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Civil War Memory in the Tennessee Heartland, 1865-1920 By View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations ‘THAT MYSTIC CLOUD’ Civil War Memory in the Tennessee Heartland, 1865-1920 by Edward John Harcourt Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History May, 2008 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor David L. Carlton Professor Don H. Doyle Professor Richard J. Blackett Professor Larry J. Griffin Professor Rowena Olegario Copyright © Edward John Harcourt All Rights Reserved 2 for Kok Wai 3 Contents ABBREVIATIONS................................................................................................ 6 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 7 1. MEMORY AND MOURNING ................................................................. 30 Footprints of War ............................................................................................. 33 Living With Death ............................................................................................ 36 Bad Death .......................................................................................................... 43 Marking the Dead............................................................................................. 48 Shades of Gray .................................................................................................. 60 2. RESTORATION OR RECONSTRUCTION? ......................................... 69 Not So Now ........................................................................................................ 73 Cause to Regret................................................................................................. 80 Let Us Restore................................................................................................... 85 An Uneasy Alliance........................................................................................... 90 Ku Klux Come................................................................................................... 97 They Told Me .................................................................................................. 101 Lee Still Lives .................................................................................................. 105 Seek Shelter Elsewhere................................................................................... 109 The Stupendous Contest................................................................................. 113 3. ROLL CALL FOR CONFEDERATE MEMORY................................... 118 ‘Home Rule’ .................................................................................................... 120 Live in the Living Present .............................................................................. 124 Entirely from Memory ................................................................................... 128 An Urgent Entreaty ........................................................................................ 139 4 In Search of Amusement................................................................................ 149 Not In Vain ...................................................................................................... 152 Fall In!.............................................................................................................. 157 Lynching Green Wells.................................................................................... 166 4. THE DISEMBODIED CAUSE.............................................................. 170 We Were Comrades........................................................................................ 173 Lives of Difference .......................................................................................... 176 Acts of Remembrance..................................................................................... 182 Disillusioned Black Republicans ................................................................... 190 Black Legislators............................................................................................. 195 No Axes to Grind ............................................................................................ 198 Not in Nashville............................................................................................... 205 Black veterans ................................................................................................. 212 Bury the Past................................................................................................... 221 5. THE LONG SHADOW OF THE LOST CAUSE................................... 227 Mournful but glorious .................................................................................... 232 The Confederate Generation ......................................................................... 237 Rescue from Oblivion..................................................................................... 242 Bound by Love ................................................................................................ 253 From a Southern Standpoint......................................................................... 258 Building the Past............................................................................................. 262 Storing the Past............................................................................................... 266 Corners of the Field........................................................................................ 271 6. EPILOGUE .......................................................................................... 279 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................. 286 Primary Sources.............................................................................................. 286 Secondary Sources.......................................................................................... 291 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ 303 5 Abbreviations CV Confederate Veteran FB Freedmen’s Bureau (Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land) JSH Journal of Southern History NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. RG Record Group SBHLA Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee SCD Special Collections, Duke University SHC-UNC Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill THQ Tennessee Historical Quarterly TEHC Carroll Van West, editor-in-chief, Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture (Nashville, Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press for the Tennessee Historical Society, 1998). THS Tennessee Historical Society TSLA Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee 6 Introduction Everywhere it is the historic consciousness which has seized upon and controls our life and its manifestations—our letters and the expression of our thought. We shall not go out of our way to compare it with the French consciousness wrought by the great Revolution, or with the ripening of German thought and the intensifying of German unity which sprung from the Napoleonic wars. The growth of this historic instinct throughout the country seems one of the main results of the war itself—a consciousness born of new feelings and ideas and conceptions, and derived from a closer discernment of the events and the development of the past. The historic sense has grown in proportion as the personal feeling has become blunted.1 J. B. Henneman, Sewanee Review (1893) It is tempting, as J. B. Henneman suggested in 1893, to view the Civil War Era as a watershed in American consciousness, akin to the French Revolution in bringing forth a new form of historical sensibility. While, as is true in the case of both France and the United States, forces of modernity had begun to disintegrate traditional connections between experience and memory long before the revolutions of 1789 and 1861, the impact of the Civil War on the relationship between consciousness, memory, and identity, should not be underestimated—particularly in the South. Robert Penn Warren remarked that the Civil War provided Americans with their only ‘felt’ history, by which he meant “history lived in the national imagination.” The Civil War uprooted thousands from their homes, liberated many hundreds of thousands more, and had in many parts of 7 the South a totalizing impact upon society that often blurred distinctions between the battlefield and the homestead. The war touched the lives of all and took each individual to places that were different from before, thereby shaking the present from the deep grooves of the past and, as J.B. Henneman observes, producing a “historic instinct” to remember, rethink, and restructure the past lest it be lost for ever. Recollections of the Civil War —through what Warren termed the ‘mystic cloud’ of memory—have often been an imperfect representation of history. As David W. Blight has observed, Americans’ fascination with the war has more often focused on its “music and pathos” than “its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies.” In the former Confederate states, as a number of historians have shown, a valorized Confederate heritage—promulgating the myth of white unity, denying the history of slaves becoming citizens,
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