Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell James J. Broomall (bio) Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era. Sarah J. Purcell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-4696-6833-8. 352 pp., paper, $34.95. Sarah J. Purcell’s remarkable book, Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era, adds depth and clarity to an ongoing debate about the claims of post–Civil War memory. By examining competing meanings of public [End Page 94] funerals and mourning rituals, Purcell considers how the living mourned and remembered the dead to better understand the shifting ground of American nationalism and Americans’ self-identities. Although historians have generally agreed that four strands (reconciliation, Lost Cause, emancipation, and Union Cause) framed postwar memory, they have disputed which paradigm dominated public discourse. Building on recent scholarship, especially work by Nina Silber, Purcell contends that “American identities were built out of competing and sometimes opposite ways of thinking and being” (5). Gracefully written and deeply researched, Spectacle of Grief explores politics through culture to demonstrate how memory and mourning created imagined communities. Through five thematic chapters and with sweeping chronological breadth, Purcell connects mourning rituals from the early Republic to the Reconstruction era. Nine public figures underpin the study and are considered through a variety of source materials including newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, published accounts, and government documents. The author’s thoughtfully layered reconstruction of public discussions and deliberations is an especially rewarding aspect of the study. Chapter 2 sets the book’s tone. Upon the death of Henry Clary, Americans mourned the passing of a public figure that “provided a safe but high-stakes way to claim a part of national memory” (13). To many, Clay’s death signaled the end of sectional compromise. By the war years, martial sacrifice underpinned the formation of Confederate and American nationalism. Elmer Ellsworth and Stonewall Jackson, the subjects of chapter 2, illustrate how collective mourning “contributed to polarization and opposed versions of American and Confederate national identity during the Civil War” (93). Despite a climate of reunification, sectional tensions lingered during the postwar era, at least among many white Americans. Purcell clearly illustrates in chapter 3 how both the Lost Cause and the Union Cause, as seen in mourning events for George Peabody and Robert E. Lee, each formed parts of the public discourse. Here the author productively engages recent scholarship (see especially work by Caroline Janney and Brian Matthew Jordan) that has revealed the deeply contested ground of postwar memory. As Reconstruction waned between the 1870s and 1890s, an unsteady memory of the Civil War continued to frame the creation of American national identity. Charles Sumner and Joseph E. Johnston, the figures of chapter 4, urged the public to forget elements of the Civil War in the interest of sectional reconciliation. Johnston proved a particularly complex figure who touted the Lost Cause but also worked toward reunion with a pro-Union flare. In the end, Purcell writes, “their funerals show how their sectional partisans could not afford to let them lie in peace” (176). Instead, promoters of Lost Cause mythology vocally claimed Johnston as a Confederate symbol, while Black orators emphasized Sumner’s fight for racial equality. [End Page 95] Between the 1850s and the 1880s, white men populated the pantheon of national heroes who were recognized by public mourning. Yet, the 1890s witnessed two unprecedented events. Upon the deaths of Frederick Douglass and Winnie Davis, a Black man and white woman were elevated into national symbols and mobilized in the cause of memory. As Purcell perceptively remarks, the mourning of Douglass signaled “that emancipationist memory of the Civil War had not faded away in 1895 and that the national identities created by public funerals had expanded enough to include an African American subject” (178). Davis’s memory proved deeply layered, as she was mourned at once as a symbol of the Lost Cause but also national reconciliation. Taken together, Purcell’s fifth chapter powerfully traces the lingering and overlapping strands of Civil War memory. Spectacle of Grief is a careful study of...