to stand for.

Henry Clay and Public Grief

Public mourning for Henry Clay started immediately upon his death. When Clay died of tuberculosis on June 29, 1852, President Fillmore closed all executive offices, and the U.S. Senate immediately took action to prepare an elaborate Washington funeral and to send six senators to accompany Clay’s remains to Lexington, where he wished to be buried.¹³ The funeral subcommittee included both Whigs and Democrats who represented a wide geographic base from New Jersey to Texas.¹⁴ Very quickly, the usual congressional funeral arrangements for a deceased