McKenzie 1 “The Shaft is in the Stone”: The Emergence of Confederate Memory through Early Monumentation in South Carolina, 1866-1904 by Sarah Anne McKenzie Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the History Department at Vanderbilt University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For Honors in History April 20, 2020 Dr. Dennis Dickerson, Thesis Advisor Dr. Joel Harrington, Director of Honors Dr. David Carlton, Third Reader McKenzie 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis could not have been completed without the tireless counsel of Professor Tasha Rajke-Epstein, Professor Joel Harrington, and Professor Dennis Dickerson, as well as former professor David Carlton, Joe Long and Fritz Hamer of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, and Jason Schultz of the Vanderbilt University Jean and Alexander Heard Library.
I would also like to recognize my colleagues who attended the honors seminar with me and peer-reviewed by work at each step of the process, as well as my friends and family who encouraged me to continue with this endeavor. McKenzie 3 “Ode: Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S., 1866” Henry Timrod Sleep gently in your humble graves, Sleep martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In the seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, And somewhere waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone. Meanwhile, behalf your tardy years Which in trust keep your storied tombs, Behold! Your sisters bring their tears, And these memorial blooms.
Small tributes! but your shades will smile More proudly on these wreaths today, Than when some cannon-moulded pile Shall overlook this bay. Stoop angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies By mourning beauty crowned!1 1 Aileen Wells Parks and Edd Winfield Parks, eds., and Henry Timrod, The Collected Poems of Henry Timrod (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965), pp. McKenzie 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2 TIMROD’S “ODE TO MAGNOLIA CEMETERY” 3 CONTENTS 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 5 INTRODUCTION 6 CHAPTER ONE: BACKGROUND 13 CHAPTER TWO: MOURNING, 1866-1880 29 CHAPTER THREE: TRIUMPH, 1880-1904 50 CONCLUSION 74 APPENDICES 77 BIBLIOGRAPHY 79 INDEX 85 McKenzie 5 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS SC: South Carolina LMA: Ladies Memorial Association or Ladies Monumental Association SCMA: South Carolina Monument Association UDC: United Daughters of the Confederacy SCV: Sons of Confederate Veterans or South Carolina Volunteers WLI: Washington Light Infantry McKenzie 6 INTRODUCTION The Persistence of Memory Reverend Clementa Pinckney, born July 30, 1973 in Beaufort, South Carolina, was a lonely voice for the rights and interests of black South Carolinians in the SC state senate from 2000-2015. He was also a staunch believer in the power of reconciliation to ease the sectional pain still evident in Civil War memory.
On April 19, 2015, he joined other Charleston leaders in Hampton Park to commemorate the 150th anniversary of what they believe to be the first Decoration Day, when black South Carolinians and Union soldiers came together to decorate the graves of Union soldiers who had been buried there. Pinckney delivered a spiritual address, acknowledging not only the gravity of the events that had transpired there, but also the “knowledge, understanding, and even-tempered healing”2 that remembrance of those events can bring. His reconciliatory address was far more empathetic than the circumstances that day merited, effectively reaching across the aisle in the city and state where secession began, a “place of tortured memory.”3 In fact, he argued that because of that tortured memory, it is necessary to acknowledge “‘all the blood’” spilled on this ground, no matter the uniform, for “‘God is no respecter of persons or causes.’”4 His friend, a historian and a fellow speaker at the event, David Blight, was shocked and even “troubled”5 by how radically inclusive Reverend Pinckney’s message was, but he was all the more moved because of it. 2 David Blight, “Clementa Pinckney, a Martyr of Reconciliation,” The Atlantic, June 22, 2015, Politics edition.
McKenzie 7 Almost exactly two months after that event, Reverend Pinckney and eight members of his church were killed during a prayer meeting by a white supremacist who had been radicalized by neo-Nazis over the internet. Their deaths sent shock waves throughout the country, prompting a national dialogue over not only the pattern of violence in the oppression of black people in the United States, but also the meaning and significance of the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of a violent war and, to many, racialized aggression, which Pinckney’s killer had proudly flown. Many voices began to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. The controversy over the flag reignited a longstanding debate over the place of Civil War memory in South Carolina.
Some critics argued that the prominence of Confederate monuments, tributes, and flags being displayed on public property suggested that the political ideas that the Confederates fought for were to be celebrated, while sweeping their defense of slavery and white supremacy under the rug. Others responded that the Civil War was a significant event in this state’s history, and these objects were merely historic relics, and to remove them would be to attempt to erase history. I was seventeen when the Emmanuel Nine were killed. In a place where shootings of this scale are almost unheard of, the weight of the murders of so many, in a place considered to be holy, for a purpose so evil hit our community like a sack of bricks.
For many, it dispelled the notion that nothing so violent or hateful could ever happen in our town. For people my age, who were still figuring out what was true and what we believed about most things but nevertheless were months from being shoved into the adult world, their loss and the ensuing controversy-- which seemed to envelope every conversation every day--were extremely formative. The crux of the debate was not whether Confederate monuments and flags should be displayed on public property, although that was argued over, but rather what the Confederacy McKenzie 8 fought for and whether it is okay to have pride in it as one’s heritage. Despite starting from the same facts about the war, different people came to vastly different conclusions about what the Confederates fought for and believed; even when presented with the same baseline information, two people could paint very different portraits of the Confederacy.
It became clear to me that in matters of memory, facts seem to matter less than feelings, and those feelings get stronger when one’s surroundings seem to confirm them. Social factors played a far larger role in shaping one’s perception of the Civil War than formal education, and therefore, many different versions of the Civil War live on in people’s memories. This thesis aims not to establish which version is the most accurate, but rather how different groups in South Carolina from 1866-1904 sought to control and shape their communities’ collective memories of the Civil War as early as possible. Therefore, this thesis investigates the evolving, multifaceted nature of Civil War memory in South Carolina as it was shaped by monumentation in the first four decades after the war’s close.
By using memory studies to examine the various monuments that enshrine various groups’ memories of the Civil War and its dead in South Carolina, I will uncover how the memory of this event began to be molded in South Carolinian collective consciousness. In doing so, I hope to illuminate the lasting effects of their efforts on the present day and address the importance of memory as a subject. Although the study of memory is a relatively new field in historiography, the role of public memory in wartime historiography is a budding topic on the forefront of current historiographical literature for its unmistakable importance in addressing war’s impact on a geographical area’s collective psyche and can be used as a framework within which to understand the unique case of the war’s impact on the first rebels. McKenzie 9 The sources I will analyze, as well as those that created and received them, include historical guides to South Carolina monuments which describe the appearance and location of the monuments as well as the historical events that brought them about, periodical local histories of organizations which erected these monuments, transcripts of monument dedication ceremonies, and newspaper articles.
Memory in Historiography Memory of historical events is less concerned with facts and figures and more with cultural objects, social conditioning, and collective reactions as people in a community feed off each other’s pathos and together form a memory of it. For this reason memory is often thought to be a social phenomenon rather than individual, and an emotional process rather than a rational one.6 Scholar Kerwin Lee Klein posits that when a community processes a historical event, material artifacts such as statues or tombstones themselves become memories which are passed down through generations. However, as Wulf Kansteiner later clarifies, the objects do not do the work of shaping memory, but the people that observe and interpret them.7 Thus, those people are equally deserving of study as the objects they interpret. The process of passing memory down through cultural objects and word of mouth hearkens back to ancient practices of passing down legends, religion, and community folklore from generation to generation.
For this reason some scholars such as Klein find memory studies to be too subjective and emotional, even anti-historical.8 However, by treating the formation of a certain memory as a historical process, one can trace how it formed, which actors primarily 6 Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse” (The Regents of the University of California: Representations, vol. 7 Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” (Wesleyan University: History and Theory, vol. 8 Klein, “Emergence of Memory.” McKenzie 10 sought to shape it, and how it developed into the memories of historical events still present in certain communities. Being able to isolate and analyze the formation of memories, such as South Carolinian memory of the Civil War, is the first step to questioning them and their influence on society.
Structure of Thesis In order to tease apart the strands of early Civil War memory in South Carolina, I begin with some background information on the state’s experience in the war and the political, social, and cultural processes at play that led to South Carolina’s participation and loss in the war. The most notable sources of South Carolina histories before, during, and after this time period include Jack Bass and W. Scott Poole’s book, The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina, and Walter Edgar’s book, South Carolina: A History. Whereas Edgar is traditional in his telling of history and generally unwilling to criticize famous South Carolinian figures of the past, Bass and Poole approach their history with a modern skepticism that balances out the former.
Another of Poole’s books, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry is a valuable resource to round out the sociopolitical landscape of the western part of the state, since South Carolina histories tend to bias Charleston and the Lowcountry in their focus. All of these authors are South Carolinian, and as such it is clear from reading their works that the impetus behind their desire to document South Carolinian history is pride in their state regardless of the content of their works. These historians were working from within the region of their focus rather than from without, which provides them with more information than an outsider might have, but also potentially less detachment from their topic. As a South Carolinian myself, I am in danger of falling into the same predicament.