"Tell the southrons we lie here": The rhetoric of consummation in southern epitaphs and elegies of post-Civil War America

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Sedore, Timothy S

CIVIL WAR SITES OF MOURNING offer striking contradictions and paradoxes. The monuments are at once intimate and aloof-formed of granite, limestone, bronze, or granite, yet invested with a rhetoric of life emotions. Though fixed in lifeless substance, they are dynamic in ideology, interpretation and evocation: The Virginia and Georgia courthouse monuments of the "Lost Cause" era, for example, stand in revealing contrast to the triumphant tone that is so often represented in comparable New York and Pennsylvania elegiac monuments. Yet they share a common striving to reconcile word and referent, sacrifice and cause.

This essay draws from field research I have conducted over the last several years; I have photographed and analyzed the sites and texts of over two hundred courthouse or cemetery memorials and tombstones in that time. My travel has focused on Virginia, but my analysis includes sites in Georgia, West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Minnesota, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. My research began long before the events of September 11th and the appropriate reawakening of interest in public memorials that Ground Zero visits evoked.

Early on in my research, I was struck by the authors' multifaceted rhetorical efforts to effect a reconciliation of intimate, private mourning with abstract public ideology: between the loss of child, spouse, parent, or sibling in the American Civil War, and the rhetorical effort to rationalize that loss and to sustain adherence to the Lost Cause and other ideologies that emerged during reconstruction. No analysis of these texts has been undertaken, but as models of rich, cogent public rhetoric, they reflect "the power of traditional languages, rituals, and forms to mediate bereavement" (Winter 115). Moreover, these terse or fragmentary texts reflect trends of nineteenth-century American discourse that continue to this day.

A striking feature of Civil War elegiac rhetoric is the extraordinary rhetorical claim imputed to an uplifted, idealized individual, often embodied in a prototypical sculpted figure standing at parade rest atop a pedestal. Over one hundred sculptures of Confederate private soldiers stand in Virginia. Wayne Craven asserts that this orientation is a distinctively American phenomenon. Craven writes that "Prior to the Civil War it was the custom to erect monuments of officers only-to the generals, admirals, colonels and so on." American Civil War momimentation was different: at "battlefields, in the town parks and public squares throughout the nation, there arose memorials to the common soldier or to his regiment which had fought so bravely" (61). To all appearances the individual soldier was heralded, not because of his social status, or for the strategy and tactics of officers, or the oratory and influence of politicians, but as one who transcended events and mortal flesh. The apparent individualistic legacy that Craven discerns has what Emerson calls a "blood impulse" means of communicating that may also be attributed to contemporary mass culture (Simpson 83). The connection-short, clipped texts juxtaposed with sculpted or iconographie images-elicits an affective, emotion-driven response in the same way that contemporary media creates an illusion of emotional intimacy between communicant and audience. It is a distinctly American genre of charismatic rhetoric whose characteristics are described by Richard Weaver and Kathleen Hall Jamieson-although they do not specifically address Civil War elegiac rhetoric. Here, I will argue, is a rhetoric of phraseology whose content, as Weaver puts it, "proceeds out of a popular will that they shall mean something. In effect, they are rhetorical by common consent, or by 'charisma'" (106).1 A feigned intimacy is created; an affective rhetoric predominates. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in turn, asserts that "Public discourse is now more personalized, self-disclosive, and autobiographical. . . . Public address now seems a collaborative and intimate act that enmeshes speaker and audience" (44-45). The authors of the texts of these public memorials mean to affect their readers, not merely inform them. This charismatic rhetoric regarding profound personal loss almost invariably proclaims recourse to public abstraction as a means of rationalizing the respective sacrifices. There is, the authors of Civil War elegiac rhetoric claim, a balm in the Gilead of "States Rights," "Preservation of the Union," noble obedience to "Lost Cause," or "Unstinted Devotion to Duty." Courthouse monuments almost invariably attempt an artful balance of the cathartic expiation of personal loss with a public rationale for that loss. The Christiansburg, Virginia, monument (1883), for example-"Erected by Her Daughters"-takes explicit note of the "Lost Cause," specifically Montgomery County's:

It is with reference to the Christiansburg Courthouse emphasis on Lost Cause that I draw reference to Jamieson's observation that the contemporary "model of persuasion is that of Pascal, not Descartes. Descartes held that facts coupled with logic should persuade; Pascal unintentionally prophesied the power of the mode of communication that is best suited for television when he noted that the heart has reasons that reason does not know" (152). I argue that there is reason to believe that the "heart's reasons," as Jamieson puts it, clearly dominate the ideological and rhetorical content of post-Civil War elegiac rhetoric. The veritable deification of the individual, as depicted in these memorials, has consequences that include body and soul investment in abstract causes. The monuments are rhetorical promontories casting acoustic shadows that retain a power to arouse the emotions of the era they reflect.