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 Stephanie K. Lawton (bio) Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era. By Sarah J. Purcell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 321. $95.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $26.99 ebook) Historians of Civil War memory have eagerly anticipated Purcell's project, and it does not disappoint. Americans in the nineteenth century took death seriously and produced an astonishing amount of material about public funerals. Purcell is up to this challenge and incorporates a remarkable number of primary sources, including over three hundred newspapers, surveying the funeral rites and memorial politics for nine prominent Americans, ranging from well-known individuals like Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, and Frederick Douglass, to nearly forgotten people like Elmer Ellsworth, George Peabody, and Winnie Davis. Purcell states that although public funerals have long been cast as rites of "unity and consensus," they are in fact contested sites of memory creation as participants "advocate for alternative visions of the past" and project "conflicting ideas about the nation onto famous figures whom they mourned" (pp. 5–6). Through such debates about the past, "Public funerals … helped define American national identities" as post-bellum Americans worked to "'reconstitute' the … nation in ways compatible with rival political interests" (pp. 3–4). But rather than a singular memorial tradition, Purcell shows that multiple, often conflicting, strands were combined in the same commemorative events. [End Page 84] Each chapter contains real gems. Purcell's discussion of how Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" oration was a rebuttal of the eulogies for Henry Clay in July 1852 is eyeopening. The diplomatic wrangling between the British and American governments over who would transport George Peabody's remains back to the U.S. in the wake of the CSS Alabama dispute shows that the political significance of memory is often international in scope. Purcell's attention to the racial lines of division in these ceremonies is superb, but there could be more attention to the less obvious ways gender and class were used to exclude or marginalize lower-class men, immigrants, and women. For example, while white women joined crowds welcoming Henry Clay's body to their cities and female family members sometimes appeared in the processions, women did not march, deliver the eulogies, or sit on the civic committees that planned these events. Only in the South after the Civil War did ladies' memorial associations start to take a role in hosting mourning rites, but they still did not participate in all aspects of public mourning equally with men. Even lower-class white men, such as firemen in New York City, usually walked near the end of funeral processions, not in the chief places of honor, which highlights the fractures of class and whiteness that became more prominent as America entered its Gilded Age. Spectacle of Grief opens promising avenues for future exploration, especially the possibility of further integrating disability studies into Civil War memory. Throughout the book, undertakers tried to prevent corpses from decaying while on public view while eulogists praised their past physical attributes and ignored often lengthy and disabling illnesses. These attempts to hide mortality, even after death, invites collaboration with disability scholars who have argued that illness and disability have never been welcome in the American community. Scholars of Civil War memory or of death and funeral traditions will find this a valuable addition to their bibliographies. History [End Page 85] instructors who teach about any of the book's nine central subjects would benefit from this additional context, and the chapters on Henry Clay and Frederick Douglass/Winnie Davis would work well as a set to assign to upper-division history classes talking about U.S. slavery, race, gender, and politics. Stephanie K. Lawton STEPHANIE K. LAWTON is an assistant professor of history at the University of the Cumberlands. Her research focuses on Greco-Roman influences on presidential funerals in the nineteenth-century United States. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society