Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration [1st ed.] 9783030376468, 9783030376475

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century Consuming Commemoration Edited by Katherine Haldane Grenier Amanda R. Mushal

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK John Sutton Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682

Katherine Haldane Grenier Amanda R. Mushal Editors

Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century Consuming Commemoration

Editors Katherine Haldane Grenier Department of History The Citadel Charleston, SC, USA

Amanda R. Mushal Department of History The Citadel Charleston, SC, USA

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-030-37646-8    ISBN 978-3-030-37647-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword: Unravelling the Nineteenth-­ Century Nexus of Consuming Commemoration

Social memory is born out of the interplay of public and private remembrance. The fruits of commemoration, in all their various manifestations, are inevitably consumed by groups and individuals. Whereas commemoration, as such, has always been commodified, utilized, and expended, a distinctly late-modern memorial culture—one that thrives on the nexus of commemoration and consumption—appears to have emerged by the fin de siècle. Undergoing banalization in the twentieth century, its commonplaceness would be taken for granted in such practices as the ubiquitous wearing of poppies at British and Commonwealth Remembrance Day ceremonies (Iles 2008). On occasion, when perceived as excessive, it might even incur criticism, as in the dubbing of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution a “buycentennial sellabration” (Gordon 2013), or a more general anxiety that the commercialization of heritage signifies the loss of authenticity (Macdonald 2013, 109–136). Coming at the end of the twentieth century, the fall of the Berlin Wall was spontaneously commemorated through the marketing of souvenir pieces (Sonnevend 2016, 123–126) and in 2001 traumatic recollections of 9/11 were instantly commodified within national and global contexts (Heller 2005). To understand the roots of these phenomena and the conditions in which they sprouted, we must turn back to the long nineteenth century. To some extent, the development of modern practices for consuming commemoration was tied in with the dynamics of “invention of tradition,” the heyday of which Eric Hobsbawm located in Europe at the turn of the century—more or less between 1870 and 1914. This was the culmination of an intense period of introducing countless memorial rituals, designed to v

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bridge the breakdown of traditional forms of solidarity in consequence of the modernization and nationalization of rural societies (Hobsbawm 1983). Accordingly, the consumption of commemoration can be placed at the conjunction of the outpouring of nationalist cultural production that gave birth to the nation-state—evocatively labelled by Pierre Nora the “memory-nation” (Nora 1989, 11)—and the embracing of consumerism that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass society. Yet, in order to have popular appeal, the marketing of newly introduced practices of memorialization often recycled and readapted familiar vernacular traditions, supplementing print with oral traditions, and using industrially manufactured products alongside handmade artefacts as aides-memoires. Derivatives of age-old commemorative folk customs, some of which harked back to the religious accoutrements of medieval cults of saints, could reappear to be consumed in secular settings through such fetishes as the Victorian obsession with relics of the dead (Lutz 2015). The principal innovation of remembrance in the modern era, compared to earlier mnemonic cultures, can be found in reflexes of democratization, whereby rank-and-file individuals staked a personal claim for themselves within the homogenizing anonymity of a general collective memory. This is perhaps most apparent in what Thomas Laqueur has labelled “the age of necronominalism”—commencing during the American Civil War and reaching its zenith in the Great War—a period in which the inscriptions on tombstones at military cemeteries and the listing of names on war monuments expressed an aspiration to commemorate all of the dead (Laqueur 2015, 413–488). Not only did everybody demand the right to be remembered, but increasingly people with means wanted to touch the vestiges of memory at first hand. Romanticism increased the appeal of historical battlefields as tourist destinations, starting with the droves of visitors who came to see the place of the Napoleonic defeat at Waterloo (Semmel 2000), but also reaching back to memorable battles from the previous century, such as the site of the Jacobite debacle at Culloden in the Scottish Highlands (McLean et al. 2007) or the hallowed battlegrounds of the American Revolution (Chambers 2012). A booming heritage tourism industry, commercially promoted by such canny travel agents as Thomas Cook, would be in full swing by the First World War, complete with guidebooks that suggested itineraries and appropriate commemorative gestures (Lloyd 1998, 13–48). Visits to historical graves could be transformed into secular pilgrimages and co-opted for political purposes, as in the case of annual visits to the

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grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone—the so-called father of Irish republicanism—which became a veritable Mecca for separatist nationalists in the years leading up to the Irish Revolution (Woods 2018). Transferring patrimony of the treasures of the past from a privileged elite to the nation, the French Revolution had transformed the Louvre Palace into the Musée Français and opened the Musée national des Monuments Français. Subsequently, under Napoleon, public museums were established across the European continent, while in America privately owned museums opened their doors to the populace (Abt 2006, 128–131; Bennett 1995, 89–95). Through the proliferation of national and local museums, including also those that featured folklife displays of everyday rural traditions and ethnological collections brought from colonies, heritage was put on display for the benefit of the general public and a variety of commemorative souvenirs were made available for purchase. Marking the genesis of what would come to be known as public history, “muzealization” underwent changes in the twentieth century and evolved into a mass medium (Macdonald 2013, 137–161; Huyssen 1995, 13–35), but even nowadays, as pointed out by Jürgen Osterhammel, “despite many pedagogical innovations, there is a tendency for museums to keep returning to the dispositions and agendas of the nineteenth century” (Osterhammel 2014, 11–14). A positivist forward-looking belief in Western progress could trump the romantic backwards gaze into the past. In terms of consumerism, historical museums were outdone by a form of commemoration of the present to be found in the great exhibitions and world fairs that took their cue from the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. Part of the Statue of Liberty was first put on display in Philadelphia at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 and the Eiffel Tower was constructed in Paris for the Exposition Universelle of 1889; both of these commercialized events were at least nominally intended to commemorate the centenary of founding revolutions. Such international exhibitions, which were in effect celebrations of imperialism and the global benefits of capitalism for Western industrialized economies, presented indigenous colonized peoples as primitive subjects of empire, without histories worthy of commemoration (Geppert 2010; Giberti 2002; Greenhalgh 1988; Hoffenberg 2001; Levin 1989). This exoticized paternalism could be extended to re-enactments of seemingly timeless idyllic peasant life, as in the mock Irish village of Ballymaclinton at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London, a living display sponsored by McClinton soap (Rains 2011).

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Commemorative consumption was a multisensual and multimedia experience. Alongside inspecting the material objects on display at museums and exhibitions, members of the public could engage visually with cultural memory at galleries that featured artworks with historical scenes. Responding to the growing appeal of historicism, a designated history department was added to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam when it moved to a new building in 1885 (Bergvelt 2010). Sound was another medium for acquiring a sense of the past, as compositions of what was perceived as national music portrayed historical scenes in the popular operas of the period (Lajosi 2010). Similarly, performances at theatre houses catered for the vogue for historical plays, set against the background of historical episodes. Sales of historical novels (often available in cheap editions), a genre popularized by Walter Scott, accommodated a private form of consuming history. These dramas and novels imaginatively narrated historical events and transformed them into a “spectacular past” (Samuels 2004). Moreover, libraries and book clubs provided public arenas for the individual experience of reading. Authors, elevated into national icons, received lavish commemorative tributes (Leerssen and Rigney 2014). In sum, “all of society, the entire public sphere was immersed neck-deep in a nonstop multimedia cult of national self-articulation and self-celebration” (Leerssen 2006, 203). The quintessential form of consuming social memory was through commemorative celebrations and the erection of monuments, which by the end of the century, according to the contemporary French historian Gabriel Monod, reached feverish heights of statuomania (Monod 1882, 656). The 50th anniversary of 1789 was barely noticed, but a half-century later the Third Republic, seeking to consolidate its authority in the face of opposition from right and left, glorified the French Revolution as a founding myth, erecting busts and statues of Marianne in every town, declaring the Marseillaise the national anthem in 1879, marking Bastille Day annually from 1880, and feting the centennial in 1889 (Ory 1984; Agulhon 1989; Gildea 1994, 19–20). This excess of commemoration fervour was indicative of a wider “cult of the centenary,” or more correctly symbolic anniversaries, celebrated throughout Europe and across the Atlantic (Quinault 1998). Staged as ritual enactments of the past, commemorations mostly reflect the politics of the present and, less noticeably, also strive to present a vision of the future. Hungarians trumpeted their privileged status in the Habsburg dual monarchy by reaching into the mists of time and triumphantly celebrating in 1896 the millennium of the fabled arrival of the

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Magyar tribes to the Carpathian Basin. A modern dimension was superimposed on the quasi-historical national commemorations by scheduling the opening of Budapest’s underground railway to coincide with the occasion. Several years then passed until the completion in 1906 of the statues of chieftains and kings at the main memorial site, which would later be renamed Heroes Square (Varga 2016, 28–31). Indeed, there is usually a significant time lapse between inaugural ceremonies, at which foundation stones of memorials are laid, and the eventual unveiling of the monuments, following years of fundraising and planning that are often beset by ideological disagreements and political infighting. Remembrance does not end with the erection of a monument. On the contrary, rather than a one-­ off construction, memory is an ongoing work in progress and its vitality depends on the vicissitudes of popular reception. Facing the ever-looming threat of inevitable decline and succumbing to oblivion, memory is maintained through periodic attempts at regeneration, intended to counter loss of interest. Consumption of commemoration is therefore a lifeline for social memory. Beyond public participation in ceremonies (rates of which are difficult to determine, due to the rhetorical hyperbole of reports and a tendency to inflate numbers), commemoration was consumed and brought home through various ephemeral mementoes, from printed programmes of events and special newspaper supplements to pins and badges, souvenir handkerchiefs and customized crockery, postcards and illustrations, and even miniature replicas of the memorials. In correlating the multiplicity of arenas and practices through which commemoration was consumed in the nineteenth century, some general observations can be made about the economy of memory, which also sharpen our understanding of its sociology and geography. Commemoration is in essence a vibrant marketplace within which the value of memory as a form of cultural capital is negotiated. Struggles over ownership of memory reveal the inequalities of access to social remembrance. Governments aspired to shape a hegemonic collective memory and were often assisted in this task by historians (just as the new discipline of anthropology helped forge identifications with empire). However, metropolitan attempts to dictate memory from above could encounter grassroots resistance from communities that struggled to attain recognition for local traditions. Somewhere in between, local elites that corresponded to the social profile identified by Miroslav Hroch as key agents of national revival (Hroch 1985)—including such influential figures as regional politicians, editors of provincial newspapers, priests, and schoolteachers—organized and

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choreographed commemorations at a ground level. Availing themselves of the apparatus of dedicated clubs and associations that had a popular membership, these formers of public opinion effectively brokered the negotiations of memory between top-down and bottom-up initiatives (Beiner 2006, 243–275). Certain social classes and ethnic groups were better positioned to dominate commemoration, while others were marginalized. Consequently, commemoration was driven by competitiveness, riddled with passionate emotions of possession and envy that pitted those who consumed and celebrated memory against those who felt excluded and desired a piece of the pie. Gender was a key factor in the struggles over how commemoration was produced and consumed. Expected to passively assume responsibility for the domestication of memory in the household, female activists increasingly challenged the social norms that kept them off the main public platforms. In turn, the protests of suffragists would later be commemorated by feminists (Kean 2005). These multilayered dynamics of social remembrance, in their manifold private and public spheres, clearly require careful unravelling through specific historical case studies. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, we can now identify and problematize what seemed transparent to those who partook in consuming commemoration. Beer Sheva, Israel

Guy Beiner

References Abt, Jeffrey. 2006. The Origins of the Public Museum. In A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 115–134. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Agulhon, Maurice. 1989. Marianne au pouvoir: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1880 à 1914. Paris: Flammarion. Beiner, Guy. 2006. Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge. Bergvelt, Ellinoor. 2010. Potgieter’s ‘Rijksmuseum’ and the Public Presentation of Dutch History in the National Museum (1800–1844). In Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, ed. Lotte Jensen, Joseph Leerssen, and Marita Mathijsen, 171–195. Leiden: Brill. Chambers, Thomas A. 2012. Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Geppert, Alexander C.T. 2010. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-­ Siècle Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giberti, Bruno. 2002. Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Gildea, Robert. 1994. The Past in French History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gordon, Tammy S. 2013. The Spirit of 1976: Commerce, Community, and the Politics of Commemoration. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heller, Dana A., ed. 2005. The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 263–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffenberg, Peter H. 2001. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hroch, Miroslav. 1985. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge. Iles, Jennifer. 2008. In Remembrance: The Flanders Poppy. Mortality 13 (3): 201–221. Kean, Hilda. 2005. Public History and Popular Memory: Issues in the Commemoration of the British Militant Suffrage Campaign. Women’s History Review 14 (3–4): 581–602. Lajosi, Krisztina. 2010. Nineteenth-Century National Opera and Representations of the Past in the Public Sphere. In Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, ed. Lotte Jensen, Joseph Leerssen, and Marita Mathijsen, 227–246. Leiden: Brill. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. 2015. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leerssen, Joep. 2006. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Leerssen, Joep, and Ann Rigney, eds. 2014. Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Levin, Miriam R. 1989. When the Eiffel Tower Was New: French Visions of Progress at the Centennial of the Revolution. South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Lloyd, David Wharton. 1998. Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919–1939. New York: Berg. Lutz, Deborah. 2015. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macdonald, Sharon. 2013. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. New York: Routledge. McLean, Fiona, Mary-Catherine Garden, and Gordon Urquhart. 2007. Romanticising Tragedy: Culloden Battle Site in Scotland. In Battlefield Tourism: History, Place and Interpretation, ed. Chris Ryan, 221–234. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Monod, Gabriel. 1882. Contemporary Life and Thought in France. Contemporary Review 42 (Oct.): 641–658. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire. Representations 26: 7–24. Ory, Pascal. 1984. Le Centenaire de la Révolution française. In Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 1: La République, ed. Pierre Nora, 523–560. Paris: Gallimard. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2014. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quinault, Roland. 1998. The Cult of the Centenary, c.1784–1914. Historical Research 71 (176): 303–323. Rains, Stephanie. 2011. Colleens, Cottages and Kraals: The Politics of ‘Native’ Village Exhibitions. History Ireland 19 (2): 30–33. Samuels, Maurice. 2004. The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Semmel, Stuart. 2000. Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo. Representations 69: 9–37. Sonnevend, Julia. 2016. Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. New York: Oxford University Press. Varga, Bálint. 2016. The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary. New York: Berghahn. Woods, C.J. 2018. Bodenstown Revisited: The Grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Its Monuments and Its Pilgrimages. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Nineteenth Century Studies Association (NCSA) for providing the venue within which the ideas in these essays first began to germinate and cross-pollinate. We are grateful to the NCSA Board, especially Lucy Morrison and Marlene Tromp, for their help and advice in the early stages of organizing this publication. Thanks are due to all of our contributors for the exciting ideas they brought forward, and for the energy, intelligence, and patience with which they rewrote drafts, answered questions, and replied to numerous emails. We would also like to thank our colleagues and friends in The Citadel Department of History; Bo Moore, whose support helped initiate the project; and Joelle Neulander, for her valuable input on the introduction. Eric Zuelow took the time to read and comment on an early draft of our proposal. Particular thanks are due to Guy Beiner for agreeing to write the foreword, and to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan: Lucy Batrouney, Mala Sanghera-Warren, and Bryony Burns. Above all, we are grateful to our families: Stephen, Ian, and Matthew Grenier; Barbara Cantey and David Mushal; and the Bell-­ Samarov-­Flaherty family for their unwavering love and support throughout this project. Kathy Grenier Amanda R. Mushal

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Katherine Haldane Grenier and Amanda R. Mushal Part I Memory and the Personal: Community, Commercial Culture, and Global Commerce  17 2 Mirrors with a Memory: Postmortem Photography and Spirit Photography in Transitional British Fiction and Culture 19 Susan E. Cook 3 Autograph Albums and the Commercialization of Memory in the United States 39 Jennifer M. Black 4 Music for Birthdays: Commemorative Birthday Pieces in Johannes Brahms’s Circle (1853–1854) and Elsewhere 61 Jacquelyn Sholes 5 A Whale Is a Palimpsest: Dismembering and Remembering in Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales 81 Kelly P. Bushnell

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6 Votive Boats, Ex-votos, and Maritime Memory in Atlantic France 97 Maura Coughlin Part II Memory and Civic Identity 123 7 Libby Prison War Museum: Site of Commemoration or Commercial Enterprise125 Angela M. Riotto 8 Randolph Cemetery and the Politics of Death in the Post-Civil War South145 Ashley Towle 9 “The Same Effort and the Same Death”: The Memory of the Langalibalele Incident of 1873165 Jacob Ivey 10 Remembering the 1857 Indian Uprising in Civic Celebrations183 Danielle Nielsen 11 Nationalist Ironies: The Legacy of the Federalist Party and the Construction of a Unified Republic203 Asaf Almog 12 German Domestic Pedestrian Tourism and the Rhetoric of National Historical Memory, Empire, and MiddleClass Identity 1780s–1850s223 Johann J. K. Reusch 13 The Art of Memory: Tracing the Colonial in Contemporary India241 Mira Rai Waits Index269

Notes on Contributors

Asaf Almog  is a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, “Looking Backward in a New Republic: Conservative New Englanders and American Nationalism, 1793–1848,” examines the intersection of conservatism and nationalism among New England’s elite in the early American republic and the antebellum era. Guy Beiner  is Professor of Modern History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He was a Government of Ireland Scholar at University College Dublin, an Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, a Government of Hungary Scholar at the Central European University, a Gerda Henkel Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a Burns Scholar at Boston College. He specializes in the history of memory and forgetting in the late modern period and is the author of the award-winning books Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (2006) and Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (2018). Jennifer M. Black  is Assistant Professor of History and Government at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, and serves as network editor-in-chief for H-Material Culture. She holds a PhD in American History and Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, as well as an MA in Public History and a BA in Art History, both from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in the Journal of American Culture, The Public Historian, Winterthur Portfolio, Material xvii

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Culture, and several anthologies. Her research examines ways in which people interact with images and objects, and the power of visual and material culture to influence trends in politics, the law, and society. She is working on a book manuscript, Branding Trust: Advertising, Trademarks, and Legitimacy in the US, which decodes advertisers’ early branding strategies and their impact by looking at material culture use and practices. Kelly P. Bushnell  is a scholar of the environmental humanities, specializing in oceanic literature, history, and culture of the nineteenth century. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, and has taught at the University of London, the University of West Florida, and the Williams College-Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program. She lives in Seattle, Washington, and when she’s not writing or teaching you can find her rowing a wooden boat around—or diving in—Puget Sound. Susan  E.  Cook is Associate Professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University, where she teaches composition, nineteenth-­century British literature, and gender studies. She is the treasurer of the Dickens Society and the president of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. She has published articles on visual culture and literature of the long nineteenth century in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920; Dickens Studies Annual; Conradiana; and Nineteenth Century Studies. Her book, Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 2019. Maura  Coughlin  is Professor of Visual Studies at Bryant University in Rhode Island. Her research is focused on French Atlantic visual culture, coastal ecology, and the rise of marine sciences in France. Across her projects is a fascination with the ways that fish and animals, seaweed, salt, people, sand, stones, and boats move across and through the tideline and across borders, and the ways in which the visual culture of the shore pictures intensely local perceptions of tide, geology, beach morphology, and marine botany. She is the co-editor of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (2019). Katherine  Haldane  Grenier  is Professor of History at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where she has taught for 27 years, serving as director of Graduate Studies and Department Chair. Her area of specialization is nineteenth-century British History. She is the author of Tourism and Identity in Scotland: Creating Caledonia, 1770–1914 (2005) and

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several articles in essay collections and journals, and is co-editor of That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity (1990). Her research examines aspects of religious memory in Victorian Scotland, looking at late nineteenth-century Roman Catholic pilgrimages, and at the role of Sabbath observances in Scottish identity. Jacob  Ivey  is Assistant Professor of History at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida, where he teaches courses on the history of modern Africa, the history of South Africa, race in the Modern Age, and Western civilization. He holds a PhD from West Virginia University and his research centers on the British Empire in Southern Africa. He has published in Britain and the World and the South African Historical Journal and is completing a monograph on the African constabulary and other police institutions in nineteenth-century British Natal. Amanda R. Mushal  is Associate Professor of History at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, specializing in the nineteenth-century American South. She holds an MA and a PhD from University of Virginia and a BA from the College of William and Mary. She is a contributor to The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity (2017) and The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (2011). Her research examines the development of commercial credit reporting in the nineteenth-century United States. She has also served as an editorial contributor to projects on slavery and colonial commerce developed by the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. Danielle  Nielsen is Associate Professor of English at Murray State University in the Department of English and Philosophy. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian and Edwardian colonial literature and rhetoric, disability studies, and technical and professional writing. Johann J. K. Reusch  is associate professor in the Division of Social and Historical Studies at the University of Washington at Tacoma where he teaches history and global studies. His research and publications focus on the culture and politics of tourism, travel, and migration. Angela M. Riotto  is a historian with the Documentary Team at Army University Press. She completed her PhD at The University of Akron under the direction of Dr. Lesley Gordon in 2018. Her dissertation examined ex-prisoners of war (ex-POWs) and their memories in the postwar

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period. Focusing on both Union and Confederate ex-POWs’ postwar accounts, Riotto traced the ways in which both Civil War ex-­prisoners of war discussed their prison experiences between 1862 and 1930. Jacquelyn Sholes  is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Rochester, having held previous visiting appointments at Boston University, Brown University, Central Connecticut State University, Wellesley College, and Williams College. Her first book, Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms’s Instrumental Music, was published in 2018. Her research has been published in journals including 19th-Century Music and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and she has done interdisciplinary work with neuroscientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology resulting in a co-authored publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With Lewis Lockwood, she served as acting co-­ director of the Center for Beethoven Research at Boston University, where she remains an affiliate scholar. She serves as president of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society and on the editorial board of College Music Symposium. Her projects explore narrative and the musical canon and connections between music and literature, math, science, and technology. Ashley Towle  is a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Southern Maine and holds a PhD in History from the University of Maryland. She is at work on a book manuscript that examines the ways in which African Americans used death to stake claims to citizenship, equality, and justice in the post-Civil War South. Mira Rai Waits  is Assistant Professor of Art History at Appalachian State University. She holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research has addressed the development of fingerprinting in colonial India, the architectural history of colonial and postcolonial Indian prisons, and the role remunerative prison labor played in the production of colonial Indian penology. She is working on a book project that explores the spatial and visual culture history of colonial Indian prisons.

List of Figures

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Fig. 3.3 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Attributed to Jacob Byerly, [Postmortem portrait of a little girl holding a small bouquet of roses], c. 1850–1855. Daguerreotype. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 20 William H. Mumler, “Mrs. Tinkham,” c. 1862–1875. Albumen silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 21 Entry signed “J. G.” (1828), Sarah Ruckman Album, 1828–1831. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE 45 Title page of the Aldine Album, c. 1880, reprinted from Robert P. Stevenson, “The Autograph Album: A Victorian Girl’s Best Friend,” Pennsylvania Folklife 34, no. 1 (1984): 37. Courtesy of Ursinus College Special Collections Department49 Willis C. Grant patent application, no. 296,404 (1884). United States Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, DC 51 Paul or Charles Géniaux, Young Boy in Front of the Chapel of Perros-­Hamon, c. 1900. Gelatin silver print, 14.9 × 10.6 cm. Musée de Bretagne, Rennes. http://www.collections. musee-bretagne.fr/ark:/83011/FLMjo182634. Public Domain98 One of the plaques on the porch of Notre Dame de PerrosHamon, c. 1856. Photo by the author 104

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Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 10.1

Emma Herland, Gaud Mével, 1887. Oil on canvas, 180 × 120 cm. Musées de Laval. Photo courtesy Ville de Laval Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle), 1889. Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 73.7 cm. The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1996, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain Paul Géniaux, Interior of the Church at Billiers, 1900–1902. Gelatin silver print, 17.8 × 12.7 cm. Musée de Bretagne, Rennes. Public Domain image Notre Dame de Grâce, étoile de la mer, protectrice des matelots, et des passagers (Our Lady of Grace, Star of the Sea, Protector of Sailors and Travelers), 1831–1835. Colored woodcut, printed by Alphonse Picard, Caen (Normandy), 81.4 × 54.1 cm. Photo 12, Ann Ronan Picture Library, Alamy Stock Photo, used by permission Ulysse Butin, The Ex-Voto, 1880. Oil on canvas, 146 × 232 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Photo by the author Albert Guillaume Demarest, Le Voeu (The Vow), 1894. Oil on canvas, 166.5 × 258 cm. Musée d’ Arts, Nantes. Photo by the author Henri-Paul Royer, The Ex-Voto, 1898. Oil on canvas, 219.5 × 181 cm. Musée des Beaux Arts, Quimper. Photo by the author Pierre Vasserot, The Salvation of the Brig “The Pearl,” 1836. Oil on canvas, 130 × 170 cm. Chapel of Notre Dame de la Cour, Lantic. Photo by the author A. Hoen and Co., Libby Prison: The Only Picture in Existence. As It Appeared August 23, 1863. Lithograph, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013645219/ Photograph by Samuel Bourne, Cawnpore; The Memorial Well, the Marble Statue by Marochetti, from the Entrance. 1865–1866. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Carlo Marochetti’s statue adorned the Cawnpore Memorial Well, commemorating the deaths of British women and children during the 1857 Uprising. After Indian independence, the statue was moved to the Kanpur Memorial Church, an Anglican church also built to commemorate the loss of British life during the Uprising

106

107 109

111 114 114 115 117

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  List of Figures 

Fig. 13.1

Coronation Park, New Delhi, India, 2019. Photo by the author Fig. 13.2 Frederick Bremner, Retainers’ Review at the Delhi Durbar: State Elephants Marching Past the Viceregal Dais, 1903. British Library, London, UK. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Bridgeman Images Fig. 13.3 Bourne & Shepherd, H.H. The Maharaja of Jaipur, G.C.S.I., 1877. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program Fig. 13.4 Nikhil Chopra, The Death of Sir Raja III, 2005, performance, Kitab Mahal, Mumbai; costume: Tabasheer Zutshi; photo: Shivani Gupta. © Nikhil Chopra and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai Fig. 13.5 Pushpamala N. in collaboration with Clare Arni, Toda (after 1898 British anthropometric study), The Native Types, Native Women of South India ~ Manners and Customs, 2000–2004. © Pushpamala N. Fig. 13.6 Maurice Vidal Portman, “Woicha,” a forty-two-year-old woman of the “Pucaik-War Tribe,” 1890s. © The Trustees of the British Museum Fig. 13.7 Print made by Sir Samuel Reynolds, The Finding of the Body of Tippoo Sultaun, 1800. Mezzotint and Etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum Fig. 13.8 Raqs Media Collective, The Untold Intimacy of Digits (UID), 2011. © Raqs Media Collective Fig. 13.9 Konai’s Hand, Bengal, 1858. From W. J. Herschel, The Origin of Fingerprinting, 1916 Fig. 13.10 Open Hand Monument, Chandigarh, India, 2015. Photograph ID 127733108. © Saiko3p | Dreamstime.com Fig. 13.11 Raqs Media Collective, Coronation Park sculptures on display at the Venice Biennale, 2015. © Raqs Media Collective

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Katherine Haldane Grenier and Amanda R. Mushal

On the night of June 17, 2015, nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were gunned down by a young man acting on a white supremacist interpretation of nineteenth-century American history. He chose the church, known locally as “Mother Emanuel,” in part because of its historical significance as a center of African-American life. The congregation, indeed, traces its roots to the church co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man who planned a slave revolt in the city in 1822. In the weeks before the massacre, the shooter made several pilgrimages to locations associated with African-American history in the Charleston area, photographing himself by the slave houses at nearby plantations as well as on the shores of Sullivan’s Island, the initial debarkation point for thousands of enslaved Africans. In these photographs, he posed with the Confederate battle flag and the flag of apartheid-era Rhodesia, as well as other symbols of white nationalism. Proclaiming his intention of avenging supposed black crimes, the shooter made clear the connection between his actions and his vision of nineteenth-century history—and thus illustrated in an unmistakable fashion the intense power of memory to shape our understanding of the world around us (Hawes 2019, 7, 84–85; Tucker and Holley 2015).

K. H. Grenier (*) • A. R. Mushal Department of History, The Citadel, Charleston, SC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_1

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In targeting a Charleston congregation, the shooter also tapped into a long history of Charleston itself as a lieu de mémoire or “site of memory,” which might be a physical place, a historical concept, or a symbol around which a community constructs meaning and which is then used to transmit selected social values (Nora and Kritzman [1992] 1996). In the early twentieth century, Charleston began marketing elite white memories of its antebellum past as public history; this romanticized narrative shaped understandings of American history for generations of tourists (Yuhl 2005; Kytle and Roberts 2018). Meanwhile Fort Sumter, located at the entrance to Charleston Harbor and remembered as the site from which the first shots of the Civil War were fired, reinforced the city’s place in constructions of white southern identity. And while black Americans’ memory of the city’s past has been more painful, visitors’ interest in sites connected to African-American history, as well as stories passed down orally through the local community, attest to the importance of the city, and particular sites within the city, as lieux de mémoire in a counter-­ narrative of American history (Kytle and Roberts 2018). The shooting—and the shocked and horrified responses to it in Charleston and the nation—added a new layer of symbolism to the way in which the city remembers its past, turning Mother Emanuel into a site of memory with national resonance. As survivors of the shooting and those close to the victims mourned their losses, the acts of witnessing with which Charlestonians responded to the events of June 17 reflected many of the rituals that shaped nineteenth-century memory culture: funerals which both laid the dead to rest and served as protests against racial violence, processions which asserted control of public spaces to challenge prevailing narratives of the past, the use of new technologies that provided novel forms of commemorative expression, and the consumption of artistic images through which individuals asserted sympathy with those who grieved (Elmore 2015; Graham 2016). At the same time, as Charlestonians engaged with forms of commemoration that had their roots in the nineteenth century, many wrestled with the interpretations of nineteenth-­century history which motivated the shooter’s animus, interpretations often enshrined in the city’s Confederate monuments and its tourist destinations. The massacre also sparked national conversations about Confederate monuments and public space, leading to the removal of many such monuments, and spurred efforts to engage in a more direct public examination of the United States’ racial history. This debate was

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reinvigorated two years later, with the killing of protestor Heather Heyer following a white nationalist rally against the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia.1 * * * The editors of this collection live and work in Charleston, and the conference which was the genesis of this collection was in its early planning stages when the Emanuel massacre happened in June 2015. In many ways, our own witnessing of the process of commemoration which followed has influenced our understanding of the interplay of history and remembrance. The shooting at Mother Emanuel and the responses it spurred are a powerful example of the argument, which runs throughout this collection, that the ways in which ordinary people remember—and forget—the past is a way of making history. Our authors explore how nineteenth-­ century individuals created personal memories in dynamic interaction with their social, cultural, and political environments, even as they also participated in “communities of remembrance” (Hutton 2016, 67) which shaped their understandings of the past. In focusing on ordinary people’s actions, our authors are influenced by the work of Jay Winter, who suggested the use of the term “remembrance” rather than “memory,” to place the emphasis more clearly on the actions of individuals (2006), and also by the work of W.  Fitzhugh Brundage, whose studies of memory in the American South reveal collective or historical memory to be the result of an active, intentional process of ordering the past (2005, 4).2 As Brundage, David Blight (2001), and other scholars contend, and as the post-Emanuel conversation in the United States demonstrates, attempts to assert through commemorations, monuments, histories, school curricula, and public policy the naturalness of historical remembrances which are actually socially and culturally constructed are expressions of power. Scholars such as Stephanie Yuhl (2005), Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts (2018), and Keith Camacho (2011) unpack the class, racial, and gender dynamics which shape the way this power operates, informing the ways particular groups remember and commemorate the past, and determining which groups’ memories are privileged within communities. In so doing, they remind us that selective forgetting is also central to constructions of remembrance. Guy Beiner (2018) pursues this latter question further, moving the conversation from sites of memory to sites of forgetting, and exploring the concept of “social forgetting,” which

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he defines as the suppression of uncomfortable memories, which are nonetheless retained and occasionally resurface.3 His ideas have particular resonance for essays in the second half of the volume, which address the selective use of memory in empire- and nation-building, struggles by those excluded from power to reinscribe their memories within the public sphere, and ways that histories suppressed by nineteenth-century imperialists emerged to shape post-colonial identities. While this collection highlights the role of individual agency in understanding the work of memory in the public sphere, it also recognizes the influence upon individuals of collective memory. Although many scholars are rightly skeptical of the imprecision of the term “collective memory,” it is nonetheless clearly the case, as Aleida Assmann argues, that personal memories include much more than individuals’ own experiences (Assmann 2010; see also Halbwachs [1950] 1992).4 Individuals acquire memories both through their own lived experiences and through their interactions with wider social, cultural, and political communities. When individual Charlestonians remember, interpret, and make meaningful the events of June 2015, for instance, they do so in interaction with these “collected memories” (Brundage 2009) which they have encountered both through private experiences and in the public sphere. Like the nineteenth-century events analyzed by contributors, the accumulation of Charlestonians’ actions, in turn, has coalesced into a set of lenses, or frames, through which the Emanuel tragedy is now collectively viewed and with which both individuals and the wider American public continue to engage. Much of the scholarship on memory has focused on the uses and construction of public memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although some of this work—including that on Confederate Lost Cause memorial culture—has pushed the chronological frame back to the immediate post-Civil War years (Janney 2008; Kytle and Roberts 2018). By shifting attention to the nineteenth century, this collection probes the deeper roots of memory culture, connecting it to processes of middle class formation and the associated cultures of sentiment and mourning, industrialization and consumerism, and nation- and empire-building that collectively, over the course of the century, gave form to the modern world. In so doing, the collection demonstrates the degree to which twentiethand twenty-first-century memory culture grew out of the nineteenth-­ century past. * * *

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The essays that follow, which consider memorialization in the United States, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, and South Africa, explore many of the same themes that have been at work in Charleston since June 2015: the significance of ordinary people’s actions in the shaping of memory; the continued importance of nineteenth-century ideas of race to citizenship and definitions of national belonging; the invocation of memory as a political tool; the development of cultures of sentiment, mourning, and memorialization; and the significance of travel itineraries, newly available technologies, and consumer goods through which individuals gave meaning to personal loss as well as historical events. Drawing together the work of historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and art historians, this collection considers the intersection of personal and civic dimensions of memory in the nineteenth century, arguing that even as individuals used memories of friends and loved ones to construct highly personal identities, they also made consumerist choices—in both a literal sense and as consumers in a marketplace of ideas—that forged a sense of connection to community, nation, and empire. In turn, those choices served to shape and challenge national and imperial identities. Contributors investigate the development of communities of remembrance through music, votive offerings, and mass-produced mementos, as well as ways in which art, literature, and early photography enshrined ideas of memorialization. Moving from individual memory-making to individuals’ actions within the larger public sphere, they then study contemporaries’ decisions to participate in commemorative activities through visits to new museums, including a controversial Civil War prison, to travel to sites of national memory, and to deploy memory through burial practices and partisan rhetoric to challenge definitions of political belonging. The nineteenth century’s new cultures of memory were fundamentally tied to the many social, economic, cultural, and political transformations of the period. Large-scale migrations—across political borders and from rural areas to growing cities—uprooted populations from their old communities, spurring the creation of new individual and corporate identities. Industrialization led to a new class system, new styles of work, and new dangers for those who secured the raw materials for industry or labored at the growing numbers of machines. At the same time, new technology made available products, including photographs, souvenirs, and keepsake albums, with which an ever-wider consuming public sought to make their memories tangible. As new technologies and commercial developments provided novel means by which individuals might seek to preserve

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memories, changing attitudes toward the past gave those memories a new cultural importance (Semmel 2000). A culture of sentimentality, particularly embraced by the rising middle class, emphasized emotional connections and, when those bonds were severed, rituals of mourning and loss. Political revolutions in Europe and the United States led to the creation of new nations and national identities, founded on claims of popular mandate and replacing subjecthood with citizenship but also embarking on a new wave of colonialism undergirded by emerging racial ideologies. Understandings of the past became political tools, as governments and political parties sought to use memories, often carefully edited, to mobilize support, build consensus, and inculcate particular ideas of citizenship among their constituents. Aided and driven by technological advances, nations pursued imperialist projects, projects that required the mobilization of popular will. The collection begins by exploring novel ways of commemorating personal relationships, made possible by the technological advances of the nineteenth century and reflecting the growth of a bourgeois consumer culture. Noting that photography enabled a modern version of the memento mori, Susan Cook explores how the practices of postmortem photography and spirit photography—which allegedly captured an image of a deceased person’s spirit—influenced the ways in which Victorians imagined death. Examining literary depictions of each photographic form, she argues that the two ways of remembering the dead suggest very different attitudes toward death: by preserving the image of the dead person, postmortem photography depicted the conclusiveness of death, while spirit photography endeavored to prove life’s endlessness. Critically, both of these practices suggest a dynamic rather than static memorialization of the dead, in which memory is rendered animate, the photographs still influencing the lives of the living. As Cook’s essay demonstrates, nineteenth-­century readers were fascinated by photography’s memorial possibilities, and death photography was “a booming business,” a testament to the importance of the market in shaping memory culture. Other commemorative forms were equally tailored to nineteenth-­ century consumers. Jennifer Black examines the business of producing and selling autograph albums in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. These albums, in which one’s family and friends inscribed poems, quotations, and other sentiments expressive of friendship and affection, rendered tangible and permanent memories of relationships which might otherwise be fleeting. They were heavily marketed

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by booksellers and other retailers, whose encouragement to the public to purchase albums helped to shape the way in which Americans memorialized their friendships—as did the design of the books and the proliferation of volumes that guided users in the art of inscribing appropriate sentiments. Just as autograph albums commemorated in writing relationships which might one day fade, so too did the music of birthday celebrations serve to commemorate loved ones’ lives. Jacquelyn Sholes observes that the new culture of sentiment, combined with the growing affluence of the middle classes, changing attitudes about childhood, and rising literacy rates—to which we might add the expansion of demographic record-­keeping— combined in the nineteenth century to make the observance of individual birthdays (especially those of children) a regular practice. Her essay explores music’s role in these annual commemorations: both the uniquely personal comic pieces written by Johannes Brahms and his friends in honor of each other’s birthdays, and the popular pieces spread through music publishers and purchased by the expanding middle class. Alongside essays which consider the interplay of memory and consumerism in middle-class culture, Kelly Bushnell and Maura Coughlin examine commemorative responses among working communities to the dangers posed by extractive industries of the nineteenth century. Both essays examine the risks of the global maritime economy, a business in which those who lost their lives were not easily memorialized. Through Herman Melville and Robert Ballantyne’s whaling novels, Bushnell examines how sailors on whaling vessels crafted alternative memorials to their dead colleagues. The intangibility of memorials to whalers whose bodies had been lost at sea contrasted with the tangible bodies of the whales themselves, which were brought ashore to power the technology and industry that had sent the men forth. Similarly, Coughlin considers how ex-voto paintings and other commemorative objects of French Atlantic fishing communities functioned to maintain relationships between the living and the dead in communities built on the risky maritime trade. Her essay considers community rituals and the “material culture of grief” (Doss 2002) through which Bretons maintained the memories of those who had died at sea, as well as the nostalgic lens through which bourgeois painters and photographers portrayed these traces of a vanishing folk culture for modern audiences. As commercial enterprises shaped individuals’ efforts to capture memories which might otherwise become elusive, so too did commercial

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concerns play a role in the ways in which new museums depicted a collective past. The nineteenth century witnessed the widespread development of museums whose collections, open to the public, served as repositories of memory while actively shaping how the past would be remembered (Abt 2006, 130–132; Boswell and Evans 1999; Mackenzie 2009). In his foreword to this collection, Guy Beiner notes the tenacity of many museums’ nineteenth-century points of view. Angela Riotto explores the disjunction between the narratives presented by a for-profit museum built out of a former Confederate prison, and the memories held by survivors of such prisons. Former prisoners of war hoped that the Libby Prison War Museum would reflect the particularity of their suffering in the American Civil War, and serve as a site of remembrance for the many men who had died in wartime prisons. The museum did serve as a physical reminder of the horrors of war prisons. But many ex-prisoners believed that the museum’s commercial considerations subsumed their distinctive stories into a more generalized and politically reconciliationist narrative about the war, silencing the still-festering memories that many survivors retained. As the issue of sectional reconciliation indicates, public memorialization of the nineteenth-century dead could have far-reaching political implications, a topic explored in essays by Ashley Towle, Jacob Ivey, and Danielle Nielsen, which also consider the role of race in memory culture. Towle studies tributes to African-American South Carolina state senator Benjamin Randolph, assassinated in 1868 by white opponents of Reconstruction, in an essay which offers striking parallels and intriguing contrasts to the murder of state senator Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel A.M.E. Church who was killed in the 2015 shooting. The late nineteenth-century dedication of a monument to Randolph in Columbia, South Carolina, as well as annual observances of “Randolph Day,” became reminders of the progress that had been made in the struggle for African-­ American equality, as well as an indictment of the terror used to restore white rule. A funereal counterpart to the civic celebrations analyzed by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (2005, 55–99), these ceremonies included speeches as well as processions in which black Columbians appropriated the city’s public spaces, thereby asserting their claim to political belonging in the post-emancipation South. Randolph Cemetery, named for Senator Randolph, would serve as the burial place of many other black men killed in the racial violence of the Jim Crow era, and would thus become an important site of memory for black Carolinians.

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Picking up on themes of race and power in memory culture, Ivey explores the political ramifications of memorials to black men in the context of the British Empire and post-colonial South Africa. Ivey examines changing remembrances of the Langalibalele Incident, an 1873 clash between white volunteers and a powerful indigenous chief who refused to turn over arms to the colonial government. A year after the incident, when colonial authorities erected a marker to the memory of three white soldiers and two “loyal natives” who were killed by Langalibalele’s men, they sought to inscribe in stone the rightness of their own cause and, by implication, the dangers of indigenous “disloyalty.”5 Colonial authorities could not ultimately control the narrative about Langalibalele, however, and in a testament to the memorial landscape’s significance as a reflection of political power, he would be memorialized as a symbol of resistance to colonial authority when black South Africans claimed full citizenship rights in the post-apartheid era. In India, too, the memory of indigenous people’s resistance was deployed to inculcate—in both European and Indian subjects—lessons on the importance of loyalty to the empire, while the spectacle of “loyal natives” offered reassurance to Britons of the strength of the Raj. Nielsen argues that British tourists’ travels through India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were framed by memories of the Indian Uprising of 1857. In particular, she examines travels surrounding the 1903 and 1911 Coronation Durbars in India, which were ceremonies to mark the ascension of a new emperor, in this case the British monarch. Processions of Indian troops, including veterans of 1857, signaled that loyalty to the Raj was dominant over the “treachery” of the Uprising. A number of durbar attendees also used their trips to visit sites associated with the Uprising. Nielsen’s analysis of these civic pilgrimages explores how the “colonization of public space” (Brundage 2005, 5–6) through physical markers and tourist sites, reinforced by guidebooks, reminded British visitors of selective lessons from 1857, while directing them away from other aspects of India’s long history. Tourists who read the guidebooks and followed their suggested itineraries consumed a carefully curated narrative, one intended to reinforce lessons taught in British schools and encourage commitment to the Empire at a time of rising Indian nationalism as well as domestic critiques of the imperial project. Just as the memory of Indian “treachery” in 1857 was used to consolidate loyalty to the Empire decades later, so too Asaf Almog argues that reminders of the U.S. Federalist Party’s legacy of disunion, dating to the

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War of 1812, served as a bogeyman against which political parties could measure their own patriotism and attack their opponents. As an active political force the Federalist Party dissolved soon after the war, but memories of Federalists’ implied threat to secede rendered the party’s name a byword for disloyalty in subsequent generations. In a tribute to the ways in which memory could be deployed for political purposes, the specter of Federalism would be invoked by, grappled with, and—in an ironic twist— used to defend opposing factions throughout the sectional struggles of the nineteenth century. Uprising pilgrimages and controversies over the Libby Prison museum reflect the fact that travel and tourism grew in the nineteenth century, especially among members of the middle and upper classes. This historical tourism was tied to the selling and consumption of judiciously chosen visions of the past, and these versions of the historical narrative could be deployed for particular nationalist and empire-building projects (Sears 1989; Grenier 2005; Yuhl 2005; Zuelow 2016). In a similar vein, Johann Reusch analyzes the uses of pedestrian travel, by both the state and middle-­ class tourists, to construct a unified German identity in the years between the Napoleonic wars and German unification. In choosing to undertake at least part of their travels on foot, middle-class tourists bought into this new identity, partly as a means to assert their own patriotism and claims on the state. They summited peaks in symbolic reenactments of German military triumphs, and, led by guidebooks, tramped in the footsteps of mythical Teutonic forebears through quintessentially Germanic landscapes. Governments, meanwhile, often found this practice to be a challenge to their authority and responded by seeking to appropriate it for their own purposes. The final essay, by Mira Waits, brings together many of the threads that weave throughout this collection, especially those of race, power, and technology, as she analyzes the impact of the nineteenth century on ideas of identity and belonging today. Waits’s essay examines Indian artists Nikhil Chopra, Pushpamala N., and the Raqs Media Collective, whose work engages with the role of nineteenth-century memory in contemporary Indian identity. Drawing on ethnographic photography, photographic portraiture, and images in colonial archives, these artists ask viewers to contemplate the legacy of colonial treatments of subject bodies, in terms of both personal identity and the emergence of a surveillance state today. Waits also examines Raqs’s commentary on the

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legacy of colonial monuments, which were originally erected—in a parallel to Confederate memorials and those in colonial South Africa—to celebrate and reinforce British rule. Yet when India gained its independence, many of these monuments were relocated to Coronation Park on the outskirts of Mumbai. Raqs’s Coronation Park, which features empty plinths and incomplete colonial-style statuary in white fiberglass, comments on the vestigial presence of colonial power as well as the “hollowness” of these monuments today. All of these projects, Waits suggests, question the static nature of memories. In so doing, they recall Cook’s argument that the new death photographs of the nineteenth century did more than remind viewers of a past life; they interacted with the world of the living. Echoes of both the form and the substance of nineteenth-century memory culture continue to emanate today, as the Mother Emanuel massacre demonstrates so clearly. The “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley 1996) which drew visitors to Libby Prison in the second half of the nineteenth century still motivates tours of prisons, concentration camps, and sites of tragedy like the Emanuel church. Photography and albums continue to create and reinforce communities of remembrance, although photos and commemorative messages are now more likely to be distributed through social media and online photosharing than via the analog forms of the nineteenth century. But as in the nineteenth century, constructions of community memory are still enabled—and shaped—by continually evolving technology owned and promoted by profit-driven companies. Similarly, narratives of the nation as presented by tourism can still help to create a sense of belonging, as middle-class pedestrian travelers found in nineteenth-century Germany, or alienation, as former Civil War prisoners discovered at Libby Prison. So too can the commemorative landscape reflect both political belonging and separation. Like the post-Reconstruction memorials to Confederate soldiers and politicians across the American South, the sites visited by durbar tourists and the colonial-era monument for the Langalibalele Incident served as powerful statements of European authority and indigenous exclusion, as the post-colonial, post-­apartheid, and post-Emanuel push to remove or replace them attests. Memory is not static, Waits reminds us; neither is its form. Monuments are defaced, removed, and replaced. New tourist sites, new museums, and new interpretations at older sites memorialize the past of groups whose experiences were once discounted. New forms of memory culture develop,

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such as the increasingly common practice of commemorating the lives of loved ones through charities and political action in their honor, through which those past lives continue to interact with the living in very public— and tangible—ways. The votive processions of the French Atlantic and the funeral processions of the post-Reconstruction South have given way to new commemorative practices, some of them equally politicized. Individuals make choices today—as they did in the past—about how to remember and how to act regarding the way memory is presented to them. As this collection deepens our understanding of nineteenth-century styles of remembering and the forces which shaped them, we are reminded both of our legacies from the past, and our ability to embrace or defy them. We are also reminded that many of our commemorative rituals, as well as the controversies at the heart of our struggles over memories of our collective past, have their roots in the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Among the scholarly reflections on Confederate monuments following the Mother Emanuel and Charlottesville violence see Brundage (2017), Foner (2015 and 2017), Carter (2018), Duhé (2018), Lewis (2018), Morgan (2018); also the Charleston Syllabus and Confederate Monuments Syllabus projects compiled by Williams et al. (2016) and Levin (2019). Many financial and educational institutions in the United States and elsewhere had already begun recognizing their debt to slavery and the slave trade even before 2015, and many sought ways to make amends for that past. The massacre in Charleston gave greater urgency to this movement, which has grown stronger since 2015. Campaigns against the memorialization of controversial figures connected to slavery and colonialism were simultaneously underway elsewhere. Most notably, the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign began in spring 2015, a few months before the massacre (Swarns 2016; Teather 2005; Chaudhuri 2016). 2. For an excellent overview of the historiography of memory, see Hutton (2016). 3. On the question of forgetting, see also Forest and Johnson (2019) and Morgan (2018). 4. For critiques of the concept of “collective memory,” see Winter and Sivan (1999), Assmann (2010), Klein (2000), and Confino (1997). 5. For perspectives on the similar idea of the “loyal slave” in American history, see Holloway (2019).

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References Abt, Jeffrey. 2006. The Origins of the Public Museum. In A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 115–134. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. Re-framing Memory: Between Individual and Collective Forms of Constructing the Past. In Performing the Past: Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter, 35–50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Beiner, Guy. 2018. Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. New York: Oxford University Press. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Boswell, David, and Jessica Evans, eds. 1999. Representing the Nation: A Reader— Histories, Heritage and Museums. London: Routledge. Brundage, W.  Fitzhugh. 2005. Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. Contentious and Collected: Memory’s Future in Southern History. Journal of Southern History 75 (3): 751–766. ———. 2017. I’ve Studied the History of Confederate Memorials. Here’s What to Do about Them. Vox, August 18. https://www.vox.com/the-bigidea/2017/8/18/16165160/confederate-monuments-history-charlottesvillewhite-supremacy. Camacho, Keith L. 2011. Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Carter, Chelsey R. 2018. Racist Monuments Are Killing Us. Museum Anthropology 41 (2): 139–141. Chaudhuri, Amit. 2016. The Real Meaning of Rhodes Must Fall. The Guardian, March 16. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-realmeaning-of-rhodes-must-fall. Confino, Alon. 1997. Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method. American Historical Review 102 (5): 1386–1403. Doss, Erika. 2002. Death, Art and Memory in the Public Sphere: The Visual and Material Culture of Grief in Contemporary America. Mortality 7 (1): 63–82. Duhé, Bailey J. 2018. Decentering Whiteness and Refocusing on the Local: Reframing Debates on the Confederate Monument Removal in New Orleans. Museum Anthropology 41 (2): 120–125. Elmore, Christina. 2015. This Juneteenth Particularly Poignant—Emancipation Celebration Widens Scope to Share Grief. Post and Courier, 4, June 21. Foner, Eric. 2015. The Historical Roots of Dylann Roof’s Racism. The Nation, June 25. https://www.thenation.com/article/the-historical-roots-of-dylannroofs-racism/.

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———. 2017. Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History. New York Times, August 20. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/opinion/confederate-statuesamerican-history.html?searchResultPosition=1. Forest, Benjamin, and Juliet Johnson. 2019. Confederate Monuments and the Problem of Forgetting. Cultural Geographies 26 (1): 127–131. Graham, Alison. 2016. Palmetto Dove Image Spreads around City after One Year. Post and Courier, June 25. https://www.postandcourier.com/features/palmetto-dove-image-spreads-around-city-after-one-year/article_07a10236-868 3-5cfb-93de-7515fc36004b.html. Grenier, Katherine Haldane. 2005. Tourism and Identity in Scotland 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia. Houndmills: Ashgate. Halbwachs, Maurice. (1950) 1992. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hawes, Jennifer Berry. 2019. Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness. New  York: St. Martin’s Press. Holloway, Kali. 2019. ‘Loyal Slave’ Monuments Tell a Racist Lie about American History. The Nation, March 25. https://www.thenation.com/article/ loyal-slave-confederate-monuments-civil-war-slavery/. Hutton, Patrick. 2016. The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing: How the Interest in Memory Has Influenced Our Understanding of History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Janney, Caroline E. 2008. Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse. Representations 69 (Winter): 127–150. Kytle, Ethan, and Blain Roberts. 2018. Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: New Press. Lennon, J. John, and Malcolm Foley. 1996. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Continuum. Levin, Kevin M. 2019. Confederate Monuments Syllabus: A Crowdsourcing Project about Confederate Monuments and Civil War Memory: From #NOLA to #Cville. Civil War Memory. Accessed November 13. http://cwmemory. com/civilwarmemorysyllabus/. Lewis, Courtney. 2018. Banning Change: The South Carolina Heritage Act. Museum Anthropology 41 (2): 128–130. Mackenzie, John M. 2009. Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morgan, David. 2018. Soldier Statues and Empty Pedestals: Public Memory in the Wake of the Confederacy. Material Religion 14 (1): 153–157. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds. (1992) 1996. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Volume 1—Conflicts and Divisions. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sears, John F. 1989. Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Semmel, Stuart. 2000. Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo. Representations 69 (Winter): 9–37. Swarns, Rachel L. 2016. Insurance Policies on Slaves: New York Life’s Complicated Past. New York Times, December 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/ us/insurance-policies-on-slaves-new-york-lifes-complicated-past.html. Teather, David. 2005. Bank Admits It Owned Slaves. The Guardian, January 21. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/22/usa.davidteather. Tucker, Neely, and Peter Holley. 2015. Dylann Roof’s Eerie Tour of American Slavery at Its Beginning, Middle and End. Washington Post, July 1. Williams, Chad, Kidada E.  Williams, and Keisha N.  Blain. 2016. Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War. The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan. 1999. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yuhl, Stephanie E. 2005. A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zuelow, Eric G.E. 2016. A History of Modern Tourism. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART I

Memory and the Personal: Community, Commercial Culture, and Global Commerce

CHAPTER 2

Mirrors with a Memory: Postmortem Photography and Spirit Photography in Transitional British Fiction and Culture Susan E. Cook

Two haunting images, each representative of distinct early photographic trends, appear to depict divergent attitudes toward death. In Fig. 2.1, a postmortem daguerreotype from the 1850s attributed to Jacoby Byerly, a dead child in white lies posed, eyes closed, clutching a bouquet. The ostensible purpose of this image is to memorialize the individual in the stasis of death—to fix one final view of the child before that child is laid to rest. The subject of this photograph is death itself. It is a photograph of the end of the individual; an image of finality, memorializing for family and friends someone who was. In Fig. 2.2, a photograph from the 1860s or 1870s by the notorious William H. Mumler, the ghostly image of a child appears standing next to a more tangible woman. The image is framed to accommodate both opaque woman and transparent child, and the woman’s head is turned as though looking at the ghostly figure beside her. This is a spirit photograph, a double exposure intended to give the illusion that a ghost has been captured in the image. The focus of this

S. E. Cook (*) Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_2

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Fig. 2.1  Attributed to Jacob Byerly, [Postmortem portrait of a little girl holding a small bouquet of roses], c. 1850–1855. Daguerreotype. The J.  Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

image is split—it is an image about the living subject of the photograph as well as the undead spirit next to that subject. The purpose of this image is in one sense to refuse death by representing the dead as a spirit actively engaging with the living. The subject of this second photograph rejects the finality of death featured in the first image. Insubstantial like the child, death here is figured as something mysterious, alluring, and incomplete. On the surface, then, it might seem that these two images demonstrate different understandings of death, as well as the role of photography in representing those understandings. Yet despite this apparent difference, postmortem photography and spirit photography reveal a similar attitude toward death: namely, they share an attempt to rethink death as a social experience. As Nancy West argues in “Early Photography, Death, and the Supernatural,” photography developed “at a time when spectral shows,

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Fig. 2.2  William H. Mumler, “Mrs. Tinkham,” c. 1862–1875. Albumen silver print. The J.  Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

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magic lanterns, and other such ghostly entertainment had become a British staple of entertainment” (1996, 175). The photograph is a valuable object both because it “provides a startling likeness,” but also because “it reveals a supernatural world and exposes the inner motives and character of its subject”; thus, “it is not surprising that postmortem photography had its corollary in another freakish moment in photographic history”: spirit photography (173). West argues that both postmortem photography and spirit photography appealed to an evidentiary cultural impulse—a scientific drive to offer visual “proof”—but that both photographic trends, and indeed photography more generally, also veered toward the supernatural, occupying an “uneasy space between the worlds of science and magic” (172).1 West traces this uneasiness primarily through spirit photography, with its promise of the return of the dead and its turn away from conventional understandings of the link between vision and reality. Here, however, I shift the focus to the way postmortem and spirit photographs each implicate viewers in the images, effectively establishing a community of the living through a shared reflection on the meaning of death. Both types of images, in other words, take what is typically thought to be a very personal, individual, and final event—death—and make the viewing of this event an ongoing social experience. What is at stake in this discussion, therefore, is not only our understanding of ostensibly different types of photography, but also our understanding of how those images reflect nineteenth-century memorial practices as well as our definition of memorialization. These images represent memorialization itself as an ongoing, dynamic interaction with the past—a temporal challenge, in some respects, to the pastness of death. While postmortem photographs outlived spirit photographs in popularity and were more ubiquitous throughout the Victorian era and into the early decades of the twentieth century, the two trends overlapped by several decades in the mid- to late nineteenth century. To analyze the extent to which photography and death were entwined with the social—and the extent to which this relationship among photography, death, and the social may be traced across seemingly dissimilar genres—this chapter turns to the Walter A. Johnson Postmortem Collection and the general photography archive of the Eastman Museum, as well as representations of both postmortem photography and spirit photography in literature spanning the 1880s–1910s. Specifically, I analyze Cyril Bennett’s “The Spirit Photograph” (1888), Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888), and E. W. Hornung’s The Camera Fiend (1911).2 In doing so, I contribute to

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work started by critics such as Nancy Armstrong, Jennifer Green-Lewis, and Daniel A. Novak that addresses the relationship between nineteenth-­ century literature and realism. Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography convincingly makes the case, for instance, that fiction in the Victorian era takes a “pictorial turn,” and could not do so “to the extent or in the way it did, were its readership not already hungry for certain kinds of visual information” (1999, 8). This visual information is largely photographic, and Armstrong argues that realist fiction in particular “works” by evoking vision and referencing objects “that either had been or could be photographed” (7).3 The photographic trends I examine were both transatlantic: although the archives I examine are American, both postmortem photography and spirit photography were practiced and discussed in Britain as well. Some of the British stories I analyze here include fantastical elements or scenarios, but all are presented as works of realism and all not only feature photographs but also evoke photographic ways of seeing. As Jennifer Green-Lewis writes, Victorian fiction “continually draws our attention to the close relationship between visualization and the processes of memory” (2017, 104). I would note that in some Victorian fictions, those processes of memory fold the memorialized subject into the present. While Bennett’s short story features spirit photography, Levy’s novel describes postmortem photography, and Hornung’s novel attempts to reconcile both, all normalize, through the photographic image, death as an enduring element of social life. * * * Typically linked to the spiritualist movement, spirit photographs were either created through the double exposure of a single negative or by ­making a single print from two separate negatives. The first official spirit photograph is credited to William H. Mumler of Boston in the early 1860s, yet Arthur Conan Doyle notes an earlier example by Richard Boursnell in 1851 (1924, 128), and Sir David Brewster’s 1856 treatise on The Stereoscope; its History, Theory, and Construction, with its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts and to Education teaches others how to use double exposures to create the effect of a ghostly figure “for the purpose of amusement” (205). While amusement may have been Brewster’s aim, many consumers took spirit photographs quite seriously: these photographs, after all, promised a glimpse beyond the grave. Indeed, insofar as the primary consumer of the spirit photograph was a family member of the

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deceased, spirit photographs promised to put one in the presence of a lost loved one—a solace notoriously sought by Conan Doyle and other prominent Victorians. Perhaps most famously, however, the Mumler case exposed the potential for deception in these types of photographic images. Mumler was an engraver and amateur photographer who accidentally created a spirit photograph when working with an imperfectly cleaned plate. A spiritualist friend treated the image seriously and notified the New York Herald and Progress. Having made the first image accidentally, Mumler began to recreate this effect deliberately, and advertised his ability to capture spirits surrounding his sitters. Mumler became famous, with clients paying upwards of $100 for a single image, and the likes of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln sitting as subjects. The photographer was arrested in New York in 1869 and brought to trial for fraud and larceny related to his spirit photographs, yet the case was dismissed, as the veracity of the photographs could not be proven or disproven absolutely. The case was widely publicized and did much to educate the public about the extent to which a photograph might be faked (Petersen 2008, 552). Along with the case of M. Ed. Buguet, a French spirit photographer likewise charged with the creation of fake images, Mumler’s case marks the beginning of what Chris Webster describes as the “realisation that fakery was quite possible in the apparently immutable photographic image” (2008, 1333). Even as spirit photography was rising in popularity, then, so too was awareness about spirit photography as a fraudulent practice. Such dualism persists to this day, with a general understanding of photographic manipulation existing concurrently with photographic material presented in support of the supernatural. As a modern example, the online Haunted Museum: The Historic and Haunted Guide to the Supernatural rationalizes the existence of ghosts in a photograph as “the effect of radiation of some sort on photosensitive film”—yet this description is contextualized as part of a virtual museum that advertises itself as “a Collection of Exhibits on the History of the Supernatural, Spiritualism & Ghost Research.” The museum wants to have things both ways, explaining photographic spirit effects in quasi-­ scientific terms while simultaneously displaying objects around which exhibits have been built “to keep visitors free from the [supernatural] dangers associated with them” (Taylor 2008). From its earliest days, “fakery” emerged as uneasily intrinsic to spirit photography, yet this fakery functioned as a trick performed over and over again, and was likewise rediscovered as a trick over and over again.4 In a

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sense, this fakery is an amplified version of a quality inherent in all photography. Photography implies a mimetic proximity that folds under the pressure of time: as Green-Lewis explains, “the fact of the photograph affirms the moment’s having ceased to be, its pastness: its separation from present flux” (2017, 93). A photograph, in other words, suggests unparalleled proximity to its subject, but the very existence of the photograph as an object in time and space belies this proximity. “At the same time,” Green-­ Lewis continues, “the experience of reading the photograph affirms the opposite: the subject exists in the ever present” (93). This suggested temporal proximity of viewing a photograph undercuts the reality of the subject, because to view as present an image from some time in the past is to view that image outside of its original temporal context. Photography, that “mirror with a memory,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in 1859, is uneasily poised between mirror and memorial: reflection of reality and image of the past. Spirit photography serves as an index of the extent to which all photography is a trick of sorts, promising a presence that cannot be. Furthermore, the debate over spirit photography—is it real? is it a manipulation?—echoes a much broader equivocation about death. Is death the end of the individual, or is the individual still with us, albeit on some other plane? Cyril Bennett’s short story “The Spirit Photograph” demonstrates a general cultural awareness of the trickery potentially involved in spirit photography and implicitly all photography as well. Even though the story explains away the trick, the fake spirit photograph has a material effect on the story’s romantic resolution. In addition, the photograph’s lie in this story is that the ghostly subject in the image is not really dead after all. This photograph, then, is a spirit photograph perfected: it is the promise of life after an assumed death. Bennett’s story begins with a group of characters climbing in the Himalayas. In the first scene, one of the climbers— an Englishman named Mansell—falls, presumably to his death. The story then quickly brings us to England where we are introduced to Mansell’s widow Fanny, who has befriended her neighbor, Lord Undercroft. Undercroft dabbles in photography and teaches Fanny some of the basics of the craft. One of his lessons addresses spirit photography, and Undercroft describes Spiritualism’s belief that “we are constantly surrounded by spirits, invisible to the naked eye, yet sufficiently substantial to affect the highly sensitised photographic plate” (1888, 365). Undercroft himself scoffs at this explanation and goes on to clarify how the photographic process might be manipulated to create a spirit photograph: “I dare say

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they are easy enough to manufacture. We will have a try one day if you like. I have often obtained very funny results by taking two pictures one over the other on the same plate,” he notes. A grieving individual “makes up his mind that he is going to see the shade of some particular defunct individual, and then he recognizes the apparition, no matter whether it is recognizable or not” (365–366). Here Undercroft demystifies spirit photography by explaining the mechanics of double exposures and how they may be manipulated to produce the spirit effect. With a dubious sense of timing, Undercroft concludes this discussion of spirit photography and the loss of loved ones captured on film by proposing marriage to the widowed Fanny—after all, he thinks to himself, “She was still young and pretty, and mourning suited her well” (366). Fanny, who still loves her lost husband, later contemplates her predicament as she takes a photograph of her house and begins to develop the image. Looking at the developing photograph, she is shocked to see that “the outline of the house formed a frame round a portrait. She was gazing at her husband’s face” (369). Mansell disliked having his photograph taken, so Fanny believes there is no image of him “in existence”: this must, therefore, be a spirit caught by the camera—silent condemnation that she had “dared for one moment to entertain Lord Undercroft’s offer. This was a judgment on her for her wickedness” (369). Overwhelmed by this supernatural message, Fanny does what any good stereotypical Victorian lady ought to do: she faints. When she awakens, she is shocked once again, this time to see her husband by her side. He explains he survived his fall but was ill and unable to notify Fanny that he was still alive. Once he recovered, he heard that Fanny was spending time with a certain gentleman from the neighborhood. He jealously decided the best course of action would be to secretly return home and investigate the relationship before revealing himself to his wife. While Fanny was photographing the house, Mansell was hiding in the shrubs nearby, and happened to stand up and into her frame at the very moment she turned away to time the exposure. Fanny accepts all of this as a perfectly reasonable way to behave, and the story ends with husband and wife happily reunited. Bennett frames “The Spirit Photograph,” from title on, as a ghost story: a narrative about photographing the undead. Yet Undercroft introduces a dose of pragmatic realism into the tale, using the explanation of photographic manipulation to suggest, before we even see the titular spirit photograph, that such an image will be a trick of double exposure. Instead of ending with ghosts or tricks, the story’s resolution suggests that the

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“spirit photograph” is a mistake, but one necessary for a reunion between husband and wife. Like the story’s title, the photograph in the story misdirects. Rather than place the trickery of the spirit photograph in the center of this tale, Bennet places Mansell there—and indeed, his presumed death echoes the work of the spirit photograph insofar as it is also a trick the story plays on its readers. In one sense, the photograph merely captures this trick. The “spirit photograph” is in fact an unplanned effect, and it is Fanny’s candid reaction to this mistake that causes her husband to rush to her side, thereby righting the proper domestic order. The “spirit” in the photograph ends up being very much alive, his ghostly image a sign not of the finality of his death but rather of the reestablishment of his presence at the center of the family. On its surface, Bennett’s story may appear to have little to do with postmortem photography, a photographic trend that confronts death much more directly. David E.  Stannard notes that “explicitly created memento mori are among the most ancient examples of human artistic expression” (1991, 74).5 The postmortem photograph thus participates in a legacy of memorializing the dead through portraiture, following in the footsteps of painted mourning portraits. Indeed, Roland Barthes argues, all photography has a particular connection to death. Writing of “the melancholy of Photography,” Barthes explains that “by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead” (1981, 79). In other words, the photograph is a representation of life, but paradoxically a life that is already passed. Massimiliano Gioni suggests that “an image is a challenge to death, an assault on time. It is the desperate attempt to make up for something absent, and yet the most painful demonstration of that absence is the image itself” (2013, 2). Postmortem photography is simply a manifestation—an embodiment—of the mortality embedded in all photography. Indeed, insofar as it was indexical of photography’s connection to mortality, postmortem photography was reflective of social life in the nineteenth century. As Cathy N.  Davidson has demonstrated, in the early decades of photography daguerreotypes memorializing a dead loved one were more common than those celebrating a birth or marriage.6 West notes that photography was developed during an era of massive disease outbreaks, as well as a time of scientific discovery and the erosion of

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conventional religious belief. Thus, “fearful of their mortality, many embraced the medium as a means of counteracting death…If their lives had already been taken, the daguerreotypist could take a lasting portrait, preserving their bodies in the photograph’s quiet and immobile world” (1996, 172). In 1846, the famous Boston-based photographic firm Southworth and Hawes advertised, among other photographic services, that “we make miniatures of children and adults instantly, and of Deceased persons either at our rooms or at private residences. We take great pains to have Miniatures of Deceased Persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to Artists, in a quiet sleep” (qtd. in Ruby 1984, 206). Other professional photographers across the United States and Europe advertised that they would take death portraits with as little as “one hour’s notice” (Ruby 1995, 52–53). Jay Ruby reports that “the practice was sufficiently common that black mats, often decorated with floral patterns, were sold by photographic supply houses” (1995, 52–53). Death photography was a booming business. Throughout the nineteenth century, postmortem photographs followed several distinct conventions. Sometimes the body was photographed in a coffin, while at others it was posed on a bed or in a chair. Postmortem images frequently featured the deceased individual posed as though sleeping, while occasionally the body was posed as though it were awake, either alongside other family members or by itself. Some postmortem portraits were hand-colored, to help contribute to the illusion that the person was still alive. Ruby notes that the pose known as the “last sleep” was the most popular postmortem convention from 1840 to 1880, and its prevalence in the Johnson Collection at the Eastman Museum affirms this popularity: children—and particularly children posed to look asleep or awake—are the most common postmortem subjects represented in the Collection (1995, 65). Stannard explains that “in many cases postmortem portraits were the only images of the deceased that family members would possess, in the absence of portraits painted during a lifetime” (1991, 81). Thus, the postmortem portrait would have been especially valuable to families and friends. And it was priced not quite out of reach: Beth Ann Guynn notes that by 1850, some daguerreotypes (for example) cost a shilling in England and 25  cents in the United States (2008, 1164). This was a significant sum, though it means they would have been affordable to the majority of the public. Amy Levy’s 1888 novel, The Romance of a Shop, attests to the popularity of this practice. The novel focuses on the four Lorimer sisters who are

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struggling to support themselves following the sudden death of their father. They decide to open a photographic studio to earn a living, but this turn to trade is perceived as a scandalous misfortune: as sister Fanny plaintively asks the others, “need it come to that—to open a shop?” (54). Friends, family, and the sisters themselves see this as somewhat of a disgrace, for the shop mires the sisters in the world of commerce. One of the sisters, Gertrude, admits that the prospect of a business is “progressive; a creature capable of growth; the very qualities in which women’s work is dreadfully lacking” (55). This “progressive” business of The Romance of a Shop, and the disruption of “the traditional distinction between popular culture and high art,” as Linda Hunt Beckman puts it in Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, “anticipates the New Woman novel of the 1890s,” a genre of fin de siècle fiction featuring independent women and critiquing traditional gender roles (2000, 153).7 As Beckman writes, however, The Romance of a Shop is more akin to a “romantic comedy” than to Gissing’s contemporaneous naturalist New Woman novels. Levy achieves this comedic tone by deploying “purposely exaggerated…conventions of Victorian realism” (2000, 154). Among these conventions, writes Beckman, are stock minor characters, contemporary slang and topical references, and also “phenomena of the moment—like the advent of omnibuses” (156). We might add postmortem photography to this list of phenomena of the moment, for it makes an early appearance in the novel and serves as an important plot device. Postmortem photography represents yet another layer of scandal the Lorimer girls must confront. One day, Gertrude announces that the sisters have been hired for “rather a dismal sort of job”—to take a postmortem portrait of Lady Watergate (84). While in her analysis of the novel Green-­ Lewis suggests it is the decision to work—and not necessarily to work with photography—that creates a scandal in the novel, working with the dead introduces another layer of disgrace (2017, 99). Gertrude defends postmortem portraiture as “quite usual,” but Fanny feels it odd that their client Lord Watergate “should select ladies, young girls, for such a piece of work!” (84). Not only are the sisters being asked to work outside the home, but now they are being asked to interact with the dead—and to interact professionally rather than emotionally as mourners. The scandal here is not necessarily that the girls are confronted with a dead body, but that they interact with that body through a profession generally coded as masculine: they are performing men’s work and, in so doing, also occupying a masculine position in the mourning process.

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This threat to the girls’ reputations, however, is mitigated by the plot itself, for it is the postmortem photograph that introduces Lord Watergate to Gertrude, who will become his future wife. When she arrives for the job, Gertrude sees the deceased Lady Watergate “lying dead or asleep, with her hair spread out on the pillow” (87). The subject in the postmortem photograph could be mistaken for someone merely sleeping, and, indeed, argues Green-Lewis, this type of positioning suggests the postmortem photograph “was not a truth-teller so much as an aide-mémoire: a means of recalling a subject and resisting a loss” (2017, 100). At the same time, Gertrude observes Lord Watergate as she might if he were her photographic subject: “the broad forehead, projecting over the eyes; the fine, but rough-hewn features; the brown hair and beard; the tall, stooping, sinewy figure: these together formed a picture which imprinted itself as by a flash” (87).8 David Wanczyk writes that Levy’s narrative style throughout the novel is “subtly photographic,” and this technique makes Gertrude’s vision specifically “like photography, both active and passive, creative and receptive, subjective and mechanical” (2015, 131).9 Gertrude’s first sight of her postmortem subject is not described as fully as her initial glimpse of Lord Watergate, and thus visual perception is given priority over photography in this scene. Insofar as this is a scene about taking a photograph, the shift in priority effectively challenges the distinction between postmortem photograph and image of a living individual.10 This blurring also normalizes the postmortem photograph, treating it as just one in a series of common photographic poses. Rather than remain a scandal, the girls’ participation in postmortem portraiture is likewise normalized, domesticated by the plot as it is used to facilitate a more comfortably conventional conclusion. Indeed, in a testament to its ubiquity and banality, death photography also performs multiple plot and thematic functions in the novel: as Beckman notes, the postmortem portrait scene allows Levy to separate Phyllis from her sisters. Beckman writes that Phyllis’s “values are aesthetic, not moral. Examining the photographs that Gertrude has taken of the corpse of Lady Watergate, an adulteress, Phyllis says, ‘Poor thing…Mrs. Maryon told us she was wicked, didn’t she? But I don’t know that it matters about being good when you are as beautiful as all that’” (2000, 155). The postmortem photograph exposes Phyllis’s different value system, which prioritizes the beauty of the photographic subject over the subject’s morality. This scene works to differentiate Phyllis from Gertrude in particular, showing Gertrude’s relative morality by way of counterpoint. It

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also communicates the late Lady Watergate’s amorality as an adulteress, preemptively pardoning Gertrude for her eventual relationship with Lord Watergate. The novel, then, figures postmortem photography as a technology of memorialization but also as a catalyst of social relations and a tool to expose character traits among the living. Like the spirit photograph represented in Bennett’s story, the postmortem photograph here animates the plot, facilitating or complicating romantic interactions between the living characters. In this way, both postmortem photographs and spirit photographs represent death as a subject to be dynamically intertwined with life rather than statically memorialized. If Bennett’s and Levy’s fictions allow us to trace a common thread linking death and social life across the seemingly dissimilar photographic genres of spirit photography and postmortem photography, E. W. Hornung’s novel The Camera Fiend draws these threads together by dramatizing the attempted postmortem/spirit photographs of the fi ­ ctional Dr. Baumgartner. Hornung’s novel follows a precocious schoolboy, Pocket Upton, on a convoluted adventure from his boarding school to London. The sixteen-year-old Pocket travels to London to locate medicine for his asthma, finds himself stranded overnight, goes to sleep in a park with a revolver in his hand, and wakes up to a strange man telling him he has fired the revolver in his sleep. The strange man is Dr. Baumgartner, a spirit photographer, who takes Pocket to his house and soon convinces the boy he accidentally shot and killed a man while sleepwalking in the park. Confined to Dr. Baumgartner’s house with only the doctor’s niece Phillida for company, Pocket spends the bulk of the novel attempting to escape and learn whether he has, in fact, accidentally killed someone. As it turns out, Dr. Baumgartner is the true killer, and the man shot in the park is but one in a series of murders the doctor has committed in his attempts to photograph a spirit leaving its body. Baumgartner explains his photographic practice in scientific terms: You admit there may be such things as ghosts, as you call them?…Visible shapes, in the likeness of man? As visible and yet as tangible as that sunbeam?…then you admit everything! You may not see these images, but I may. I may not see them, but my lens may! Think how much that glass eye throws already upon the retina of a sensitised film that our living lenses fail to throw upon ours; think of all that escapes the eye but the camera catches. Take two crystal vases, fill one with one acid and the other with another; one comes out like water as we see it; the other, though not less limpid in our

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sight, like ink. The eye sees through it, but not the lens. The eye sees emptiness as though the acid itself were pure crystal; the lens flings an inky image on the plate. The trouble is that, while you can procure that acid at the ­nearest chemist’s, no money and no power on earth can summon or procure at will the spirit which once was man. (1911, 48)

Baumgartner reasons that the camera lens may see what the eye does not; thus, if ghosts exist, the camera may capture and prove their existence on film even as they remain invisible to the eye. The only “trouble” amounts to timing: to capturing a spirit within a frame. Of his attempts, Baumgartner writes in his own suicide note, he “can conceive no purer and no loftier aim than mine…Your physician wrestles with death to lengthen life, whereas I would sacrifice a million lives to prove that there is no such thing as death; that this human life of ours, by which we set such childish store, is but a fleeting phase of the permanent life of the spirit” (241–242). Likening himself to a physician, Baumgartner describes a scientific process whereby he will use a camera to empirically prove the existence of an afterlife. In order to capture on film an individual’s spirit as it leaves the body, Baumgartner finds himself “driven ultimately to the extreme course of taking human life, on my own account, in order to prove the life eternal” (243). He begins shooting people (with a gun) and then shooting them (with a camera) immediately afterward,11 hoping the camera will show the individual’s spirit rising above the body in a hybrid postmortem-spirit photograph. This operation requires quick toggling between gun and camera. In order to help manage the shift between his two instruments, Baumgartner has created an “ingenious engine,” a stereoscopic camera with a pistol inside in place of one of the lenses, rigged so that the bullet and the other shutter may be fired at nearly the same instant (245). Baumgartner is convinced that if he can take a photograph of the exact instant a person dies, he will be able to fix their spirit on a photographic plate, thereby proving the afterlife using the very image of death. The repeated failure of this experiment, the failure of Baumgartner to produce spirit photographs within his postmortem photographs, leads him to wonder, “What if the human derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had no souls to photograph?” (249). Facing certain incarceration or execution, the photographer finally turns his pistol-camera on himself. We are denied even a failed spirit photograph of Baumgartner, however, for the camera ends up in the river and the plate is exposed as the authorities try

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to pry it from the mangled apparatus. Rather than an anti-social project, Baumgartner sees his experiments as attempts to reveal the existence of a much larger social plane—proof that our souls continue to exist, and indeed exist in the world, after they have separated from our bodies. He aspires to capture the moment when “for however brief a particle of time,” he stands “in the presence of a disembodied soul” (243). Baumgartner’s experiments hinge on the assumption of a greater social world than the eye can see; he paradoxically kills people so he can prove that they still live among us. Bennett and Levy each represent ongoing social relations in the photography they depict, suggesting an overarching Victorian attitude toward death that persists within both images that appear to accept death and those that seem to reject it altogether. In terms of their social uses in photographic images, the ghost is not so dissimilar from the body posed on its deathbed. Yet the similarity between spirit photography and postmortem photography is perhaps most grimly explored in Hornung’s novel, which collapses the distinction between the two, and does so purportedly in the interest of enriching society. These texts each represent, then, a persistent desire to maintain social interaction with the dead—to render memory animate, to materialize, and to capture what was lost. They register an ongoing commitment, from the fin de siècle through the first decade of the twentieth century, to understanding death through photography and to reimagining death’s relationship to the living social order through what we might otherwise consider to be two very distinct photographic practices. Both, these literary works show us, are social practices that are as much about memorializing as about imagining a new social reality—for both employ photography to bring memorial out of the past and make it an active, ongoing process.

Notes 1. Cathy N. Davidson makes a similar argument in her essay “Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,” suggesting that “the intimate connection between early photography and the cult of remembrance (immortality in an age of mechanical reproduction) underscores the unstable status of science in the early nineteenth-century” (1990, 679–681). 2. I discuss Bennett’s and Levy’s treatments of photography from another angle and to make a different argument in my book, Victorian Negatives:

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Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century (2019). 3. In her recent Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory, Green-Lewis similarly argues, with reference to Armstrong, that “The work of Victorian novels was, among other things, to represent a world in which photography had begun to shape the experience of being human” (2017, 93). Also like Armstrong, Novak suggests Victorian photography and literary realism were both constructions; or, as he puts it, manipulations. Focusing largely on composite photography, Novak argues that “this impossible literary and pictorial body-in-pieces” describes photography and literary realism alike during the period: “this fictional and grotesque composite is…central both to a Victorian technology of realism and to the Victorian realist novel” (2008, 1). Paradoxically, “the technology of realism produced what appears to be its opposite: the non-existent, the fictional, and the abstract” (3). In her earlier Framing the Victorians, Green-­Lewis points to a relationship between nineteenth-century realism and photography, suggesting that such a relationship was acknowledged in the period: “The existence of a relationship between literary and photographic realism was in fact frequently observed throughout the nineteenth century and fostered by writers on both sides of the Atlantic who recognized in photography’s ontology a means of discoursing on literary form” (1996, 6). 4. Lyle Repiton Buskey illustrates one such repetition in his article “The Photograph as Evidence,” for The Virginia Law Register in 1915: more than 50 years after the Mumler case drew international attention to the possibility of photographic fakery, Buskey writers that “the photograph is becoming an increasingly important evidential factor in modern litigation. The danger, however, of accepting the testimony of the ‘silent witnesses’” is that “evidence which can be mechanically created by man can, by him, be altered and distorted to suit his own ends” (1915, 181). Indeed, Buskey’s article reminds his audience (again), “all ordinary photographs are of questionable evidential value” (187). 5. Stannard historicizes the memento mori over time, noting that “Thousands of funeral portraits, realistic paintings of the deceased on his or her bed or bier or in the coffin, were produced in all the countries of Europe from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries by artists unknown and famous alike” (1991, 80). Conversely, “By the 1870s and 1880s bourgeois fashions in death and dying began taking a new turn…Soon mortuary ritual, from the funeral to the burial to advice on mourning itself, was being subdued: the funeral was moved out of the home to the professional funeral parlor” (103–104).

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6. Davidson writes that “in the first decade of photography, for example, people were more willing to pay $1.50 for a daguerreotype to memorialize a loved one’s passing than to commemorate a marriage or a birth. Advertisements for the daguerreotypist’s services were often pitched at the newly bereaved (especially bereaved mothers) and the daguerreotypist attested his readiness to come to the sickbed or deathbed. Itinerant daguerreotypists traveled with the stock accessories of nineteenth-century mourning—statues of angels and cherubs, prayer books, bouquets of flowers” (1990, 678). Jennifer Green-Lewis likewise observes that “For many people in the early days of Victorian photography, its most significant potential function was to provide a visual reminder of the dead” (2017, 92). 7. Indeed, as David Wanczyk notes, “Photography and the photographic way of seeing is, it seems, an emblem of the New Woman in the novel” (2015, 139). 8. As Kate Flint writes, the “language of flash” became “both the language of revelation and recollection” in the 1880s (2009, 10). 9. Green-Lewis makes a similar argument about the photographic style of the novel, writing “it is on Levy’s style that photography really leaves its mark, the novel’s many cultural references creating a collage of contemporary tastes and technologies” (2017, 99). 10. This scene is “peculiar,” notes Wanczyk, “in that we never see Gertrude taking the picture she’s there to get, but Levy gives us examples of many pictures of ‘what her eyes encountered’” (2015, 136). 11. The verb “to shoot” came to mean “to take a snapshot (of) with a camera; to photograph” in the 1890s; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first published instance of this usage appeared in 1890 (“Shoot” 2019).

References Armstrong, Nancy. 1999. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Beckman, Linda Hunt. 2000. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bennett, Cyril. 1888. The Spirit Photograph. In Murray’s Magazine: A Home and Colonial Periodical for the General Reader, vol. 3 (Jan.–June), 361–372. London: John Murray. Brewster, Sir David. 1856. The Stereoscope; Its History, Theory, And Construction, with Its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts and to Education. London: John Murray.

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Buksey, Lyle Repiton. 1915. The Photograph as Evidence. The Virginia Law Register, New Series 1 (3): 181–187. Conan Doyle, Arthur. 1975. The History of Spiritualism. Vols. 1 and 2. Facsimile of the 1924 ed. New York: Arno Press. Cook, Susan. 2019. Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press. Davidson, Cathy N. 1990. Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne. South Atlantic Quarterly 89: 667–701. Flint, Kate. 2009. Photographic Memory. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, vol. 53. Accessed March 9, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7202/029898ar. Gioni, Massimiliano. 2013. Mothers of Invention. In The Hidden Mother, ed. Linda Fregni Nagler, 2–3. Monaco: MACK. Green-Lewis, Jennifer. 1996. Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2017. Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past. London: Bloomsbury. Guynn, Beth Ann. 2008. Postmortem Photography. In Encyclopedia, ed. John Hannavy, 1164–1167. New York: Routledge. Hannavy, John, ed. 2008. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. New York: Routledge. Hornung, E.W. (1911) 2014. The Camera Fiend. Auckland: Floating Press. Levy, Amy. 2006. The Romance of a Shop. Edited by Susan David Bernstein. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Novak, Daniel A. 2008. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petersen, Stephen. 2008. Frauds and Fakes. In Encyclopedia, ed. John Hannavy, 552–553. New York: Routledge. Ruby, Jay. 1984. Post-Mortem Portraiture in America. History of Photography 8 (3): 201–222. ———. 1995. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. “Shoot”. 2019. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stannard, David E. 1991. Sex, Death, and Daguerreotypes: Toward an Understanding of Image as Elegy. In America and the Daguerreotype, ed. John Wood, 73–108. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Taylor, Troy, ed. 2008. The Haunted Museum: The Historic and Haunted Guide to the Supernatural. Accessed June 18, 2018. http://www.prairieghosts.com/ museum.html. Wanczyk, David. 2015. Framing Gertrude: Photographic Narration and the Subjectivity of the Artist-Observer in Levy’s The Romance of a Shop. Victorian Literature and Culture 43: 131–148.

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Webster, Chris. 2008. Spirit, Ghost, and Psychic Photography. In Encyclopedia, ed. John Hannavy, 1331–1334. New York: Routledge. Wendell Holmes, Oliver. 1859. The Stereoscope and the Stereograph. The Atlantic Monthly, June. Accessed March 9, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/. West, Nancy M. 1996. Camera Fiends: Early Photography, Death, and the Supernatural. The Centennial Review 40 (1): 170–206.

CHAPTER 3

Autograph Albums and the Commercialization of Memory in the United States Jennifer M. Black

In 1859, the Rev. George Knox inscribed a gift to Martha Mitchell, of Lewiston, Maine. The blank album features pastel-colored sheets of paper interleaved with engraved plates; its cover includes hand-painted and gilt-­ stamped designs on black enamel, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. One might expect that such an elaborately decorated object would have been handmade, yet it was published by Leavitt & Allen of New York, a profitable book publisher. Mitchell’s book is characteristic of a thriving commercial trade in sentimental objects at mid-century in the United States. Yet as an For their comments on this chapter, the author would like to thank Amanda Mushal, Katherine Grenier, and the audience of the 2017 annual meeting of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association held in Charleston, South Carolina. Research assistance was provided by Sara Shields, and supported by the Winterthur Museum and the Misericordia University Faculty Research Grants Program. J. M. Black (*) Misericordia University, Dallas, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_3

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intimate collection of remembrances, the album is a beautiful token of emotion that symbolized both the giver’s and the recipient’s status and character. Inside, handwritten quotations, expressions of friendship, Christian sentiments, and other personal notes addressed to Martha bridge the years surrounding the start of the Civil War. While some of the inscribers offered only brief well wishes, others copied poems and prose into Martha’s album, allowing each page to serve as a personal gift (Mitchell 1859). Hattie Fisk wrote the following in the late summer of 1868: Your album is a garden spot, Where all your friends may sow; Where thorns and thistle gather not, And naught but flowers can grow; I, also, in this garden spot Would sow one seed, ‘Forget-me-not.’ Hattie M. Fisk. Lewiston, August 10th 1868. (Mitchell 1859, 25)

Dwelling on remembrance, inscriptions like this underscore the function of autograph albums to memorialize relationships and events, highlighting the reciprocity of sentimental exchange (Cohen 2017, 78–80). In circulating the object and the verses contained within, individuals expressed their anxieties about longevity and personal connection, while claiming a place in perpetuity through the written record they left behind in the autograph album. This chapter examines the creation and use of autograph albums as tools for memory-making in the nineteenth-century United States. Autograph albums provided a semi-private venue for intimate inscriptions from friends and family members, and were often augmented with pressed flowers, handicrafts, and drawings. Yet album-making was also supported by a large commercial industry dedicated to supplying the albums and instructing consumers on appropriate inclusions. Autograph albums illustrate the ways in which middle-class displays of character depended upon consuming commercial goods; they can thus help reconstruct both the material and commercial dimensions of memory-making in the United States. In historical examinations of the antebellum period, the dichotomy of separate spheres remains a structuring paradigm, especially in themes of public versus private, personal versus commercial, and masculine versus

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feminine. The dichotomy can be traced to the work of historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s (Kerber 1988; Douglas 1977), but as early as the 1990s, material culture scholars found exceptions that disproved the theory, especially in the realms of commerce and domestic life (Bercaw 1991). Importantly, gender often defines the terms used to discuss the middle-­ class obsession with displaying one’s status in this period: whereas “sentiment” and “sincerity” are often associated with women (Halttunen 1982), the values of “respectability,” “manliness,” and “honor” are attributed to men (Augst 2003; Luskey 2011). Yet this is a false distinction along gendered lines; the terms betray the same intense preoccupation with displaying virtue and character as components of middle-class status. Antebellum men and women defined this notion of virtue and character in terms of sentiment for women and honor for men. Likewise, both men and women displayed their status through language (writing in letters, cards, and albums), through acts of dress, and through their manners (Halttunen 1982; Bushman 1993; Augst 2003). Furthermore, historians have shown that commercial enterprises developed to support the supposedly private display of character. In other words, sentiment depended upon commerce for its material forms, and capitalists thus catered to the middle-class appetite for expressions of virtue and character (Nelson 2004; Black 2017). This chapter expands that argument, demonstrating how the commercial production of autograph albums assisted not only the nineteenth-century middle-class display of character but also its interest in memory-making. The literature surrounding nineteenth-century albums is vast, and points to the ways that albums can help us better understand intellectual and cultural history. Known as scrapbooks, autograph or friendship albums, and commonplace books, nineteenth-century albums have sparked a lively literature, especially among scholars of women’s history and material culture (Black 2018). Some scholars point to the autobiographical function of albums (Buckler 1991), while others show how albums facilitated identity performance within communities (Cobb 2015; Dunbar 2008, 120–147; Rosenthal 2009; Sanchez-Eppler 2007). Still others explore how albums helped individuals memorialize and commemorate personal and national events (Marling 1992; Dallow 1995; Stabile 2004; Mecklenburg-Faenger 2007). For example, Susan Stabile suggests that albums kept by women in the early national period demonstrate how memory was “mapped” onto objects invested with meaning (2004, 73). Through alternating texts and images inscribed by friends and families, such albums mimicked the fragmented process of memory-recall (Stabile

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2004, 15). Stabile’s study thus argues that memory-making was a homespun pursuit in the decades following the Revolution. As the nineteenth century progressed, commercial markets developed to provide the blank albums, tools, and support literatures necessary to transform this process. Rather than the earlier homemade objects, album-making by the mid-­ nineteenth century had become a process supported by a vast network of booksellers, publishers, and other retailers selling a variety of commercial products that shaped how individuals recorded their memories. In the United States, the practice of keeping autograph albums likely descended from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century album amicorum, or “friendship albums.” Alternatively known as sentiment albums, these bound, blank books contained signatures, drawings, short texts, and material objects (such as pressed flowers), typically dedicated to the book’s owner.1 Album owners collected such texts and objects to commemorate and record daily life, often around school settings (Nickson 1970, 13; McNeil 1968, 29). In contrast to scrapbooks and commonplace books, which generally remained private repositories of images or texts, autograph albums circulated as semi-public forms of written and visual expression, due to their collaborative nature. In the decades following the American Revolution, the practice of keeping autograph albums became popular, especially among the members of the emergent middle classes (McNeil 1969, 27). In fact, autograph albums were so common that they required little distinction in popular speech; the 1841 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary defines an “album” as “a book, originally blank, in which foreigners or strangers insert autographs of celebrated persons, or in which friends insert pieces as memorials for each other” (Webster 1841, 23). Individuals inscribed and exchanged autograph albums in a variety of ways. Typically given as gifts among the middle classes, albums were bought and sold most frequently during the Christmas and New Year holiday season (Dickinson 1996, 59; Lehuu 2000, chap. 4). Once in the hands of consumers, the books passed from owner to inscriber for varying lengths of time, with the expectation that the latter would sign the tome and add an inscription, drawing, or other sentiment that could be reflective of his or her relationship to the owner—in a practice that paralleled our modern-­ day use of school yearbooks. Many individuals created the albums to commemorate life-cycle events or specific occasions (Mitchell 1859), to document school or social networks (Pusey 1845–1847; Sanchez-Eppler

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2007), and to commemorate travel (Ruckman 1828–1831; Rosenthal 2009). Individuals might collect inscriptions in short bursts or over many years (Stevenson 1984); albums were often circulated at parties and family gatherings as well (Potter 1948). As expressive objects that communicated emotion between individuals, autograph albums circulated in a culture of sentimental exchange that also included calling cards, greeting cards, literary annuals (also called “gift books”), and other objects designed to materialize relationships throughout the nineteenth century. Such objects facilitated meditation on sentimental themes popular in the antebellum culture of sincerity, including flowers, friendship, character, truth, and devotion (Black 2017, 30). Containing both long and short verses, drawings, and sometimes small objects, each page in these albums became a gift from the signatory to the album owner (Sanchez-Eppler 2007, 301). Moreover, as objects linked to the cult of manners and sincerity, albums became material demonstrations of one’s character and propriety. The cult of manners developed from the 1750s through the 1820s as American cities urbanized, creating new social strata and an emergent middle class (Hemphill 2002). This group of socially mobile merchants and industrialists adopted the mannerisms of genteel society in order to differentiate themselves from the working classes (Bushman 1993, xiv). Proper dress, language and writing skills, and other outward displays of character assisted the new middle classes in this venture (Halttunen 1982; Augst 2003; Luskey 2011). Albums “affirmed their owners’ social class” by facilitating the performance of proper character as dictated by middle-class tastemakers, while reinforcing personal relationships and emotional bonds (Petrino 2017, 90; Kunard 2006, 232; Dunbar 2008, 139). Penning an entry in an autograph album represented one-half of a treasured exchange, and individuals understood that great care should be taken to respect the importance and honor of such a request (Good 2015, 162). The texts written in autograph albums varied widely; they included original and copied verses and prose, but always contained personal expressions intended for contemplation in some way. In an early survey of the genre, William McNeil noted thirteen different themes among the verses inscribed in such books, ranging from advice, to remembrance, to self-­ conscious apologies for poorly rhymed lines (McNeil 1970, 164). Mary Schell included one such note to her friend Katie Fitzgerald:

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To Katie, When asked in your album to write Of course I could not refuse, But what shall I strive to indict That may a young lady amuse? Not love, I could not write that, For romance my fancy is tame, And as compliments sound rather flat Allow me to write merely my name. Yours truly, Mary Schell. Jan 13 1876. (Fitzgerald 1876–1881)

Though clever and witty, the entry points self-consciously to the writer’s discomfort at being asked to pen a verse in the album. The verse appears to have been composed solely for the purpose of indicating one’s loss of words when confronted with an album request. It does not dwell heavily on sentiment, as other entries might have, and thus could appear trivial at best. But despite its triviality, the entry still serves to remind Katie of her relationship with Mary—however deep or cursory—and thus its purpose to prompt reflection remains fulfilled. Other entries point to the formal ways that individuals expressed feelings of friendship and connection to each other. In January 1828, a friend copied a verse titled “Memory” into Sarah Ruckman’s album (Fig. 3.1) (Ruckman 1828–1831).2 The text wistfully describes a feeling of nostalgia, evoking an intimate exchange between Sarah and “J.  G.”—though the signatory wrote only his or her initials, the pen-work at the top of the page and the soft words of remembrance point to the meaningful relationship between the two, a relationship that was partially concealed through the missing components of the signatory’s name. As a demonstration of literacy, the inscription self-consciously performed J. G.’s character, making the album itself a locus of middle-class identity-formation as it was passed between family and friends (as in Cobb 2015). Moreover, the entry’s concentration on remembrance offers another gesture to the anxieties that must have been present surrounding social relations in this period. With rapid industrialization and migration dramatically reshaping American society and culture, personal connections likely seemed vulnerable. Albums, like letters, provided a material and textual form of expression that attempted to concretize and preserve personal relations in the face of such widespread social change (Decker 1998, chap. 2). These objects materialized the ephemeral nature of friendship, addressing individuals’ anxieties over relationships that might be lost.

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Fig. 3.1  Entry signed “J.  G.” (1828), Sarah Ruckman Album 1828–1831. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE

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While an individual might purchase or create an album for him or herself, autograph albums were also compiled collectively as presents for the recipient (Sanchez-Eppler 2007; Rosenthal 2009). For example, from 1845 to 1847, students at Prospect Hill Boarding School (likely in Southeastern Pennsylvania) exchanged and signed an album for their classmate, fourteen-year-old Edward Pusey. A few wrote brief remembrances or copied poems, but most simply wrote their names and the names of their hometowns. It is unclear why Edward left the school, but his situation must have been compelling: the book contains over sixty individual entries from other young men at the school in a remarkable testament to the value Edward contributed to the community, and to the loss they must have felt in his absence. When the book was complete, someone mailed the album to Edward’s father, Jacob, a cotton manufacturer in Wilmington, Delaware, where the album was saved and passed on to subsequent generations (Pusey 1845–1847; U.S. Census 1850). Albums like these became important reference points for their owners as time passed. When Caroline Cowles Clarke was twenty-one years old, she attended a friend’s wedding on Christmas Eve, 1863. In her diary, she delighted in the affair, noting that the bride had penned an inscription in Clarke’s autograph album years before, and had included a curled lock of hair alongside the inscription (Clarke 1913, 161). For Clarke, the celebration of her friend’s marriage brought back fond memories of the time the women had spent together in years prior, and of the heartfelt message her friend had left in Clarke’s album. Here, the album and the memories became cross-referents in a mutually reinforcing relationship: the album provided a concrete record of the women’s friendship, and helped to materialize Clarke’s emotions, just as her memories gave meaning to the album and the wedding. As objects of memorialization, autograph albums thus functioned as repositories that documented social networks, friendships, and interpersonal bonds. Like photograph albums, autograph albums helped individuals “make sense of and order aspects of their personal lives” by operating “as a site for individuals to consolidate relationships” and helping to record feelings and memories associated with those relationships (Kunard 2006, 239). Children and adults of both genders and of different races collected such albums, and the memorialization function of albums was key to their popularity in the nineteenth century (Garvey 2012; Vosmeier 2003, 22–23). This popularity was not lost on printers or retailers. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, small binderies and stationers began creating

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blank albums bound in plain leather for retail sale. While handmade albums remained common through 1800, customers could bring unbound pages to tradesmen for binding after the pages had been filled (Gernes 2001, 122; Good 2015, 154). Often, artisans who worked as book-­ binders also served as local booksellers and dealers (Gernes 1992, 68). After 1820, new paper-making, printing, and book-binding technologies led to the mass production of blank albums (Gernes 2001, 122; McNeil 1968, 30). Moreover, since blank-book manufacturers avoided the added costs associated with plate making, typesetting, and content-acquisition, they stood to make greater profits than the publishers of literary texts (Green 2010, 112–119). Finally, a growing reliance on steam printing and women workers (who received lower wages than men) also helped make album production more efficient and profitable (McCarthy 2013, 119–120). Soon, a new industry for blank-book manufacturers had emerged in the old publishing strongholds of Philadelphia and Boston. Previously housed in stationery stores or bookshops, the blank-book industry grew in scale by the early 1840s, finding homes in warehouses and manufactories. Following the economic panics of the late 1830s, workers flocked to this growing industry, which promised higher wages than those paid to the typical job printer at the time (McCarthy 2013, 109–112). The new albums—which now included illustrated gift books, literary annuals, photo albums, and scrapbooks—all facilitated the cultivation of literary and aesthetic taste, and the memorialization of time, place, and community. They filled the shelves of stationery stores and the pages of publishers’ sales catalogs (Gernes 2001, 113–116; Green 2010, 117). Yet importantly, though the new mass-produced albums were factory-­ made, great care was often taken to make the objects look like pre-­ industrial handmade books. Many albums featured elaborate gilding or tooled leather on the books’ covers, complete with brass hinges and clasps (Vosmeier 2003, 26). Others sported steel plate engravings, which were widely available after 1819 (Dickinson 1996, 54–55). These marks of genteel luxury helped situate the objects within the middle-class culture of sentiment, lending an added air of personalization despite the books’ commercial origins. Soon ready-made books largely eclipsed homemade albums. Indeed, as consumers’ buying power expanded after 1820, their desire for ready-made luxury goods fueled a growing market for albums and like objects (Tucker et al. 2006, 7–11).

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Autograph albums, like photograph albums and gift books, were frequently advertised as suitable holiday presents (Siegel 2010, 91). Beginning in the 1830s, advertisements in urban newspapers regularly noted that albums could be purchased from local stationery and dry goods stores, booksellers, importers, and other merchants (e.g., Mason 1836). By the 1850s, mass-produced autograph albums were widely marketed across the United States. Despite the thriving domestic production of albums, imported albums also vied for public attention in the popular press. In 1854, Franck Taylor, an importer in Washington, DC, advertised richly bound albums that had just arrived from London and Paris (Taylor 1854). Over the next several decades, advertisements hawked autograph albums alongside other wares deemed appropriate as holiday presents, including gift books, photograph albums, stationery goods, and other printed materials.3 At mid-century, entrepreneurs moved to capitalize on this growing industry by taking out patents on album designs. The U.S. Patent Office issued the first photograph album patent in 1861, and fifteen more followed in the next four years. Yet the market for album production persisted and generic versions proliferated. By the end of the Civil War, publishers, booksellers, and other firms had begun manufacturing and distributing blank albums of all sorts in an attempt to meet increasing consumer demand (Siegel 2010, 74–75). For example, Philadelphia publisher J.  B. Lippincott and Co. supplemented its book publishing business by taking ad hoc printing orders and manufacturing other bound materials, such as albums. Known as one of the largest book distributors in the world by the 1850s, in the next decade the firm reportedly employed over one hundred workers in its album factory on Market Street, and frequently advertised these wares alongside literary works and “elegant presents” suitable for holiday gift-giving (Lippincott 1864; Winship 2007, 121; Siegel 2010, 80). Other publishers sought to cultivate demand by branding their albums.4 During the Civil War, Boston printer Louis Prang adapted an album to collect small-scale chromolithographs he called “album cards,” marketing the album under his own name. Prang’s formulation would help transform the practice of album-making by the next decade, when chromolithographed scraps and cards would be collected in blank albums (Black 2017, 9–10, 30). Another branded project came from the Aldine Press of New York, a publishing house known primarily for its publication of art magazines between 1868 and 1879 (Univ. of Penn Libraries 2018). In the

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mid-1870s, advertisements for the press indicate that it had branched out to produce blank books, scrapbooks, art prints, and chromolithographed art reproductions alongside its other printed materials and journals. Enticing potential customers, the press noted its “splendid assortment” of albums “expressly prepared for the holiday season” for men and women of all ages (Aldine 1874a). Similar advertisements appeared throughout the country over the next five years, pointing to the company’s persistent efforts at capitalizing on the fad for album-making (Aldine 1874b, 1875, 1880). The Aldine Autograph Album (Fig. 3.2) became popular enough in these years to warrant copycat products: in 1880 one merchant in Richmond, Virginia, advertised his own line of photograph and autograph albums, which, he noted, encompassed the “Aldine style” (Yancey 1879). Though the generic market for albums expanded following the Civil War, entrepreneurs continued to patent new designs and improvements. In March 1883, Willis A. Grant of Norwalk, Ohio, applied for a patent for a new sort of Autograph Album. In his patent application, Grant complained that “writing and getting friends to write in albums has become monotonous… more of a task than a pleasure” (Grant 1884, 1). Grant’s innovation was to combine the existing practice with a collaboratively authored secondary story (with pictures) housed in a separate section of the album. After penning one’s inscription to the book’s owner, Grant

Fig. 3.2  Title page of the Aldine Album c. 1880, reprinted from Robert P.  Stevenson, “The Autograph Album: A Victorian Girl’s Best Friend,” Pennsylvania Folklife 34, no. 1 (1984): 37. Courtesy of Ursinus College Special Collections Department

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proposed that the initial signatory would start a story in the back of the album, but only write one line and add an illustration. The next signatory would add a second line of the story (with an accompanying illustration), and the process would continue until the story was complete. The result was a multi-purposed album that Grant hoped would induce excitement and “much amusement” as the story unfolded, while remaining a “valuable keepsake” for the book’s owner (Fig. 3.3) (Grant 1884, 1). While it is unclear whether Grant managed to produce the album and market it successfully, his invention demonstrates a continued cultural investment in compiling autograph albums, though his complaint of monotony suggests that public opinions on the genre were in flux. Grant’s proposed innovations were intended to improve upon the album’s entertainment function while preserving its capacity for memory-making and reflection after entries had been collected. With this, Grant affirmed the importance of the memorial itself and sought to reinvigorate public interest in albums by making the collection of signatures a more interesting and exciting process. Autograph albums could be purchased through a range of outlets that only shifted slightly as time went on. In the decades before the Civil War, booksellers appear to have outnumbered other retail outlets in offering autograph albums for sale. After 1865, stationers, fancy goods merchants, and others advertised autograph albums in newspapers more frequently. Especially in large urban centers, local booksellers were the primary vendors for blank books in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Such merchants typically advertised their wares through bills or window displays, though newspaper advertising and trade cards were not uncommon modes of reaching the public. Publishers’ notices, typically inserted with other back-matter in printed books, also served as an effective mechanism for publicizing blank books and albums. In smaller locales and in rural areas, consumers likely depended upon general stores for access to printed books and blank albums. Again, such goods would be hawked through local newspapers, prompting rural buyers to request the items through their local merchants (Winship 2007, 117–130). Other printers, including the Aldine Press, utilized traveling salesmen in conjunction with newspaper advertising to sell their wares, offering to fulfill mail-order requests in their ads (Aldine 1874b). In fact, catalog and door-to-door sales appear to have remained a constant venue for album sales throughout the nineteenth century (Siegel 2010, 72, 88). Prices for autograph albums were comparable to other objects designed for memory-making in the nineteenth century. Many of these goods began

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Fig. 3.3  Willis C. Grant patent application, no. 296,404 (1884). United States Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, DC

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as objects available strictly to members of the middle and upper classes in the early nineteenth century, but became increasingly democratized over time. For example, gift books and literary annuals typically ranged from about $3.00 to $15.00 in the antebellum years, a cost that made the genre largely inaccessible to members of the working class (Lehuu 2000, 77, 101). Improvements in binding and printing technologies helped to reduce these costs following the Civil War, though publishers still offered albums at a range of price points to accommodate different income levels. In 1857, one retailer advertised blank albums at prices ranging from 75 cents to $6.00 each; fifteen years later, a Midwestern retailer advertised blank albums at prices from 50 cents to $10.00 (Adams 1857; Gray 1873). Such an effort at achieving widespread affordability appeared across different album media in the second half of the nineteenth century. Photograph album manufacturers promoted their wares as affordable for all, as such albums were thought to be a “minimum requirement of … family gentility” (Siegel 2010, 86). Later, Mark Twain’s patented Self-Pasting Scrapbook sold in a range of sizes and styles, and could be purchased for anywhere from 40 cents to $5.00 (Garvey 2012, 61). Still, other manufacturers maintained higher prices into the latter decades of the nineteenth century, perhaps in an effort to preserve an air of luxury; the Aldine Press’s scrapbooks and autograph albums were commonly marketed at $5.00, $7.00, and $12.00 in the mid-1870s—sums that, even with the economic growth after the Civil War, would have remained above the means of the average working-class family (Aldine 1874a). As album-making gained popularity, an array of guidebooks emerged, promising to assist individuals in properly penning inscriptions in albums. These guidebooks (or “album writers”) were poetry anthologies that also offered advice on the practice of album inscription and exchange. From the mid-1820s forward, such guidebooks proliferated in the United States. They contained extracts from popular poetry ranging from contemporary authors to Shakespeare, though Michael Cohen notes that most selections came from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British authors. A key feature of such poetical selections was their brevity, which made them easy to memorize and copy (2017, 70, 75, 77). Stemming from existing literary practices that included “commonplacing” (i.e., copying) extracts from published sources into albums, copying poetical selections into autograph albums combined this older practice with the cultural emphasis on personal sincerity. Individuals customized their inscriptions by adding embellishments such as drawings, and by manipulating phrases and words in the

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inscription itself. By the early 1860s, album writers had become “an indispensable necessity” for individuals asked to inscribe friends’ and family members’ albums (Hayward 1861, ix). Though some authors note the decline of album writers as a genre after 1850, a cursory attempt at quantifying this literature suggests that the books remained popular reference tools, and enjoyed frequent reprints, through the end of the century (McNeil 1970, 163; Stevenson 1984, 35).5 The influence of album writers can be seen across several albums reviewed for this study. For example, in the earlier selection from Martha Mitchell’s album (Mitchell 1859, 25), the 1868 verse penned by Hattie Fisk (“Your album is a garden spot,”) originated from a poem by British poet James Montgomery, which was included in an 1830 anthology (Poetical Works 1830, 191). The verse went through several adaptations and reprints, with the initial lines “Your album is a garden plot” copied and transformed in myriad ways, eventually changing “plot” to “spot” (Cohen 2017, 77).6 Likewise, the self-deprecating verse penned by Mary Schell for her friend Katie in 1876 is notably similar to a selection in Ogilvie’s Album Writer’s Friend, indicating a strong likelihood that the verse was already a commodified one when Schell copied it just a few years earlier (1881, 36). Ogilvie’s verse begins “When asked in your album to write” and ends “I’m forced to write merely my name”—similar to Mary’s inscription to Katie; though Mary swapped a few words in the middle of the verse, the sentiments remain the same. Aside from offering suggestions for inscriptions, album writers also stressed the importance of taking seriously an invitation to write in a friend’s album. Suggesting that albums recorded a writer’s devotion as well as his or her understanding of social codes, John Henry Hayward cautioned that great care should be taken when writing in an individual’s album. Good grammar, prose, and poetical selections carefully matched to the recipient, the prompt return of the inscribed album, and the utmost care and respect for the integrity of the album ought to be followed, he warned (Hayward 1861, xii–xiii). With this, Hayward linked the album’s function as a tool of memory-making to the middle-class emphasis on character as a mode of identity-expression. In this way, autograph albums, like photograph albums, provided a “receptacle for family memories” and identities that would last long after a social network’s dispersal (Siegel 2010, 87). Thus, album-writing manuals did not just provide textual excerpts that could be used in albums, they also instructed individuals on

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how to properly express their feelings toward important people in their lives. Album-writing manuals helped propel the practice of keeping and maintaining autograph albums to the forefront of the nineteenth-century culture of memory, while cultivating consumer demand for the albums. In so doing, these manuals reinforced the values of sentimental culture while incorporating consumption into demonstrations of character. The emergence of such guidebooks alongside the growth of the blank-book industry demonstrates the market response to the popularity of album-writing and album-making, representing an effort to capitalize on the cultural popularity of sentimental expression and memorialization of social relationships. In these ways, autograph albums forced individuals to engage in market culture even as they pretended to escape it through the sentimental album. To varying degrees, these objects of memory-making thrived into the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While the popularity of gift books declined after 1880, autograph albums and other album types remained popular in the United States through 1900 (Stevenson 2007, 330; Tucker et al. 2006, 6–7). Given the variety of albums available on the market, an individual could conceivably use such products to trace an entire life’s experiences over multiple volumes. In childhood, scrapbooks could provide the educational structure to cultivate a child’s taste and aesthetics (Blake 1883, 145–148). In school, young adults used autograph albums to record their social networks and interactions with peers. Photograph albums helped families document major life events, and helped to construct visual family trees that were preserved for posterity. Commercial baby books, which emerged in the 1880s, functioned as another form of album to help individuals record baby development in texts and photographs (Vosmeier 2003, 209, 213). These commercial products both supported and expanded the kinds of memorialization available, and provided the tools needed to document and preserve an individual’s entire life. While functioning as private repositories that were also public sites of display, albums simultaneously served as both commodities and keepsakes; they were objects of commerce brought into the service of sentiment (Siegel 2010, 70–72). Nineteenth-century autograph albums thus broke the codes of sentimentalism that they were, in part, designed to uphold and display, including sentimentalism’s prescriptions for pure, authentic emotional expressions in opposition to market commercialism. As objects that drew upon commodified verses for content, autograph albums

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paradoxically existed both within and outside the boundaries of the domestic sphere. In other words, the commercial world helped to standardize private and personal expressions of emotion and character through album writers and prescriptions for album use. Commercially produced albums, as store-bought gifts, crossed from commercial culture to private life in a practice of exchange that displayed social status while reinforcing intimacy and social bonds (Lehuu 2000, 76–84). The albums thus reflect market culture’s efforts to commodify the cultural practices surrounding emotional bonds and private expression. Likewise, middle-class displays of character depended upon the consumption of material goods such as albums. These objects thus “mediat[ed] between the worlds of commerce and sentiment” (Dickinson 1996, 66). Foregrounding the commercial production of albums helps to demonstrate the ways that memory-making was made compatible with consumer culture, and ultimately commodified through autograph albums.

Notes 1. Cassandra Good (2015) suggests that friendship albums are occasionally erroneously referred to as autograph albums (chap. 6). Sanchez-Eppler positions friendship albums between the earlier commonplace books and later autograph albums, which she notes only contained signatures and short messages from acquaintances and not the lengthy prose of devotion in friendship albums. The albums I look at here have both long and short verses, hand-drawn and pasted imagery, and span both the ante- and post-­ bellum years. Archivists called them autograph albums (rather than friendship albums), though the examples here clearly fit within both categories. (Sanchez-Eppler 2007, 301). 2. The poem also appears in the literary magazine The Casket (1826), 156. The only attribution is “S. M.” 3. A survey of approximately 85 newspaper advertisements for albums, culled from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database (accessed between July and October 2018), demonstrates that booksellers and stationers across the United States marketed these items widely by mid-century. The sample set included advertisements ranging from the mid-1830s through 1900, from locations throughout the United States but mostly smaller, regional urban centers rather than large commercial centers in the Northeast. I would like to thank my research assistant, Sara Shields, for her invaluable work in helping to collect and sort this data. See also Jabour (1999, 157).

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4. Whereas some manufacturers staked a claim to the market for albums through patents (which provided exclusive right to manufacture certain registered designs), branding provided market share by drumming up demand for the brand-name product. Brand-name goods were not necessarily patented in their design. 5. My own survey (conducted through Google books) of these volumes yielded twenty-three unique titles published between 1826 and 1891, with multiple reprints appearing. 6. As Michael Cohen claims, this poem initially appeared in James Montgomery’s “Mottos for Albums,” under the title “By the Owner” (the twelfth in that volume). Cohen suggests that this metonymic copying helps to imagine the album as a bouquet of flowers, and each inscription as a blossom in the bouquet. Note that the Montgomery excerpt also appears in Tomisetta (1880, 5).

References Adams’ Store. 1857. Advertising Supplement. Western Reserve Chronicle (Warren, OH), November 25. Aldine Press. 1874a. Advertisement. Marshall County Republican (Plymouth, IN), 10, December 10. ———. 1874b. Advertisement. Lamoille Newsdealer (Hyde Park, VT), 3, December 23. ———. 1875. Advertisement. Worthington Advance (Worthington, MN), 2, January 15. ———. 1880. Advertisement. Morning Appeal (Carson City, NV), 3, September 3. Augst, Thomas. 2003. The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-­ Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bercaw, Nancy Dunlap. 1991. Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings: Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840–1880. Winterthur Portfolio 26 (4): 231–247. Black, Jennifer M. 2017. Exchange Cards: Advertising, Album Making, and the Commodification of Sentiment in the Gilded Age. Winterthur Portfolio 51 (1): 1–53. ———. 2018. Gender in the Academy: Recovering the Hidden History of Women’s Scholarship on Scrapbooks and Albums. Material Culture 50 (2): 38–52. Blake, Mary. 1883. Twenty-Six Hours a Day. Boston: D. Lothrop. Buckler, Patricia Prandini. 1991. A Silent Woman Speaks: The Poetry in a Woman’s Scrapbook of the 1840s. Prospects 16 (Oct.): 149–169. Bushman, Richard L. 1993. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Vintage Books.

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Clarke, Caroline Cowles. 1913. Diary Entry for 24 Dec 1863. In Village Life in America, 1852–1872. New York: Henry Holt. Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. 2015. ‘Forget Me Not’: Free Black Women and Sentimentality. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 40 (3): 28–46. Cohen, Michael C. 2017. Album Verse and the Poetics of Scribal Circulation. In A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry, ed. Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides, 68–86. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dallow, Jessica K. 1995. Treasures of the Mind: Individuality and Authenticity in Late Nineteenth-Century Scrapbooks. Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Decker, William Merrill. 1998. Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dickinson, Cindy. 1996. Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, 1825–60. Winterthur Portfolio 31 (1): 53–66. Douglas, Ann. 1977. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. 2008. A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fitzgerald, Katie. 1876–1881. Untitled Album. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. 2012. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press. Gernes, Todd Steven. 1992. Recasting the Culture of Ephemera: Young Women’s Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. PhD diss., Brown University. ———. 2001. Recasting the Culture of Ephemera. In Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur, 107–127. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Good, Cassandra A. 2015. Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, Willis C. 1884. US Patent 296, 404, issued April 8, 1884. Gray, H. C. 1873. Advertisement. Northern Ohio Journal (Painesville, OH), 25, December 27. Green, James N. 2010. The Rise of Book Publishing. In A History of the Book in America, vol. 2: An Extensive Republic- Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A.  Gross and Mary Kelley, 75–128. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Halttunen, Karen. 1982. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-­ Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hayward, John Henry. 1861. Gems of Love, Friendship, Sympathy, and Truth, for the Album. New York: Rudd & Carleton.

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Hemphill, C. Dallett. 2002. Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Jabour, Anya. 1999. Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia. Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 107 (2): 125–158. Kerber, Linda. 1988. Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History. Journal of American History 75 (1): 9–39. Kunard, Andrea. 2006. Traditions of Collecting and Remembering: Gender, Class and the Nineteenth-Century Sentiment Album and Photographic Album. Early Popular Visual Culture 4 (3): 227–243. Lehuu, Isabelle. 2000. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lippincott, J.  B., & Co. 1864. Advertisement. The Daily Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia, PA), 4, December 23. Luskey, Brian P. 2011. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-­ Century America. New York: New York University Press. Marling, Karal Ann. 1992. Writing History with Artifacts: Columbus at the 1893 Chicago Fair. The Public Historian 14 (4): 13–30. Mason, A. 1836. Advertisement. New York Herald, 3, January 1. McCarthy, Molly. 2013. The Accidental Diarist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McNeil, W.K. 1968. The Autograph Album Custom: A Tradition and Its Scholarly Treatment. Keystone Folklore Quarterly 13 (1): 29–40. ———. 1969. Poems, Parodies, and Dictums: Quotations Used in Autograph Albums 1820–1900. Journal of the Ohio Folklore Society 4: 15–31. ———. 1970. From Advice to Laments Once Again: New York Autograph Album Verse, 1850–1900. New York Folklore Quarterly 26 (3): 163–204. Mecklenburg-Faenger, Amy. 2007. Scissors, Paste and Social Change: The Rhetoric of Scrapbooks of Women’s Organizations, 1875–1930. PhD diss., Ohio State University. Mitchell, Martha E. 1859. Forget Me Not Album. New  York: Leavitt & Allen. Dibner Special Collections Library of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Nelson, Elizabeth White. 2004. Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Nickson, Margaret. 1970. Early Autograph Albums in the British Museum. London: Trustees of the British Museum. Ogilvie, J. 1881. The Album Writer’s Friend. New York: J.S. Ogilvie. Petrino, Elizabeth A. 2017. Presents of Mind: Lydia Sigourney, Gift Book Culture, and the Commodification of Poetry. In A History of Nineteenth-Century

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American Women’s Poetry, ed. Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides, 87–105. New York: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Charles Francis. 1948. Round Went the Album. New York Folklore Quarterly 4 (1): 5–15. Pusey, Edward. 1845–1847. Autograph Album. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE. Rosenthal, Margaret F. 2009. Fashions of Friendship in an Early Modern Illustrated Album Amicorum: British Library, MS Egerton 1191. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39 (3): 619–641. Ruckman, Sarah. 1828–1831. Friendship’s Record (Album). Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. 2007. Copying and Conversion: An 1824 Friendship Album ‘From a Chinese Youth’. American Quarterly 59 (2): 301–339. Siegel, Elizabeth. 2010. Galleries of Friendship and Fame: The History of Nineteenth-­ Century American Photograph Albums. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stabile, Susan. 2004. Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stevenson, Robert P. 1984. The Autograph Album: A Victorian Girl’s Best Friend. Pennsylvania Folklife 34 (1): 34–43. Ursinus College Special Collections. Stevenson, Louise. 2007. Homes, Books, and Reading. In A History of the Book in America vol. 3: The Industrial Book 1840–1880, ed. Scott E.  Casper, Jeffery D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, 319–331. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taylor, Franck. 1854. Advertisement. Evening Star (Washington, DC), 3, December 26. The Casket, or Flowers of Literature, Wit & Sentiment. Vol. 1. 1826. Philadelphia: Atkinson & Alexander. The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb, and Kirke White: Complete in One Volume. 1830. New York: Carey & Lea. Tomisetta, Marie. 1880. Poetical Selections from Celebrated Authors, Suitable for Inscription in Autograph Albums, Comprising a Choice Collection of Humorous, Friendly, Affectionate and Miscellaneous Verses. New York: Sharps. Tucker, Susan, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P.  Buckler. 2006. The Scrapbook in American Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. United States Census Bureau. 1850. Record for Jacob Pusey, Wilmington, DE. In Seventh Census of the United States (National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, Roll: M432_53; Page: 42A). Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. http://www. Ancestry.com.

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University of Pennsylvania Libraries. 2018. Online Books Page: The Aldine. Accessed October 27, 2018. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/ serial?id=aldine. Vosmeier, Sarah McNair. 2003. The Family Album: Photography and American Family Life since 1860. PhD diss., Indiana University. Webster, Noah. 1841. An American Dictionary of the English Language. New York: White & Sheffield. Winship, Michael. 2007. Distribution and Trade. In A History of the Book in America vol. 3: The Industrial Book 1840–1880, ed. Scott E.  Casper, Jeffery D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, 117–130. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Yancey, J.  A. 1879. Advertisement. The Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA), 2, December 24.

CHAPTER 4

Music for Birthdays: Commemorative Birthday Pieces in Johannes Brahms’s Circle (1853–1854) and Elsewhere Jacquelyn Sholes

Musical commemoration of births and birthdays in nineteenth-century Europe, and elsewhere, is a subject ripe for exploration. This chapter takes as its departure point two little-known examples from the immediate social circle of Johannes Brahms in the 1850s. Conceived as private jokes, both works remained unpublished for over a century and have received little attention since. This chapter begins with an examination and comparison of the two pieces, exploring an array of humorous musical techniques reflecting the joviality of the composers’ relationships and the conviviality of the commemorated occasions. These pieces provide a humanizing glimpse into Brahms’s relationships with friends during a formative period of his career and offer insight into commemorative musical practices surrounding birthdays among composers of his time and place. The remainder of the chapter situates these examples within a larger tradition of musical birthday commemorations, public and private, in nineteenth-­ century Germany and elsewhere. More broadly, the chapter highlights

J. Sholes (*) University of Rochester, Milton, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_4

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ways in which birthday music of the period resonates with other trends of the time, particularly the rise of music literacy and middle-class parlor culture, an increase in commercialism surrounding special occasions, and growing emphases on sentimentality, on childhood, and on the celebration of the individual.

Birthday Pieces in Brahms’s Circle, 1853–1854 Joseph Joachim, the Hungarian Jewish violinist, in his youth a concertmaster in Liszt’s orchestra at Weimar, was a close friend of Brahms for decades. The two musicians immediately took to one another after being introduced in spring 1853 by Eduard Reményi, another Hungarian violinist, with whom the 20-year-old Brahms had been touring as an accompanist. In the autumn of that year, it was Joachim who would encourage Brahms to introduce himself to Robert and Clara Schumann; they would become dear friends and mentors who would play key roles in bringing the as-yetobscure, unpublished Brahms to the attention of a broader musical public. In the summer of 1853, Joachim turned 22, and in honor of the occasion, Brahms presented his new friend with an odd little piece he had composed for two violins and bass, a tongue-in-cheek waltz whose title is a humorous mix of the solemn and grandiose: “Hymne zur verherrlichung des grossen Joachim” (“Hymn to the Veneration of the Great Joachim”). Not published until the mid-1970s, this piece was discovered roughly 45 years ago among the papers of Joachim’s estate, a rare surviving sketch in Brahms’s own hand. Klaus Stahmer, who edited the work for its initial publication, indicates that Brahms and two of his other friends “planned to play a joke on Joachim and agreed to bestow on him an especially distinguished honour… For this occasion, Brahms would compose… A ‘Hymn to the Veneration of the Great Joachim!’… These three took to hand the nearest available instruments… and naturally each took up that instrument which he mastered the least of all. And then the little birthday party began” (Brahms 1976, 16). The spirit of jest can be heard in the piece in a variety of ways. Setting up expectations and then defying them have always been one of the key aspects of musical humor, employed so expertly in the music of Haydn, among others. The title of Brahms’s work leads us to expect the traditional musical hallmarks of a hymn: moderately slow tempo, square meter, even note values, chordal texture, limited melodic range, balanced phrasing and stepwise motion, and simple harmonies. Instead of the solemnity of church

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music, however, Brahms gives us a light-hearted, worldly waltz, for which we are totally unprepared. The piece gets off to a comedically rocky start, with the musicians not only playing instruments at which they lack proficiency but also playing up their ineptitude with slapstick-style, oafish mistakes, and false starts written into the score. The second violin begins with a series of open fifths evocative of tuning up; the first violin and bass then enter with the proper melody and accompaniment. However, as the open fifths continue in the second violin, the first violin interrupts his melody in apparent frustration (indicated by the exclamation “Ach!” which Brahms marks into his line) at the second violin’s lack of cooperation. After echoing the second violin himself, the first violinist begins again, but this time it is the bass who does not cooperate, and this precipitates another interruption. After a pause, the first violinist determines that the third beginning will be the last; he counts the other players in, and the waltz begins properly. The main tune is fairly mundane—the sort of thing one might expect to hear on a carousel. Triviality is suggested by large leaps, interrupting rests, pizzicato and accents, and lilting triplets. When the contrasting tune begins at measure 29, it incorporates jarring chromaticism and dissonance. In the final section before the da capo, the music becomes particularly ostentatious, with dramatic long notes, melodic ornamentation, use of extreme high register and dramatic registral contrasts, and finally a rapidly repeating melodic loop, crescendo e accelerando, with accented B flats repeatedly clashing with the sustained low As in the accompaniment. The effect is evocative of a satirical cadenza, something one certainly would not expect to find in a waltz, but apparently a spoof of the virtuoso violinist Joachim himself. There is further humor in the contrast between the melodrama of this passage and the mundanity of the returning main theme, which follows. The piece notably contains references to Joachim’s Hungarian heritage, incorporating musical elements traditionally associated with the “Hungarian style” in music. The instrumentation is similar to that used by Hungarian or “gypsy” bands of the time, which often consisted of two violins, cimbalom, and double bass (Head 2017). The drones and double stops, pizzicato, wide leaps, at times the modal language and chromatic inflection, rhapsodic feel of the cadenza, and highly sectionalized structure of the piece as a whole, are consistent with the style hongrois. Less than a year later, in May 1854, another of Brahms’s closest friends, pianist and composer Julius Otto Grimm, wrote a similarly whimsical

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polka in honor of Brahms’s own 21st birthday. Grimm’s “Zukunfts-­ Brahmanen-­Polka” for solo piano, found in Grimm’s hand among Brahms’s papers in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, has likewise received little attention save for its publication in 1983 (Grimm 1983). The full title of the piece, “Zukunfts-Brahmanen-Polka: Dem lieben Johanni Kreislero Juniori (Pseudonymo Brahms),” like that of Brahms’s “Hymn,” is clearly ironic. As is well known, Kreisler was a fictional musician from the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a character with whom Brahms strongly identified, using the pseudonym “Kreisler Junior” on several of his works of this period. Grimm reverses the pseudonym with Brahms’s real name in the subtitle of the piece, suggesting ironically that Kreisler Junior is the true identity, and “Brahms” the pseudonym. More unclear in meaning, though, are his suggestions that the piece is associated with the future (Zukunft) Brahms (perhaps a play on the similarity between “Brahms” and “Brahman”?) and that the work somehow represents the life of Kreisler/Brahms. Following its introduction, Grimm’s piece adheres to the basic conventions of the polka—it is in a lively 2/4, in ternary form, with eight-bar phrasing—but, like Brahms, Grimm begins his piece in a highly unconventional manner. Grimm opens with a cipher, spelling his friend’s last name with the notes B flat – A – B natural – E flat (B-A-H-[E]s in German) and marking the spots for “R” and “M” with quarter-rests. Repetitions of the cipher build in intensity through the excision of the rests and the steady increase in rhythmic values, as well as a progressive thickening of texture in octaves. Not only is the introduction restricted with humorous obsessiveness to statements of the cipher in these various forms, but it comprises an oddly substantial portion of the piece: excluding repeats, nearly half of the total measures. Grimm comedically spends nearly as much time preparing for the polka to begin as he does on the actual polka. When the polka proper arrives, the cipher generates its main thematic material as well, serving, for example, as the head motive of the main theme and reappearing in various forms, including immediately before the final cadence. The cipher itself is of jagged contour and incorporates chromaticism and a tritone between A and E flat, all of which contribute to an off-kilter feeling. Grimm further emphasizes these elements of the cipher in the material of the polka itself. Despite the absence of key signature, the piece appears to begin in E flat major, with the initial note of the cipher serving a dominant function and the motive’s conclusion on E flat representing a resolution to the

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tonic following the tonal ambiguity engendered by the intervening A and B natural. Incessant repetition of the cipher in the introduction seems to establish E flat major fairly clearly. Nevertheless, when the polka proper arrives, it becomes clear in retrospect that Grimm has played a trick: the main polka theme is not in E flat, but in E major; the pitch E flat is reinterpreted and respelled as D sharp, the leading tone of the polka’s true tonality. Thus the opening note of the cipher and the piece, B flat, is in fact a tritone away from the polka’s actual tonic, E natural! As many of these elements indicate, there is a general emphasis on instability in the piece—particularly in terms of harmony, rhythm (which includes much syncopation), and melodic contour. Furthermore, like Brahms, Grimm uses accents, extremes of dynamics, and pauses in order to heighten the drama of his music. Also like Brahms, Grimm makes textual notations in the score to add to the humor. Grimm’s are more detailed. Beneath the title of the work, Grimm writes, “Along with obbligato, entirely fresh birthday cake from [the baker] Langenberg, as well as some exquisitely delicious birthday fifths to improve digestion.”1 In the opening measures of the introduction, he spells out the letters of the cipher and continues: “Brahms!! Brahms!! Awake from your leathery [ledernen] reveries and taste this cake” (by which he seems to mean the polka to follow). The final staff of the manuscript is labeled “Trio,” but contains no music—only the notation, “one settles, as with the funeral march of [opera singer Luigi?] La Blache, eight times rather broadly and pianissisimo on the keys alternately in the lowest and the highest octaves and gives himself over there to the beginning. And then from the beginning of the polka to the end.” There are a number of additional notes in a similarly irreverent spirit in the margins. The “gifting” of original musical works in Brahms’s circle was not an isolated incident, and in fact many of the examples of this practice date from roughly the same period. One of the most well known is the so-­ called “F-A-E” Sonata, composed for Joachim as a collaborative effort by Brahms, Robert Schumann, and their mutual friend Albert Dietrich in October 1853. Written at Schumann’s suggestion to mark Joachim’s visit to the Schumanns that month, this violin sonata features a first movement by Dietrich, intermezzo and finale by Schumann, and scherzo by Brahms. The work derives its name from the use of a motive involving the sequence of notes F-A-E, which stand for Joachim’s personal motto during this period: “Frei aber einsam” (“free but alone”). Brahms’s famous lullaby, or Wiegenlied (Cradle Song), op. 49/4 for voice and piano, is another

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example, written in 1868 as a gift for Brahms’s friend Bertha Faber, to commemorate the birth of her son.2

Evolution of Birthday Traditions in Western Culture Although commemorations of the birthdays of important figures date to antiquity (including in Egypt, Greece, and Rome), it was apparently not until the nineteenth century that records became consistent enough, literacy widespread enough, and the notions of individuality and childhood sufficiently appreciated that the observance of commoners’ birthdays became regular practice.3 At this time, birthday festivities became increasingly popular and elaborate. The tradition of the birthday cake with one candle per year of age was common in Germany during the nineteenth century, possibly deriving from the Kinderfest (a celebration dating back as far as the fifteenth century and apparently itself evolving from Epiphany), in which the candles lit on a child’s birthday were believed to carry wishes to God on the day of the year when the child was thought most vulnerable to evil spirits (Jernow 2004; see also Pleck 2000, 144; Chudacoff 1989, 127–128 and 130). This tradition, the apparent origin of the children’s birthday party in modern culture, appears to be connected with similar fears surrounding birthdays in ancient pagan cultures, in which birthday festivities were employed as a method of protection against this vulnerability (“Happy Birthday to You” 2003, 8). In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria, partly of German lineage herself, began celebrating the birthdays of her children with celebrations apparently inspired by the Kinderfest; these celebrations in turn inspired and served as models for the marking of children’s birthdays more widely in English and American cultures (Chudacoff 1989, 128; Jernow 2004). The historic role of music—other than “Happy Birthday to You”—in celebrating birthdays, although long and multifaceted, has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Yet there is a long history of music written for public commemoration of the birthdays of prominent personages, music played or sung at family celebrations, and pieces, like the Grimm and Brahms examples, written and exchanged among musicians as private birthday gifts.

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Royal Birthdays Most notable among music for public birthday celebrations, historically, is that composed for royal birthdays (“Birthday Odes” 2011). The tradition of commemorating monarchs’ birthdays with odes sung at court dates back at least to the early seventeenth century in England and was related to similar traditions elsewhere, as in Ireland (Murphy 2017, 32–73). In England, for instance, Thomas Tallis’s motet Spem in alium (“Hope in Any Other”) may have been composed to mark the 40th birthday of Queen Elizabeth I, in 1573 (Scott 2019). Other examples include Henry Purcell’s six musical birthday odes for Queen Mary II (composed between 1689 and 1694) and William Boyce’s three birthday odes for Prince George (composed in the years around 1750).4 During the Baroque Period, composers like Antonio Cesti in Vienna wrote operas to celebrate imperial birthdays and other special occasions (Rosand 2019). Telemann composed 20 serenatas on original texts to commemorate birthdays and name days, including a work entitled Germania mit ihrem Chor honoring the birthday of Austrian Archduke Leopold in 1716 (Zohn 2019). Another example comes from Mozart. In early November 1787, roughly a week after the premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague, Mozart composed a song entitled “Des kleinen Friedrichs Geburtstag” (“Little Frederick’s Birthday”), K. 529 (Mozart 1877, 68–69). The text, four verses by Johann Eberhard Friedrich Schall, were apparently written in commemoration of the ninth birthday of Crown Prince Friedrich of Anhalt-Dessau, an event that had taken place nearly ten years earlier, on 29 December 1778; it is unclear why Mozart chose to set this text to music in 1787 (“Mozart’s Thematic Catalogue” 2019; see also Abert 2007, 1024, fn. 94). The piece was later published in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Kinderbibliothek, where the final verse was added by Campe (Abert 2007, 1024). The text, typical of birthday odes in its generous praise, reads: Es war einmal, ihr Leutchen, Ein Knäblein jung und zart, Heiss Friedrich, war da neben recht gut von Sinnes art. War freundlich und bescheiden, Nicht zärtlich und nicht wild, War sanft wie kleine schäfchen, Und wie ein Täubchen mild.

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[Chorus:] Und Gott im Himmel oben erhörte ihr Gebet Sein Segen folgt dem Knaben, Da wo er geht und steht. Drum gab auch Gott Degeihen, Das Knäblein wuchs heran, Und seine Eltern hatten Recht ihre Freude dran. Zu Schul’ und Gotteshause Sah man es fleissig geh’n, Und Jedem, der es grüsste, Gar freundlich Rede steh’n. [Chorus] Auch war ihm in der Schule Ein Jeder herzlich gut, Denn Allen macht es Freude, Und Allen war es gut. Einst hiess es: Brüder morgen Fällt sein Geburtstag ein! Gleich riefen All’ und Jede: Der muss gefeiert sein. [Chorus] Da war des Wohl behagens Und jeder Freude viel, Und wo man sah und hörte, War Sang und Tanz und Spiel. Denn Alle, Alle freuten Des frohen Tages sich, Und Alle, Alle sangen: Heil unserm Friederich! [Chorus] There was once, you people, A little boy, young and tender, Named Friedrich, [and] he was besides Of quite good artistic sense. He was friendly and modest, Not fussy and not wild, Was gentle like small fish, And mild like a little dove.

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[Chorus:] And God in heaven Above heard his prayer His blessing follows the boy, Where he goes and stands. That is why God gave orders that The little boy grow up, And his parents have The right to their joy. To the school house and God’s house One saw him studiously go, And to everyone he greeted, He spoke in a friendly way. [Chorus] He was also in school And to everyone very good, Because all makes him happy, And all were good to him. Once it was said: Brothers tomorrow Is his birthday! All and everyone called: He must be celebrated. [Chorus] There was well-being And to everyone much joy, And where one saw and heard, Was singing and dancing and playing. Because everyone, everyone was happy The happy day, And everyone, everyone sang: Hail our Friederich! [Chorus]

Mozart’s setting follows this strophic form, with piano accompaniment. Like many children’s songs, including those for birthdays (and like many Mozart melodies), it is tuneful and lively, in a major key, generally syllabic, and simple in texture and structure. There are any number of other examples of music composed for royal birthdays, including several in the nineteenth century. Rossini wrote

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Giunon (Juno), a cantata for the birthday of King Ferdinando IV of Naples, in early 1816 (Gossett 2019). In 1899, a collection of choral songs by 13 British composers, including Edward Elgar, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Sir Hubert Parry, commemorated Queen Victoria’s 80th birthday (Choral Songs 1899; see also Richards 2001, 359ff; Choral Songs 2009). The volume nods to a longer tradition of music dedicated to royalty; it was inspired by The Triumphs of Oriana, a collection of madrigals famously compiled in 1601 in tribute to another English queen, Elizabeth I (Choral Songs 1899). In more modern times, the tradition continues. Alfred Young (1900–1975) composed a work in the late 1930s, during the reign of King George VI, entitled Tournament, but also known as “Royal Birthday,” which combines two British patriotic songs—“God Save the King” and “Here’s a Health Unto His Majesty”—with “Happy Birthday to You” (Richards 2001, 221). A “specially-composed Royal Birthday March” marked the British Queen Mother’s 98th birthday in 1998 (“Queen Mother Keeps Step” 1998). Queen Elizabeth II herself has been the recipient of multiple musical birthday tributes, including Sir Arnold Bax’s Morning Song (“Maytime in Sussex”) on her 21st birthday and Debbie Wiseman’s The Queen’s 90th Birthday Celebration Suite in 2016 (“Music for Her Majesty” 2019).

“Happy Birthday to You” and Other Music for Domestic Celebrations and Public Consumption The most familiar birthday tune of all, “Happy Birthday to You,” was written for young children by kindergarten teacher Mildred Hill (1859–1916) in Louisville, Kentucky, with lyrics by Mildred’s sister and fellow kindergarten teacher Patty Smith Hill (1868–1946).5 The song, originally entitled “Good Morning to All” (with lyrics to match) was intended as a way to start the day in the kindergarten; the song was published under that title in 1893 in Song Stories for the Kindergarten (Hill and Hill 1893). Reportedly, one of the Hills’ students thereafter told the teachers that her classmates had sung this song to her at a birthday party, changing the words to “Happy birthday to you,” and from that point forward, those lyrics were used in the Hills’ classroom to commemorate each child’s birthday (Pleck 2000, 292, n. 32). The song was published again, uncredited and apparently without the Hills’ permission, with an additional stanza containing the birthday lyrics, in a 1924 collection called

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Harvest Hymns and in at least three additional collections by the same editor between 1930 and 1933 (Coleman 1924; see also Fuld 2000, 267; Chudacoff 1989, 117). Although the song had thereby become popular among schoolchildren, it was its appearance (also without the Hills’ permission) in the 1934 Moss Hart/Irving Berlin Broadway musical As Thousands Cheer that helped to cement its ubiquitousness at birthday celebrations (Rothman 2015; Pleck 2000, 292, n. 32). The Hills were neither credited nor paid royalties for the song’s appearance in the musical, and a third sister, Jessica M. Hill, who later claimed to have collaborated on the song’s composition, filed a lawsuit against the publisher of the musical, Sam Harris, requesting $250 per performance. After this was settled out of court, the Hills registered a copyright for the added lyrics, and their song was published as “Happy Birthday to You” in several properly credited editions and arrangements—including as a march without words—by Clayton F. Summy of Chicago in 1933–1935.6 Until “Happy Birthday to You,” which is a relatively recent development, music was sometimes a part of everyday birthday celebrations, but there was no one song universally sung to commemorate birthdays in Western culture. A description of practices for celebrating children’s birthdays in an 1896 American periodical speaks of birthday cake, gifts, a special meal, the possibility of an old-fashioned costume party, and reports that, at family birthday celebrations, “the songs of childhood and of the school, and the hymns of the church, may be sung, and the family stories be retold” (B. 1896, 3). The article also suggests that “a very pretty celebration of birthdays is a concert of cradle songs… Many new cradle songs written of late have become popular, but it is those which recall the past in the rhythms and tunes of a mother’s voice which are the most welcome. Many of these ditties are very merry…” (B. 1896, 3). The recitation of Mother Goose nursery rhymes is also recommended (B. 1896, 3). There were also party games that involved music, although not necessarily specified pieces. For example, one children’s game popular in America, a kissing game called “Pillows and Keys,” would sometimes be accompanied by unspecified piano music to which the boy would “march in time” before choosing a girl to kiss (see, e.g., Pleck 2000, 149; citing Wright 1926, 133–134). Given the historical association between birthdays and childhood, it is not surprising that generic birthday music often exhibits a kind of light-­ hearted simplicity. Of a song entitled “Birthdays,” with text and music by S[ophia] E[lizabeth] Younge, published in London circa 1856, one

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reviewer wrote that it possessed “a form so unpretending the theme could scarcely be treated better. The music is almost childishly simple…” ([Review of] 1857, 115).7 Among the (mostly obscure) birthday pieces intended for consumption by the general public, whimsical, lively marches, polkas, and other dances for solo piano or small ensemble—like the Brahms-circle pieces—became common in the nineteenth century. The rise of musical literacy and of the availability of pianos and other instruments in middle-class homes during the nineteenth century, along with the increased appreciation of childhood during this period, would have been factors encouraging the commercialization of printed birthday music, as well as private performance of these pieces in parlors and other intimate domestic settings. Other examples of such works include “The Birthday Waltz” for piano by J. L. Mombach (1847), reviewed anonymously in The Musical World in 1847 (“The Birthday Waltz” 1847, 776)8; “The Birthday March,” an 1851 piano duet by Joseph Thomas Cooper ([Review of] 1851); “The Birthday Polka” for piano by Edward Abry, dating from circa 1853, the year of Grimm’s polka for Brahms (Abry 1853); and Charles Ainslie Barry’s “A Birthday March,” op. 13, a theme and variations for solo piano, published in London circa 1869 (E. 1869).9

Private Birthday Music Exchanged in Composers’ Social Circles Particularly beginning in the nineteenth century, when the celebration of birthdays became more widespread among the general public, composers and those who moved in their immediate circles were naturally more likely to be the recipients of music specially composed to mark their own birthdays. Another nineteenth-century German composer, Felix Mendelssohn, furnished several examples of works that marked or served as gifts for specific birthdays. An early Singspiel (German light opera, usually including spoken dialogue) of his own creation was premiered in the Mendelssohn home on his 12th birthday, in 1821, and he then composed a second work of the same type, performed the following month to mark the birthday of his mother. Six years later, he wrote an original setting of Tu es Petrus (a sixteenth-century motet by Palestrina) as a birthday gift for his sister Fanny. In 1828, he wrote his first “Song without Words” for solo piano, apparently as another birthday gift for Fanny. His famous Hebrides Overture was composed in 1830 and dedicated as a birthday present to his father. (On all of these examples, see Todd 2019.) What distinguishes all

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of these from the Brahms examples, and from others I mention here, however, is that the Mendelssohn works, although performed and/or composed especially in order to commemorate birthdays, do not make explicit reference to such occasions, nor to their honorees.10

A Final Example from an Exact Brahms Contemporary11 Several of the examples of birthday music we have encountered, like the Brahms-circle works, date from mid-nineteenth-century Germany; such pieces seem to have been especially popular in Brahms’s time and place. This chapter will conclude with a particularly elaborate and entertaining final example from an exact contemporary of Brahms in Germany, a work that shares with the Grimm and Brahms birthday pieces a characteristic whimsy and several corresponding elements of musical style: August Hermann Bernhard Meissner’s 1897 Der Mutter Geburtstag: Eine moderne Kinder-Sinfonie (The Mother’s Birthday: A Modern Children’s Symphony) (Meissner 1897). Meissner was born two months and a day before Brahms, on 6 March 1833; this piece was published in the year of Brahms’s death, when Meissner still had six years remaining to him. The emergence of this piece, a work intended for children to perform in honor of their mothers’ birthdays, on the commercial market indicates how common domestic celebrations of birthdays had become and suggests the growing commercialization, during this time, of holidays and special occasions.12 The piece is scored for violin, piano, triangle, snare drum, children’s rattle, and (with a nod to domesticity) two pan lids and one large baking tray! It begins with a swift march including a jaunty melody to which these words are sung: Guten Tag, guten Tag, guten Tag sagen wir, Wir woll’s, wir woll’s, wir woll’s gratuliren all hier, Unsern lieben Mütterlein, Dass sie mög’ glücklich sein. Denn es ist, denn es ist Ihr Geburtstag doch heut’, Worauf wir uns doch so lang schon gefreut; Lasst uns spielen, tanzen fein, lustig sein, gross und klein. Good day, good day, good day we say, We want, we want, we want to congratulate all here, Our beloved little mother,

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So that she may be happy. Because it is, because it is your birthday today, Which we have indeed been looking forward to for so long; Let us play, dance fine, be merry, big and small.

Following a moderato movement with a trio section, the third movement is a polka—also with a trio. The fast fourth movement is a “Kreis-­Lied,” a song to be sung by children in a ring formation: [Alle:] Hurra, hurra, hurra! Der Frühling ist wieder da! [Solo:] Die Lerchen steigen und singen, Die Störche bau’n ihr Nest. Im Grünen die Lämmer springen Und feiern das Frühlingsfest. [Alle:] und feiern das Frühlingsfest. [Alle:] Hurra, hurra, hurra! Der Frühling ist wieder da! [Solo:] Auf lasst uns singen und springen in’s blum’ge Feld hinaus Und Dank unser’m Gotte bringen, Der Mutter den Blumenstrauss. [Alle:] der Mutter den Blumenstrauss. [All:] Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! The spring is here again! [Solo:] The larks soar and sing, The storks build their nest. In the greenery the lambs leap And celebrate the spring festival. [All:] And celebrate the spring festival. [All:] Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! The spring is here again! [Solo:] Let us sing and leap out into the blooming field And bring thanks to our God, To Mother a bouquet of flowers. [All:] to Mother a bouquet of flowers.

The fifth movement is a sung prayer, accompanied only by piano: Die Glocken laeuten hell und schön, Zur Andacht stimmet ihr Klang;

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Bittend wir zum Herrgott fleh’n: Hör’ unser Gebet und Gesang. Die Mutter, die treue, die lieb uns und gut, Er halt’ noch lang’ mit fröhlichem Mut, Gieb, gieb ihr ein zufried’nes Herz, Dankend schau’n wir himmelwärts. The bells ring clear and beautiful, To devotion tune their ring; We pray to the Lord God: Hear our prayer and song. Mother, the true, who loves us and good, [May] He sustain long with happy courage, Give, give her a happy heart, In thanks we look heavenward.

The closing movement is an abbreviated version of the march that opened the piece. This work, like the Brahms and Grimm pieces, draws on the musical genres of march and polka, popular at the time and appropriately upbeat and jovial for a birthday celebration. The Meissner, Brahms, and Grimm pieces also share such musical features as extremes of dynamic, grace notes, exaggerated articulation including accents and staccato, and simple (predominantly syllabic) text-setting. All three works reflect the role that the commemoration of birthdays increasingly played in helping to reinforce personal relationships in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Meissner’s piece, with its relatively elaborate overall conception, also testifies to the growing importance attributed, during this period, not only to the celebrations of birthdays, but also to displays of familial affection.

Conclusions The Brahms and Grimm birthday pieces provide a humanizing perspective on relationships between Brahms and two of his closest friends during a formative period of Brahms’s career. These pieces help to reveal a humorous side of Brahms’s personality that, although evident in anecdotes and correspondence, is quite different from the image suggested by much of the music he would go on to write. His symphonies, German Requiem, Four Serious Songs, motets, and many other works earned him a reputation as a serious, formal composer suffering from his position in Beethoven’s

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shadow, striving to defend the genre of symphony from other composers of the time (e.g., Wagner) who proclaimed its obsolescence, and grappling with existential questions. The birthday pieces also offer insight into musical practices surrounding birthdays among composers of his time and place. In so doing, they open a window on a long history of commemorative birthday music written in public tribute to historically significant figures, for domestic celebrations, and for private performance among friends in many different times and places. Such pieces, alongside commemorative music written to mark other major life events and ceremonies, are ripe for further exploration. More broadly, as we have seen, the examples of birthday music discussed here are linked to several important developments in Western culture in the nineteenth century. These include not only a rise in the importance of domestic birthday celebrations but also, the emergence of middle-class parlor culture, with its increasing music literacy; the rise of commercialism that included printed sheet music and holidays; and growing emphases on sentimentality, childhood, and the celebration of the individual.

Notes 1. All translations are my own. 2. For more on pieces written for friends in Brahms’s circle, see Berry (2014). 3. In antiquity, the practice seems to have been limited mainly to royalty and nobility, as the births of others were not consistently recorded. In about the twelfth century, the Catholic church began the more widespread and exact recording of births, but at least until the Reformation, the celebration of birthdays was considered unholy, with pagan associations. Following the Reformation, it became more common once again to celebrate birthdays of important figures, particularly royalty (see Chudacoff 1989, 118 and 126–130; Argetsinger 1992, 180ff; Mikalson 2012; “Birthday” 2007; “Birthday Cake Candles” 2003; Jernow 2004). 4. The manuscripts are among the holdings of Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (mss mus. Sch. C. 105, C. 106, and D. 264). 5. The sisters, working actively to demonstrate the value of early childhood education, had established a kindergarten together in Louisville. The school was called the Louisville Kindergarten Training School, and Patty was its principal. Patty, the younger of the two, became a professor of education at Columbia University in the early twentieth century; Mildred went on to become a church organist and developed particular interest in African American spirituals (see Pleck 2000, 292, n. 32; Fuld 2000, 267).

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6. For a detailed publication history of the song, see Fuld (2000, 267). Fuld (p. 268) also notes a number of earlier children’s songs to which the tune of “Happy Birthday” bears resemblances. On Jessica Hill, see also Chudacoff (1989, 117). 7. A rare copy of the piece exists in the British Library, St. Pancras. 8. The reviewer claims that presumably because the work was “dedicated to a lady,” it was written “as simply as possible.” 9. A copy of Barry’s score, also rare, likewise exists in the British Library, St. Pancras. The tradition of whimsical birthday songs for public consumption continued to evolve in the twentieth century. Examples include “Another Candle on Your Birthday Cake,” a fox-trot by Peter de Rose with lyrics by Charles Tobias and Carl Field, published in 1931 and premiered by Paul Whiteman’s band (De Rose et al. 1931); the similarly titled “Put Another Candle on My Birthday Cake” (a.k.a., the “Birthday Cake Polka”), a recurring theme on the children’s television programs hosted by John Rovick (“Sherriff John”) in the 1950s–1960s (McLellan 2012); and a “Happy Birthday Polka” by Dewey Bergman and Jack Segal (Bergman and Segal 1947), recorded by Sons of the Pioneers in 1947 (Sons of the Pioneers 2005). 10. One may cite any number of more recent tunes written for birthdays of specific friends, particularly friends who are composers or musicians themselves, some of which do make more specific reference to their recipients. Contemporary composer Juan Orrego-Salas composed Variations for a Quiet Man, for Clarinet and Piano, op. 79, in honor of the 85th birthday of his friend and former teacher Aaron Copland in 1985 (Orrego-Salas 1986; see also “Score” 2019; “Relationships” 2019). Among the holdings of Boston University’s Gotlieb Research Center is a short musical composition on a handwritten birthday note from Leonard Bernstein to his friend Irene Mayer Selznick (ex-wife of David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind, and herself a producer of theatrical productions including A Streetcar Named Desire) on her 75th birthday in 1982 (Bernstein 1982). In 2001–2002, Samuel Adler wrote a more complex example: Four Composer Portraits: Birthday Cards for Solo Piano in tribute to his friends, composers Milton Babbitt, Ned Rorem, Gunther Schuller, and David Diamond. Not only is the general style of each Portrait intended to evoke the appropriate composer’s own music, but the main musical themes are based on modified musical spellings of the honorees’ first names, much as Grimm spells Brahms’s name in his own birthday polka (Adler 2006, 2008). 11. For an excellent discussion of music and commemoration in nineteenth-­ century Germany, see Rehding (2009). Rehding, with  his focus on  the  monumental and  grand political gestures, rather than on  small pieces and domestic celebrations, does not address birthday commemorations at all.

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12. The piece also perhaps presages the formalization and commercialization of Mother’s Day in Western cultures in the early twentieth century, although there were less commercialized celebrations of Muttertag in Germany dating back to the Middle Ages; see “Muttertag” (2019).

References Abert, Hermann. 2007. W.  A. Mozart. Edited by Cliff Eisen and translated by Stewart Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Abry, Edward. 1853. The Birthday Polka. New York: Geib & Jackson. Adler, Samuel. 2006. Four Composer Portraits: Birthday Cards for Solo Piano. King of Prussia, PA: Theodore Press. ———. 2008. Liner Notes for Samuel Adler, Musique, Poetrie, Art, and Love. Laura Melton (Piano) and the Bowling Green Orchestra, with Emily Freeman Brown. Naxos 8.559602. Compact Disc. Argetsinger, Kathryn. 1992. Birthday Rituals: Friends and Patrons in Roman Poetry and Cult. Classical Antiquity 11 (2): 175–193. B., H. 1896. How to Celebrate Birthdays: Family Celebrations. Unique Gifts. Merriments. A Birthday Bank Account. The Youth’s Companion 70 (24): 3. Bergman, Dewy, and Jack Segal. 1947. Happy Birthday Polka. New York: Bourne. Bernstein, Leonard. 1982. Musical Manuscript for Irene Mayer Selznick. Irene Mayer Selznick Collection. Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berry, Paul. 2014. Brahms Among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Birthday.” 2007. In Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World, ed. John Roberts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Birthday Cake Candles.” 2003. In A Dictionary of English Folklore, ed. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Birthday Odes.” 2011. In The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “The Birthday Waltz for Pianoforte.” 1847. [Review of J. L. Mombach Work by This Title Published in London by George Peachey in 1847.] The Musical World 22 (49): 776. Brahms, Johannes. 1976. Hymne zur Verherrlichung des grossen Joachim. Edited by Klaus Stahmer. Hamburg: J. Schuberth. Choral Songs by Various Writers and Composers in Honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria on the Occasion of Her 80th Birthday. 1899. London: Macmillan. Choral Songs in Honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. 2009. Spiritus Chamber Choir, directed by Aidan Oliver. Toccata Classics DL 2010, Compact Disc. Chudacoff, Howard P. 1989. How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Coleman, Robert H. 1924. Harvest Hymns: Singable Gospel Songs for General Use in Churches, Schools, Young People’s Meetings and Evangelistic Services; Church Hymns, Revival Songs, Children’s Melodies, Solos, Duets and Choruses. Dallas: Coleman. De Rose, Peter, Charles Tobias, and Carl Field. 1931. Another Candle on Your Birthday Cake. New York: Miller Music. E., T. 1869. [Review of Charles Ainslie Barry’s A Birthday March for Pianoforte, op. 13 (London: Lamborn Cock & Co., [1869?])], in The Musical World 47 (34): 588. Fuld, James J. 2000. The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk. 5th ed. New York: Dover. Gossett, Philip. 2019. Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio). Grove Music Online. Accessed March 11, 2019. www.oxfordmusiconline. Grimm, Julius Otto. 1983. Zukunfts-Brahmanen-Polka: Dem Lieben Johanni Kreislero Juniori (Pseudonymo Brahms) dediziret. Edited by Otto Biba. Tutzing: H. Schneider. “Happy Birthday to You.” 2003. USA Today Magazine, 131 (2694): 8. Head, Matthew. 2017. Style Hongrois. Grove Music Online. Accessed January 31, 2017. oxfordmusiconline.com. Hill, Mildred J., and Patty Smith Hill. 1893. Song Stories for the Kindergarten. Chicago: Clayton F. Summy. Jernow, Liza. 2004. Birthdays. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, ed. Andrew F. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLellan, Dennis. 2012. ‘Sheriff ’ John Rovick Dies at 93; Popular L.A. Children’s TV Host. Los Angeles Times, October 7. Accessed March 11, 2019. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/07/local/la-me-sheriff-johnrovick-20121007. Meissner, August. 1897. Der Mutter Geburtstag: Eine modern KinderSinfonie. Bayreuth: Carl Giessel. Score Available Via the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library. Accessed June 4, 2019. http://imslp.org/wiki/ Der_Mutter_Geburtstag_(Meissner,_August_Herman_Ernst_Bernhard). Mikalson, Jon D. 2012. Birthday. In The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mombach, J.L. 1847. The Birthday Waltz for Pianoforte. London: George Peachey. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 1877. Des kleinen Friedrichs Geburtstag. In Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Werke, Ser. VII, Bd. 1, ed. Gustav Nottebohm, 68–69. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. “Mozart’s Thematic Catalogue—ff. 13v-14r.” 2019. British Library Online Gallery. Accessed January 10, 2019. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ mozart/accessible/pages7and8.html. Murphy, Estelle. 2017. ‘Liveridge is in Ireland’: Richard Liveridge and the Earliest Surviving Dublin Birthday Odes. Music & Letters 98 (1): 32–73.

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“Music for Her Majesty: Important Musical Moments in the Life of Queen Elizabeth II of England.” 2019. WFMT. Accessed March 11, 2019. https:// www.wfmt.com/music-for-her-majesty-important-musical-moments-in-thelife-of-queen-elizabeth-ii-of-england/. “Muttertag—Mother’s Day in Germany.” 2019. German Culture. Accessed June 5, 2019. https://germanculture.com.ua/german-holidays/muttertagmothers-day-in-germany/. Orrego-Salas, Juan. 1986. Variations for a Quiet Man, for Clarinet and Piano, op. 79. Bloomington, IN: Frangipani Press. Pleck, Elizabeth H. 2000. Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Queen Mother Keeps Step on 98th Birthday.” 1998. BBC News, August 4. Accessed March 11, 2019. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/144737.stm. Rehding, Alexander. 2009. Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. “Relationships.” 2019. Cook Music Library, Indiana University Bloomington. Accessed March 11, 2019. https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/cookmusiclibrary/exhibits/show/orrego-salas-100th-birthday/relationships. Review of Joseph Thomas Cooper, “The Birthday March” (London: Cramer, Beale and Co., 1851). 1851. The Musical World 26 (51): 813. Review of S. E. Younge, “Birthdays” (London: [circa 1856]). 1857. The Musical World 35 (8): 115. Richards, Jeffrey. 2001. Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1853. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rosand, Ellen. 2019. Opera: III.  Early Opera, 1600–90. Grove Music Online. Accessed January 13, 2019. www.oxfordmusiconline.com. Rothman, Lily. 2015. The Long History of the ‘Happy Birthday’ Song—and Its Copyright. Time, July 29. Accessed January 4, 2019. time.com/3976577/ happy-birthday-copyright-history/. “Score: Variations for a Quiet Man, op. 79 (1980) by Juan Orrego-Salas.” 2019. Cook Music Library Digital Exhibitions. Indiana University Bloomington. Accessed March 11, 2019. https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/cookmusiclibrary/items/show/31. Scott, David. 2019. Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Grove Music Online. Accessed January 13, 2019. www.oxfordmusiconline.com. Sons of the Pioneers. 2005. My Saddle Pals and I. Proper Records PROPERBOX 87 (P1445–P1448). 4 compact discs. Todd, R.  Larry. 2019. Mendelssohn(-Bartholdy), (Jacob Ludwig) Felix. Grove Music Online. Accessed January 13, 2019. www.oxfordmusiconline.com. Wright, Mabel Osgood. 1926. My New York. New York: Macmillan. Cited in Pleck 2000, 149. Zohn, Stephen. 2019. Telemann, Georg Philipp. Grove Music Online. Accessed March 11, 2019. www.oxfordmusiconline.com.

CHAPTER 5

A Whale Is a Palimpsest: Dismembering and Remembering in Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales Kelly P. Bushnell

Off the coast of Utqiagvik, Alaska, in June 2007 a group of Alaska Native hunters took a forty-nine-foot bowhead whale. Monitored by the International Whaling Commission, ten Alaskan villages were permitted to hunt a total of 255 whales over a period of five years provided they kept the meat for their own consumption. When the hunters began to cut up the fifty-ton whale they found something embedded in the thick blubber between the neck and scapula: the sharp point of a harpoon from the 1880s (Elsworth 2007). Archaeological analysis dated the 3.5-inch barb to a harpoon manufacturer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who had made it for a shoulder-­ mounted harpoon gun patented in 1879. Unlike earlier hand-thrown harpoons, the explosive projectile was fired from a shoulder-mounted gun and contained a bomb on a time fuse designed to kill the whale without the necessity of a lengthy chase followed by a bloody battle with the lances.

K. P. Bushnell (*) Williams College-Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program, Bremerton, WA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_5

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The bomb in question likely did explode, but struck the whale in a non-­ lethal area and he escaped and recovered. And while it is possible that the antique weapon was in use later than its manufacture, biologists who studied the whale dated its injury to between 1885 and 1895 based on how the blubber had grown around it, making the whale between 115 and 130 years old. Between 2001 and 2007 six other nineteenth-century harpoon barbs were discovered in Arctic bowheads. These whales may live as long as two hundred years and are still recovering in population from the large-­ scale commercial whaling of the nineteenth century. The Utqiagvik discovery is an incredible story, but one that nineteenth-century whale hunters knew well, as they regularly “read” the bodies of whales, tracing their histories through embedded harpoons and other characteristics. These empirical and imaginative readings also loom large in the novels of the era. This chapter will focus on the men and whales of two nineteenth-­ century novels: Melville’s mega-behemoth Moby-Dick (1851) and the lesser-known Fighting the Whales (1863) by Scottish novelist R.M. Ballantyne, which reinterprets many elements of Moby-Dick into a didactic adventure novel for British boys. There is much to gain by reading the two novels together, not the least of which is their use of similar events and ideas which they adapted to very different audiences. The two novels explore multiple modes of remembering and dismembering in the literature of the whale hunt. Both remember and dismember are rooted in the Latin membrum: a term of constituency, whether physically (a limb or part of the body) or socially (a member of a group), and provide the ultimate irony in the literary interpretation of the whaling venture: the whalemen of the novels read the whale’s flesh like a text to imaginatively “remember” (put back together) its life story while industriously dismembering its body. The whale’s biography is put together as its body is taken apart. Whalemen read the text of the whale’s body as a palimpsest: harpoons embedded in the whale from previous skirmishes with whalemen in addition to scars and distinguishing marks all help craft this life story (which also materially contributed to early scientific knowledge about whales). The whale is endowed with this “memory” and funereally commemorated after the cutting-in (removal of blubber from the body) and trying-out (melting this fat into oil). This act of “remembering” is then set against the constant danger of the whaleman’s life—the dismembered body is sometimes his own—and the familiar nineteenth-century trope of burial at

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sea in which the lack of a fixed grave marker necessitates alternate forms of commemoration for the slain whale hunter. A further level of irony lies in the act of commemoration. Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales commemorate and memorialize dead whales as well as dead whalemen; however, only the whale is brought back to land (in the form of its oil), while men killed at sea never return to land and are buried at sea (if a body is recovered at all). In the vivid print culture of nineteenth-century sea stories, a reader may then read about the whaleman’s burial at sea by the light of a lamp or candle made from the blubber of a whale—both of these forms (the literature and the light) issuing from the dangerous job of the whale hunter. The concept of a palimpsest—a manuscript or text that is written over multiple times, sometimes obscuring what is beneath—is a useful way to think about this phenomenon. The word never appears in Moby-Dick or Fighting the Whales, but the image of the palimpsest was a common metaphor in Victorian literature, one often used in regard to memory. In 1828 Coleridge wrote, “I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the Palimpsest of my memory” (Poetic Works II.107), while Thomas De Quincey asked rhetorically in 1845: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” (Suspiria de Profundis). Between the publication of Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh characterized the soul thus: “Let who says ‘The soul is a clean white paper’ rather say / A palimpsest … / Defiled.” In 1879 G.H.  Lewes (also famous for writing about the sea) wrote in his Study Psychologica: “History unrolls the palimpsest of mental evolution” (i.30). The whale as a palimpsestic textual body with multiple layers of physical and semiotic inscription also constitutes a new ecomaterialist approach to these novels. In Iovino and Oppermann’s seminal collection on this new theoretical mode, they write: “material ecocriticism examines matter both in texts and as a text,” exploring “the way bodily nature and discursive forces express their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality” (Iovino and Oppermann 2011, 2). Building on Donna Haraway’s naturecultures (the inextricability of nature and culture, environment and society), Iovino and Oppermann position bodies in particular as “living texts that recount naturalcultural stories” (6). In Chapter 104 of Moby-Dick, “The Fossil Whale,” Ishmael pronounces the leviathan a “text” which alters its own interpretation. The body of the whale indeed tells its own story while also chronicling the violence of the whaling

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industry, a violence which was visited not just upon the bodies of the whales but also on the men who pursued them. In this chapter I first read harpoons lodged in whales’ bodies as concentrated narrative histories of skirmishes with whalemen around the globe, and as touchstones of early scientific knowledge about cetacean biology and migration, even as they also signal the immortality and global ubiquity of whales like Moby Dick. The chapter then considers “inscriptions” on the textual whale which do not penetrate as deeply as the harpoon. Whales’ scars and markings craft a different sort of narrative (battle among huge bulls, brushes with ice) that ultimately proves “indecipherable” to literary whalemen as—unlike the harpooning—it occurs out of view of humans. Finally, the chapter refocuses around the whaleman’s death narrative and burial at sea as imbricated with that of the whale. As a burial at sea has no permanent physical marker like a gravestone, I consider literary whalemen’s alternate physical, textual, and imaginative memorials to their sunken comrades. These texts also often indicate a rough parallel between the fate of the whale and the whaleman, which is made gruesomely clear when characters are impaled on the implements meant for the whale.

“Canst Thou Fill His Skin with Barbed Irons?”: Reading Harpoons1 Mocha Dick, the famous albino sperm whale after which Melville’s white whale is fashioned, supposedly had at least twenty harpoons lodged in his back. Melville’s whalemen likewise encounter the phenomenon of old harpoons embedded in whales multiple times. In Chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets the Virgin,” the crew of the Pequod kills a whale whose story especially resonates with that of the 2007 Alaska bowhead: It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the hump before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that

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stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.

Ishmael pronounces these discoveries “frequent,” though this whale’s description differs from Moby Dick, whose barbs (at least the three thrown by Ahab) remain visible outside of his body. The “lance-head of stone” embedded in the blubber near the “buried iron” particularly captivates Ishmael and he reads its implicit narrative. In the penetrated and healed skin of this whale he interprets its age as potentially hundreds of years old, reflecting the technological development from stone to iron “darts.” His description provides both a hyperbolized sense of the ancientness of whales and an example of the early data used by nineteenth-century scientists to learn about cetacean biology. The “lance-head of stone” thrown perhaps by “some Nor’ West Indian” also alludes to the ancient nature of the whale hunt itself, underscored by the proximity of the stone and iron barbs within the whale. The contemporary and the ancient narratives collapse into each other in the brutality of the whale hunt. Moby-Dick teems with these allusions. In Chapter 3, among the decor at the Spouter Inn is a “harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—[that] was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.” In Chapter 36, in providing the first physical description of Moby Dick, Queequeg asserts, “And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” and Ahab confirms, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him.” (During the gam in Chapter 100 this pattern is one of the ways Ahab can tell that the other captain has seen Moby Dick: “harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”) In Chapter 41, titled simply “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael relates, “It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.” (Scoresby is William Scoresby, whose Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale-Fishery, published in London in 1822 is one of Melville and Ballantyne’s most important respective source materials.) These harpoons thus served an even more biographical and cetological function: they provided some of the first data about whale migration, speed, and navigation. Ishmael notes that “in some of these

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instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days” (Chapter 36), suggesting the speed with which a whale might move from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by reading the “text” of each individual whale as data points with which to understand cetacean biology and behavior at large. Some harpoons were even more particular, brandishing marks (“ciphers”) that could be attributed to specific ships or even individual harpooneers. This specificity allows even greater depth to the whaleman’s interpretation of the textual leviathan, as it may be possible to determine which ships (and possibly even which exact men) had previously “darted” a whale and where these encounters had taken place. In Chapter 45, “The Affidavit,” Ishmael relates such a story: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same cypher, have been taken from the body.

In the intervening years the harpooneer traveled the world (“joining a discovery party” in Africa and “penetrating far into the interior”); “meanwhile, the whale he has struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it has thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa” (Moby-Dick, Chapter 45: “The Affidavit”). This speaks to the three harpoons lodged in Moby Dick by Ahab and prefigures the captain’s inability to accomplish the same feat. In Fighting the Whales, narrator Bob Ledbury also describes the phenomenon of embedded harpoons several times. In Chapter 8, “one or two [whales] bolted so fast that they broke loose and carried away a number of harpoons and many a fathom of line.” Bob relates the stories of several famous “fighting whales,” including the whale that sank the Essex (a whale which also inspired Melville—Ishmael describes the encounter in depth), and New Zealand Tom: “an old bull whale that had become famous among the men who frequented these seas for its immense size and fierceness, and for the great trouble it had given them, smashing some of their boats, and carrying away many of their harpoons” (Fighting the Whales, Chapter 7).2 More generally: “Fighting-whales, as they are called, are not uncommon. These are generally old bulls, which have become wise from

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experience, and give the whalers great trouble—sometimes carrying away several harpoons and lines” (ibid.). The literary whalemen of Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales read these harpoons as “storied matter,” to use Iovino and Opperman’s ecomaterialist term. Through their barbs they can interpret a whale’s age, distance, and trajectory around the oceans, and reconstruct what amounts to “memories” of skirmishes with other whalers. The image of the embedded harpoon is also a metaphor of human industry penetrating nature in the nineteenth century, as factories proliferated and their gears were illuminated and lubricated by whale oil.3

The “Mystic-Marked Whale”: Reading Flesh The whalemen of Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales do not just read the implements lodged in the whale’s flesh, but the flesh itself, creating the palimpsestic text comprised of many layers of inscription. In Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” Ishmael turns this interpretive eye toward the body of his former bunkmate Queequeg: “There’s another rendering now; but still one text. … here comes Queequeg—all tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.” This “rendering” connects artistic and literary rendering (i.e., interpretation) with the gruesome physical rendering of oil from the whale. “Still one text” engenders a further connection, as Ishmael reads Queequeg’s tattoos just as he does the “hieroglyphics” of scars on whales; the palimpsest of his skin is “still one text” even as it undergoes layers of new inscription.4 In Chapter 68, “The Blanket,” “the visual surface of the Sperm whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents” (emphasis mine). Ishmael calls these marks on whales’ skin “hieroglyphical”; the skin “almost invariably” is “all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array.” In addition to the harpoons, Ishmael uses these marks to construct the whale’s life story, assuming that “such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.” He describes the fights in Chapter 88: “They fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for their supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scalloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths.” Similarly, in Fighting the Whales: “The lower jaw of

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one old bull of this kind was found to be sixteen feet long, and it had forty-eight teeth, some of them a foot long. A number of scars about his head showed that this fellow had been in the wars. When two bull-whales take to fighting, their great effort is to catch each other by the lower jaw, and, when locked together, they struggle with a degree of fury that cannot be described” (Chapter 6). Ishmael agrees as to the readability of the animal, as ultimately “the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable” (Moby-Dick, Chapter 68: “The Blanket”). The “cypher” by which the harpooner realized he had darted the same whale twice is reworked by Ishmael here into its antithesis: the “undecipherable.” Though whalemen read the whale’s textual body prolifically, they do not always understand what they read, particularly those layers of the palimpsest which are inscribed far beneath the surface and out of their view. In speaking of these hieroglyphics Ishmael pokes fun at the “passing fable” of physiognomy, playfully asking Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. (Chapter 79: “The Prairie”)

This passage is a memorial to a whale, the vivid descriptions of which (and the lovely assonance of “but put”) invite the reader to “read” the whale alongside Ishmael and his shipmates. And Ishmael should perhaps have given his brethren more credit, as much early cetological knowledge came from the observations of the men who killed whales for a living. Some of the earliest cetological treatises on the physiology, biology, and behavior of whales were written by physicians aboard whaling ships, the intuitive and inherited knowledge of whalemen providing the basis for much of their research. The evolutionary biologist and poet Jennifer Calkins puts it this way: The continued relevance of the whale embodied in Moby-Dick is, in part, a result of the fact that sperm whales are long-lived, marine and therefore cryptic, highly social, wide-ranging, and socially flexible organisms—in other words, notoriously hard to study. Much of what we feel we “know”

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about the whale currently is based upon the observation drawn from whalers prior to and during the time of Melville’s writing. (Calkins 2010, 35)

A further paradox of whalemen reading the skin of the whale is that their very aim is to remove this skin from the carcass altogether, as below it is the blubber for which they have traversed the globe risking life and limb. (In the case of the sperm whale, they will also be after the even more valuable spermaceti oil in the head and ambergris in the stomach.) The huge sheets of flesh and blubber of this cetacean text are appropriately called “bible leaves” (“Bible leaves! Bible leaves!” calls the mate to the mincer in Chapter 95), and they are indeed read with religious attention. The mincer, responsible for slicing the blubber as thinly as possible for the enormous try-pots in which it will be melted into oil, is “arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves,” and when this process is finished and the whale has been stripped of its flesh, it is time for the “funeral,” as Ishmael terms the releasing of the corpse in Chapter 69, “The Funeral.” Just like a burial at sea (and prefiguring the burial at sea in Chapter 131 when the Pequod meets the Delight), the order is given: “Haul in the chains! Let the carcase [sic] go astern!” On the “peeled white body of the beheaded whale” there is nothing left to read. The skin and blubber are gone, and the whale’s hieroglyphics are melted down into oil, the whale’s story concentrated into the barrels of oil and memories of whalemen, some of which will be printed and read by the light of whale oil. The dead whale does retain a certain ecological agency even beyond its ubiquitous oil: “For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship” the crew watches the “hideous sight” of the birds and sharks tearing at the nearby carcass (Moby-Dick, Chapter 69: “The Funeral”). Remarks a disturbed Ishmael: “There a most doleful and most mocking funeral!” Ishmael commemorates the whale, however: “Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare” (ibid.). He writes that other ships, “some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel,” perhaps, will see the whale’s carcass, believe it to be a dangerous rocky shoal, and add it to the ship’s log and perhaps even maps: “shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!” The whale will thus be misunderstood yet commemorated again, this time cartographically, where “for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place.” The memory of the whale becomes a “ghost” which haunts men and maps: “Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to

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his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.” (Ishmael then asks the reader, “Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?”) Ultimately, like the “undecipherable” intact flesh of the whale, other ships will read and misread the memorial impression of the floating corpse long after it sinks into the depths (Chapter 69).

“Deep Memories Yield No Epitaphs”: Reading Burials at Sea The whale is, of course, not the only dismembered body. And just as the whale’s “funeral” creates a similitude between the commemorations of whale and man, so Ahab’s body is similarly dismembered by the whale hunt. In Chapter 37, in an aside from Ishmael’s narrative, Ahab says to himself: “The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.” Ishmael’s depictions of memory and commemoration of humans keep with and depart from that of the whale. Of commemoration and death at sea, Jessica Roberson notes that “the loss of a corpse at sea makes visible the extent to which any act of posthumous identification relies upon a complex network actively maintained by the living … death and burial at sea deny the living corporeal access to the dead through conventional mediums like the grave or urn, demanding alternative methods of memorialization” (Roberson 2017, 30, emphasis mine). Ishmael embodies this memorialization while in the Whaleman’s Chapel: Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. (Chapter 7: “The Chapel”)

Those “immovable inscriptions” are the antithesis of the total mutability of the sea, the “placelessness” of the place in the sea where a corpse is committed to the deep. The whale’s body may be commemorated (however inaccurately) on maps as a dangerous shoal, but the whaleman’s body sinks right away, marked thereafter only in the “alternative” abstract

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memorials of his shipmates. Chapter 7, “The Chapel,” is all about literally and figuratively inscribed memorials and commemorations of Yankee whalemen killed on the hunt and Ishmael lists several (though he “[does] not pretend to quote” these “frigid inscriptions”). Other alternate memorials in the novel include Ahab’s and Fedallah’s terming the ship a “hearse,” and in the novel’s final line the sea itself becomes a burial shroud for the “uncoffin’d” (to borrow Byron’s word) dead whalemen: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” In the burial shroud of the sea the whalemen have become as immortal as the sea itself, just as Ishmael jokes in Chapter 7, “The Chapel,” that in the whale hunt there is a “fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet” and the crew regards Moby Dick as “ubiquitous” and “immortal.” The figure of Bulkington, whose story Ishmael relates in Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” is yet another example of the conflation of immortality, memorial inscription, and the sea in Moby-Dick. Of Bulkington, Ishmael writes: “deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington” and “Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing— straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!” Bulkington’s memorial is Ishmael’s narration—the novel itself. The retrospective first-person narration of both Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales also renders the entirety of the novels both memory and commemoration of life at sea. Fighting the Whales also commemorates the commercial whaling industry of the British Isles and the British whaleman’s way of life, which was declining rapidly at the time of its publication. In 1859 the last casks of sperm whale oil fished by British vessels arrived in London after a slow decline in the size of the fleet, which could not compete with the Golden Age of Yankee whaling.5 The same year, however, petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania, which spelled the end of sperm whale oil as America’s choice illuminant and shifted fishing interests to whale species that could produce “whalebone”—baleen—instead of oil. In 1861 the United States became mired in the Civil War, in which the Confederate Navy all but crippled the Yankee whaling fleet, relocating American whaling to San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. Not long after, the invention of the explosive shoulder-mounted harpoon like the one found lodged in the 2007 Alaska bowhead revolutionized the whaling industry by exposing

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new species (such as the blue whale, largest on Earth) to exploitation. This new weapon ended the need for intimate, practically hand-to-hand skirmishes with the most famous and aggressive species, the sperm whale, while the discovery of petroleum removed the need to engage him at all. Ballantyne’s novel is an unwitting final salute to the golden age of whaling on both sides of the Atlantic. The motif of the coffin in Moby-Dick makes material these anxieties. In the very first paragraph of the novel Ishmael introduces himself by telling the reader he knows it is time to go to sea once more “whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet” (Chapter 1: “Loomings”). The life at sea is Ishmael’s “substitute for pistol and ball”; Ishmael goes to sea to live, in a brutal environment where plenty perish. The next coffin Ishmael encounters is not a casket, per se, but Peter Coffin, the proprietor of the Spouter Inn in New Bedford where Ishmael lodges while waiting to book passage on a packet to Nantucket. Ishmael notes the homonym: “Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous is that particular connexion [sic], thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.” Just as Ishmael asserts in Chapter 60 (“The Line”) that “all men lived enveloped in whale lines,” so too are the tenants of the Spouter Inn already associated with a coffin/Coffin before they even set sail. The coffin, however, is more than just memento mori. After Queequeg survives his nearly fatal fever, his unneeded coffin is sealed shut and turned into a buoy whose true irony becomes manifest in the final scene, as Ishmael becomes the sole survivor of the Pequod’s voyage because he is able to float on the coffin. The funereal, memorial object is thus reimagined as Ishmael’s physical salvation, by which Ishmael lives to craft the extended memory which is the novel. In Chapter 131 the Pequod meets the “most miserably misnamed” Nantucket whaler Delight. As the Pequod nears, “the life-buoy coffins still lightly swung” aside the Delight and Ahab inquires only about the location of Moby Dick, whose handiwork is visible on the ship’s shears: in the “shattered white ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whaleboat.” Instead of a profitable whale corpse hanging beside the Delight it is the corpse-like skeleton of a boat, and the carcass the Delight will cast into the sea will be not that of the whale but of one of their shipmates. Ahab either does not realize or does not acknowledge

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that the Delight is preparing for a burial. Her captain answers Ahab’s questions about the white whale with “I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” As the Pequod turns away from the Delight it is “not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.” And not before one of the Delight’s men calls out in a “foreboding” voice: “In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!” There are, of course, usually no coffins for those that die at sea and are instead sewn into canvas, but the Pequod unintentionally flaunts its unused coffin at the Delight, foreshadowing the three-day battle with the white whale which will soon take the lives of every man aboard (save Ishmael, who is saved by floating on the coffin). In his mania Ahab further solidifies this deathly connection between men, the white whale, and the sea, in which he commits his own bodily fate to that of Moby Dick in keeping with Fedallah’s prophecy: “Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!” (Chapter 13). Ahab acknowledges that he will never have a proper burial, and thus wishes only to be memorialized as attached—literally and figuratively—to Moby Dick. Like the Pequod’s crew, Ballantyne’s whalemen read the palimpsestic bodies of the whales as texts prefiguring their own demise, as Fighting the Whales also suggests a parallel in the fate of man and whale in the South Seas. The most striking element of memory and commemoration in Fighting the Whales is the parallelism between the death of Fred Borders and that of the whales he hunts. Ballantyne’s narrator Bob is no Ishmael, and while in Moby-Dick there is but one survivor, in Fighting the Whales there is only one death: Bob’s dear friend Fred Borders. After a boat is stove by a whale, all the men are recovered, but Fred Borders is mortally wounded: “The worst case, however, was that of poor Fred Borders. He had a leg broken, and a severe wound in the side from a harpoon which had been forced into the flesh over the barbs, so that we could hardly get it drawn out” (Chapter 8: “Death on the Sea”). Both the whale and Fred Borders meet their demise on the barb of the harpoon, are brought back to the ship, and after several days their corpses are released overboard. Fred lives for about a week before he dies and his body is buried “in the usual sailor fashion” where “in deep silence, we committed his corpse to

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the deep,” echoing Bob’s earlier description of releasing the whale carcass from the side of the ship after the cutting-in and trying-out. Unlike the floating carcass in Moby-Dick, the whale carcass in Fighting the Whales “sank like a stone,” prefiguring the cannonball the men would later attach to Fred Borders’s corpse. Furthering the similarity between the corpse of the whale and that of Fred Borders, the text suggests that both will be fodder for ocean scavengers: Fred’s corpse is “committed to the deep” and the sharks therein, while the whale’s corpse is lost to the scavenging seabirds at the surface, “but what was loss to the gulls was gain to the sharks, which could follow the carcass down into the deep and devour it at their leisure” (ibid.). But why zoomorphize Fred Borders in this particularly gruesome way? The zoomorphized man reinforces the humanized whale; that is, Bob Ledbury spends a significant portion of his narrative on the human qualities of the whale, only to underscore the whale’s humanity by showing the vulnerability of man to the same fate as the whale (death on the end of a harpoon). To kill a man with the same weapon used to kill the whale offers a further commonality between whale and whaleman, blurring the line between zoomorphized man and anthropomorphized whale. Fred Borders’s demise may also signal skepticism of the view espoused by many of his whaling and writing contemporaries that whaling demonstrates man’s primacy over nature. Fred’s death on the harpoon is a reminder that the barb which pierces the flesh of the whale can pierce men too, and that even Victorians are not exempt from the pointed spear-tip where nature and culture, subject and object, come together. “But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered,” Ishmael tells his reader in Chapter 104, “The Fossil Whale.” The harpoon barb recovered from the Alaska bowhead in 2007 is now in the collection of the Iñupiat Heritage Center in Utqiagvik, Alaska, which is now a National Park affiliated with the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park.6 And just as early cetological treatises were based on the lived experience of the men who hunted whales, today the cooperation between the Indigenous whale hunters and whale researchers continues to yield new information about these animals.7 Leviathan is still the text. The case is still altered. And the flesh of the whale contains as many stories today as it did in Chapter 79 of Moby-Dick: “Read it if you can.” Or, perhaps, if you dare.

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Notes 1. “Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?” appears in Moby-Dick, Chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets the Virgin.” As the chapters of Moby-Dick are all relatively short (and editions so diffuse), I have cited chapters instead of page numbers. 2. New Zealand Tom was a particularly famous whale, mentioned by Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Chapter 45, “The Affidavit.” As Fighting the Whales is no longer in print, I identify passages by their chapter numbers (all of which are manageable in length). The novel has been both scanned and transcribed on Project Gutenberg and Archive.org. 3. I take this up in a forthcoming essay, also arguing for the try-works as a corollary to industrial Britain. 4. It is important to note that although Queequeg can read whales, he cannot read English. In Chapter 7, “The Chapel,” Ishmael notes that though Queequeg is in the chapel he cannot read the inscribed memorials to Nantucket’s dead whalemen on its walls. Thus, he does not commemorate them. (“This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.”) 5. Robert Hamilton calculated in 1843 that in 1791 seventy-five British vessels fished the Southern grounds, but by 1830 the fleet was comprised of just thirty-one ships from London with 937 sailors aboard and a burden of eleven thousand tons (Hamilton 1843, 175). 6. Please visit the Iñupiat Heritage Center at www.nps.gov/inup. 7. See Haag (2007).

References Ballantyne, Robert Michael. 1863. Fighting the Whales or Dangers and Doings on a Fishing Cruise. London: J. Nisbet & Co. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. 1857. Aurora Leigh. Calkins, Jennifer. 2010. How Is It Then with the Whale?: Using Scientific Data to Explore Textual Embodiment. Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 18 (1–2): 31–47. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1828. Poetic Works, Vol. 2. DeQuincy, Thomas. 1845. Suspiria de Profundis. Elsworth, Catherine. 2007. Whale Had Antique Harpoon in Its Neck. Telegraph (London), June 14. Haag, Amanda Leigh. 2007. Patented Harpoon Pins Down Whale Age. Nature, June 19. https://doi.org/10.1038/news070618-6.

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Hamilton, Robert. 1843. Whales; Mammalia Series, the Naturalist’s Library. Edinburgh: Lizars. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2011. Material Ecocriticism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lewes, G. H. 1879. Study Psychologica. Melville, Herman. 1851. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper and Brothers. Roberson, Jessica. 2017. Sea-Changed: Felicia Hemans and Burial at Sea in the Nineteenth-Century Imaginary. Gothic Studies 19 (2): 30–44.

CHAPTER 6

Votive Boats, Ex-votos, and Maritime Memory in Atlantic France Maura Coughlin

Before the chapel of Notre Dame de Perros-Hamon, in the town of Ploubazlanec, near Paimpol (Brittany), a young boy was photographed by Charles or Paul Géniaux in about 1900 (Fig. 6.1). His seafaring costume of wooden clogs, a fishermen’s beret, and woolen sweater marks him as a mousse, or cabin boy. He holds a model sailboat and sits on a stone wall that surrounds the churchyard. Unsmilingly, his gaze meets the lens of the camera. His skin has been browned by the sun, as is clear in the contrast between his face and collar. Sepia tones articulate the material facts of this composition: the detail is fine enough to notice the nails in the sole of his wooden clogs, worn over woolen socks. Granite and slate textures of roof and wall are opposed to the white fabric of the boat’s sail. Wool, canvas, and wood—materials that went to sea—are set off against the stone of the Breton peninsula and its culture. The model is not a toy: it is a votive boat or “ex-voto,” either a material commemoration of a devotional vow of thanksgiving or a demonstration of faith in future salvation at sea. There is nothing accidental or spontaneous about the details of this image: the boy’s dress identifies him as a member of the fishing community, the boat M. Coughlin (*) Bryant University, Smithfield, RI, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_6

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Fig. 6.1  Paul or Charles Géniaux, Young Boy in Front of the Chapel of Perros-­ Hamon, c. 1900. Gelatin silver print, 14.9 × 10.6 cm. Musée de Bretagne, Rennes. http://www.collections.musee-bretagne.fr/ark:/83011/FLMjo182634. Public Domain

he holds refers to his vocation at sea, and the chapel behind him is a ritual site devoted to those lost at sea. This image is my starting point for thinking about the cultural roles played by religious and commemorative maritime imagery of the French North Atlantic in greater global ocean

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ecologies and visual culture. In 1900, the cash economy of fishing (that this boy may have already entered into) had been driving transatlantic trade for centuries. I would like to suggest that the Géniaux photograph can be read as attesting both to this boy’s entry into a marketplace of global capital (as a human resource) and as a witness to a very different sort of economy: the gift economy of memory and commemoration expressed through the votive object. The visual culture of Brittany is replete with loss and mourning; part of my larger project explores connections between its materially elaborate nature and Atlantic shoreline communities and material ecologies (Coughlin 2012, 2014a, b). My work on images of Atlantic maritime communities is informed by ecocriticism in literary and visual studies; I am interested in putting them into dialogue with relational networks of the human and more than human (Iovino 2012). As feminist ecocritic Stacy Alaimo has demonstrated, rather than being discretely bounded, our bodies and our histories are utterly enmeshed; she calls this condition “trans-­ corporeality” which she defines as “material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world” (2012, 476). To contemplate the visual and material potential of votive culture to serve as a form of commemoration, I will be using this idea of ecological “material interchanges” extensively in this chapter, to contemplate the human and more-than-human networks of fishing the Atlantic in 1900.

Cod Fishing and Boys at Sea The global economic history of fishing is a story about human populations depleting wild resources; the cod trade was among these relentless global efforts to empty the oceans. A seemingly limitless abundance of codfish in North Atlantic waters was (as popular historian Mark Kurlansky has demonstrated) a wild-food commons that was rapidly decimated over the course of the modern era (1997). Cod had brought great wealth to the southern ports of Brittany such as Penmarc’h in the Bay of Audierne (Finistère) before the fish stocks collapsed in the sixteenth century and the abundance of cod in far North Atlantic waters was discovered. With a global shift to long-haul trips across the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cod fishing became a year-round profession for Bretons, rather than a seasonal labor. Morue, or codfish that was dried and salted for long-term preservation, both fed the poor in Europe on meatless days and supplied the slave trade, especially in the Caribbean (LeHuenen 1984). Wealth from overseas fishing expanded the ports of Paimpol, St.

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Malo, and Saint Brieuc on the northern coast of Brittany (and the wealth of ship owners) as the southern ports on the peninsula declined. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than 10,000 men and boys from the Norman and Breton littoral were employed yearly as Newfoundland and Iceland fishermen or terre-neuvas (Musée de Bretagne 2013, 87).1 Families in coastal villages were seasonally divided: able-bodied men and boys shipped out for fishing and the merchant marine for months—if not years—at a time. To work as mousses, children from the seafaring communities on the west coast of La Manche (Lower Normandy) and the Côtes-d’Armor (the north coast region of the Breton peninsula) went to sea on fishing boats for half-year excursions; they departed in April and returned in October. At the time that Paul or Charles Géniaux photographed him, the young mousse could have already made the long ocean voyage from Paimpol to Iceland or the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. As historian David Hopkin has shown, boys were enculturated early to this role through folklore, imitation, and performance (2012, 88–91). If they could read and write, they could join a crew when they were as young as ten years of age (Gemähling 1906, 62). Hopkin notes that “at least half a dozen children’s books from the turn of the century … take as their subject the vicissitudes of a cabin boy employed on the Grand Banks…. music-hall songs… articles in Le Petit Journal, and … postcards featur[ed] ‘the martyred cabin boy’—sadly not an entirely invented trope” (2012, 88). Working as sailors, apprentices, and cooks, they were often brutally mistreated by the short-tempered, drunken fishermen on the boats (Le Braz 1904; Chappé 1991, 120–126). Paul Géniaux (1873–1930) and his brother Charles (1870–1931) were natives of the Breton city of Rennes. Naturalistic, objective representation was at the heart of their photographic practice; they sold their images as souvenirs to tourists in sets and later photomechanically reprinted them in journals and books and on postcards. Sharp-focused gelatin silver prints with detailed depth of field and a reproducible gray-scale (that ranged from velvet blacks to crisp whites) resulted from shooting their subjects primarily in natural light. As a catalog of traditional labors, trades, traditions, and local communities of Brittany, these photographs were featured in Bretagne Revue, the journal they launched in 1893 (later renamed Revue Pittoresque de Bretagne). Charles Géniaux, who is perhaps better known as a regionalist author, frequently reproduced their Brittany photographs in his later texts. The title of his book La Vieille France qui s’en va (The Old France That Is Vanishing) (Géniaux 1903; Prod’homme 2014) clearly articulates a lament for a traditional way of life that was

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rapidly vanishing from the modern world. In other works, Géniaux was fatalistic in his descriptions of the lives of Breton fishermen as he relied on repeated clichés of their depravity, drunkenness, and an inability to adapt to life on shore (Frélaut 1997, 314–317). Charles and Paul likely had limited contact with their young fishermen subjects: although they often represented children at work, they did not dwell on the injustices of child labor. As well-educated bourgeois Bretons they lived very different lives alongside their peasant subjects; as John Berger writes (in a different context), they were “exempt from those necessities which have determined most lives in the village. To be able to choose or select was already a privilege” (1979, 7). The Géniaux photographs partake in both familiarity and distance; as material objects that perform commemorative functions, they remain traces of momentary encounters. If the Géniaux brothers’ nostalgia elided the suffering of boys in cod fishing, viewers of their photograph may well have been informed by critical accounts of the period, such as the scandalous report of the death of a mousse at sea (who had been tormented by the ship’s crew) in the Granville press in 1895 (Hopkin 2012, 88–91; Musée de Bretagne 2013, 132). The misery of the children who worked in Atlantic cod fishing was given extensive detail by Charles Le Goffic, a Breton regionalist author whose work often described the relentless cycles of ignorance, exploitation, poverty, and alcoholism among generations of fishermen. In an article of 1897, titled “The Trafficking of Children in the Twentieth Century: The Graviers of Saint-Pierre,” he described the inhumane recruitment of boys from the inland Breton countryside (Le Goffic 1897a, 164; Chappé 1991, 127–133). Illegitimate street children and the sons of day laborers, ages 12–18, who spoke only Breton were shipped across the Atlantic in “floating pig-sties” to arrive at the end of the Canadian winter to work in indentured servitude as graviers.2 Their name came from a Bordeaux patois term grave, a variant of the French word for beach, grève, that described purely stony shorelines that were ideal for the desiccation of salted fish. Rather than the fishing boat work of the mousses, the filthy, monotonous, and endless labor of these troupes of boys was flipping salted cod fillets as they dried on the shores of Newfoundland and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.3 Le Goffic explained that so many Breton children were employed on les graves, not as cabin boys or mousses (who received much better salaries), because they were sons of farmers, humble laborers of the plebs, whom their parents cannot feed in the fields. They are native to the interior of the northern coast; some of them had never seen the sea. What makes them decide to serve as graviers

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is that the Navy, precisely, authorizes their inscription on the crew rolls and that they can thus, after two campaigns to Newfoundland, enter the Fleet as a novice or sailor. For this unique favor, which others would regard as an aggravation of misfortune, they condemn themselves for two years to a life that is harder than can be imagined. (1897b, 270)

Citing the many boys lost at sea or buried in Canada, Le Goffic denounced this abusive life of forced labor as an exploitive practice that treated adolescents as nothing more than expendable maritime resources grown on land—raw materials that enabled the global fishing business, akin to the hemp and linen and wood that made ropes, sails, and boats. To repurpose the phrase of Rob Nixon, environmental “slow violence” was enacted on North Atlantic fishing communities, where the labor and lives of men and boys of the peasant class were treated as disposable resources, and their suffering mostly occurred out of sight (2011, 2). The plight of Breton boys employed in the North Atlantic fishing industry was clearly well known in turn-of-the-century France. In 1900, Parisian journalist Adolphe Brisson wrote about visiting Les Deux-­Empereurs, a former Newfoundland cod-fishing boat from Granville that was moored on the Seine to provide visitors to the Paris Universal Exposition a sanitized experience of the daily lives of Iceland fishermen. Assuming that his readers knew the context, Brisson asked the ship’s captain about the treatment of boys apprenticed to the trade; the captain complained that his name had been “dragged through the mud” by the press on the subject and stated that this was how sailors like him had been trained for a life at sea (1900, 35).4 This is one context that many viewers would have brought to the Géniaux photograph in early twentieth-­century France.

Pierre Loti’s Iceland Fishermen, Piety at Sea, and Visual Representation By 1900, it was almost inevitable that the site of the photograph—the chapel at Perros-Hamon—would be associated with the fiction of Pierre Loti, who in his 1886 best-selling melodramatic novel, Pêcheur d’Islande (Iceland Fishermen) had described the “chapel for shipwrecked sailors” dedicated to the “lost at sea” (Loti and Cadiot 1888, 83, 221). As mentioned, the cod-fishing trade killed thousands of men and boys; countless others survived miserable living conditions and abuse on the boats and on the shores of Newfoundland. This scandalous tragedy was mythologized

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by Loti as a personal melodrama (that appealed to the popular French imagination) but he assigned no blame to the alienating forces of capitalism (Chappé 1991, 231). It was clearly Loti’s romance of the sea and the piety of fishermen in peril that appealed to the Géniaux brothers, rather than the sober social facts that Le Goffic, Le Braz, and others had published. In the area of Paimpol, many fishermen died or disappeared at sea and their bodies never returned to the home soil; mourners lacked both the emotional closure of proven death and the ritual focus of a physical body. In the cemetery next to the Perros-Hamon chapel is a well-known “wall of the disappeared” (also described by Loti) to which were affixed homemade cenotaphs and plaques, standing in for those missing from the ground (Coughlin 2012). As we can see on the porch behind the boy, many of the older wooden plaques had been moved from the cemetery into the side porch and chapel by 1900 (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). In La Bretagne Vivante (Living Brittany), Charles Géniaux was clearly invoking Loti when he wrote of the “sailors lost at sea in places or chasms that will never return them” (1912, 122). He described the “sorrowfully famous” cemetery “of the Icelander Fishermen of Ploubazlanec” that is placed “in a green and gold country of shimmering gorse, heather and spruce, in a country that looks full of happiness” but that because of its poverty, “men and even children leave each year for Iceland and die there of cold, of bad food, sorrow, fatigue, and pain in the eternal night. Poor people who expatriate themselves and indulge in a horrible job for a pitiful salary but a frequent benefit: drowning in icy water!” (1912, 122). Géniaux quoted some of the commemorative inscriptions that repeated on the plaques in the cemetery and chapel: In memory of Gilles Brézeïlec, 17 years old, deceased in Iceland. In memory of Jean-Marie Brézeïlec, 16, died in Iceland. In memory of Yves Brézeïlec, 37 years old, deceased Iceland. Pray God for them! (1912, 122)

Loti had tremendous appeal to artists of the late nineteenth century who willingly viewed fishermen through the lens he provided. Although images of Normandy coastal fishing communities appear in the work of painters in the early to mid-nineteenth century, those who went to sea were rarely represented in painting before the 1880s. After Loti’s book was published, the image of the Atlantic fisherman became much more widespread in Salons and the illustrated press. In the most obvious sense, the Géniaux photo of a boy dressed for the long ocean voyage plays to the nostalgia

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Fig. 6.2  One of the plaques on the porch of Notre Dame de Perros-Hamon, c. 1856. Photo by the author

and epic maritime romance that Loti popularized. And yet, as this chapter argues, the inclusion of the votive boat and the chapel’s plaques in the composition attests to ritualized gift economies of maritime peasants that maintained their memories and dealt with the losses suffered in the course of their dangerous work.

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In his global travelogue of 1814, René Chateaubriand remarked on the way that a sailor’s religiosity was formed (or inspired) by peril at sea: “sailors on shore may turn free-thinkers as well as any others, but human wisdom is disconcerted in the hour of danger; man then becomes religious; and the torch of philosophy cheers him in the midst of a storm, much less than a lamp lighted up before the Madonna” (Chateaubriand and Shoberl 1814, 64). The chapel of Notre Dame de Perros-Hamon and its cemetery is a devotional center of what historians Gilbert Buti and Alain Cabantous call “maritime Christianity” (2016, 157). It displays many votive objects including more plaques, statuettes, and votive boats that attest to the accumulated memories of the area’s seafaring community. The assemblage of collective memory at this site is similar to the many coastal Norman and Breton chapels devoted to Mary, Virgin (or Star) of the Sea, and Saint Anne: patron saints of fishermen. Like the Perros-Hamon chapel, the walls of Notre Dame de Grace at Honfleur (Calvados, Normandy) are covered with plaques and exvoto imagery giving thanks for the return of sailors, mourning the lost at sea, and memorializing the toll that shipwrecks have taken on the local population. Loti’s dramatization of the losses of the community of Ploubazlanec that focused on this chapel inspired artist Emma Herland (1855–1947) to paint her rendition of Gaud Mével (1887, Musées de Laval) (Fig. 6.3), the fictional female character from Loti’s Iceland Fishermen. Herland worked primarily in Brittany and was drawn to the intensity of this very popular and highly gendered tragedy (Delouche 1999, 499). In the novel, Gaud, awaiting her husband’s return from Iceland, makes a daily visit to the village cemetery and the nearby chapel, expecting bad news and obsessively reading the family names of those lost at sea, names that repeat for several generations. She has a (correct) premonition that a new plaque will soon be added for her missing husband, Yann Gaos. He does not return to his young wife: at the end of Iceland Fishermen, Yann drowns and “weds” the sea: One August night out there off the coast of somber Iceland, in the midst of a great fury of sound had been celebrated his marriage with the sea,—with the sea which had formerly been his nurse. It was she who had cradled him, who had made him a strong and broad-chested youth, and had then taken him in his magnificent manhood for herself alone. A profound mystery had enveloped these monstrous nuptials. Dark veils were shaken constantly above them, curtains moving and twisted, stretched there to hide the feast; and the bride had given voice, making all the time her most horrible loud noise to drown the cries. (Loti and Cadiot 1888, 251)

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Fig. 6.3  Emma Herland, Gaud Mével, 1887. Oil on canvas, 180  ×  120  cm. Musées de Laval. Photo courtesy Ville de Laval

As in the Géniaux photograph, Herland includes the hand-painted wooden cenotaphs in the porch that memorialize the names and ages of the missing mariners, and heart-wrenching details such as the dates of their deaths and the storms, ships, or sites of their demise.

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Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was also powerfully moved by Loti’s novel, but he did not illustrate a scene from it; instead he proposed to more directly make his own imagery for fishermen (Soth 1989, 296; Silverman 2000, 346). Van Gogh’s letters often referenced the image of the ship as religious metaphor in Breton maritime Christianity. In a letter of 1876, he invoked the Breton sailor’s prayer: “Protect me O God, for my bark is so small and Thy sea is so great” (Emile Souvestre, Les Derniers Bretons, 1836, qtd. in Van Gogh, 1876). Years later, in 1889, provoked by a description of a venerated ceramic statuette of Mary on a shelf in the fishing boat in Loti’s Iceland Fisherman, Van Gogh painted five versions of a consoling female figure as a nursemaid (as in the passage above from Loti), titled La Berceuse (The Lullaby) (Fig. 6.4).

Fig. 6.4  Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle), 1889. Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 73.7 cm. The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1996, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain

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Writing that he was trying “to make an image such as a sailor who couldn’t paint would imagine it when he was in the middle of the sea and thought of a woman on land” (Van Gogh 1889a), his maternal image would be a devotional painting that could be taken to sea. He described a “picture that sailors, at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of a boat of Icelandic fishermen, would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies,” and that it might comfort fishermen as they rocked in their bunks when they were heartbroken, hopeless, and far from home: “if one placed this canvas just as it is in a boat, even one of Icelandic fishermen, there would be some who would feel the lullaby in it” (Van Gogh 1889b). Like the Géniaux photograph and Herland’s painting, Van Gogh’s exploration of the role of votive imagery was fostered by the powerful metaphor and reality of the lives of the Iceland fishermen that Loti gave his generation.

Gift Economies and Votive Objects Anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his essay, “The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies” (first published in 1923), declared that “one gives one’s self while giving” (Mauss 1954, 227). Mauss implied that by entering into social processes, such as votive ritual, one submits to an entanglement with the material world that exceeds the personal or individual. Lewis Hyde, in his influential text, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (2007), draws upon Mauss to oppose the commercial exchange of things or services for money to the reciprocal and sustaining movement of things in a gift economy. In the latter, when gifts such as food, time, or labor are exchanged in a circular, rather than a linear, mode, they establish powerfully emotive “feeling-­ bonds” (56) between people, whereas the sale of a commodity creates no necessary connection. The commodity economy builds power, capital, or debt; the gift economy builds and maintains community and social coherence through the circulation of common property that strengthens bonds between people. Votive objects and images partake in this economy and connect communities to broader ecologies of ocean fishing communities. Objects, such as plaques or votive boats, called “ex-voto,” short for ex voto suscepto, “from the vow made” (Fig. 6.5), are things that bind people to faith and circumstances. They follow the logic of a gift economy, operating as commemorative enactments that in the words of archeologist Andrew Jones, are “paradigmatic of the kind of connective practices which

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Fig. 6.5  Paul Géniaux, Interior of the Church at Billiers, 1900–1902. Gelatin silver print, 17.8 × 12.7 cm. Musée de Bretagne, Rennes. Public Domain image

tie together people and things” (2007, 46). An ex-voto object is ritually given to a chapel or church by one seeking grace or giving thanks as part of a social process: rather than being an object in the market, its role is site-specific and ritual in function. Art historian Hannah Baader notes the “status of maritime ex-votos in the form of ships as objects or things … the metaphoricity of ships as bodies and figures of transfer … the seriality of votive vessels, and … their capacity for creating communality” (2016, 217). She proposes that ex-voto boats have social functions within a community and express anxieties and fears about the dangers of life at sea; the ex-voto is a trace and a linkage between a person, a vow made, and the resulting good fortune produced through faith. Although few votive boats made prior to the French Revolution survive in Normandy and Brittany, the tradition of mariners, captains, carpenters, and shipbuilders giving accurately modeled boats to chapels along the Atlantic coast and in the Mediterranean is much older (Baader 2016, 222). Once given to the building (and by implication, to the saint to

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whom it was dedicated), the boats function in their designated sites to place sailors under divine protection. On the occasion of sailors’ and fishermen’s yearly saint’s-day festivals known as pardons (and blessings of the fleet), votive boats circulate in public space: taken out of the church and paraded through the streets of a coastal town, they make visible and memorable their original vows that are then ritually reinvigorated by the community. In one account, Le Goffic mentions a yearly pardon in May at Ploubazlanec in which adult and boy sailors (including a man named Guillaume who Le Goffic claims was Loti’s model for Yann) walked with a miniature frigate, an ex-voto that hung the rest of the year from the ceiling of the church (Le Goffic 1897a, 224). The skillfully made model boat is not meant to float or travel afar, rather, as literary critic Susan Stewart explains (in a different context), its “miniature description reduces the object to its signifying properties” (1984, 47). The model’s signification depends upon its sites of display and social use. When moved to a museum (and out of the chapel that was its destination) and displayed as a work of popular art, the boat’s assembled vitality is canceled or stilled. Thus, when the ex-voto has been extracted from its ritual context in a gift economy (like so many other things), it is reframed as an aesthetic commodity; as art historian Michelle Henning succinctly notes, “museums turn things into objects” (2006, 7). Images of ships and voyages were both a common religious metaphor and a marker of local identity for maritime communities who engaged with global trade, including fishing. Low-relief sculpted images of an ocean-going fishing fleet are the sole figural ornament on the façades of churches built in the sixteenth century in the former cod-fishing Breton ports of Audierne and Penmarc’h in Finistère; they attest to the wealth of these towns prior to the discovery of much greater, distant cod stocks off Newfoundland and Iceland. The devotional image of the ship is also featured in popular imagery such as the print Notre Dame de Grace (printed in Caen, Normandy, c. 1830s) (Fig. 6.6) that presents Mary as patron saint of sailors and travelers and would be sold cheaply at maritime pardons. (Not coincidently, the bright colors and simple forms of these prints were admired and emulated by Van Gogh and Gauguin.) In this print Mary stands upon a flying galleon: the famous ship of Don Juan of Austria, Christian vanquisher of the Turkish fleet in 1571. Included are allegories of Europe and a “savage” America and a second boat, with a crucified Christ on its mast, making another spiritual voyage. Like the ritualized circulation of votive boats

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Fig. 6.6  Notre Dame de Grâce, étoile de la mer, protectrice des matelots, et des passagers (Our Lady of Grace, Star of the Sea, Protector of Sailors and Travelers), 1831–1835. Colored woodcut, printed by Alphonse Picard, Caen (Normandy), 81.4 × 54.1 cm. Photo 12, Ann Ronan Picture Library, Alamy Stock Photo, used by permission

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when removed from the chapel for parades, the journey at sea was conflated with the journey of life; the travels of a sailor encompass both local voyages and global colonial histories. As Chappé notes, the ex-voto is a fascinating type of material object that is utterly entangled with spiritual life. As an “immaterial aspect of maritime culture, thriving on legends, traditions, superstitions and sayings …created on boats and quaysides,” its imagery appears in “books, posters and charts”; its beliefs were transmitted orally and can be seen in “statues, altars, churches, chapels, processional routes or stained-glass windows” (Chappé 2000, 110). Ever since French scholars began to research the culture of maritime ex-votos in the 1970s, a large body of interdisciplinary scholarship has grown that explores their classification, function, and entanglement in the social fabric. Historian Michel Mollat established an elaborate typology of ex-votos according to the spiritual intention of the donor. The congratulatory ex-voto corresponds to an offering made in thanksgiving for a favor requested and granted in a time of danger. The ex-voto is propitiatory when the donation is made in advance, irrespective of any immediate danger, before, for example, a long fishing season: in this case, it is a request for future protection. A commemorative ex-voto recalls a tragic event such as a shipwreck: it takes its meaning at the time of a pilgrimage and works “to recall to the memory of the alive the disappeared in seas.” Finally, a supererogatory ex-voto corresponds to a spontaneous and gratuitous gift, which has no obvious intention and makes no specific request (Mollat 1975, 14). Ethnologist Alain Tanguy later explained the vow and its relationship to temporality: “The moment of the solemn promise falls within the interval that separates the disaster of foreseen death: invocation of the celestial powers with the formulation of the vow, expectation of the miracle, intercession of the divinity, rescue” (1989, 202). More recently, philosopher Georges Didi-­Huberman described the personal, emotive, and corporeal power of ex-votos: Things deposited in sanctuaries out of votive gratitude are always objects that have been touched by a sovereign event, by a symptom: the suffering of misfortune or the sudden transformation of misfortune into miracle, illness into health, … objects that acquire psychic significance by the fact of being given, in the sense that, in “devoting” them, the giver indicates that he holds them dear, that he is beholden to them: clothes, agricultural products, specially made loaves or cakes, live beasts, precious objects, coins, body parts (such as hair), right up to the children who, in the Middle Ages, were offered up, “given” to the Church. (2007, 8)

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Hyde’s meditation on the social bonds established by giving one’s self while giving in a gift economy provides a particularly apt mode for thinking about such “institutions of positive reciprocity” and viewing the anonymous, un-commodified, and commemorative aspects of an ex-voto as “an agent of social cohesion” (2007, 490) that maintains the memories of a maritime community, just as the labor of the men and boys at sea materially sustain the community at home. The historical and ethnographic study of ex-votos above demonstrates the complexity of thanks and commemoration bound up in this maritime practice. As ex-votos become commonly held objects within a church (once given), they enter into circular and ongoing relationships—among members of the community, between the living and the dead, and between God and the faithful.

Paintings of Votive Ritual and Painted Ex-votos Late nineteenth-century Salon paintings and countless early twentieth-­ century photographs explore the spectacle of votive boats in public performances of piety and thanksgiving for maritime communities. Naturalist painter Ulysse Butin in The Ex-Voto (1880) depicts a maritime community ritual: a girl in traditional costume is followed by fishermen and their family as they bring a model of a fishing sailboat or “lugger” to a stone building on the Normandy coast (probably the church in Hennequeville, near Trouville) (Fig. 6.7). Working sailboats in the port are visible on the left, reminding us of departure; a crucifix at the center of the painting suggests the context of faith and intercession (Lepage et al. 1975, 10). As Baader observes, the “exvoto ship model in the woman’s arms is part of a transactional process between the physical and a divine world and is therefore intended as a vehicle for transfer from the profane to the sacred and vice versa” (2016, 219). Likewise, Salon painter Albert Guillaume Demarest, in The Vow (1894, Nantes) (Fig.  6.8), paints a procession of barefoot Breton fishermen in white shirts who have returned from the banks of Newfoundland and are walking the edge of sea cliffs with clergy and a votive boat to a chapel of Notre Dame of the Waves, Star of the Sea.5 In the words of British maritime writer Peter Anson, sailors would march like this because of “a vow made during a storm at sea, or other occasions of danger, to make a commemorative votive pilgrimage to one of her shrines if they are saved. Very often the voeu included going barefoot and bare-headed, dressed only in shirt and trousers, and fasting on bread and water” (1965, 69).

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Fig. 6.7  Ulysse Butin, The Ex-Voto, 1880. Oil on canvas, 146 × 232 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Photo by the author

Fig. 6.8  Albert Guillaume Demarest, Le Voeu (The Vow), 1894. Oil on canvas, 166.5 × 258 cm. Musée d’ Arts, Nantes. Photo by the author

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In Henri-Paul Royer’s painting of 1898, The Ex-Voto (Quimper) (Fig. 6.9), the survivor of a shipwreck has made a similar barefoot pilgrimage to give a commemorative votive ship in offering of thanks to the statue of the Virgin and child in the Chapel of Saint-Tugen, near the port of Audierne in Brittany (where Royer lived). Although Baader notes that depictions of votive rituals do not always distinguish between a vow being made (for a desired protection) or executed after salvation, the works of these painters picture the votive object enmeshed in its local visual culture

Fig. 6.9  Henri-Paul Royer, The Ex-Voto, 1898. Oil on canvas, 219.5 × 181 cm. Musée des Beaux Arts, Quimper. Photo by the author

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of faith and community and they help us to understand votives’ circulation, ritual, performance, and memorial functions (2016, 220). Illustrational in nature and closer to Herland’s image than to Van Gogh’s, these academic painters worked for a wide art public that was fascinated by the seemingly archaic rituals of people of the sea. Maritime ex-voto paintings both depict ships as literal things in the context of representing divine intervention and salvation from disaster at sea (storms, fire, shipwreck, illness, murder, marine combat) and also invoke the ship more metaphorically. Like the carvers of models, ex-voto painters were not named and did not sign their works: these images are generally taken to be the “artisanal” work of sign painters rather than professionally trained academic painters. They were intended to commemorate salvation and to attest to gratitude in the sailors’ chapels to which they were initially given. As mentioned, votive boats are often presented in museum collections as a form of popular art: votive maritime paintings also often cross the line from gift economy to aesthetic commodity in the context of the museum setting. Two well-known examples of ex-voto paintings, depicting salvation for Iceland fishermen, are Voeux faits à Notre-Dame de Grâce par Robert Bunel et son equipage sur le Navire La Marie Francoise le 22 et 30 novembre 1768 (Vows Made to Notre Dame de Grace by Robert Bunel and His Crew…) at the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de Grâce, Honfleur (Calvados); and Le sauvetage du brick “La Perle” le 27 mai 1836 (The Salvation of the Brig “The Pearl,” 27 May 1836), at the chapel of Notre Dame de la Cour, Lantic (Côtes-d’Armor) (Fig. 6.10). Famed through repeated description in novels and the popular illustrated press, sailors’ chapels such as these were sites of pilgrimage for mariners and fishermen of the region. As art historian David Freedberg has remarked, most votive paintings have a formal cohesion in style and appearance because they must express “the event from which the devotee was saved” as well as establish “a form of lasting testimony and gratitude at a pilgrimage center or other shrine. In every case, manufacture and figuration is predicated on a strict concept of distinctiveness and accuracy” (1989, 155). Similar to the painted plaques in the chapel at Perros-­ Hamon, these are painted things, images that are bound to people (sailors, passengers) and to events by vows that commemorated peril and loss at sea.

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Fig. 6.10  Pierre Vasserot, The Salvation of the Brig “The Pearl,” 1836. Oil on canvas, 130  ×  170  cm. Chapel of Notre Dame de la Cour, Lantic. Photo by the author

Conclusion In one of his later essays, John Berger proposed that to see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature. Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do: collectively. The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time. It would include all those who had ever lived. And so we would also be thinking of the dead. The living reduce the dead to those who have lived, yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective. (2007, 3–5)

Géniaux’s image of the boy, with which this chapter began, is intensely local in its evocation of and connection to lost generations of men, named

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and remembered from the past. Through the lens of this photograph, we may view the complexity of votive culture that begins with the votive boat and the commemorative plaques to those lost at sea and that threads through texts, material culture, and images (both popular and modern) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The photograph also reminds us of the widespread romanticization (to which the Géniaux brothers contributed) of this way of life amongst outsiders to that community. Examining this diverse body of imagery of commemoration and maritime faith reminds us today of the lives that were given to the sea by the fishing communities of Atlantic France. Hyde’s emphasis on the inherent reciprocity (rather than exploitation) of gift economies permits us to think ecologically about the oceanic metaphors of the votive boat and to juxtapose this gift to the global ecology and economy of cod fishing that the Géniaux boy has either already entered into or prays to return from. It is also a reminder of the global nature of his labor and future perils. Yet despite its specificity, we cannot see the boy in the photograph as an individual. The photograph does not function as a commemorative portrait; it regards him as part of a greater collective, and, as Berger implies, it lets us imagine his future at sea as a life-long past. As a sailor who hopes to return from a season in Newfoundland, he might later feel the earth rocking below his feet on return, as he might sense the lack of the sea on land.6

Notes 1. Along the French Atlantic coast, the term included those who fished off Iceland as well as the Newfoundland Grand Banks, although in Brittany the former were known as Islandais fishing for cod on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland (see Musée de Bretagne et  al., Terre-Neuve, Terre-­ Neuvas, 2013). 2. Le Goffic (1897b) describes the transactions between a “procuress” of children and their parents as akin to a slave trade. 3. Before 1904, when France’s North American territory would be reduced to the archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, the French held colonial fishing rights along the “French Shore” in Newfoundland: these are the sites where the graviers worked. The archipelago of Saint-Pierre/Miquelon, south of what is—at present—the Canadian island of Newfoundland, was contested ground in British and French colonial conflict. In the 1600s, Saint-Pierre was a seasonal base for French fishing fleets from Normandy and Brittany; this North Atlantic zone had been shrinking ever since the

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1713 Treaty of Utrecht. During the 1700s, fishing rights in Newfoundland and occupation of the archipelago were caught in a contentious colonial tug of war between the British and French. Gradually the island of Saint-Pierre became a year-round, mostly French community in the nineteenth century. In 1904, in the agreement known as the “Entente cordiale,” France retained only Saint-Pierre and Miquelon when it ceded its remaining fishing rights to the long north-west coastline or the “French Shore” of Newfoundland to Britain in exchange for territories in West and North Africa. Thus, Atlantic fishing grounds were bartered in the scramble for Africa (Hiller 1995; Musée de Bretagne 2013, 43–47). 4. Four years after Brisson’s account, folklorist and regional author Anatole Le Braz (1904; qtd. Chappé 1991, 128), in an essay “Les Mousses enfants-­ ­ martyrs” (“The Cabin Boy Child-Martyrs”) also detailed the neglect, abuse, and total lack of hygiene that children suffered on the cod boats. 5. This is the description in the 1894 Salon catalog; the painting may have been based on an engraving in L’Illustration from 9 December 1893 of fishermen executing a vow they had made during a storm at sea (Salomé et al. 2006, 60). 6. I am indebted to the assistance of Emily Gephart for her careful reading of this text. Toby Everett was ever-enthusiastic about accompanying me on maritime research. Elizabeth Walden introduced me to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and our conversations that followed have been formative to this chapter. I am grateful to Laurence Prod’homme at the Musée de Bretagne, Rennes and Marie-Rose Prigent at the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC), Brest, for their assistance in research. Librarians Sam Simas and Maura Keating at Bryant University were eternally patient and helpful in researching texts and images. All translations from French are mine unless otherwise attributed. Many thanks to Amanda Mushal and Kathy Grenier for their patient editing and advice.

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2012. States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (3): 476–493. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/iss068. Anson, Peter. 1965. Fisher Folk-lore: Old Customs, Taboos and Superstitions Among Fisher Folk, Especially in Brittany and Normandy and on the East Coast of Scotland. London: Faith Press. Baader, Hannah. 2016. Vows on Water: Ship Ex-Votos as Things, Metaphors, and Mediators of Communality. In Ex Voto: Votive Giving Across Cultures, ed. Ittai Weinryb, 217–245. New York: Bard Graduate Center.

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Berger, John. 1979. Pig Earth. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. ———. 2007. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New York: Pantheon Books. Brisson, Adolphe. 1900. Promenades et Visites à l’exposition: L’équipage du ‘Deux-Empereurs.’. In Encyclopédie du siècle. L’exposition de Paris de 1900, 34–38. Paris: Montgredien. Buti, Gilbert, and Alain Cabantous. 2016. Être marin en Europe occidentale (1550–1850). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Chappé, François. 1991. L’épopée islandaise, 1880–1914: Paimpol, la République et la mer. Thonon-les-Bains: L’Albaron. ———. 2000. Heritage and History: Rocking the Boat. In Recollections of France: Memories, Identities and Heritage in Contemporary France, ed. Sarah Blowen, Marion Demossier, and Jeanine Picard, 108–122. New York: Berghahn. Chateaubriand, François-René, and Frederic Shoberl. 1814. Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary, During the Years 1806 and 1807. New York: Van Winkle and Wiley. Coughlin, Maura. 2012. Representing Heritage and Loss on the Brittany Coast: Sites, Things and Absence. International Journal of Heritage Studies 18 (4): 369–384. ———. 2014a. Sites of Absence and Presence: Tourism and the Morbid Material Culture of Death in Brittany. In Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, ed. Brigitte Sion. London: Seagull Books. ———. 2014b. Death at Sea: Symbolism and Charles Cottet’s Subjective Realism. In Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen, 203–223. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Delouche, Denise. 1999. Emma Herland, peintre en Bretagne. Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 77: 491–520. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2007. Ex-Voto: Image, Organ, Time. L’Esprit Créateur 47 (3): 7–16. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frélaut, Bertrand. 1997. Un inventeur de la Bretagne: Charles Géniaux (1870–1931). Mémoires de la société d’histoire et archéologie de Bretagne 7: 309–334. Gemähling, Paul. 1906. L’emploi des mousses pour la pêche à Terre-Neuve. Revue populaire d’économie sociale 5: 62–67. Géniaux, Charles. 1903. La Vieille France qui s’en va. Tours: A. Mame. ———. 1912. La Bretagne Vivant. Paris: Champion. Henning, Michelle. 2006. Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.

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Hiller, James K. 1995. The 1904 Anglo-French Newfoundland Fisheries Convention: Another Look. Acadiensis 25 (1): 82–98. Hopkin, David M. 2012. Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyde, Lewis. 2007. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books. Iovino, Serenella. 2012. Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics. In Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism, ed. Timo Müller and Michael Sauter, 51–68. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Jones, Andrew. 2007. Memory and Material Culture. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Kurlansky, Mark. 1997. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. New York: Walker. Le Braz, Anatole. 1904. Les mousses enfants-martyrs. Lectures pour tous, 95–107, November. Le Goffic, Charles. 1897a. Sur la côte: gens de mer. Paris: Colin. ———. 1897b. Deux tableaux de la vie terreneuvienne, une traite d’enfants au XIXe siècle, les graviers de St-Pierre. Les métiers pittoresques. In Les Métiers Pittoresques, 151–208; 257–294. Paris: Fontemoing. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/cb32366456k. LeHuenen, Joseph. 1984. The Role of the Basque, Breton and Norman Cod Fishermen in the Discovery of North America from the XVIth to the End of the XVIIIth Century. ARCTIC 37 (4): 520–527. Lepage, Jean, Eric Rieth, and Daniel Samson. 1975. Ex-voto marins du Ponant offerts à Dieu et à ses Saints par les gens de la mer du Nord, de la Manche et de l’Atlantique. Paris: Musées de la Marine, Palais de Chaillot. Loti, Pierre (pseud. Louis Marie-Julien Viaud), and Clara Cadiot. 1888. An Iceland Fisherman: A Story of Love on Land and Sea. Translated from the French Pêcheur D’Islande; Roman. Paris: C. Lévy (1886) by Clara Cadiot. New York: Wm. E. Gallsberger. Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen & West (Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques. L’Année sociologique 1923/1924: 30–186. http:// catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34404872n). Mollat, Michel. 1975. Introduction. In Ex-voto marins du Ponant offerts à Dieu et à ses Saints par les gens de la mer du Nord, de la Manche et de l’Atlantique, ed. Jean Lepage, Eric Rieth, and Daniel Samson, 11–17. Paris: Musées de la Marine, Palais de Chaillot. Musée de Bretagne, Musée d’histoire, & Musée du vieux Granville. 2013. Terre-­ Neuve, Terre-Neuvas. Tourgéville: Illustria. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Prod’homme, Laurence. 2014. Charles et Paul Géniaux: deux frères en photographie. Lyon: Fage Editions. Salomé, Laurent, Jean-François Minot, Marie-Claude Coudert, and André Gide. 2006. Albert-Guillaume Démarest la morosité delectable. Lyon: Fage. Silverman, Debora. 2000. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. Soth, Lauren. 1989. Gauguin, Van Gogh and the Fishermen of Iceland. Burlington Magazine 131: 296–297. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tanguy, Alain. 1989. Ex-voto marins de Bretagne et d’ailleurs. Extrait de La société archéologique du Finistère 127: 199–233. Van Gogh, Vincent. 1876. Letter to Theo van Gogh from Isleworth, UK, November 3. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let096/letter.html. ———. 1889a. Letter to Theo van Gogh from Arles, March 29. http://www. vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let753/letter.html#translation. ———. 1889b. Letter to Paul Gauguin from Arles, January 21. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let739/letter.html.

PART II

Memory and Civic Identity

CHAPTER 7

Libby Prison War Museum: Site of Commemoration or Commercial Enterprise Angela M. Riotto

Tickets were not free for the men who had once been confined within its brick walls. Just like the thousands of other visitors, former prisoners of war would have to pay 50 cents apiece to tour the old Libby Prison (Libby Prison War Museum Broadside c. 1890). Once the site of a Civil War military prison in Richmond, Virginia, Libby Prison by 1890 stood on the south side of Chicago as a museum. Its exhibitions were not simply displayed to ease the trauma of war or to remember those who had been lost during the conflict; they were also there to entice visitors and sell tickets. As such, the museum’s very existence maintained a complicated relationship with its subjects, its purpose, and its role in shaping public memory of the American Civil War. During its brief time as a tourist attraction, veterans of the conflict, ex-prisoners in particular, struggled to reconcile the museum’s advertised purpose and interpretations with their own memories of the war.

A. M. Riotto (*) Army University Press, Kansas City, MO, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_7

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Throughout the late-nineteenth century, survivors of Civil War military prisons actively sought recognition, and in some cases recompense, for their suffering. In their pursuit to prove themselves worthy of public remembrance, both Union and Confederate ex-prisoners penned memoirs, published diaries, appeared before congressional committees, addressed conventions, and sponsored monuments. While the reasons for sharing their stories changed over time, the overarching and constant motivation was to obtain public acknowledgment for their distinct form of military service. By sharing their accounts of captivity, former prisoners strove to honor their fallen comrades, find some meaning in their suffering, and possibly even enshrine themselves within the nation’s history of the war (Riotto 2018, 5). Ex-prisoners’ memorialization efforts coincided with broader cultural movements to commemorate the American Civil War and its dead in the late-nineteenth century. One of the public spaces of commemoration that appeared as part of this larger effort was the Libby Prison War Museum. Although they sought recognition and remembrance, many former Union prisoners of war contested the museum’s commercialization of their experiences and disapproved of how the museum’s owners exploited their stories for profit. For those who had suffered in Libby Prison, the building should never have become a site of celebration or tourism, but rather, if it were to be saved, it should have been preserved as a memorial of their suffering and their distinct wartime experiences. * * * This is a study of memory and identity. Borrowing from novelist and English professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, this chapter proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice—the first time on the battlefield (or in this case, in wartime military prisons), and the second time in memory (Nguyen 2016). To illuminate one fight in former prisoners’ lengthier postwar struggle to have their wartime experiences memorialized, this chapter focuses on Union survivors of southern military prisons and their reactions to the Libby Prison War Museum. While Libby Prison was the only Civil War prison to be deconstructed and reconstructed as a tourist attraction, other prisons also became tourist attractions in the late-nineteenth century. After the war, for instance, both northerners and southerners traveled to Andersonville, Georgia, to visit the site of the South’s deadliest military prison (Domby 2017, 268).1

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Here, too, former prisoners wrestled with the growing commercialization of Civil War sites and “dark tourism”—and their own place within it. Although former prisoners’ postwar challenges in their pursuit of remembrance were not limited to the resurrection of Libby Prison, this case study provides a unique opportunity for a closer look into one singular struggle. This chapter also engages the nascent field of dark tourism—the study of the commercialization and visiting of sites of death and disaster—a field in which historians of the American Civil War have only recently begun to participate. J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley first coined the term in 1996 to refer to interest in macabre exhibits, executions, asylums, carnivals, and even jails; an interest which, they argue, dates back to ancient Roman gladiatorial games (Lennon and Foley 1996). In antebellum America, the public also frequented similar spaces for entertainment. It is not surprising then that during the American Civil War, military prisons caught the public’s attention as well. However, it is only recently that historians of the war have analyzed the public’s interest in such sites. Recognizing the void in the scholarship, Michael Gray, author of The Business of Captivity (2001), examined how military prisons “captivated” northern civilians during the war. Just as civilians paid to view the exotic and grotesque in P. T. Barnum’s circus and museums, they also paid to see the inside of military prisons (Gray 2018, 25). For example, as early as 1862, the prison on Johnson’s Island fascinated the locals in Sandusky, Ohio. Gray reveals that shortly after the camp’s completion, its Rebel inhabitants became a popular attraction to civilians on the mainland. Johnson’s Island was not the only military prison to captivate northern citizens. Chicagoans, as they would be again in the 1880s with the arrival of Libby Prison, were attracted to their local military prison—Camp Douglas. Gray explains that local entrepreneurs built observatory posts, hotels, and saloons near the camp so that the public could watch the Confederate prisoners within (Gray 2018, 30). With the end of the war and the release of prisoners, however, the northern public lost access to these sites of suffering and the once-busy observation posts fell into disrepair. The end of the war did not mean the end of the public’s interest in dark tourism. Historian Joan Cashin explains that objects from the Civil War continued to fascinate nineteenth-century Americans. Certain objects acquired during the war, sometimes referred to as a “trophy,” “relic,” or “souvenir,” conveyed a multitude of cultural messages that were not always easy to translate into words. The traffic of these objects and their

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eventual display in museums helped shape the memory of the war (Cashin 2011, 339). So when a group of Chicago businessmen purchased Libby Prison, deconstructed it, and shipped it brick by brick on 132 twenty-ton railroad cars from Richmond to Chicago to be rebuilt as a museum, the dark tourism of the antebellum and war periods was also renewed (Gray 2018, 43). Prisoners of war were not entirely enthusiastic about being exploited for entertainment, however, either during the war or afterward. They wanted non-prisoners to know of their suffering, to be sure, but they did not want to be gawked at as if they were curiosities in a circus (Gray 2018, 33). Former Union prisoners of war expressed hopes that sites of memory would convey their lived experiences and include the stories they propagated in their narratives. Former prisoners had experienced a war far different from those who had not been captured. As a result, they fashioned a collective memory and identity separate from the prevailing public memory and its celebration of the gallant volunteer who fought and died on the battlefield. They put forth their distinct memory by writing memoirs, republishing wartime diaries, and attending memorial events; some initially hoped that the Libby Prison War Museum would help to disseminate their stories to a wider audience. Rather than preserving the particularities of prisoners’ wartime experiences, however, the museum absorbed their suffering into the larger narrative of the war that celebrated battle-­ hardened veterans. For the men who had spent time in Libby Prison and in other military prisons during the war, the Libby Prison War Museum was not a memorial to their suffering, but rather a commercial enterprise that disregarded their distinct collective memory.2 In addition to discussing memory, this chapter also engages recent arguments made by historians that by the late 1870s the majority of Civil War veterans had moved toward reconciliation and away from animosity. Union and Confederate veterans may have eventually clasped hands over the bloody chasm, but ex-prisoners, like those veterans analyzed in M. Keith Harris’s 2014 book, found it much more difficult to forgive and forget (Harris 2014, 4). Even into the late 1880s, bitterness dominated prisoner-of-war-produced literature. For some, feelings of bitterness only intensified with the purchase and subsequent transformation of Libby Prison into a tourist attraction. The commercialization of one of the Confederacy’s most infamous prisons reminded survivors, and even nonprisoners, of the horrors of captivity and, as scholar John Casey explains, the “messiness of war” (Casey 2015, 1).

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Former prisoners hoped that a museum dedicated to their wartime experiences would validate their collective identity and memory, while simultaneously functioning as a space to mourn the thousands of prisoners who never returned home. This was somewhat achieved by the museum’s exhibits of prison trinkets and other prisoner-produced items and wartime artifacts. Yet, the museum did not showcase the many versions of captivity that Civil War prisoners experienced. As a result, the Libby Prison War Museum did not serve as a site of commemoration, but as a site of contention among both former prisoners of war and non-prisoners. * * * The building that became Libby Prison originally stood along the James River as a tobacco warehouse.3 In 1862, the Confederate States of America confiscated the “Libby’s Buildings” to confine captured Union soldiers (Richmond Dispatch, March 7, 1862a). The main warehouse, as seen in one August 23, 1863, lithograph (Fig. 7.1), became the infamous Libby Prison. Writing in 1864, former prisoner Captain Isaac Johnston of the 6th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry described the prison: “The building is of brick, with a front of near one hundred and forty feet, and one hundred feet deep. It is divided into nine rooms; the ceilings are low, and ventilation imperfect; the windows are barred, through which the windings of James River and the tents of Belle Isle may be seen” (Johnston 1864, 48). Within weeks of accepting its first inmates, the prison became overcrowded and it soon became synonymous with hardship and death (Richmond Dispatch, April 9, 1862b).4 Even after the Confederacy opened additional prisons, the majority of Union prisoners remained in the Richmond area. While thousands of men languished in Confederate military prisons, those fortunate enough to have been released or to have escaped shared their stories of captivity. During the war, these stories served as proof of Confederate savagery and attempted to evoke hatred for the enemy. Many in the late 1880s feared that the Libby Prison War Museum would resurrect a similar hatred. After the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865, the once-overcrowded prison fell into disrepair. In 1888, during a trip to Richmond, W. H. Gray of the Knights Templar Assurance Society of Chicago visited the dilapidated prison. Allegedly disappointed that such a historical landmark might fall into decay, he secured the services of real estate dealers in Richmond and purchased the former prison (Kent 189?). They deconstructed the

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Fig. 7.1  A.  Hoen and Co., Libby Prison: The Only Picture in Existence. As It Appeared August 23, 1863. Lithograph, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2013645219/

three-story, 600,000-brick building and, for $200,000, transported it to Chicago by rail (Richmond Dispatch, February 7, 1888). Charles F. Gunther, the wealthy candy manufacturer, who possessed probably the largest collection of Civil War relics at the time, largely funded the venture. Gunther, a native of Germany and a veteran of the Confederate Navy, had amassed a large collection of wartime artifacts, art, and rare books. With his collection as a foundation for its exhibits, the Libby Prison War Museum initially did tremendous business. At its grand opening in September 1889, a brass band played in honor of the Union Army officers and members of the Grand Army of the Republic in attendance. Within just three months of opening, more than 100,000 people had visited the museum, and attendance swelled during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.5 According to its own catalogue, the museum became

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a national center for Civil War veterans, who managed its day-to-day operations, published a monthly newsletter, guided tours, and hosted reunions on its grounds. The Libby Prison War Museum appealed to late-nineteenth-century Americans’ interest in exotica and curiosities. The museum’s galleries displayed former Union and Confederate soldiers’ writings, alongside wartime objects such as the bullet-ridden trousers from a soldier wounded at Chickamauga and minié balls collected from the fields of Gettysburg. It also housed a few entirely unrelated items, including an Egyptian sarcophagus and a snakeskin allegedly from the Garden of Eden. As a result, the museum was a blend of the macabre, the heroic, and the exotic—the sarcophagus, for instance, shared a room with Civil War-era firearms and memorabilia. The museum also displayed genuine Civil War items alongside those of dubious origin—such as the physical “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” said to be the home of the character that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe. Relics from the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln were also displayed and served as the principal symbol of war and personal sacrifice. These included the garments allegedly worn by Mary and Abraham Lincoln on the night of the assassination, bloodstained linens from the Petersen House where the president died, and a comb he may have used (Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1895; Chicago Herald, September 21, 1889). Still worse, from the perspective of former prisoners, Gunther used the museum to promote not only his collection but also other business ventures, such as Libby Prison cigars, Gunther’s candy, Libby Prison Hotel and Restaurant, silver Lincoln souvenir spoons, and buttons and napkin rings carved from the prison’s wood flooring (Buenger 2005, 217). The Libby Prison War Museum was not just a war memorial or a site of reunion—it was also a cabinet of curiosities, a site of dark tourism, and a place for profit. Upon hearing of Gunther and his associates’ plan for the former prison, ex-prisoners expressed fears that the new owners might, on the one hand, renew wartime animosities, and on the other, fail to acknowledge the extent of Union prisoners’ suffering in their quest for profit. Feeling especially horrified by the venture, former prisoner James Workman wrote to Mayor W.  C. Carrington of Richmond expressing his concerns about the “vile scheme.” The former captain of the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry lamented, “I lost a father and two brothers in Virginia, and I have been striving for 23 years nearly to bury the war into oblivion, which is impossible while a Republican politician lives to wave the bloody shirt. Why, this would

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perpetuate in the North all the animosity of the war, and what can the people of Richmond be thinking about to permit it, or even harbor the thought for a moment?” Seeking to keep the venture from happening, Workman begged the Richmond people: “Better burn the building to ashes than for a few paltry dollars allow it to stand in a Northern city, a standing shame on the fair fame of the South” (New York Times, February 11, 1888a). Echoing Workman’s letter, other former prisoners also denounced the scheme to carry Libby Prison to Chicago. In a note to the New York Times four days later, James Stewart chastised, “It might serve to collect dimes and dollars as a ghastly circus exhibition to fill the pockets of sharp, unprincipled speculators, men that have conceived the selfish and despicable idea of violating the sanctity of the soldiers’ sufferings and to many the very spot of their deaths.” He continued, “Now, the proposal to remove Libby Prison is a piece of disturbing impertinence, that no prisoner of war who was ever confined in it would for a moment have anything to do with… Rather, far rather, let it be consigned to the torch, or a torpedo placed under it, and hurl the whole structure into the James” (New York Times, February 15, 1888b). For him and others, Libby Prison would always be a place of misery. It should never have been preserved, let alone made into a tourist attraction—for such a thing to exist was a shameful affront to all of those who had suffered there, or who lost loved ones within its walls. As Thomas Sturgis, another former prisoner, summarized, the Libby Prison War Museum was not a site of reconciliation as it was advertised, but rather a manifestation of the “malice or as a vindictive display of power” he witnessed while imprisoned there (Sturgis 1912, 305). Not all survivors of southern military prisoners, however, were disgusted by the business venture. For some, Libby Prison had a deeply personal meaning and they sought to mark their place in the Libby Prison War Museum. During his visit to Chicago, William Ellsworth met an old soldier who told him how ex-prisoners “would come running up the stairs on their first visit since wartime to find the spot where they had slept.” Ex-prisoners allegedly exclaimed, “It was ‘over there next to the second pillar’ or ‘the width of two men from that north wall, in the corner.’” With so many ex-prisoners seeking to mark the physical space with their memories, the museum offered ex-prisoners the opportunity to purchase a brass plate for $1.00 to mark their spot. When Ellsworth visited in 1893, the floor was studded with memorials, bearing the names of some of the prisoners, indicating the spot where each man had “stretched out his aching limbs on the long nights of confinement” (Ellsworth 1893, 267). For

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some of these men, their time in Libby Prison defined their military service. They were not ashamed of their captivity, but rather found solace in knowing that their particular experience had not been lost to history— preserved as it was on the very floor on which they had once slept. Yet some survivors argued that with these personalized plates, the museum’s owners simply strategized to make an additional profit. Just as some were thrilled to show off their previous site of imprisonment, others admonished the museum’s owners for the price they had to pay to do so. These former prisoners of war wanted their experiences to be remembered and recognized, but they rejected the museum’s approach to remembrance. These criticisms and others’ choice not to visit the museum reveal not only the tension between commemoration and commercialization, but also the tension between ex-prisoners themselves and how they should be remembered. Even as former prisoners diverged in their responses, non-prisoners also expressed fears that the Libby Prison War Museum would unveil horrors that many would rather forget, that it would violate prisoners’ experiences, and that it was doing so for base financial motives. Even after the prison left Richmond, local citizens remained interested in it and reprints of articles covering its existence as a museum often appeared in Richmond newspapers. In a reprint of the Chicago special to the New York Herald, the anonymous author stated, “already the war is being fought over again in the streets of Chicago…Pictures of Libby Prison are seen everywhere, and relics of the war are displayed in all the windows. Down on Wabash Avenue between Fourteenth and Sixteenth streets a grim front is being reared, and behind this soon will rise the drear walls of Libby’s old tobacco warehouse, made infamous during the great civil conflict” (Richmond Dispatch, June 1, 1889). These fears manifested as anger and disapproval. Upon hearing of the prison’s purchase, local Chicagoan William Taylor also wrote to the Chicago Tribune: It is a shame that good citizens of Chicago should attempt to make money out of horrid memories which cluster around this temple of death. The cupidity which promotes its erection here would induce a speculation out of a revival of the horrors of the Spanish inquisition. No soldier or friend of a soldier can contemplate the scheme or gaze upon the wretched form of this old prison without a renewal of the animosities engendered by the late war … it is to be hoped disasters may follow in quick succession till every vestige of its damnable material be sunk to unknown depths before it reaches Chicago (Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1889).

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New Yorker and son of a Civil War veteran Robert J. Hare Powel also voiced his concerns that Gunther’s true motive was to turn a profit and wrote to the New York Times expressing his disapproval: The primary and sole object of this exhibition can only be to make money … The show is one to pander only to morbid taste or to vulgar, idle curiosity. Why resurrect the bitter, rancorous feelings of war times, which, once buried, should remain so for all time? In common decency and out of respect to the gallant men who suffered in this horrible den, and with just indignation, every respectable citizen should declaim against it and, if he cannot prevent, at least he can manifest his disapproval of the show by refusing to indorse or to patronize it. (Powel 1888)

For Powel and other observers, the resurrection of a site of suffering and horror could only be for profit. No “respectable citizen” would conceive of such a venture (Powel 1888). Libby Prison was a site that should be preserved for somber memorials, rather than for profit or voyeurism. Even for these non-prisoners, the Libby Prison War Museum evoked wartime sectional animosities. Despite these protests, the museum’s owners continued to promote the unique exhibits within the “Old Libby” (Richmond Dispatch, June 1, 1889). To entice visitors, the museum’s catalogue recounted popular stories shared in Union veterans’ narratives about Confederate brutality toward Union prisoners of war and the horrors of military prisons. The museum’s inclusion of common tropes, such as escape attempts and guards shooting innocent prisoners, however, only provoked further ex-­ prisoner protests (Hamilton 1893). One of the tropes perpetuated by the museum was that of prisoner escape. Escape from Civil War military prisons, however, was not common and many men never even attempted to escape (Foote 2016, 1–3, 142). During the war, former prisoners told sensationalized escape stories to emphasize the ingenuity, courage, and determination of Union soldiers. Federico Cavada, for example, described an officer who escaped from Libby by fooling a Confederate surgeon into procuring the necessary materials to make himself a new gray coat (Cavada 1864, 78). Henry S. White, former chaplain for the Rhode Island Regiment Heavy Artillery, reported a similar, but less successful, escape attempt from Libby in which a young officer from Massachusetts tried to pass himself off as a prison guard, by obtaining a pair of gray pants made of an old meal sack, an old slouch hat, and a coarse cotton shirt. He passed one guard and got out of prison, but

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unfortunately another guard declared, “You can’t come that game on me, for your shirt is too clean. I know you are not a Rebel” (White 1990, 72). Of vital importance to these types of escape stories were the actions of individuals. Heroics required actions, not just thoughts. By portraying themselves as patriots who resisted their captors and tried to escape, former prisoners glorified their own masculinity, courage, and honor and reminded their readers of their duty to support and remember the war’s captives. This was especially important during the war as sensationalized tales of escapes and resistance affirmed prisoners’ virtuous wartime service. Moreover, exciting stories offset the sorrow that also defined life in Civil War prisons. Although former prisoners frequently allocated many pages and even entire chapters to escape attempts, the curators of the Libby Prison War Museum chose to emphasize only the Great Tunnel Escape of February 1864—complete with a display of the alleged chisel used to dig the escape tunnel. On the night of February 9, 1864, Thomas F. Rose, colonel of the 77th Pennsylvania Volunteers, and 109 Union officers escaped through a 53-foot-long tunnel (Moran 1888, 770). Of the 109 men who emerged from the tunnel, 59 made it to Union lines. During the war, survivors of Libby Prison boasted about the Great Tunnel Escape. Both Federico Cavada and Isaac Johnston gave the escape precedence in their memoirs, detailing how Rose and the others struggled against countless obstacles to reach freedom. After covering the escape, Cavada was also sure to add that the tunnel escape “completely destroyed [Libby commandant Major Thomas P. Turner’s] mental equilibrium” and made him irrational—suspicion of another escape preoccupied his mind and he even seized onto the idea that someone might try to escape from the third-story windows (Cavada 1864, 189). Cavada added that Turner also became convinced that Federal officers were planning to escape and blow up Richmond using gunpowder. Fearing what would have been a modern Guy Fawkes insurrection, he reportedly ordered any prisoner looking out the windows to be shot (Cavada 1864, 196). Writing during the war, former prisoners hoped the northern public would agree that these men, even those who failed in their escapes, were heroes who faced insurmountable obstacles and vindictive prison commanders with honor and courage. In the 1870s and 1880s, ex-prisoners increasingly told of their reactions to capture, resistance while in prison, and enduring loyalty to the cause. These accounts appeared alongside petitions for veterans’ pensions and Confederate ex-prisoners’ recollections of captivity. Since becoming a

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prisoner was not a glorious end to combat, those who surrendered depicted themselves as brave men who responded to their situations with grace and honor, and who in turn deserved pensions for their service. One of the events that former prisoners continued to highlight during this time, not surprisingly then, was the Great Tunnel Escape. Writing in 1888, escape participant Frank Moran bemoaned, “Strange as it may appear, no accurate and complete account has ever been given to the public of this most ingenious and daring escape made on either side during the Civil War.” Seeking to share the true story of the escape and to secure public acknowledgment for their efforts, Moran published a 20-page piece about the escape in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. After describing the escape in detail, Moran proudly informed his readers that “Colonel Rose has served faithfully almost since the end of the war with the 16th United States Infantry, in which command he holds a captain commission; and no one meeting him in these peaceful days would hear from his reticent lips, or read in the placid face of the veteran, the thrilling story that links his name in so remarkable a manner with the history of the famous Bastille of the Confederacy” (Moran 1888, 790). Moran’s choice to mention Rose’s post-escape service and humility highlights former prisoners’ determination to receive acknowledgment for their distinct military service. Not only did Moran want to share the entire story of the escape—more than 20 years later—but he also wanted others to know of the escapees’ continued service to the Union and their unblemished manhood. Considering themselves a distinct group of veterans, ex-prisoners used stories from capture and captivity as evidence of their masculinity. They remembered their wartime sacrifices as noble and they wanted to make sure that their communities understood that even though they had surrendered and suffered indescribable hardships, they remained honorable men. As reflections of social relations, particularly under the strain of prison life, ex-prisoners’ stories reflected both cultural concerns of how men dealt with suffering and crisis, and how they legitimated or questioned nineteenth-century American gender expectations. Feeling the need to prove themselves worthy of communal and governmental support, veterans stressed their masculinity, bravery, and steadfastness during the war. Northern veterans, for example, exploited Southerners’ humiliation by feminizing the Confederate losers or by emphasizing Union soldiers’ suffering at the hands of the brutal, uncivilized prison keepers, such as Major Turner of Libby. Former prisoners used their works to amend the common conceptions of masculinity, at the same time as they attempted to share their distinct collective memory.6

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A second trope propagated by the museum was the shooting of prisoners by prison guards. During the war, stories of sentinels shooting innocent men served as wartime propaganda to enrage northern readers and undermine the Confederacy. After the war, when animosity was still high, especially during the trial of Andersonville prison commandant Captain Henry Wirz, ex-prisoners recounted unprovoked killings to urge readers to seek retribution against their former enemies.7 Through repetition, these stories eventually became entrenched in the historical narrative of Civil War prisons. This trope continued into the 1880s, and when the Libby Prison War Museum opened, the catalogue unexpectedly advertised the newly-added “Prison Yard.” Although the original Libby Prison did not have such a yard, this addition provided a place from which visitors could contemplate what prison life had been like during the war. Directing visitors to the yard, the catalogue asked visitors to imagine that “during the war it was guarded on the outside by a few patrolling guards, and a mounted battery always ready for action.” The catalogue’s authors were also sure to remind visitors that the prison’s commandant had ordered the guards to shoot any prisoner caught looking out and “many a poor prisoner with the hope of obtaining a breath of fresh air or a glimpse of the outer world thus lost his life” (Libby Prison War Museum Catalogue 1890). Although an analysis of prisoners’ wartime diaries reveals that shootings seldom occurred, published tales of sentries shooting prisoners for fun and for revenge eventually became tropes in postwar captivity narratives. Stories such as these served a purpose—they stoked sectional animosities and conveyed the horrors of Civil War prisons. For instance, former prisoners often lamented that words failed to convey the horrors of prison life. Feeling incapable of accurately or eloquently describing their experiences, some former prisoners included language and scenes from already published pieces, such as those which included stories of evil guards shooting innocent men. These embellished, and often completely untrue, stories conveyed to non-prisoners the desperate and dreadful day-to-day life of prisoners of war.8 While the museum exaggerated some prisoners’ experiences, it ignored others. For instance, the museum’s catalogue advertised “The Kitchen.” As the former “mess” or dining room for prisoners, one might expect a sample menu or a discussion of the prisoners’ poor diet in this exhibit (Libby Prison War Museum Catalogue 1890). This was not the case. Rather this room was filled with oil portraits, weapons, newspaper clippings, and battlefield relics. This room also contained “Special Exhibits,” such as “Shrunken heads of Incas” and marble busts of Generals Ulysses S. Grant

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and Philip Sheridan. The curators’ choice to ignore prisoners’ meager diet and resulting health issues reveals their lack of interest in depicting the horrors of prison life. Former prisoners, like Samuel Boggs, were determined to share their stories and took great pains to depict the realities of prison life. Boggs, who spent time at Belle Isle, Libby, Andersonville, and several other prisons, related that the guards at Libby “seemed determined to starve and torture us, with the intention of raising such a clamor in the north, that our government would be compelled to accede to their dishonorable terms, and to so cripple and disable us that when they did get their terms we could be unfit for soldiers” (Boggs 1887, 8). However, the museum failed to include exhibits that accurately portrayed such daily horrors that marked prisoners’ distinct wartime experiences. The museum also failed to acknowledge ex-prisoners’ hatred for the former commanders of Libby Prison, even as it perpetuated stories of unprovoked punishment. During the war, prisoners leveled accusations of cruelty against prison authorities in Richmond, especially Major Turner. Besides mentioning Turner’s shooting order in an effort to advertise the new prison yard, the Libby Prison War Museum did not outrightly condemn his mistreatment of the prisoners in his care. Yet, the museum boasted that a portrait of the former commandant now hung in the front room of the museum. This room once served as, according to the catalogue, the “prisoners’ reception room.” Although the catalogue makes the first room sound inviting, the reality was anything but. For former prisoners, this room was where their horrors began. Former prisoners often recalled entering Libby and meeting Captain Richard “Dick” Turner (no relation), who proceeded to search and rob them of their personal items before assigning them to a holding room. The museum’s minimization of this traumatic experience reveals that the owners were not particularly interested in respecting prisoners’ distinct wartime experiences. This impertinence continued as the catalogue then announced that Major Turner had visited the museum twice between its opening and 1890. Both men received an entire paragraph of acknowledgment in the catalogue, while individual prisoners received none (Libby Prison War Museum Catalogue 1890). The museum owners’ choice to feature prison commanders instead of their victims reveals that they were not particularly interested in prisoners’ stories or search for remembrance. * * *

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While the Libby Prison War Museum was initially profitable, it never produced the revenue that the Chicago businessmen had hoped it would. The New York Times reported in 1895, “The old soldiers did not go around as numerously as was anticipated, to hunt up the foot by five to six feet strips of floor which once constituted their respective couches.” The initial morbid interest in the museum did not last and its collections did not continue to draw large crowds. Furthermore, in contrast to the museum’s advertisements, the New York Times revealed, “The ancient bastile was scarcely noticed during the World’s Fair” of 1893 (New York Times, June 23, 1895). This decline in interest is not entirely unexpected. As veterans passed away and autobiographical memory of the war decreased, so did northern public interest in the Civil War. Recognizing that his enterprise was failing, the ever-resourceful Gunther converted the building into a 15,000-seat auditorium that saw several more decades of spectacles. Many of the bricks were sold as souvenirs (New York Times, April 12, 1899). A large number, however, went to the Chicago Historical Society, along with much of the museum’s collection. To commemorate the men who suffered in Libby Prison, the Historical Society constructed the north wall of their Civil War Room from the recovered bricks. The opening of the Libby Prison War Museum unearthed feelings of animosity for Union ex-prisoners of war. Although former prisoners enthusiastically told their stories, they did not welcome the museum’s appropriation of their narratives. The story of captivity, they believed, was their story to tell. They wanted non-prisoners to know of their sacrifices and suffering, to be sure, but they did not appreciate the museum’s commercialization of their distinct wartime experiences. The men who had spent time in Libby Prison during the war did not find the Libby Prison War Museum to be a memorial to their wartime experiences. Instead, the museum exacerbated their memories of suffering, reminded them of the horrors of Confederate prisons, and violated the sanctity of their experiences of suffering and death. Through their written protests, they created a contested space in which former prisoners of war again fought to be remembered in their nation’s history.

Notes 1. Although Camp Sumter was the camp’s official name, Union prisoners and Confederate authorities commonly referred to it as Andersonville—the rail station and town closest to the stockade. During the camp’s brief existence from February 1864 to April 1865, 12,912 Union soldiers died within its walls.

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2. It is important to note that the concept of collective memory differs from autobiographical and historical memory as it draws strength from a body of individuals who remember the event with similar enough detail to constitute a collective recollection. By definition, collective memory does not exceed the boundaries of the group that experienced the memorable event. In The Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs (1950) distinguished between autobiographical memory and historical memory. Autobiographical memory is the remembrance of the events in an individual’s life that he or she experienced directly. Historical memory refers to the resonation of events through time regardless of the original generation’s presence. Historical memory of the American Civil War, for instance, is part of the collective narrative of the United States, even though no one today has autobiographical memory of the event. John Bodnar (1993) examined collective memory and its connection to cultural and public memory. He argued that collective memory is intimately linked with cultural memory, as the latter forms through the construction, adaptation, and circulation of certain codes, words, sounds, and images. These tropes and images are often a product of those who experienced an event. So even after the members of the original group pass away, the cultural memory remains. If disseminated well enough through official and vernacular cultural expressions, cultural memory may emerge as public memory. 3. John Ender, Esq. originally constructed the warehouse in 1845. He passed away in 1851. Luther Libby and Abraham Burton purchased the brick warehouse as part of their business partnership before 1861 (“Distressing Event,” Richmond Enquirer, October 21, 1851; “Dissolution of Co-Partnership,” Richmond Dispatch, March 11, 1861). 4. The main Richmond-area military prisons were Belle Isle, Castle Godwin, Castle Lightning, and Castle Thunder. Several other locations also housed prisoners temporarily. By April 9, 1862, there were a total of 724 individuals in confinement, “prisoners of war, 435; citizens, 232; deserters, 9; Confederates, 25; negroes, 10.” By May 12, 1862, the prison hosted 1157 prisoners. 5. Although the Museum was in Chicago during the year of the Columbian Exposition, it had no connection with the World’s Fair. 6. For more information on how the Civil War affected Americans’ perception of masculinity, see (Berry 2003; Kimmel 1996; Walsh 2013, 2014). 7. Captain Henry Wirz was the commandant of Andersonville. With the start of the Wirz trial in July 1865, hundreds of ex-prisoners testified to Wirz’s brutality, the atrocious conditions within the camp, and the deadline—the perimeter within the stockade beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot. Many of those published post-1865 included graphic descriptions of starving, diseased prisoners being abused by their captors.

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8. In his Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative (1994), historian Robert Doyle states, “Cruelty nonetheless remained the prisoners’ fate at the hands of commandants and guards who understood such treatment to be part of their duties. At Libby Prison the general order was given to the guards by the commandant to shoot any head that appeared in the window.” Doyle cites Herbert C.  Fooks, Prisoners of War (1924), who got his information from Frank E.  Moran’s 1890 memoir. Neither Doyle nor Fooks investigated the veracity of Moran’s claim. Yet, it is important to recognize that by 1890 when Moran wrote his memoir, stories such as these had evolved into a common literary trope.

References Berry, Stephen W., II. 2003. All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South. New York: Oxford University Press. Bodnar, John. 1993. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boggs, Samuel. 1887. Eighteen Months under the Rebel Flag, a Condensed Pen-­ Picture of Belle Isle, Danville, Andersonville, Charleston, Florence, and Libby Prisons. Lovington, IL: Privately printed. Buenger, Nancy. 2005. Charles Frederic Gunther. In American National Biography, Supplement 2, ed. Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press. Casey, John A. 2015. New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-­ Nineteenth-­Century American Literature and Culture. New  York: Fordham University Press. Cashin, Joan E. 2011. Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War. Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (3): 339–365. Cavada, Federico Fernandez. 1864. Libby Life: Experiences of a Prisoner of War in Richmond, Va., 1863–1864. Philadelphia: King & Baird. Chicago Herald. 1889. Libby Prison, September 21. Chicago Tribune. 1895. Relics of Lincoln in Chicago, February 10. Domby, Adam. 2017. Captives of Memory: The Contested Legacy of Race and Atrocity at Andersonville National Historic Site. Civil War History 63 (3): 253–294. Doyle, Robert C. 1994. Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Ellsworth, W.W. 1893. Forty-Eight Hours in Chicago, 11 February 1893. The Christian Union: A Family Paper 47 (1): 267. Fooks, Herbert C. 1924. Prisoners of War. Federalsburg, MD: J. W. Stowell. Foote, Lorien. 2016. The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Gray, Michael. 2001. The Business of Captivity: Elmira and its Civil War Prison. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. ———, ed. 2018. Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. The Collective Memory. New  York: Harper-­ Colophon Books. Hamilton, Andrew G. 1893. Story of the Famous Tunnel Escape from Libby Prison. Chicago: S. S. Boggs. Harris, M. Keith. 2014. Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Johnston, Isaac N. 1864. Four Months in Libby, and the Campaign against Atlanta. Cincinnati, OH: R. P. Thompson, Methodist Book Concern. Kent, William Parmiter. 189?. The Story of Libby Prison, Also Some Perils and Sufferings of Certain of its Inmates. Chicago: Libby Prison War Museum Association. Kimmel, Michael S. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press. Lennon, J.  John, and Malcolm Foley. 1996. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Continuum. Libby Prison War Museum Broadside. c. 1890. Chicago, IL: Chicago Historical Society. Libby Prison War Museum Catalogue and Program. 1890. Chicago, IL: Libby Prison War Museum Association. Moran, Frank E. 1888. Colonel Rose’s Tunnel at Libby Prison. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 770–790, March. ———. 1890. Bastilles of the Confederacy. Baltimore: Privately printed. New York Times. 1888a. Calls It a Vile Scheme, February 11. ———. 1888b. A Soldier’s Protest. Libby Prison Should Be Kept from Speculators, February 15. ———. 1895. Libby Prison to be Demolished, June 23. ———. 1899. End of Libby, April 12. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Powel, Robert J. Hare. 1888. The Libby Prison Show. New York Times, March 2. Richmond Dispatch. 1861. Dissolution of Co-Partnership, March 11. ———. 1862a. Change of Quarters, March 7. ———. 1862b. C.S. Prison Statistics, April 9. ———. 1888. Libby Prison Has Been Purchased by a Western Syndicate; To Chicago It Goes; It Will be Pulled Down and Re-erected in the Lake City; Gigantic Undertaking; To Carry It Out $200,000 to be Subscribed; A Famous Building; Interesting Historical Incidents in Connection With It; Escape of

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Colonel Streight’s Party; Removal of the Prisoners at the Time of the Evacuation, &c., &c., &c, February 7. ———. 1889. The Libby in Chicago: Fears that the Prison Show May Lose Them Trade, June 1. Richmond Enquirer. 1851. Distressing Event, October 21. Riotto, Angela M. 2018. Beyond ‘the Scrawl’d, Worn Slips of Paper’: Union and Confederate Prisoners of War and their Postwar Memories. Ph.D. diss., University of Akron, Akron, OH. Sturgis, Thomas. 1912. Prisoners of War. In Personal Recollections of the War of the Rebellion, ed. A.N. Blackman. New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons. Taylor, W.  M. 1889. Doesn’t Want Any Libby Prison Here. Chicago Tribune, May 12. Walsh, Chris. 2013. ‘Cowardice Weakness or Infirmity, Whichever It May Be Termed’: A Shadow History of the Civil War. Civil War History 59 (4): 492–526. ———. 2014. Cowardice: A Brief History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. White, Henry S. 1990. Prison Life Among the Rebels: Recollections of a Union Chaplain. Edited by E. D. Jervey. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Randolph Cemetery and the Politics of Death in the Post-Civil War South Ashley Towle

On February 27, 1871, two thousand African Americans marched through the streets of Columbia, South Carolina, in a tribute to Benjamin F.  Randolph, a black state senator who had been assassinated by white conservatives three years earlier. The crowd’s destination was Randolph Cemetery, where they laid the cornerstone of a monument in honor of the slain senator. Amid the procession were black militia companies dressed in uniform, black masons bedecked in their masonic aprons, a host of fraternal and benevolent societies, and a brass band whose music echoed throughout the city. This appropriation of city streets by African Americans in a show of community strength and military prowess would have been unthinkable just six years before, but much had changed since the end of the Civil War and the onset of Reconstruction. The procession captured the essence of that contradictory period of hope and progress, and of ruthless violence and oppression known as Reconstruction. Black masons and benevolent societies marching through the streets were emblematic of the flurry of institution and community building that African Americans embarked on at the end of the Civil War, A. Towle (*) University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_8

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as they erected separate black churches, schools, masonic lodges, fraternal organizations, and mutual aid societies, as well as black-owned-and-­ operated cemeteries. Ceremonies surrounding the burial of black politicians revealed the pride that black people took in the political strides they had made once they gained the right to vote, as they mobilized to send black majorities to the state House of Representatives and oftentimes the Senate.1 Indeed, Randolph had been elected to the South Carolina Senate as a result of this political organizing. But his murder by white conservatives exposed the dangers of Reconstruction, as white supremacists violently attempted to curb African-American advancement and racial equality. In the wake of this bloodshed, African Americans in Columbia created Randolph Cemetery to honor the martyred senator. The cemetery became a site that memorialized the advances African Americans made during Reconstruction, while also serving as a reminder of the violence black people had endured to achieve that progress.2 Only twenty years after the Randolph monument was erected, South Carolina’s Democratic Party, a bastion of white conservatives, had violently stifled the progress made by Randolph and his colleagues toward racial equality. As a result, in the 1890s, the most significant burial in the cemetery was not of an illustrious African-American politician, but an innocent teenage boy named Wade Haynes who was executed by the state of South Carolina for a murder he almost certainly did not commit. Haynes became an inadvertent martyr for racial justice through his burial in Randolph Cemetery. When black South Carolinians used Haynes’ funeral to denounce racism and discrimination, they built on the tradition of creating and honoring martyrs that they had developed during Randolph’s funeral and memorialization. Cemeteries such as Randolph Cemetery were integral to this method of protest. They provided spaces to valorize the dead and created martyrs to inspire the living as they confronted the ever-present specter of violence and murder in the post-­ emancipation South. Benjamin Franklin Randolph embodied the opportunities the Civil War and Reconstruction offered African Americans. Born to a free black family in Kentucky in 1820, he graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, and worked as the principal of an African-American public school in Buffalo, New York. In 1863, during the Civil War, he joined the Union Army and served as a chaplain with the 26th United States Colored Troops. His military service brought him to South Carolina; at the end of the war, he remained in the state, serving as the assistant superintendent of education

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in the Freedmen’s Bureau. In this role, he inspected newly established freed people’s schools and helped to create schools for former slaves. Randolph also continued his ministerial work in South Carolina. He was accepted into the South Carolina Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a minister in 1867.3 Along with his contributions to black education and religion, Randolph became a leader of the state Republican Party and helped establish two African-American newspapers, the Charleston Journal and the Charleston Advocate. He was an active member of the Union League, a political organization that championed the interests of southern freedmen. His influence in South Carolina was especially apparent in his participation in the Colored People’s Convention held in Charleston in 1865. At the convention, Randolph and the rest of the delegates discussed “plans best calculated to advance the interests of our people.” These plans included black male suffrage, access to education, and the rights to bear arms and serve on juries (Proceedings of the Colored People’s Convention 1865, 5; Foner 1988, 112–116). Randolph’s most significant political action came in 1868, when he served as a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention and as a state senator for Orangeburg County. In order to be readmitted into the Union, Congress tasked states with drafting new constitutions that included black male suffrage. In his capacity as a delegate to the convention, Randolph was instrumental in drafting an article for the new South Carolina Constitution that authorized free integrated public education in the state. In his effort to pass the article, Randolph explained that he envisioned the United States to be at a crossroads of racial reckoning. “There is no backing down from these questions [of racial inclusion]. We are laying the foundation of a new structure here, and the time has come when we shall have to meet things squarely, and we must meet them now or never. The day is coming when we must decide whether the two races shall live together or not” (Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention 1868, 747). Randolph’s vision of racial equality was distressing to conservative white Southerners still reeling from the defeat of the Civil War and emancipation. At a meeting of white Democrats, D.  Wyatt Aiken, a former Confederate officer and state legislator, suggested bluntly that Randolph should be killed for his advocacy of African-Americans’ rights. He urged his listeners to “never suffer the Hon. B. F. Randolph to come in their midst; and, that if he did, to give him a piece of land four feet by six” (Reports and Resolutions of the General Assembly 1870, 620–621,

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625–626). Many white Southerners heeded such calls for a campaign of terror to prevent African Americans from exercising their new voting rights during the 1868 presidential election. Randolph was one victim of this bloody strategy. On October 16, 1868, during a speaking tour in support of the national Republican ticket, Randolph prepared to depart Hodge’s Station in Abbeville County. As he stood on the train in broad daylight, three white men approached and shot him fatally (Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee 1872, 1258). Randolph’s assassination incited outrage across the state and laid bare the precarious position of black people as they attempted to assert their freedom and act on their new rights. The Charleston Daily Courier reported that the news of Randolph’s death “created a profound sensation among the colored people in this city yesterday. Crowds of freedmen assembled in knots and groups in the streets, and the corners of Broad and Meeting-streets were the scenes of anxious discussion throughout the entire day” (October 20, 1868). As the response of black Charlestonians made clear, the assassination had the power to galvanize African Americans. With no family in South Carolina, Randolph’s burial arrangements fell to his Republican colleagues, who vacillated over where to hold the funeral. Leading Republicans feared that bringing Randolph’s body to Charleston would be too dangerous, believing that “such a step in the present state of feeling among the blacks would be unadvisable” (Charleston Daily Courier, October 20, 1868). Eventually, Republicans telegraphed Republican Governor Robert K. Scott, asking to have the senator buried in Columbia, the state capital (Charleston Daily News, October 20, 1868). Randolph’s funeral provided an opportunity for African Americans to collectively mourn the loss of a leader and to mobilize to ensure that his death had not been in vain. On the afternoon of October 18, a large crowd of black South Carolinians gathered at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbia to attend Randolph’s funeral. Inside the crowded church, three of Randolph’s friends delivered eulogies in honor of their slain comrade. Following the service, funeral-goers poured out of the church and wound their way through the streets en route to the municipal cemetery in northwest Columbia (Daily Phoenix, October 20, 1868).4 Immediately following Randolph’s funeral, newspapers, politicians, and laypeople began to cultivate a public memory of Randolph as a martyr to the causes of liberty, justice, and equality. Benjamin Tanner, editor of the Philadelphia-based African-American newspaper the Christian Recorder,

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lamented Randolph’s murder, calling him a “martyr to the cause of reconstruction.” According to Tanner, Randolph’s death evidenced the lengths to which white Southerners were willing to go to keep African Americans in a subordinate position: “B.  F. Randolph has made his last and only remaining sacrifice. Perhaps it was necessary that this bright star should be stricken out, to show how black is the night in which the slave oligarchs of the South would doom the negro.” Despite Randolph’s murder, Tanner remained optimistic: “But let them know that our night is past, that our day is at hand; and as well may they attempt to chain the chariot of the glorious sun” (October 31, 1868). Likewise, the Charleston Advocate, an African-American newspaper Randolph had helped start, published a poem entitled “Randolph,” that predicted that the senator’s death would serve to advance the causes of liberty and equality. The poem opened by recounting Randolph’s murder, questioning whether his murderers would ever be brought to justice, but concluded with a threat to those who had struck down the senator: Thy martyr blood that stains your soil May yet rouse Vengeance from its lair. Still’d is the voice that waked your fears, The heart ye hated throbs no more; But while we steep his grave in tears, His cause is dearer than before. (October 24, 1868)

In the following years, African-American political leaders would use Randolph’s grave, and the legacy it commemorated, to rouse African Americans to action. In the wake of Randolph’s elevation to martyrdom, African-American politicians envisioned creating a lasting memorial to the slain senator. In so doing, they sought to harness the power of Randolph’s sacrifice by erecting a monument to serve as a permanent reminder of the causes for which he had given his life. On January 9, 1869, in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Thaddeus K.  Sasportas, a black representative from Randolph’s home county of Orangeburg, introduced a bill “to provide for the erection of a monument to the memory of the late Hon. B F Randolph” (Journal of the House of Representatives 1869, 164). The bill was the first attempt to create a lasting monument to Randolph; it was referred to the Committee on Ways and Means, but apparently progressed no further.5 It would be two more years before the state erected a monument.

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By March 1870, a proposal to establish a monument to Randolph emerged once again. This time, Alonzo J. Ransier, Randolph’s successor as chairman of the state central committee, announced that he had created a subscription fund to purchase a new lot in which to inter Randolph’s body with an appropriate marker. Black legislators including Robert Smalls, a former slave and Civil War hero who had piloted a Confederate ship to freedom behind Union lines, voiced their support for the fund. In a showing of biracial cooperation, white Republican Governor Scott ordered the prospective monument to state “the fact of his being a martyr and charge the crime on the party who murdered him,” and pledged $100 to the subscription fund (Charleston Daily Republican, March 8, 1870; Brown 2018, 106). Plans to erect the monument to Randolph were underway by July 1870. Ransier, speaking on behalf of the Randolph Monument Committee, reported to the state nominating convention that they planned to reinter Randolph’s body “near the present Columbia Cemetery, in a lot of ground to be called the Randolph Monumental Cemetery.”6 As he spoke about the importance of the monument, Ransier cast Randolph as a martyr not only for African Americans, but for the Republican Party more broadly. He asserted that Randolph had not been killed “because he was a negro, but because he was a man representing the principle of equal rights in this country” (Charleston Daily Republican, July 27, 1870; Brown 2018, 106–107). White and black Republican politicians who supported the monument likely viewed its construction as a personal act of defiance against white supremacy. Any one of them could potentially become the next victim of white Democrats’ violence, yet they refused to be cowed. As such, the monument represented a public and permanent assertion of black courage and denunciation of white terror. The proposed memorial to Randolph took on an increased importance following the bloodshed of the 1870 state elections. As white and black Republicans continued to gain political power in the state, white conservatives resorted to violence to curtail their influence. The 1870 election season witnessed a host of bloody conflagrations, including the Laurens Riot in which six black Republicans and one white Republican were killed by white Democrats. Among the victims of the Laurens Riot was Wade Perrin, an African-American state representative from Laurens County. His body lay in state at the statehouse before his funeral ceremony took place in the chamber of the House of Representatives. Then, according to the Charleston Daily News, his “remains were buried in the cemetery

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where Randolph lies” (January 31, 1871).7 It is unclear who decided to bury Perrin in the same cemetery as Randolph, but this choice of location reinvigorated the campaign to erect a monument to the martyrs of Reconstruction. With two assassinated African-American elected officials buried there, the cemetery became a nascent memorial ground for those slain in the pursuit of racial equality. Within a month of Perrin’s burial, the state senate moved for a monument to be erected to Randolph and Perrin. Despite earlier discussions of including Perrin on the memorial, however, the final monument was dedicated only to Randolph. On February 24, 1871, the “Special Committee on the Randolph Monument,” headed by Ransier, invited the House of Representatives to take part in the dedication of the monument.8 Black men and women in Columbia used the monument dedication as an opportunity to mourn the loss of their leaders while simultaneously celebrating the political and social strides they had made since emancipation. On February 27, 1871, in front of a large crowd of African Americans, the cornerstone for the monument was laid over Randolph’s new grave in a corner of the privately owned and primarily white Elmwood Cemetery. Chief Marshal Colonel William B.  Nash and the Committee of Arrangements led the ceremony, which began with a march from the statehouse to the cemetery. State legislators, black militia companies, black benevolent societies, a brass band, Governor Scott, and black citizens of Columbia followed behind in the procession (Charleston Daily News, March 1, 1871). One participant in the ceremony estimated that there were nearly two thousand people in attendance: “every Compny of the City and 2 from Charleston wose hear. Music of all discrpton wose hear.” The onlooker also remarked on the variety of classes of people who took part in the dedication, from the wealthy to the poor, noting that “Sum in uniforme and Sum in Citoson Clothren Sum in Shurt Sleve and Sum barfutted but all wose a muven a long” (Mother & Father, March 10, 1871).9 While the exact route of the procession is not known, by beginning at the statehouse the organizers linked Randolph’s martyrdom to his political service. The route to the cemetery would have taken the procession through the heart of the city. They likely would have passed former spaces of white authority, including the city hall and the courthouse, or their route could have taken them past symbols of black community organization and institution building, including two black churches established after emancipation. Regardless of their route, by appropriating public streets in the city center, African Americans boldly proclaimed their

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freedom and exercised their right to access these public spaces. These sorts of processions had been a part of antebellum white political culture prior to the Civil War, but now, black Columbians staked their claim to the streets and citizenship as well (Varon 1998). The anonymous spectator’s observations also revealed that the festivities were not solely the purview of elite men. The public nature of the event allowed working-class African-­ American men, women, and children to participate and by entering the public sphere, they asserted themselves politically. While women and children were unable to vote, by appropriating city spaces they exercised their rights of citizenship and demonstrated their vested interest in Randolph and his legacy.10 This collective showing of support for Randolph’s cause represented a defiance of the violence and intimidation that white Southerners wielded. As the procession neared Elmwood Cemetery, it would have passed by the state fairgrounds. In previous years, the Democratic Party had met during the state fair to mobilize supporters in their efforts to overturn Republican rule. D. Wyatt Aiken, the man who had reportedly ordered the assassination of Randolph, was a leading organizer of the fair. Armed African-­ American militia, such as the Randolph Riflemen, marching by the state fairgrounds served as a demonstration of black masculinity, military prowess, and citizenship. Particularly in the context of recent political violence, these armed black men in uniform stood as a warning that they could and would protect themselves from future attacks by white Democrats (Charleston Daily News, March 1, 1871; Brown 2018, 113). The obelisk that was finally erected over Randolph’s grave memorialized the violence of Reconstruction: IN MEMORIAM B. F. RANDOLPH LATE STATE SENATOR FOR ORANGEBURG COUNTY AND CHAIRMAN REPUBLICAN STATE CENTRAL COMMITTEE WHO DIED AT HODGES STATION ABBEVILLE COUNTY AT THE HANDS OF ASSASSINS ON FRIDAY OCT. 16 A.D. 1868.

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By emphasizing that Randolph died “at the hands of assassins,” the stone served as a condemnation of the actions of white conservatives and reminded them that black South Carolinians would remember the unsolved murder of one of their own. More broadly, that single line ensured that the memory of the bloodshed during Reconstruction was literally written in stone and would not be forgotten by the community or future generations. Perhaps as a result of the monument’s radical message, vandals attempted to topple it in February 1873. They took hammers and crowbars to the obelisk, breaking off a large piece of the base (Daily Phoenix, February 23, 1873). In response, cemetery trustees petitioned the General Assembly to donate a block of granite from the South Carolina State House grounds to either repair the memorial or to erect a new monument dedicated “to the memory of deceased members of the General Assembly and prominent officers of the State” (Daily Phoenix, March 3, 1874). The proposal to incorporate stone from the statehouse into the monument served as an additional testament to the political achievements made by African Americans during their short time in office.11 While the monument to Randolph represented a significant start to commemorating the senator, local black leaders had bigger plans. At the time of the cornerstone ceremony, they were in talks with Elmwood Cemetery officials to purchase the land within the cemetery where Randolph’s grave and monument were located to create Randolph Cemetery. On May 11, 1871, Alonzo Ransier convened a meeting to establish the Randolph Cemetery Association. As Thomas J.  Brown has pointed out, it is likely not a coincidence that the Association met one day after the annual Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies had taken place in Elmwood Cemetery (2018, 111). Immediately following the Civil War, white women in Columbia—and across the South—formed Ladies’ Memorial Associations to honor the Confederate dead. As Caroline Janney has argued, the activities of these Ladies’ Memorial Associations, including decorating Confederate graves on Memorial Day, constituted “a political response to Reconstruction” and were instrumental in enshrining the idea of the Lost Cause (2008, 3). By establishing Randolph Cemetery adjacent to this site of Confederate memorialization, African-American leaders created a counter-landscape to that of Elmwood Cemetery in which they could foster their own historical memory of Reconstruction. By January 1872, the Randolph Cemetery Association successfully purchased three acres of land for $900 in the western section of Elmwood Cemetery.12

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The Association was comprised of nineteen men, many of whom were part of Columbia’s elite African-American community. Three of these men had also served on the committee to erect Randolph’s monument. The Association included politicians such as William Nash and Alonzo Ransier, as well as barbers, carpenters, grocers, school commissioners, farmers, an attorney, a trial justice, and a minister. The array of professions demonstrated that the project drew from a large swath of the black community, but it also evinced that this was largely an elite endeavor. These men likely considered the undertaking to be part of their civic duty to the black community. Across the South, local black politicians were at the forefront of efforts to establish black cemeteries as well as burial societies and mutual aid societies. Indeed, three members of the Randolph Cemetery Association, Alonzo Reese, Isaac Black, and Captain J. Carroll, were members of the Friendly Union Society of Columbia, a benevolent organization and burial society (New South Associates 2007, 15; Brown 2018, 113). While these organizations were usually only accessible to wealthier families, participants considered them to be an important avenue for uplifting black society and fostering an image of respectability.13 In establishing Randolph Cemetery, these men staked out a space within which to honor their dead, and claimed a highly visible place for African Americans in the city’s memorial landscape. In the following years, prominent black politicians and their families came to rest in the cemetery, further enhancing the cemetery’s role as a monument to African-American political power. At least ten African-­ American general assemblymen, five city council members, and four state senators are buried in the cemetery. Extant records suggest that the cemetery charged nearly $30 for a plot, which meant that it was not a place where many of Columbia’s laboring African Americans could afford to be buried (Trinkley and Hacker 2007, 8; New South Associates 2007, 15; Brown 2018, 100). Instead, the cemetery served as the burial place for South Carolina’s elite African-American families and politicians, and a public statement of pride in their post-emancipation achievements. Randolph Cemetery remained an important site for African Americans to commemorate their history in the midst of the racially oppressive institution of Jim Crow. In 1876, Reconstruction came to an end when Democrats wrested control of the state legislature from Republicans. Following the social, political, and economic upheavals of Reconstruction, white Southerners sought to enshrine white supremacy by implementing a three-pronged strategy of disfranchisement, lynching, and segregation of

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African Americans. In this perilous era, black people found that spaces of death, including funerals and burial grounds such as Randolph Cemetery, were useful and relatively safe places to draw inspiration from the past in order to face an uncertain and threatening future. In an annual event known as Randolph Day, African Americans from across the state convened in Columbia to celebrate the memory of B.  F. Randolph. The celebration held in August 1891 was the largest memorial yet; the newspaper The State reported an “enlargement” to the ceremony compared to previous years. The First Regiment of the National Guard from Charleston, along with the Capital City Guards and the Carolina Rifles—all African-American militia companies—marched through downtown Columbia in a “grand street parade” that culminated in Randolph Cemetery, where “memorial exercises” were held, including decorating Randolph’s grave (The State, August 6, 1891; August 7, 1891; August 16, 1891; August 18, 1891).14 While these events showcased African-American community organization, the threat they posed to Democrats who were firmly entrenched in local and state government was minimal. South Carolina Governor Benjamin Tillman’s presence at the celebration, in particular, signaled an enhanced white oversight of African-­ American public gatherings. Newspapers reported that Tillman attended the celebration to “review the troops” (The State, August 18, 1891). Just fifteen years earlier, Tillman had been an unapologetic participant in the Hamburg Massacre, in which men from his rifle club company, the Red Shirts, murdered six African-American militiamen. Two men from Tillman’s company played a smaller part in the Ellenton Riot when they were ordered to execute Simon Coker, an African-American state senator. Hamburg and Ellenton heralded the decline of Republican rule in the state and made Tillman a prominent member of the Democratic Party (Kantrowitz 2000, 40–79). During Reconstruction, a celebration like Randolph Day would have been cause for alarm among white Democrats. However, by the 1890s, African Americans had been stripped of all effective political power, and white Southerners no longer felt threatened by this display of military might and civic engagement by black men. The demise of the Republican Party in the state in 1876 meant that by 1891, Randolph Day was a commemorative event that lacked power to encourage political mobilization as previous ceremonies like Randolph’s funeral had done.15 Indeed, Tillman’s presence at the event signaled this change. By overseeing the procession

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from the balcony of the Grand Central Hotel, Tillman physically symbolized his dominance over one of the largest displays of African-American military and civic pride in the state and his ability to suppress any real threat to white supremacy. The 1891 Randolph Day celebration revealed the changed context within which African Americans now used Randolph Cemetery. Stripped of the right to vote, and lacking allies in local and state government, it was no longer safe for black people to mount overt political protests against Democrats as they had during Reconstruction. But by venerating Randolph and his achievements on Randolph Day, black participants maintained a tradition of memorialization that they had begun in 1868. Surprisingly, white newspaper reports of Randolph Day did not deride the ceremony or comment on the nature of the speeches given in the cemetery. It seems that the organizers of the ceremony successfully maintained a façade of political neutrality during the day’s events, even as they used the day to keep alive the memory of black political participation during Reconstruction. The execution and funeral of a young African-American boy named Wade Haynes further exemplify the changes Jim Crow wrought in the lives of black people in the state. In 1893, fifteen-year-old Haynes was executed by the state of South Carolina after being convicted of the 1891 murder of Florence Hornsby, a white teenager from Richland County. On November 1, Haynes had found Hornsby’s body near her home and alerted her family. As the only suspect in the case, Haynes was arrested and tried for the murder. Although the evidence was entirely circumstantial, and Haynes was most likely innocent of the crime, he was convicted of murder and hanged on May 5, 1893. Before the execution, The State reported that black people in South Carolina had taken a keen interest in the execution, and that “negroes the number of a thousand or more were massed around the jail enclosure long before the time appointed for the execution and they peeped through the cracks and viewed the scene of the coming execution from the adjoining house-tops, many of which were covered with human beings” (May 6, 1893). Outraged African-American civilians and clergy used Haynes’s execution as an opportunity to highlight the discriminatory treatment of African Americans before the law. According to The State, the “funeral of Haynes proved to be the largest mass meeting of the colored people of Columbia ever held in this city. The funeral was set for 3 o’clock but long before that hour the negroes of all classes and conditions and sexes had begun to pour

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into the church building.” During the funeral proceedings at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (the same church where Randolph’s funeral and at least one Randolph Day ceremony had been held), ministers from the city’s black churches delivered speeches defending Haynes and denouncing racism. Reverend Robert Eber Hart, the minister of Sydney Park Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbia, stood before the throngs of mourners and indignantly exclaimed, “Here lies the body of the boy. If he had been a criminal I would not say a word. I believe in punishing all criminals, no matter of what race. My reason for talking is this: Here lies a dead man, who died in innocence.” As Hart continued, he questioned the cause of the senseless death of a young boy. “Why, if this boy is innocent, is he lying here dead, you ask. It is simply this, that Wade Haynes belongs to a race that is unfortunate in this respect. He was thought to be guilty before he was tried because he was a poor colored man. There is no nationality on this earth that has such disadvantages as our race.” Despite this dispiriting conclusion, Hart looked to the future. “The present condition cannot be sustained long,” he prophesied. “There is a day in the near future when we can get a fair trial and mercy too. I believe in a God that rules the universe. The white people will have to take this government in charge and give us justice. Yet be active and stern and avenge yourselves not in blood, and die innocent” (The State, May 6, 1893). Hart’s entreaty to remain peaceful revealed the power that Haynes’ execution had to galvanize the community, and the danger they faced if they acted on their anger. The path forward had changed since Reconstruction. No longer could Hart advocate that African Americans vote for politicians like Randolph to legislate on their behalf. Instead, he attempted to assuage the grief and rage of the mourners by providing a hopeful message that God was on their side.16 Despite the orators’ measured and tactful language, the political implications of the service were not lost on white South Carolinians. The State published an article explicitly linking the racial politics of the Reconstruction era to the public demonstration at Haynes’ funeral: There was a time in South Carolina when the solid black race was arrayed against the solid white race and when the misgovernment of the negro majority was so great, so onerous, so galling, that it was impossible to separate race questions from political questions…The race hatred ingrained before 1876 has remained in many hearts…It is that which causes some negro men to make martyrs indiscriminately of those of their race who are convicted by white juries.

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The article chastised the funeral attendees, claiming that “the manner of the funeral of Wade Haynes yesterday was unwise and improper…There was no need to make a public demonstration of it, to have speeches and to be intemperate in lamentation.” The article warned that further public accusations of racial injustice would only exacerbate racial discrimination and hostility by white Southerners. The editor of The State clearly saw in Haynes’ funeral the potential for mobilization that Randolph’s funeral had represented twenty-five years earlier. Yet with the overthrow of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, white Southerners wielded the very real threat of terror to curb African-American protest and organization (The State, May 6, 1893). Haynes could have been buried in the city’s potter’s field, a burial ground for black people and poor whites. As a farm laborer, Haynes and his family were likely unable to afford a plot in Randolph Cemetery, but he was buried there, “where a plot had been presented for the purpose” (The State, May 6, 1893). By laying the body of an innocent boy to rest alongside the graves of black politicians who had advocated for the advancement of their race, the operators of Randolph Cemetery turned Haynes into a martyr for racial justice and made his death and memorialization explicitly political. Haynes’ martyrdom was representative of a tactic African Americans used to condemn racism in the new era of Jim Crow. As white violence against African-American civilians escalated in the late nineteenth century, black activists drew on methods of protest that they had cultivated during Reconstruction, using their experiences of death and mourning to denounce white violence. In her publications, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, for example, used the lynchings of innocent African Americans to call attention to the dire situation black people faced in the South. Across the post-Reconstruction South, African Americans frequently turned to civilian cemeteries and funeral services as occasions to publicly condemn the violent demise of community members at the hands of white Southerners (Brundage 1993, 46–47). These acts of turning victims of racism into martyrs for racial justice continued into the twentieth century and helped spur the Civil Rights Movement. The open-casket funeral Mamie Till Bradley held for her murdered son, Emmett Till, is the most well-known example. In 1955, Till was ruthlessly murdered while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. In Chicago, Till’s mother decided on an open-casket funeral for her son so that “everybody can see what they did to my boy” (Chicago

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Defender, October 1, 1955). She allowed Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, both African-American publications, to photograph her son’s mangled corpse and publish the photos. Like Till Bradley, the speakers at Haynes’ funeral depicted Haynes as an innocent martyr, and thereby indicted the powers that had executed him. Examining the construction and use of Randolph Cemetery during Reconstruction and Jim Crow reveals the significant role that cemeteries played in African-American communities, politics, and activism. The first memorial efforts for Randolph show the optimism with which African-­ American leaders looked to Reconstruction, despite the violent reprisals they faced at every turn. In establishing Randolph Cemetery as a separate black cemetery, and a focal point for public displays of community strength, black leaders created a sacred autonomous space for political mobilization and memorialization. In this way, Randolph Cemetery played a similar role to that of the black church in organizing community members.17 As Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, Randolph Cemetery remained an important institution for the black community to mourn and express their grief. By burying Wade Haynes, a victim of state-sponsored racism and injustice, in the same cemetery as African-American luminaries and martyrs, operators of the cemetery subtly connected his death to that of Randolph and others, using it to condemn the agents of white supremacy. While the prospects of African Americans in South Carolina had changed dramatically by the 1890s when Haynes was laid to rest, the importance of Randolph Cemetery to the black community had not.

Notes 1. W. Fitzhugh Brundage makes a similar argument about the role of civic holidays among African Americans in the post-emancipation South (2005, 55–99). 2. There have been only a few studies of Randolph Cemetery, see Trinkley and Hacker (2007), New South Associates (2007), McIntyre (2011) and Brown (2018). 3. For an overview of Randolph’s life, see “Murder of the Rev. B. F. Randolph,” Harper’s Weekly, November 21, 1868. 4. The men who provided eulogies at Randolph’s funeral are not known. Due to a lack of concrete evidence, there has been some confusion over where Randolph’s body was initially buried. Thomas J. Brown has argued convincingly that initially Randolph was buried in the municipal cemetery, and not Elmwood Cemetery as some scholars have speculated (2018, 103).

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5. I presume that the bill died in committee, as there are no references to the bill again in the Journal of the House of Representatives (1869, 164). See also, Daily Phoenix, January 12, 1869. 6. No documentation has been found confirming when Randolph’s body was moved to Randolph Cemetery. 7. It is not clear whether Randolph’s body had been removed for burial to the new memorial cemetery by this point. It would seem to make sense that Perrin would have been buried in the new Randolph Cemetery, but this cannot be confirmed. 8. No additional discussion of including Perrin on the monument has been found. It is unclear why Perrin’s name was not on the final monument that was erected. For the full proceedings of the erection of the monument, see Journal of the House of Representatives (1871, 333, 372, 470, 527). 9. The name of the spectator is not known. 10. On African Americans’ presence in the public sphere and an enlarged vision of citizenship, see Rosen (2009), Barkley Brown (1994), Katchun (2003) and Clark (2006). 11. It is not clear if the stone was ever donated. 12. Thomas Brown contends that the Association chose to purchase land in Elmwood for practical reasons. Space was limited in the municipal cemetery where Randolph was initially buried, and the cemetery had fallen into disrepair. Through the sale, Elmwood stood to make money off a portion of the cemetery. Black people had been buried in this section since at least 1864, making it undesirable to white prospective lot holders (2018, 104–105). 13. For more on postwar black cemetery building in the South, see Towle (2017, 160–196). For more on black burial societies and uplift, see Blassingame (1973, 167–169), Levine (1997) and Hinks and Kantrowitz (2013). 14. The date of the first Randolph Day is not known. The State reported on the 1891 celebration as an “enlargement” of the “annual event” leading me to conclude that there had at least been one, if not two, previous Randolph Days to warrant that comparison. The last reported Randolph Day ceremony occurred on September 15, 1895. The ceremony took place at Bethel Church, rather than at Randolph Cemetery (The State, September 16, 1895). 15. Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts make a similar argument about black rifle clubs in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1890s (2018, 89–90). 16. These statements are similar to those voiced by civil rights activists in the twentieth century. David L. Chappell argues that many civil rights activists joined the movement because they viewed it as a battle between good and evil in which God was on the side of African Americans (2004, 2–4, 87–104).

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17. Historians such as David L.  Chappell (2004) and Charles Payne (1995) have documented the critical role that the black church played in organizing and motivating African-American civil rights activists during the twentieth century.

References Blassingame, John W. 1973. Black New Orleans, 1860–1880. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Elsa Barkley. 1994. Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom. Public Culture 7 (1): 107–146. Brown, Thomas J. 2018. The Post-Emancipation City of the Dead. In Reconstruction and the Arc of Racial (In)Justice, ed. Julian Maxwell Hayter and George R. Goethals, 99–129. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Brundage, William Fitzhugh. 1993. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2005. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chappell, David L. 2004. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Charleston Advocate. 1868. Randolph, October 24. Charleston Daily Courier. 1868. The Randolph Murder, October 20. Charleston Daily News. 1868. Randolph, October 20. ———. 1871. The State Capital, January 31. ———. 1871. Randolph’s Monument, March 1. Charleston Daily Republican. 1870. Special Notices, March 8. ———. 1870. From Columbia, July 27. Chicago Defender. 1955. Here’s a Picture of Emmett Till Painted by Those Who Knew Him, October 1. Christian Recorder. 1868. The Late Hon. B. F. Randolph, October 31. Clark, Kathleen Ann. 2006. Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Daily Phoenix. 1868. Local Items, October 20. ———. 1869. State Legislature, January 12. ———. 1873. Robbing a Monument, February 23. ———. 1874. The State Legislature, March 3. Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row. Harper’s Weekly. 1868. Murder of the Rev. B. F. Randolph, November 21.

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Hinks, Peter P., and Stephen David Kantrowitz, eds. 2013. All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of Prince Hall Freemasonry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Janney, Caroline E. 2008. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 1868–69. 1869. Columbia, SC: J. W. Denny. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, Being the Regular Session of 1870–’71. 1871. Columbia, SC: Republican Printing Company. Kantrowitz, Stephen. 2000. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Katchun, Mitch. 2003. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and the Meaning of African American Emancipation, 1808–1915. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kytle, Ethan J., and Blain Roberts. 2018. Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: New Press. Levine, Daniel. 1997. A Single Standard of Civilization: Black Private Social Welfare Institutions in the South, 1880s–1920s. Georgia Historical Quarterly 81 (1): 52–77. McIntyre, Justin G. 2011. Benjamin Franklin Randolph Monument: Remembrance and Defiance in the Age of Reconstruction. MA thesis, University of South Carolina. Mother & Father to My Dear Daughter. 1871, March 10. Elsie Booker Collection. Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. New South Associates. 2007. Randolph Cemetery: Mapping and Documentation of a Historic African-American Site. Columbia, SC: New South Associates Technical Report. Payne, Charles M. 1995. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Proceedings of the Colored People’s Convention of the State of South Carolina, Held in Zion Church, Charleston, November, 1865. Together with the Declaration of Rights and Wrongs; an Address to the People; a Petition to the Legislature, and a Memorial to Congress. 1865. Charleston: South Carolina Leader Office. Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina, Held at Charleston, S.C., Beginning January 14th and Ending March 17th, 1868, Vol. I. 1868. Charleston, SC: Denny & Perry. Reports and Resolutions of the General Assembly, S.C. 1869–1870. 1870. Columbia, SC: W. E. Johnston. Rosen, Hannah. 2009. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States-South Carolina, Vol. I. 1872. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. The State. 1891. Randolph Day in Columbia, August 6. ———. 1891. The Colored Celebration, August 7. ———. 1891. Review by the Governor, August 16. ———. 1891. Reviewed by Governor Tillman, August 18. ———. 1893. Bravely Faced Death, May 6. ———. 1893. Some Advice to the Negro, May 6. ———. 1895. Randolph Memorial Services, September 16. Towle, Ashley. 2017. Dying Free: African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom. PhD diss., University of Maryland. Trinkley, Michael, and Debi Hacker. 2007. A Small Sample of Burials at Randolph Cemetery: What Their Stories Tell Us About the Cemetery and African American Life in Columbia. Columbia, SC: Chicora Foundation, Inc. Varon, Elizabeth. 1998. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 9

“The Same Effort and the Same Death”: The Memory of the Langalibalele Incident of 1873 Jacob Ivey

In the town gardens of Pietermaritzburg in the district of KwaZulu-Natal in the Republic of South Africa sits a crumbling white stone obelisk. Inscribed on one side of this marker are the words: “In a good cause, not in their own, / they perished, / wept for, honoured, known.” On another face the inscription continues, “One country: / one interest: one object: / the same effort, / and the same death.” These words adorn the “Carbineer Monument,” commemorating the deaths of three members of the Natal Carbineers and two “loyal natives” at an incident at Bushman’s Pass in what is described as the “Langalibalele Rebellion” of 1873. The memorial sits in the shadow of Pietermaritzburg’s City Hall in the corner of what was once called Carbineer Gardens, but has recently been renamed “The Carbineer’s Garden of Peace.” On the opposite end of South Africa, at the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island in Cape Town, a list of “criminals” and “rebels” includes Langalibalele kaMtimkhulu, Chief of

J. Ivey (*) School of Arts and Communications, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_9

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the amaHlubi and leader of the rebellion, who was captured, tried, and imprisoned on the island in 1874. These two historical markers combine to highlight one of the more problematic episodes in the history of colonial Natal and British Southern Africa. But they also reveal an evolution in indigenous participation in remembering and commemorating the region’s colonial history. Though both Africans and Europeans appear on the inscription of the memorial in Pietermaritzburg as experiencing “the same death,” they were not remembered in the same way, and the person whose attempted arrest caused the deaths in question became an important conduit for the memory of African resistance to colonial rule. The Langalibalele Incident is a key indicator of the progress of British imperial authority in the region and, more importantly, revelatory of the complex colonial past of KwaZulu-Natal and the manner in which South Africa continues to wrestle with its colonial legacy in the present. The Langalibalele Incident or “Rebellion” was one of the defining moments in the early history of the British colony of Natal, situated in what is today KwaZulu-Natal along the south-eastern coast of present-day South Africa (Etherington 1978; McClendon 2010, 92–101; Guy 2013, 388–394).1 The conflict between Langalibalele and the colonial state eventually led to a clash between the white volunteers of the Natal Carbineers and an amaHlubi contingent linked to Langalibalele at Bushman’s Pass in November 1873. Though Langalibalele’s challenge to colonial rule did not reverberate on the same level as the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 or the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906, it remains a key case study in understanding the expansion of British imperial power in Southern Africa. The stone monument in the Carbineer’s Garden of Peace is telling of the complex imperial history and memory of the colony of Natal from its formative period to the present.2 This chapter will examine the incident itself, the response to the event among white colonists, and later commemorations of the event in the changing political landscape of South Africa, as the country wrestles with its colonial past in the post-apartheid era. The evolution of this commemoration moved from monuments to remembrance events, and finally to the complete repositioning of Langalibalele from villain to hero in the history of South Africa. The events of this supposed rebellion have already been extensively analyzed, appraised, and debated within the historiography of Natal (Etherington 1978; Dominy 1991; Herd 1976; McClendon 2010; Guy 2013). In brief, Langalibalele kaMtimkhulu, Chief of the amaHlubi, arrived in the colony of Natal in 1848 seeking refuge from the Zulu

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kingdom. Langalibalele had fled the Zulu kingdom in response to the conflict and ascension crisis of Dingane and Mpande, the two leaders of the kingdom after the death of their brother Shaka, the most well-known Zulu leader in history. The powerful African chief and his followers settled between the Bushman’s and Little Thukela Rivers in the northeastern section of the colony and soon became a fixture of the colonial order and British imperial rule. However, following a dispute in 1873 between Langalibalele and the colonial government stemming from the supposed possession of illegal firearms, the chief of the amaHlubi soon evolved into a “savage villain” and a treasonous force against British authority in the eyes of the colonial population. This reputation was exacerbated by the death of three white volunteers of the Natal Carbineers at Bushman’s Pass in November 1873, although Langalibalele had not even been present at the battle. This casting as a villain after 1873 was even more ironic considering that on multiple occasions during the previous two decades Langalibalele had aided the British in organizing and subjugating other African leaders. He did so under the system of administration created and implemented by Natal’s Secretary for Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone (McClendon 2010; Guy 2013; Etherington 1989; Welsh 1971). This system, which dominated the colony of Natal until the end of the nineteenth century, tapped into local power networks to exercise control, also relying heavily on the personal relationships and power dynamics between Shepstone and local indigenous rulers. Langalibalele was arguably one of the more important symbols of the Shepstone system. He had, after his arrival in 1848, become a powerful inkosi (chief or ruler) in the region, assisting Shepstone on several occasions in the implementation of colonial rule. Langalibalele solidified this position in 1857–1858 when the inkosi provided troops to the British government in what was known as the Matshana Incident. In December 1857, a mysterious death connected to witchcraft occurred within the territory of Matshana, chief of the Sithole in the Msinga region of the colony. Because of the government’s negative opinion of witchcraft and its use within the colony, Matshana was called to appear before the local magistrate to address these issues. In a blatant challenge to colonial authority, Matshana refused. In response, John Shepstone (brother to Theophilus) gathered a force of forty-seven men from the Natal Carbineers and Natal Frontier Guard, thirty-eight Afrikaner cavalry, and an additional five hundred indigenous troops, many supplied by Langalibalele, to arrest Matshana (Mann 1859, 220–221). Though the

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arrest attempt failed, some four thousand cattle, three horses, and two thousand goats and sheep were seized and Matshana’s kraal’s population dispersed (McClendon 2010, 72–79).3 Langalibalele was rewarded with land and cattle, and these seizures substantially increased his power in the region. However, Langalibalele’s assistance only provided a fifteen-year respite from similar attacks. The ire of the colonial state eventually shifted to the amaHlubi chief in 1873. The Langalibalele Incident of 1873 was representative of a clash of indigenous and colonial forces over the issue of sovereignty and more importantly the rights of defense. In 1873, John Macfarlane, Resident Magistrate at the town of Estcourt (sixty miles north of Pietermaritzburg), demanded that Langalibalele turn in all unregistered firearms under Natal’s gun laws. Though African possession of firearms had always been an issue within Natal, recent movements of migrant labor from the Free State and Transvaal had heightened concern about illegal gun possession (Storey 2012, 144). Much as Matshana had done, Langalibalele refused to submit to colonial authority. A number of white volunteer regiments were called up in response to his refusal, including the Natal Carbineers. The volunteers’ plan of action included two columns which moved into the Bushman’s River Pass in an attempt to prevent Langalibalele from fleeing the colony and escaping punishment for defying the resident magistrate. Yet the columns did not successfully meet up due to a military blunder, leaving a section of the Natal Carbineers under the command of Major Anthony Durnford of the Royal Engineers alone to discover a contingent of amaHlubi at the Pass on the morning of November 4th. The Pass was a narrow valley along the present-day Lesotho-South African border in the Drakensberg Mountain range and one of the few accessible passes out of Natal. A short engagement broke out and, outnumbered, the Carbineers were forced to retreat. When the dust settled, three volunteers were dead, along with two indigenous interpreters who reported to Shepstone. No longer impeded by the government forces and fearing further reprisal, Langalibalele fled toward Lesotho. Although there is considerable debate in the historiography about the reasons for Langalibalele’s actions, pride and ego surely dictated the actions of both sides. Langalibalele refused to submit to the local magistrate, seeing his demands as a challenge to Langalibalele’s authority and autonomy. The colonial government potentially overreacted with its use of force, concerned that Langalibalele’s refusal was a pretext for insurrection. And the volunteers at Bushman’s Pass likely saw themselves as a

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superior force against the “native troops” of Langalibalele. The disastrous results, whatever the motivations, immediately led to disputes over the memory of events at the pass. After the incident at Bushman’s Pass, much was made of Major Durnford’s report that orders were given “not to fire the first shot,” but despite these orders, accounts of the event suggest that it was in all likelihood a failure of the volunteers’ discipline that contributed to the “disaster” and deaths at the pass (BPP 1874). The failure of Captain Allison’s African troops to arrive on time to assist Durnford, however, gained the most scorn from the colonial population. Lieutenant-Governor of Natal Benjamin Pine even went so far as to argue that “the true cause of this disaster was the fatal mistake in the plans which prevented Mr. Allison and his large native force being on the spot to meet and support the volunteers” (BPP 1874). One contributor to the Times of Natal dismissed any fault on the part of the all-white volunteers, but instead cast them as a support group that was simply abused by its connected African force. Whereas much had been said about the order “not to fire the first shot,” the contributor to the Times argued that a further examination of Durnford’s orders would show that “the volunteers were sent to support the civil power in the arrest of a rebel; the civil power were supposed to be an armed force of native police” (The Natal Witness Dec. 5, 1873). Since the Carbineers were sent to the pass to support a body of Africans under Captain Allison, the orders meant that the African troops would have had to be the ones to act first. Since the orders never contemplated the volunteer force being on its own, there was no reason for Durnford to act cautiously. In fact, the contributor went so far as to suggest that since a small contingent of Sotho was present, they should have been sent first, asking: “Would not the employment of this small force in attack have been within the means of the order, and have avoided any imputation of disobedience?” Even those who were critical of Durnford and the volunteers still placed responsibility upon the Africans, presumably because there was no voice or advocate to defend the Africans’ actions directly in the press. This lack of voice is critical, as the casting of blame shaped public memory of the event and later commemoration by the white settler community, while also diminishing the influence (or even existence) of African involvement. This diminishing later resulted in a kind of backlash counter-narrative in the memory of Langalibalele and would facilitate a larger emphasis on African agency in the post-apartheid era.

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Though it remained Resident Magistrate Macfarlane’s primary responsibility to draw up forces from the local chiefs during the incident, the colonial government took over this responsibility and focused on assembling a large body of indigenous levies (troops mustered by the local African leaders) to participate in the formal putting down of Langalibalele and the amaHlubi. This mustering was made more feasible with the declaration of martial law by Lieutenant-Governor Pine in November. Two flying columns, composed largely of Africans led by local magistrates, were the primary response force that hunted down Langalibalele. Forces were mustered from around Pietermaritzburg, Estcourt, and the Klip River District. Local chiefs saw compliance with the military levy as an opportunity to maintain their place within the British administrative structure, but also to solidify claims to their own land and gain the opportunity for plunder and cattle. One group, the Mchunu of Phakade, had even taken part in driving the amaHlubi into their location twenty years before (Guy 2013, 393). Now it was their goal to drive them out entirely in response to the “rebellion.” The atrocities committed by the Africans and volunteers in suppressing Langalibalele’s rebellion were ones that had been carried out in a multitude of colonial settings, including the attacks on Matshana in 1857: looting, seizing livestock, and forcefully uprooting populations. Thousands of head of cattle were seized, kraals were burned, and women and children were captured and forcibly removed. Because of his retreat, many believed that Langalibalele had essentially forfeited his territory, and the contents could be rightfully claimed by the victors, just as Langalibalele had done after the defeat of Matshana. By the end of December, Langalibalele and many of his followers had been captured, and by April, he and seven of his sons, two of his indunas (lieutenants/advisors), and some two hundred followers were sentenced to various types of imprisonment. Langalibalele himself was sent to Robben Island in the Cape Colony, a fate typical of many indigenous leaders who rebelled against British rule. Langalibalele’s trial caused more turmoil in the colony, but the incident was essentially concluded (Guy 1983; Cox 1888). The memory of the Langalibalele Incident had longstanding ramifications for the history of Natal. The incident led to a series of attempted reforms, most notably the creation of the Defence Commission of 1875 (Colony of Natal 1877). This commission’s intent was to improve the structure and formation of Natal’s defensive institutions, in theory as a preventative measure against any future internal or external threats to the

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colony. Though the vast majority of the suggestions made by the commission were either ignored or never fully implemented, they illustrate the calls for reform that characterized the period between the post-­ Langalibalele era and the build-up to the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The memory of the Langalibalele Incident fundamentally shaped historical memory of the volunteer systems and their place in Natal’s defensive institutions. Although the failures of the volunteers led to greater concerns over discipline during the remainder of the 1870s, volunteers’ mistakes were whitewashed in the history of the volunteer corps. Accounts of the incident are filled with allusions to the bravery and valor of the Natal Carbineers (Pearse et al. 1973). In the immediate aftermath of the incident at Bushman’s Pass, there was an overall sense of mourning and loss within the white colonial community and the volunteers quickly began the process of commemorating the incident. The Natal Carbineers held a meeting on the morning of December 9, 1873, and decided to go into mourning as a public display for the next six months. They also established a fund of £60 for a corps memorial. A communal letter from the corps was sent to the parents of the three volunteers killed, expressing the esteem in which each man was “held by us for his admirable qualities as a volunteer” and that the corps trusted that such an “expression of the feeling with which your son was regarded by his comrades may be of some consolation to you in your great affliction” (The Natal Carbineers 1912, 77). The mayor of Pietermaritzburg used similar language in a letter, approved by the Maritzburg Municipal Council, sent to each volunteer’s parents, lamenting their loss while also praising the bravery and gallantry of the son who had “fallen in the discharge of an honorable duty which his love of home and country had voluntarily imposed upon him” (The Natal Carbineers 1912, 77–78). On the first anniversary of the incident, a monument which had been erected by the colonists of Natal and the Natal Carbineers was unveiled by the wife of the Mayor of Pietermaritzburg, Mrs. Pepworth. According to the regimental history, “representatives from every volunteer corps in the colony were present” (Natal Carbineers 1912, 78). The three white volunteers, Robert Henry Erskine, Edwin Bond, and Charles Davie Potterill, were listed on the monument. Below these names appeared the sentiment that the colonists and carbineers “mourn the loss of their comrades who fell.” Under the names of the three dead volunteers is an additional inscription, which was part of the original 1874 monument: “Also Elijah Kambule and Katana—Loyal Natives.” The fact that this attempt to acknowledge

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the Africans was made on a marker near the city hall and across the street from the colonial capital building, a marker viewed by the vast majority of colonial residents at some point in their lives, is telling. Gwendolyn Wright has argued that the major theme of colonial urbanization is about “space” and the ability to fill that space; objects and monuments highlight a narrative of colonial ambitions and accomplishments. In that vein, this monument fulfilled its purpose in providing a joint narrative of both colonial and indigenous sacrifice (Wright 1991, 6–7). At the same time, we see the creation of a two-pronged narrative about the sacrifices made by the white and black colonial troops at Bushman’s Pass. The Carbineers monument included names of both white and black men who perished “in a good cause.” Yet the deaths of the “loyal natives” are missing from the official regimental history published in 1912; their deaths were evidently not considered a necessary addition to the Carbineers’ official records (Natal Carbineers 1912, 78–79). While this is partially the byproduct of this regimental history being drawn predominantly from newspaper and colonial records, this absence remains a glaring omission. This type of forced forgetting reveals how, despite the attempt at commemoration, the memory of the Langalibalele Incident was still being presented from a strictly colonial, white perspective. The official history of the Carbineers, combined with the naming of the monument’s location as “Carbineer Garden,” highlights the triumph of the white side of the narrative over the black. The two African names that appear on the monument are, in this context, an afterthought to the wider sacrifice made by the Carbineers, whose name resonates all around the monument’s viewer. The purpose of these African names is likely a legitimization of the “partnership” between white and black men who maintained British colonial rule, as Langalibalele had aided in the displacement of Matshana two decades before and as the indigenous troops had done against Langalibalele in 1873. The inscription and location of the Carbineer Monument is, without a doubt, intended to both mourn and celebrate the sacrifices made to facilitate the white colonial order. The volunteer monument therefore becomes a physical testament to the racial power dynamics that existed within the colony in the late nineteenth century. Commemoration of the events at Bushman’s Pass remained part of the collective memory of the colonial population into the twentieth century. However, this memory became secondary to more pronounced remembrances of the volunteers’ participation in the Anglo-Zulu War, the Second South African War (or Boer War), the First World War, and the Second

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World War. Only half a page is given to the incident in the only comprehensive history of the Natal Carbineers, and even then, it is largely used as precursor to the Anglo-Zulu War (Hattersley 1950, 16–17). Though the Pietermaritzburg monument remained, the men who had suffered “the same effort…and the same death” had become a footnote in the colony’s history. Indeed, in May 1963, ninety years after the incident, some twenty white colonists, many likely descendants or former members of the Natal Carbineers, installed an aluminum cross at the summit of the pass which reads: “Erected by the Natal Carbineer Association 5-5-1963 In Memory.” The simple cross made no specific mention of the incident at Bushman’s Pass, or the men who had fallen there. Likewise, when the Langalibalele centennial arrived in 1973, the local history periodical Natalia made only a small note of the anniversary. Even in this publication largely dedicated to the history of Natal settlers, the editor acknowledged that “it has gone almost unnoticed that 1973 is the centenary of the so-called Langalibalele revolt” (“Notes and Queries” 1973, 55). The journal wished the best of luck to the Ladysmith Historical Society (organizers of the 1963 event) who planned to mark the occasion. In so doing, it implicitly dismissed the indigenous population as either keepers of history or even as reliable sources of information, with a perfunctory comment that “some of the descendants of Langalibalele and the Hlubi are, for the moment, still in occupation of lands in the Drakensberg. Theirs is an unusually interesting history.” The note that the amaHlubi still occupied their homelands “for the moment” hinted at their potential elimination, removal, or extinction under the apartheid state. However, the “interesting history” of the amaHlubi and more broadly that of the Africans who took part in the events at Bushman’s Pass and the wider Langalibalele Incident have ultimately proven more enduring than colonial efforts at memorialization. Contemporary commemorations in the post-apartheid era have begun to minimize the legacy of the white volunteers. The name of Bushman’s Pass, the site of the 1873 skirmish, has now been changed to Langalibalele Pass. The “Carbineer Garden” has been changed to the “The Carbineer’s Garden of Peace,” likely in an attempt to articulate the move to a post-apartheid South Africa. Its colonial-­era monument to those who died at Bushman’s Pass is now surrounded by multiple monuments to non-white members of the South African community, most notably those who challenged white minority rule in the twentieth century. In 2015, a statue of Josiah Gumede, founding member of the South African Native National Congress (the precursor

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of the African National Congress) and early president of the African National Congress, was erected in the Garden, and plans were made to follow up with “other figures, including Alan Paton [author and political activist] and Moses Mabhida [former leader of the South African Communist Party]” (Haswell 2015, 65).4 In 2011, 150 years after indentured Indians first arrived in Natal, a memorial stone dedicated to them was also unveiled, highlighting an even more diverse history than that commemorated by the white-dominated monuments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond the Carbineer Garden of Peace, memories of the incident and of Langalibalele himself have also changed. After his time on Robben Island, the amaHlubi chief was banished to a government farm near the Cape called Uitvlugt. In 1886, he was allowed to return to Natal in the wake of the titanic shift in indigenous power dynamics which resulted in the final destruction of the Zulu kingdom (Guy 1994). There he spent three years under house arrest until his death in 1889. Langalibalele’s death, however, did not diminish his memory. In fact, Langalibalele’s transformation from the “villain” who instigated the violence at Bushman’s Pass to avatar of resistance remains one of the most fascinating components of his legacy. In the end, Langalibalele and his actions have become a conduit for the memory of African resistance to colonial rule. He is often cited as one of the first black political prisoners sentenced to a term at Robben Island. His imprisonment was also somewhat unique because it entailed a special act of the Cape Parliament, known as the Natal Criminals Act, which allowed him to be banished to the island for life (Deacon 1996, 54). This special status created a kind of through-line between Langalibalele and Nelson Mandela, making him part of a historical legacy that defined post-colonial South Africa. Because of his special status as both a political prisoner and exile, Langalibalele’s legacy resonated with segments of the black population well after his death. In 1923, a new “Native Township” was established on the site of the former village of Uitvlugt near Ndabeni, an industrial suburb of Cape Town. Residents were given the choice of naming this new township, and suggested the name “Langa” in honor of the amaHlubi chief. This was not directly related to the 1873 incident, but instead, the residents of Ndabeni knew Langalibalele had been one of the laborers/prisoners who lived and worked at Uitvlugt at the end of the nineteenth century and “thus the spatial and historical significance was far more locally rooted” (Coetzer 2009, 6–7). The white local superintendent was hardly pleased

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that the people selected “the rebel Langalibalele” as their township’s namesake, going so far as to suggest the name “Chitama,” in honor of the site of David Livingstone’s death. After a brief debate, which included attempting to adopt the name “Nqubela” (meaning “success”), the name “Langa Village” was finally approved after it was observed that Nqubela “has a click which is unpronounceable by the majority of Europeans and will therefore be consistently mispronounced” (Coetzer 2009, 7). This act of naming helps to illustrate a powerful invocation (directly or indirectly) of Langalibalele’s memory by residents of the new township. He represented a kind of ownership of the past for the black population. Quite possibly, the residents also saw the naming of their township after a chief who had stood up to their colonial oppressors as a subtle, but powerful, assertion of their own agency. This agency became even more important during the mobilization against the apartheid regime in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1960, Langa was the starting point for a massive march of ten to fifteen thousand protestors to the Cape Town City Hall in response to the Sharpeville Massacre, in which sixty-nine protestors had been gunned down by police outside of a police station in the Transvaal (Lodge 1978, 2011). Langa continued to be at the center of black South Africans’ struggle for freedom into the final decades of apartheid. On March 21, 1985, twenty-five years after the Sharpeville Massacre, thirty-five people were shot and killed by police during a funeral march between Uitenhage and Langa in what is now known as the Langa Massacre (Majodina 1986). While just one of many acts of police violence in the final decade of apartheid, the aftershock of the attack facilitated widespread school boycotts and further protests, forcing the South African government to declare a state of emergency, just as the colonial government of Natal had been forced to do in 1873. It seems that the memory of Langalibalele’s resistance to colonial rule lived on in the people of the town that carried his name. Perhaps Langalibalele’s greatest posthumous triumph, however, occurred when the apartheid era finally came to an end. As a free South Africa attempted to reassert ownership over its past, many endeavored to find new figures to act as symbols of national pride. In December 2016, as part of a 350-year commemoration of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, four statues were unveiled depicting former members of African royal families who had been imprisoned at the fortress. These included the Zulu King Cetshwayo‚ Bapedi King Sekhukhune, Khoisan freedom fighter Doman, and amaHlubi King Langalibalele (Declerk 2016). The move was

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part of a larger Castle of Good Hope Legacy Project, designed not only to embody the pain of colonialism, but also to symbolize overcoming that pain to create a new democracy (SABC Digital News 2017). As he unveiled the statues, Defence and Military Veterans Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-­ Nqakula spoke of the castle’s history as “a solid defence against two enemies—Europeans‚ who could attack from the sea‚ and the indigenous people‚ who sought the return of their land and freedom” (SABC Digital News 2017). Even the unveiling of the Langalibalele statue, however, was tinged with colonial undertones. In his speech during the ceremony, Minister Mapisa-Nqakula referred to Langalibalele II, the sitting monarch of the amaHlubi, as an “inkosi” (chief) rather than “Ngonyama” (the formally correct appellation for the king, meaning “The Lion”). This “insult” resulted in Langalibalele II leaving the ceremony early, though it is unclear if the slight was accidental, or a component of the ongoing legal issue of the amaHlubi trying to restore their status and gain formal acknowledgment from the South African government (Morris 2016b). Despite this slight, Minister Mapisa-Nqakula referred to the original Langalibalele as “King,” along with Cetshwayo and Sekhukhune, and described him as representative of a “tangible recognition of these [individuals] and thousands of other unsung heroes and heroines [of the] colonial wars of resistance,” most fitting in a location whose jail cells “incarcerated the kings and chiefs we are honouring here today” (Mapisa-Nqakula 2016). By placing Langalibalele at the center of a reimagining of the former colonial past, Minister Mapisa-Nqakula was reshaping the colonial legacy of physical spaces like Cape Castle and recasting them as commemorative centers for resistance and indigenous culture, instead of colonial bastions dominated by European agency. This type of transformation would have been impossible without an existing counter-narrative that included the 1873 incident and its aftermath that turned Langalibalele into a symbol of longstanding resistance. Langalibalele was not victorious in his own time, but a century and a half later he was remembered as a hero of South Africa, who “dedicated his life to his people” and whose “temerity in resisting colonial demands was far-reaching enough” to gain the place of honor he now occupied (Morris 2016a). It is this sense of being “far-reaching enough” that likely explains why Langalibalele was also given a place of honor in the recently installed “Long March to Freedom” display at the National Heritage Monument in the Groenkloof Nature Reserve in Pretoria. Designed as a collection of

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one hundred life-size figures that will eventually grow to four hundred, the display allows visitors to “walk through the loosely spaced procession, beginning in the 1700s with rebel chiefs and renegade missionaries, along generations of freedom fighters, until they meet Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela at the dawn of South Africa’s democracy” (Corner n.d.). The display was seen by many as a milestone in the recasting of the South African past, one that moved beyond the old colonial symbols and structures of power, and, echoing Franz Fanon, removed the imperialist “germs of rot [not only] from our land but from our minds as well.”5 At the launch of the monument project, Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa praised the project as doing just that: “For a very long time, the South African story was single dimensional—told from the perspective of our erstwhile colonisers. The African proverb, ‘Until the lions have got their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,’ rings true of the South African situation” (Mthethwa 2015). Minister Mthethwa called for South Africans to rewrite their history to fill the gaps caused by colonial domination, but more importantly to remind the population of the sacrifices made to create the new nation. This monument, for Minister Mthethwa, was not just a place to visit, but “a place for us to connect with our inner selves and go through the odyssey of the history of our people” and “to celebrate our icons, uphold their legacy and chronicle our history for future generations.” The field of statues represented a reclaimed past in the post-apartheid era, paving the way for a renewed sense of historical identity created by these “icons.” Langalibalele was one such “icon,” being among the first hundred statues to be built and put on display. His statue was positioned among many key figures of nineteenth-century South African history, including King Cetshwayo, Bishop John Colenso, King Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, King Maqoma, Chief Adam Kok III, and others. Perhaps more importantly, on the National Heritage Monument’s website, the leader of the amaHlubi is presented as a staunch resister to the British, a victim of circumstance, who initially forced the British to retreat because they had “underestimated the difficult campaign.” No mention is made of Langalibalele’s work in the suppression of Matshana, the Bushman’s Pass incident, or of the volunteers who died there. Instead, the visitor is left with a sense of defiance from Langalibalele, as the website invokes Langalibalele’s own words, recorded in T. J. Lucas’s account of the incident: “I do not go there. It is the white men who scratch about the ground and look for diamonds. I sit at home, and am well known as a great chief. The white people take our

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young men there to work, and to buy guns with the money they earn. I am no purchaser of these guns” (Lucas 1879, 161; Corner n.d.). Once again, Langalibalele has been revived as a leader who stood up to empire, and he is remembered not as one who once worked within the colonial system, but as one who challenged the system, even if it cost him everything. Langalibalele is not the first nor the last indigenous leader to become a symbol of the new South Africa. His role as a member of the British colonial order complicates his eventual place as one of its great opponents. Yet, because of the fluidity of memory, Langalibalele continues to evolve as both an enemy of empire and scion of resistance. Instead of being memorialized as a collaborator or the reviled “rebel chief” that the volunteers attempted to capture near Bushman’s Pass, he has become a prominent figure in the long memory of South African resistance. His place in the National Heritage Monument and Cape Castle reflects a larger transformation in the historical memory that shapes the New South Africa. A parallel transformation has occurred in Natal itself, which has now been renamed KwaZulu-Natal. Though the monument to the volunteers still stands in the shadow of Pietermaritzburg’s City Hall, it is now within walking distance of Langalibalele Street, formerly Longmarket, a block south of the monument. Today, very little attention is paid to the old monument to the white volunteers, while thousands routinely travel down Langalibalele Street in the heart of the provincial capital. The renaming of the street is only one part in the active transformation of the historical memory of colonial Natal. This process began with the initial attempts at memorialization and remembrance of the volunteers who died at Bushman’s Pass. It continued with the attempts at shaping Langalibalele in reports and commemorations from the white settler populations within Southern Africa. And it concluded (for the present) with the transformation of Langalibalele in the historical memory of the black population of South Africa. Langalibalele and the events of 1873 have become a conduit for the memory of African resistance to colonial rule in South Africa, instead of being portrayed as an enemy of white volunteers and black collaborators who died to defend colonial rule. The “good cause [in which] they perished” has faded like the white column bearing those words in today’s New South Africa.

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Notes 1. The naming of this event as a “rebellion” remains a key question. While it was reported as a rebellion in 1873  in the colonial records and news accounts, many historians have argued this was simply untrue. Norman Etherington argues that there is little evidence of this event being a rebellion in light of the narratives of two German missionaries and the reports of John Macfarlane, the Resident Magistrate of Weenen County. Additionally, Thomas McClendon casts Langalibalele as a victim of loss of power, unable to control the men within his location. Jeff Guy argues that the event was a part of the “intensification of race hatred” in the colony. 2. I have called this period the “formative period” of the colony, from the declaration of the district of Natal as a British territory in May 1844 to the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, to place a temporal importance to the period of this research. It is during this period that Natal created the major institutions that would define it as a colonial state. 3. This “eating up” of other chiefs was universally condemned as a heathen and barbarous custom “abhorrent to humanity and social justice, and above all, to the genius of our Christian faith” by the editorial staff of The Natal Mercury at the time, see The Natal Mercury, May 23, 1857. McClendon argues that this process was part of the “intertwined discourses of power” that were being established by Shepstone during his administration, but is also largely indicative of the important reliance the colonial state had on indigenous collaborators like Langalibalele. 4. As of June 2019, no additional statues or monuments have been installed in the Gardens. 5. This quote is often attributed to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, but I have found no evidence of where the quote originated. It is, however, a likely attribution used by Minister Mthethwa in his speech (Fanon 2005).

References British Parliamentary Papers (BPP). 1874. Papers Related to the Late Kafir Outbreak in Natal. Memorandum from Major Durnford, Enclosed in No. 11, Lieutenant-Governor B.  Pine to the Earl of Kimberly, 13 November 1873. London: British Parliament. Coetzer, Nicholas. 2009. Langa Township in the 1920s—An (Extra)Ordinary Garden Suburb. South African Journal of Art History 24 (1): 1–19. Colony of Natal. 1877. Minute Paper: Volunteer Forces—Recommendation of the Defence Commission of 1875 Regarding the Same. Colonial Secretary’s Office (CSO) 591, No. 1557.

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Corner, Jungle. n.d. National Heritage Monument. National Heritage Monument. Accessed October 9, 2018. http://www.nhmsa.co.za. Cox, George William. 1888. The Life of John William Colenso, D.D.  Volume II. London: W. Ridgeway. Deacon, Harriet. 1996. The Island: A History of Robben Island, 1488–1990. New Africa Books. Declerk, Aphiwe. 2016. Statues of Royal Prisoners Unveiled at Castle of Good Hope Commemoration. Business Live, December 11. https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/life/2016-12-11-statues-of-royal-prisoners-unveiled-at-castle-of-good-hope-commemoration/. Dominy, G. 1991. Thomas Baines and the Langalibalele Rebellion: A Critique of an Unrecorded Sketch of the Action at Bushman’s Pass, 1873. Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 16 (3): 41–55. Etherington, Norman. 1978. Why Langalibalele Ran Away. Journal of Natal and Zulu History 1: 1–24. ———. 1989. The ‘Shepstone System’ in the Colony of Natal and Beyond the Borders. In Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, ed. Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest, 170–192. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Guy, Jeff. 1983. The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso, 1814–1883. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. ———. 1994. The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1879–1884. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. ———. 2013. Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African Autonomy and Settler Colonialism in the Making of Traditional Authority. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Haswell, Robert F. 2015. Transforming Our Townscapes: The Pietermaritzburg Experience. Natalia 45: 60–68. Hattersley, Alan Frederick. 1950. Carbineer: The History of the Royal Natal Carbineers. Aldershot: Gale and Polden. Herd, Norman. 1976. The Bent Pine (The Trial of Langalibalele). Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Lodge, Tom. 1978. The Cape Town Troubles, March–April 1960. Journal of Southern African Studies 4 (2): 216–239. https://doi. org/10.1080/03057077808707986. ———. 2011. Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lucas, Thomas J. 1879. The Zulus and the British Frontiers. London: Chapman and Hall. http://archive.org/details/zulusandbritish00lucagoog.

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Majodina, Thole. 1986. A Short Background to the Shooting Incident in Langa Township, Uitenhage. Human Rights Quarterly 8 (3): 488–493. https://doi. org/10.2307/762272. Mann, Robert James. 1859. The Colony of Natal: An Account of the Characteristics and Capabilities of This British Dependency. London: Jarrold and Sons. Mapisa-Nqakula, Nosiviwe. 2016. Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula: 350 Years of Existence of Castle of Good Hope. Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, December 9. South African Government, https://www.gov.za/speeches/ castle-good-hope-09-december-9-dec-2016-0000. McClendon, Thomas V. 2010. White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, vol. 46. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Morris, Michael. 2016a. #Castle350: Langalibalele Dedicated His Life to His People. IOL, December 2. https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/ castle350-langalibalele-dedicated-his-life-to-his-people-2095125. ———. 2016b. Anger after Hlubi King Insulted at Castle Statue Ceremony. IOL, December 11. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/ anger-after-hlubi-king-insulted-at-castle-statue-ceremony-7152953. Mthethwa, Nathi. 2015. Minister Nathi Mthethwa: Launch of National Heritage Monument. Groenkloof Nature Plaza, Pretoria, September 15. South African Government, https://www.gov.za/speeches/minister-nathimthethwa-lanuch-national-heritage-monument-15-sep-2015-0000. The Natal Carbineers: The History of the Regiment from Its Foundation, 15th January 1855 to 30th June 1911. 1912. Pietermaritzburg: P. Davis. The Natal Witness. 1873. Notes on ‘The Langabellala [sic] Expedition.’ (Reprinted from The Times of Natal) Pietermaritzburg: December 5. “Notes and Queries.” 1973. Natalia no. 3 (Dec.): 52–58. Pearse, R.O., J. Clark, P.R. Barnes, and G. Tatham, eds. 1973. Langalibalele and the Natal Carbineers: The Story of the Langalibalele Rebellion, 1873. Ladysmith: Ladysmith Historical Society. SABC Digital News. 2017. Calvyn Gilfellen on Castle of Good Hope Legacy Project. Accessed October 9, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue= 97&v=71YhYe3Ksdc. Storey, William Kelleher. 2012. Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welsh, David. 1971. The Roots of Segregation; Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845–1910. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Wright, Gwendolyn. 1991. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 10

Remembering the 1857 Indian Uprising in Civic Celebrations Danielle Nielsen

On January 1, 1903, nearly four hundred veterans of the 1857 Indian Uprising participated in King Edward VII’s Coronation Durbar in Delhi, India. These men marched into the amphitheater to the strains of “See the Conquering Hero Comes” and “Auld Lang Syne” (Wheeler 1904, 113). As they entered the amphitheater, the audience fixed on a shuffling, shambling band of white-haired old men … who [had] held India for the Empire on the Ridge at Delhi through heat and battle and pestilence and hardships.… [The audience] stood up and cheered and shouted until they were hoarse; women wept hysterically; and strong men sobbed. The whole assemblage rose to do them honour. One felt that but for these men there would have been no brilliant pageant to-day, no Delhi Durbar…. It was their day, and they knew it. (Menpes and Menpes 1903, 58–59)1

In her description of one of the durbar’s most memorable moments, Dorothy Menpes explicitly connected Britain’s successful defense of their interests in India in 1857 to the spectacle recognizing King Edward’s D. Nielsen (*) Murray State University, Murray, KY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_10

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coronation as British sovereign and Emperor of India. She highlighted both the contemporary vision of a united British Empire, which included the young Indian men in the Imperial Cadet Corps marching directly in front of these veterans, and its history in the bodies of the veterans. The juxtaposition of the youthful cadets and the elderly veterans, the majority of whom were Indians, reminded the predominantly white audience of the importance of maintaining peace and control in the subcontinent. Moreover, for these white audience members, alongside the Indian dignitaries, these marching soldiers, whether old or young, illustrated the idealized Indian, one who was loyal to the British colonial project. On January 1, 1903, nearly 150,000 white imperial subjects, global leaders, and Indian crown princes gathered in the shadow of the Delhi Ridge, where a major battle of the Indian Uprising had been fought, to celebrate King Edward’s durbar. In addition to recognizing their emperor, the attendees commemorated the defeat of Britain’s opponents during the Uprising. Eight years later, on December 12, 1911, in the same parade grounds, a similar event honored King George V and Queen Mary. These spectacles were designed to demonstrate imperial continuity.2 For weeks in both 1902–1903 and 1911, attendees congregated in the Durbar Camp. Representatives from the native states in the subcontinent, Nepal, Afghanistan, Persia, Siam, Japan, and the Australian and South African colonies attended (Wheeler 1904, 18–21). The main camp housed 13,000 visitors and included journalists from the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Manchester Guardian, Illustrated London News, Graphic, Sketch, English-language Indian publications, and “1222 Europeans, 159 native and other Asiatic guests, and 11,202 followers” (Wheeler 1904, 56–57). Others, including imperial subjects from South Africa, Canada, Australia, and Britain, found lodgings elsewhere. In addition to the official proceedings, colonial officials and Indian dignitaries hosted soirees and held art and craft shows featuring Indian pieces, endeavoring to showcase the unity of the diverse subcontinent under imperial dominance. At both durbars, the most significant official events were the state processionals and proclamations. During the processional, colonial British troops and Indian battalions marched through Delhi. The proclamations included the official ceremony announcing the new sovereign and the marches of the veterans. In 1903, Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, presided over the events, calling attention to the more than one hundred Indian rulers in attendance and proclaiming that “loyalty to the Sovereign is synonymous with confidence

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in the equity and benignity of his rule” (1906, 302). On December 12, 1911, King George V delivered his own address, thanking the governors, officials, Indian princes, and military for the “homage and allegiance which they loyally desire to render” (1912, 118). For attendees, the attention paid to the Indian Uprising of 1857 would have been familiar and expected, for the Uprising had cast a lasting shadow over British imperial rule. The mid-1850s had marked a period of transition for British control: the East India Company annexed Lower Burma and Oudh; native rulers without children could no longer appoint heirs and the East India Company would seize control after these rulers’ deaths; and high-caste Indian sepoys feared deployment to overseas regiments, such as those stationed in Crimea, a journey which would cause them to lose caste. In March 1857 Mangal Pandey, an Indian sepoy serving in the colonial army, attacked his British officers. He was arrested and later executed. In May, soldiers stationed at Meerut rebelled after fellow sepoys were imprisoned for refusing to use new gun cartridges, allegedly covered in pork fat and beef tallow, taboo substances for Muslims and Hindus, respectively. For many historians, these two instances mark definitive catalysts for the events known as the 1857 Indian Uprising, War of Independence, or, at the time, the Indian Mutiny.3 In the months that followed, cities throughout northern India found themselves under siege as sepoys left colonial units and fought for independence. Native and British civilians were met with violence and atrocities from soldiers on both sides. By mid-1858, British troops and Indians who had remained loyal to Britain quelled the rebellion, India was placed under control of the Crown, and the British resumed their colonizing mission with substantial changes to imperial ideologies that worked to distance cultural and personal relationships between Indians and Britons. These changes, however, failed to suppress anti-colonial movements in the subcontinent. By the time of the early twentieth-century durbars, anti-imperialism and Indian nationalism presented a growing challenge to British rule. Angst about the fragility of the empire, as evidenced by the recent South African War and more general anti-imperial sentiments, was on the rise. Commemorating the 1857 triumph over rebellious Indian subjects served to bolster Britons’ commitment to the colonial enterprise. In essence, the Uprising commemoration at the durbars created an imperial narrative for Britons that detailed imperial citizenship that foregrounded loyalty, bravery, and patriotism.

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The Audience, Their Education, and the Indian Uprising In The War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma, Christopher Herbert argues that contemporaries saw the Uprising “as an event of almost incomprehensible magnitude and historical importance— hence its common figuration as a gigantic natural disaster or national cataclysm” (2008, 2). By 1903, this conception of 1857 as a catastrophic national disaster had worked its way through Britons’ daily lives, from social studies curricula in their youth to novels they read and travel guides they used to plan trips. In short, British-educated durbar attendees were familiar with the history of the empire, the events of 1857, and contemporary debates about imperialism. Beginning in the mid-Victorian period, British pedagogues advocated a more thorough historical education for all students. Specifically, scholars asserted that history and geography encouraged patriotism regardless of one’s social class or geographic position. W.E.  Forster, a Liberal statesman, wrote the preface for The Citizen Reader, an 1885 schoolbook on citizenship; in this preface, he argued that all children have the “duty to serve their country as patriotic citizens” (n.p.). A.H. Garlick, a Victorian pedagogue, echoed these sentiments, when he posited that history “calls forth feelings of patriotism. It stimulates the national pride … and tends, rightly taught, to make good citizens” (1896, 258, emphasis Garlick’s). For Garlick and Forster “citizen” carried a specific historical context. British schoolbooks purposefully used “the term ‘citizen’ and not ‘subject’” to encourage greater identification with Britain and stronger imperial patriotism even though most people were not fully enfranchised (Heathorn 1995, 413).4 These lessons included explicit discussions of 1857. H.O. Arnold-Forster, author of The Citizen Reader, was a statesman and secretary of the Imperial Federation League. In The Citizen Reader, he described the Britons’ destruction of their own magazine at Delhi to prevent the sepoys from accessing it. He emphasized the often private and sacrificial nature of patriotism explaining that “these men who thus risked their lives for their country did so far away from the eye of friends, and without any encouragement which cheers those who do their duty in the sight of friends and with the hope of reward” (Arnold-Forster 1885, 26–27). Alongside this curriculum, media coverage had a lasting effect on Britons’ understanding of 1857. Newspaper articles, histories, and fictional accounts about the Uprising bemoaned the violence directed at

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Anglo-Indians during the Uprising.5 The call to protect the colony was part of the historical memory readers carried with them to India. Reports of Nana Sahib’s attack on Cawnpore, which involved the murder of British women and children, the dumping of their bodies in a nearby well, and the British retaliation during which Indian sepoys were forced to lick the blood of the British victims off the floor before being hanged, filled British newspapers.6 This incident proved one of the war’s defining moments. In September 1857, the Illustrated London News reported the events: We hear with pain, but not perhaps with horror, of the deaths of our brave officers and soldiers slain by the mutineers, for it is the soldier’s business to confront death in all its shapes; but when we read of the atrocities committed upon our women and children the heart of England is stirred; and the sorrow for their fate, great as it is, is overshadowed by the execration which we feel for their unmanly assassins, and by the grim determination that Justice, full and unwavering, shall be done upon them. (5)

After the events, histories such as John William Kaye and George Bruce Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1897) and William Wotherspoon Ireland’s History of the Siege of Delhi (1861) were widely available to Victorian readers, as were non-fictional narratives by both men and women, such as Captain George Hutchinson’s Narratives of the Mutinies in Oude, compiled from authentic records (1859), Adelaide Case’s Day-By-Day at Lucknow (1858), R.M. Coopland’s A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior and Life in the Fort of Agra During the Mutinies of 1857 (1859), and Frances Duberly’s Campaigning Experiences in Rajpootana and Central India, During the Suppression of the Mutiny, 1857–1858 (1859). Meanwhile, novels like Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1897), among some sixty others published between 1857 and the early twentieth century, likewise depicted the events directly. Even popular fiction that seemingly had little to do with the empire, like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), drew readers’ attention to the Uprising when it alluded to the Cawnpore well. With this media saturation, Britons arrived in India primed to recognize the Uprising’s physical sites of memory and view them through an imperialist lens. Accounts of the durbars also explicitly tied them to 1857, including Gertrude Bell’s letters to her family, Stephen Wheeler’s History of the Delhi Coronation Durbar (1904), Shelland Bradley’s novel An American Girl at the Durbar (1912), a privately published souvenir entitled Delhi Durbar

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Souvenir (1903), Mortimer and Dorothy Menpes’s The Durbar (1903), the essay collection The Cruise to the Indian Empire and the Coronation Durbar 1911–1912 on the R.M.S.  Dunottar Castle (Harden 1912), and “Where Is the Durbar Held?” (1903) from the Britain-based periodical The Gentlewoman. Each source helped Britons understand the empire, citizenship, the Indian body, and their responsibilities as colonial subjects in relation to the durbars and the Uprising. They related the writers’ observations about the sites they visited and, in particular, discussed the veterans’ marches. Significantly, for all the times that the Indian body was notably absent from the commemorative texts, it was the distinct focus on “loyal” Indian men at the durbars that brought together both the attendees’ recognition of their responsibilities as citizens and the way that historical memories identified most Indian bodies as disloyal. These durbar texts added to Britons’ imperial education, disseminating the established historical memories that elucidated the relationship between Britons and the imperial government. These memories reified British colonial ideologies, specifically those that, like the history education they received in school, encouraged citizens to recognize their responsibilities to the empire. The historical memories spoke to and for specific audiences, namely white Britons who saw the Uprising as a rebellion. Though the durbars were staged in India, their audiences included Britons reading about them at home, Anglo-Indians, and members of the British-friendly Indian aristocracy. The millions of colonized people who neither spoke English nor worked for the colonial government were generally ignored during the proceedings themselves. In “Side Lights on the Delhi Durbar,” then-popular author Flora Annie Steel specifically addressed the Britons’ and Anglo-Indians’ willingness to overlook the native population when she reminded readers that what was not seen at the durbar were Indian women and children and the hundreds of laborers who built the amphitheater and prepared the city for the influx of predominantly British visitors (1903, 3). Durbar texts were also intended for consumption in Britain; they were written in English and often printed in Britain. The travelers who compiled these souvenirs had the time, money, and connections to attend the Coronation Durbar; their interest in the empire and its success was not passing. Even when they were critical of specific imperial ideologies, their concern was to protect the empire by reinforcing specific historical memories. These souvenirs served this purpose well because the souvenir, as a genre, “literally locates experience and enables the tourist who clutches

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and displays it to report a narrative of that experience. The function of the souvenir is to secure memory and to discipline it” (Baucom 1999, 119). These texts physically moved the memory from India to Britain, expanding its reach to a wider imperial audience and “securing” it for them.

The Mutiny Pilgrimage and Its Landmarks In addition to attending the durbars, many travelers embarked on what Cohn calls “Mutiny pilgrimages” to sites associated with the 1857 Uprising, reinforcing connections between the Uprising and contemporary celebrations of imperial power (1983, 179). These journeys imitated tours taken by the Duke of Edinburgh (1869–1870) and the Prince of Wales (1875–1876). Popular travel guides like Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in India and Ceylon included routes which directed British visitors to major sites, most often the Cawnpore memorial, the Red Ridge in Delhi, and the Lucknow Residency. By 1911, in an edition whose preface noted it was “fortunate in making its appearance at the time of the proposed visit of His Majesty the King Emperor, and of Queen Mary, to India, and of the Coronation Durbar,” Murray’s Handbook included two routes heavily concentrated around Uprising sites (vii). Route 22, Delhi to Allahabad, took visitors through Lucknow and Cawnpore; for visitors interested only in Lucknow, Route 21 provided an itinerary solely for that city (xiv). In previous editions, these cities were also covered in similarly described tours. Visitors were directed to travel the 271 miles from Delhi to Cawnpore and the 46 miles between Cawnpore and Lucknow by train (Handbook 1911, 301, 306). To orient visitors, these guides described each city’s focal points, whether they were statues, parks, churches, or battle sites, as they related to the Uprising so that visitors viewed those sites specifically through the lens of 1857. They also included narratives of the battles that took place in those cities and directed readers to published histories. Murray’s Handbook, for instance, observed that “for a graphic account of the siege of Cawnpore, the traveler cannot do better than study T.R.E. Holmes’s History of the Indian Mutiny” (1911, 301). These commemorative spaces urged Britons to be responsible citizens—to protect and serve the empire. Cohn argues that Britons saw the Uprising as an event permeated with values that “explained their rule in India to themselves—sacrifice, duty, fortitude; above all it symbolized the ultimate triumph over those Indians who had threatened properly constituted authority and order” (1983,

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179). The historical memories invoked were, of course, those of a specific group of Britons who supported the colonial project, not colonized Indian subjects or anti-imperial Britons. Physical memorials erected in India lauded British heroes’ actions in the Uprising. In “‘Englishness’ on the Imperial Circuit: Mutiny Tours in Colonial South Asia” Manu Goswami explains that the colonial government placed extraordinary emphasis on Uprising sites as representative “landmarks” of the empire as a whole, noting that “the Union Jack at the British residency in Lucknow was, until 1947, the one place in the British empire where the flag was never lowered at dusk” (1996, 65).7 Alongside the ever-present Union Jack, durbar attendees viewed plaques in Lucknow; visited the Memorial Gardens and Well in Cawnpore; and in Delhi observed the gravesite (and by 1911 a statue) of Brigadier General John Nicholson, who commanded British forces retaking the city. These commemorative pieces were built in specific contexts to guide visitors in remembering the Uprising; as the tourists documented their travels, they further contextualized British sacrifice in India. To interpret these sacrifices, the guides moved tourists through major locations associated with the events of 1857, often privileging the role of the Uprising over other elements of the sites’ histories. As the host city of the durbars and site of pivotal battles during the Uprising, Delhi played a substantial role in these tours. Although Delhi had been capital of the Mughal Empire for three centuries before British rule, Bradshaw’s guidebook described the Royal Palace of Delhi almost exclusively in relation to the Uprising: it was “inhabited by the King of Delhi before the Mutiny, with triple embattled red granite walls a mile round and handsome gates, where 27 men, women, and children were massacred in 1857.” This same entry described a recently erected church “near the Cashmere Gate, with a cross to the victims of the Mutiny” (1903, 245). Murray’s Handbook gave even more detail about Delhi’s role in the Uprising, dedicating an entire section to “Sites in Connection with the Mutiny and Siege of 1857” and an extensive narrative history in the prefatory materials to the guide itself (1901, 142, lxx–lxxix). Both guides told readers where to go to see the relevant Uprising sites, what happened there, and which British heroes to commemorate. Among these heroes was John Nicholson, a commander during the Delhi siege who died from battle wounds and was still considered godlike in late-Victorian Britain. Travelers who had read Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim would have been reminded of Nicholson when Kim, the

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novel’s protagonist, and his traveling companion the Lama, encountered an Uprising veteran who sang them a ballad about “Nikal Seyn” (104). The guides directed 1903 attendees to Nicholson’s gravestone, found within a cemetery approximately 300 yards from the Cashmere Gate where he was injured. A January 1903 article discussing the durbar in the Britain-based periodical The Gentlewoman described Delhi, its landscape, and its importance to British colonial history: it called Delhi important “not only because of the magnificent Durbar now taking place there, but on account of the proposed monument to the memory of Brigadier-­ General John Nicholson who, as the simply worded inscription on his tombstone states, ‘led the assault on Delhi, and fell mortally wounded in the moment of victory,’ during the dark days of the Mutiny” (16). Even though the memorial was in progress, the author used the tombstone’s inscription to describe Nicholson’s contribution and, like so many other durbar texts, contextualized the durbar and its spaces through the lens of the Uprising. By 1911, guides directed visitors to both the gravesite and monument (the 1907 and subsequent editions of Murray’s Handbook included the location of the monument). Placed directly outside the Cashmere Gate, the monument portrayed Nicholson as ready for battle, facing the city with his sword unsheathed and raised. L.G. Moberly, a durbar attendee who published an essay in an edited souvenir collection after returning to England, described the “lasting impression carried away from that city of the past” as “the statue of that strong man, John Nicholson, with his face turned towards the Kashmir Gate” (1912, 13, emphasis mine). Like the Gentlewoman journalist, for Moberly the “lasting impression” of Delhi was not the durbar, the architecture, or the long Indian history—in a city that she proclaims is a “city of the past.” Instead, the “lasting impression” came from Nicholson’s statue. In interpreting the scene for her readers, Moberly emphasized the relationship among the gate, Delhi, and the Uprising. Cawnpore, the site of Nana Sahib’s massacre of British women and children, received a similar treatment as a location worthy of interest only because of the insurrection. Murray’s Handbook explained that “The sole interest attaching to the place arises from the frightful massacres of the Mutiny” (1901, 260–261), and Bradshaw’s guide told readers that The principal object of interest is the Memorial Well, standing among remains of entrenchments thrown up by the sepoys, marking the spot where

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the murdered bodies of the ‘company of Christian people, chiefly women and children,’ were thrown, 17th June; now covered by Marochetti’s Statue, and surrounded by an eight-sided Gothic screen. (1903, 258)

The statue features an angel with crossed arms gazing down, holding a palm frond in each hand. She stands in front of a cross and is surrounded on all sides by a Gothic screen (Fig. 10.1). The durbar attendees’ descriptions of Cawnpore similarly refocused that city’s history on Uprising episodes. For instance, despite its title, the

Fig. 10.1  Photograph by Samuel Bourne, Cawnpore; The Memorial Well, the Marble Statue by Marochetti, from the Entrance. 1865–1866. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Carlo Marochetti’s statue adorned the Cawnpore Memorial Well, commemorating the deaths of British women and children during the 1857 Uprising. After Indian independence, the statue was moved to the Kanpur Memorial Church, an Anglican church also built to commemorate the loss of British life during the Uprising

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Delhi Durbar Souvenir photo album included a number of photos of Uprising sites, including a photograph of the Cawnpore Memorial Well. The caption explains that Cawnpore possesses a warm interest for tourists on account of the foul butchery of English women and children during the mutiny of 1857. The beautiful statue of Merorhetti [Marochetti], representing the subject of the picture, is immediately over the vault or well into which the bodies of the Victims were thrown. Another object of interest is the “Memorial Church,” which occupies the site of General Wheeler’s entrenchments. (1903, Photograph 18)

The well was the only picture included from Cawnpore, and like the travel guides, the caption focused on its particular commemorative significance. These anonymous writers were already aware of the commemorative power of Cawnpore; when they took and captioned the photograph of the well, they continued that narrative. Like the travel guides, the writers highlighted the Marochetti statue and reminded readers why that statue existed: to remember “the foul butchery of English women and children” at the exact site where the “bodies of the Victims were thrown.” Here, durbar attendees confirmed the narrative that had so many times been put forth by British journalists and politicians, emphasizing that the act was “butchery” and that the bodies had been discarded in a most savage way, by “throwing” them away. Like Delhi’s commemorative spaces, those in Cawnpore were directed toward British audiences, a fact made clear in the wording of its signage, the access afforded to visitors, and the architecture of the memorial itself. The well’s plaque reads: “Sacred to the perpetual memory of a great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children, who near this spot, were cruelly massacred” (“Cawnpore” 1863, 267). Both the access afforded to visitors and the architecture itself indicate a British audience. In the decades between the memorial’s installation and Indian independence, Indian visitors were explicitly barred from entering the Memorial Gardens and viewing the Well. Where other sites and commemorations may have been Eurocentric because of their placement in Christian churches or the use of the English language, the refusal to admit Indian visitors demonstrates more than just a desire to create a narrative specifically for Britons. It explicitly segregated white British subjects from Indian subjects. While both groups were technically subjects of the crown, those who were white held greater rights and obligations, mediated specifically

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by the historical memories that sites such as Cawnpore sought to enshrine. In addition to the restricted access, the memorial’s architecture further underscored the Britishness of the space. First, the Memorial Well sculpture sits directly on top of the well containing the bodies of the British victims. Then, although Carlo Marochetti was an Italian-born French sculptor, he spent the last twenty years of his life living and working in London. He designed sculptures featured at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, on the Arc de Triomphe, and throughout London. Not only were his associations European, but the screen that surrounded the well was influenced by the then-popular, and distinctly European, neo-Gothic style. The use of this style within the Indian landscape clearly set the Cawnpore memorial apart from the Indian people and their culture. Visitors took to heart the guidebooks’ direction to pay close attention to the memorialization of the Uprising, especially in Cawnpore. The Cawnpore Memorial Well “was, for much of its 85 year existence, the iconic site of imperial remembrance in the British raj: a site that during the last third of the Nineteenth Century was reportedly more often visited by Europeans in India than was the Taj Mahal” (Heathorn 2007, Heathorn’s emphasis). To mark their own memory of the British raj, visitors paid homage to the Cawnpore victims. If the commemoration of the Uprising through the mutiny pilgrimage and the durbars helped Britons understand their responsibilities as imperial citizens, then the memorialization of the women and children, portrayed by the British media as the most innocent of victims, reiterated the most important responsibilities: protecting the continuity of the empire and innocent Anglo subjects against disloyal colonized subjects. In addition to perpetuating a historical memory that crafted a pro-­ empire narrative of the British raj, most of these sites deliberately erased Indians, both as historical actors and contemporary visitors, further anglicizing the historical memory they presented. Memorials that elided Indian languages, architecture, culture, and even the bodies of all but the most loyal Indians made clear that the history was British history, for British benefit, and based on British records even though the events occurred in India. Plaques were written in English, not a native vernacular; they were located in Christian churches attended primarily by Britons, and government officials forbade Indian visitors at the Cawnpore Memorial Well. Though colonized subjects were necessarily ever-present in these memories, they were, with the exception of the marching veterans, depicted as inherently disloyal, part of the insurrection, and decidedly not citizens.

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The March of the Mutiny Veterans The spaces of memory encountered on the mutiny pilgrimage encouraged loyalty from those Britons who visited them, but these spaces were not the only evidence of British historical memory. As the opening paragraphs of this chapter illustrate, Uprising veterans marched in the official durbar proceedings, directly connecting the Uprising and the durbars. At both events, the veterans made their appearance at important points in the processional. The official history reports that officers and non-commissioned officers who fought in Delhi and Lucknow were invited to King Edward’s durbar; twenty-seven European and Eurasian and 387 Indian veterans attended (Wheeler 1904, 112). Film footage from 1911 shows 824 Uprising veterans marching directly in front of King George and Queen Mary. Each veteran “wore a small bronze ‘V’ on a scarlet riband on their right breast” representing valor (Henton 2011). King George’s reply to the march emphasized the veterans’ loyalty: “The sight of so many old veterans on parade to-day was for Their Imperial Majesties a most touching scene, for they were looking into the faces and speaking to those who in a time of sore distress stood loyal to their Queen and country and were ready to sacrifice their own lives in defence of that sacred trust” (1912, xxxii). These textual and visual representations of the veterans created secondary spaces of memory for Britons who did not attend the durbars themselves. These records, like King George’s reply, further emphasized the loyalty the Indian veterans demonstrated and the clear connection observers perceived between that allegiance and Britain’s continued control. Gertrude Bell’s account illustrates the march’s significance: The function began with the entrance of the Delhi siege Veterans—this was the great moment of all, a body of old men, white and native, and every soul in that great arena rose and cheered. At the end came some 20 or 30 Gurkhas, little old men in bottle green, some bent double with years, some lame and stumbling with Mutiny wounds. And last of all came an old blind man in a white turban, leaning on a stick. As he passed us, he turned his blind eyes towards the shouting and raised a trembling hand to salute the unseen thousands of the race to which he had stood true. (Bell 1903)

By calling this particular moment “the great moment of all,” Bell privileges these particular bodies and what they represent—loyalty and the uprising itself—over everything else. Her reactions mirror those of Menpes

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and Menpes discussed at the beginning of the chapter, focusing on the recognition that the British crowd gave to these veterans. She even notes that “after that Viceroys and kings went by almost without a thrill” (Bell 1903). The attendees’ excitement and devotion to the veterans, even over the appearance of high-ranking Anglo officials, illustrates the importance attendees accorded to these particular men’s loyalty to and sacrifice for the British Empire. Even fictional accounts of the durbar, such as Shelland Bradley’s novel An American Girl at the Durbar, emphasized these men’s roles in saving the empire. As the narrator watches the veterans march, she reflects on their imperial contributions: “Without the heroism and devotion of these and their fellows, many of whom have long since gone to their rest, there would have been no crowning of the King-Emperor in his imperial city. They had come out of the strife and darkness of the past to bring us this great triumph of to-day” (Bradley 1912, 152). Bradley was a pseudonym for Francis Bradley Bradley-Birt, who had served in the Indian civil service. He portrayed veterans’ actions as having directly provided a pathway to this coronation (and his own position), suggesting that the only way the empire could have survived was through “the heroism and devotion of these and their fellows.” The foregrounding of the veterans in durbar attendees’ accounts underscored their loyalty to British imperial control of India. Stephen Wheeler, the government’s official historian for the 1903 Durbar, reported that though the march was “all but unanticipated even by those who had observed its inclusion in the programme,” it would “never be forgotten by a single man or woman of those who saw it” because “the appearance of this little band of war-scarred heroes was a remembrance that can never be obliterated” (1904, 111–112). Menpes and Menpes confirmed the march’s importance when they observed that “It was [the Veterans’] day, and they knew it. …Perhaps in all that splendid fortnight nothing made a deeper or more lasting impression upon one than the sight of these splendid warriors” (1903, 59). British India existed because of these men’s sacrifices. When “every soul in that great arena rose and cheered” (Bell 1903) or they acknowledged that the “lasting impression” of the “splendid fortnight” was the veterans, these authors’ reflections demonstrated how durbar attendees, and through them the readers of these texts, interpreted the veterans’ bodies and the citizenship responsibilities implied by the march. It is important to note that most of the veterans were Indian and not Anglo. They were explicitly praised for their loyalty in the midst of

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anti-­colonial sentiment both in the subcontinent and abroad. Neither the durbars nor imperialism occurred without dissent. Intellectuals and government officials like J.A. Hobson, E.D. Morel, and Roger Casement all opposed imperialism on limited grounds, whether for economic (Hobson) or human rights (Morel and Casement) reasons. The South African Wars and for those in India, especially, the memories of 1857, the growing Swadeshi movement—a response to the 1905 British partition of Bengal during which Indian nationals boycotted foreign, particularly British, goods—and the rise of Indian nationalism reminded those interested in maintaining the empire that imperial continuity continued to be threatened. The praise veterans received during the durbars simultaneously and inadvertently exposed the reality of these dangers. In the early days of the Uprising, British commanders had been confident in their sepoys and thus were surprised by their rebellion, although tension between the British and their Indian subjects had been growing in 1857 (Handbook 1901, p. lxxi). At the turn of the century, this potential for disloyalty had grown, and the disquiet was evident in the commemoration of the Uprising and the efforts made to link it to citizenship responsibilities. In all of the other commemorative spaces that travelers visited, Indian bodies were elided: the spaces represented white heroes for white citizens. Yet in this march, Indian bodies were prominently displayed. It is Bell, an archaeologist and cultural scholar, who clearly articulates that the “body of old men, [was] white and native,” before bringing her reader’s focus to the last man, who “raised a trembling hand to salute the unseen thousands of the race to which he had stood true.” Bell asks her readers to recognize the loyalty of this one particular Indian, serving, certainly as the colonial government hoped, as a metonym for the Indian people who also would “stand true” (1903). The durbars, mutiny pilgrimages, memorials, and attendees’ civic education all contained imperial propaganda that illustrated imperial strength while simultaneously emphasizing imperial fragility and Indian disloyalty. The marches further complicated loyalty, imperial citizenship, and imperial responsibilities by showing attendees that a select group of Indians were loyal. The juxtaposition between the static memorials, which reminded visitors of Cawnpore’s horrors or John Nicholson’s bravery, and the bodies of veterans who wore “medals that told of their bravery” indicated that Britons and Anglo-Indians must be ever mindful of protecting the empire against disloyal Indian subjects.

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The travelers who documented their journeys to the durbars portrayed the commemoration of the Uprising as the most important aspect of the durbars. Those who traveled may have prepared by reading travel guides that highlighted Uprising sites such as the Cawnpore Memorial Gardens and Well and Delhi’s memorials. At every turn, those attending the durbars, traveling to Uprising sites, and representing their experiences in texts reflected on the historical memory of the Uprising that asked them to protect the empire. These physical spaces helped Britons situate themselves in the historical memory—they were in Kansteiner’s word “obliterating” the space between the event and the commemoration—while connecting the event explicitly to imperial history (2002, 191). In creating spaces of memory where they memorialized British success over “mutinous” or “disloyal” Indians, Britons sought to strengthen the empire, even as challenges to the Empire at home and abroad grew. Their commemorative acts repeatedly connected the Uprising to the durbars and imperial continuity, while the British spaces of memory overshadowed the long history of the Indian people. Travelers sought and reproduced the “Mutiny Narrative” developed through the British press, their own education, and their personal experiences in the hope that they could teach others to protect and serve the empire just as those who died in the Uprising had done.

Notes 1. The government commissioned artist Mortimer Menpes to paint pictures of the durbar. Dorothy, his wife, wrote the text that accompanied these paintings in their illustrated work The Durbar. 2. Bernard Cohn (1983) explains that durbars were first used by the ancient Mughal rulers to recognize the relationship between a ruler and his subjects. The two parties exchanged gifts, and the exchange represented the loyalty that each party held to the other and established a hierarchy among the ruler’s subjects. Though Mughal durbars established hierarchies, the rulers also pledged loyalty to their subjects. As the durbar evolved into a British colonial institution, the reciprocity between the British ruler and the Indian subject dissipated. 3. Despite the fact that these events provide historians with easy to enumerate beginnings of the Uprising, the circumstances that caused the rebellion were diverse and considerably further ranging than gun cartridges greased with animal fat. The increasing Westernization of princely states and customs, such as an influx of Christian missionaries and legal rulings over religious

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customs like suttee, growing numbers of Britons in the subcontinent, and increased control over princely states—whether through puppet leaders or direct imperial control—all contributed to growing unease and discontentment in the subcontinent; see Wilson (2016). 4. The instruction included both male and female students so that children could use these skills both in the home, raising other imperial citizens, and in the world at large; see Aldrich (1988), Dunae (1988), Heathorn (1995), and Horn (1988). 5. I use the term “Anglo-Indian” in its historical context. Here, Anglo-Indian refers to a person of British heritage who had lived in or was raised in India. As the twentieth century progressed, Anglo-Indian was used to refer to a person of both British and Indian descent. 6. To maintain consistency with the historical documents, this chapter uses the nineteenth-century spellings of Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Cashmere (Kashmir). 7. That the Union Jack was never lowered at the Residency is an important reminder of the role that the Residency played during the Uprising. In 1857, Lucknow was under siege for four months, during which a number of British women and children survived in the Residency. These women and children, alongside the British soldiers stationed outside the city, held Lucknow—contrasting it with Nana Sahib’s destruction of the encampments at nearby Cawnpore. The never-lowered Union Jack represented the consistency of power.

References Aldrich, Richard. 1988. Imperialism in the Study and Teaching of History. In “Benefits Bestowed”?: Education and British Imperialism, ed. J.A.  Mangan, 23–38. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Arnold-Forster, H.O. 1885. The Citizen Reader. London: Cassell. Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bell, Gertrude. 1903 [sic]. Letter to Her Stepmother, Dame Florence Bell, January 1. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Accessed April 25, 2019. http://gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk/letter_ details.php?letter_id=1348. Bourne, Samuel. 1865–1866. Cawnpore; The Memorial Well, the Marble Statue by Marochetti, from the Entrance. Accessed July 8, 2019. http://www.getty.edu/ art/collection/objects/208358/samuelbourne-cawnpore-the-memorialwell-the-marble-statue-by-marochetti-from-theentrance-english-1865-1866/. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 1862. Lady Audley’s Secret. London: Tinsley.

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Bradley, Shelland [Francis Bradley Bradley-Birt]. 1912. An American Girl at the Durbar. London: John Lane. Bradshaw’s Through Routes to the Capitals of the World and Overland Guide to India, Persia, and the Far East: Handbook of Indian, Colonial, and Foreign Travel, with Itineraries of the Principal Railways, Ocean Tracks, River Ways, Post Roads, and Caravan Routes, Maps, Plans, Glossaries, and Vocabularies. 1903. London: Blacklock. Case, Adelaide. 1858. Day-By-Day at Lucknow. London: Richard Bentley. “The Cawnpore Memorial.” 1863. The Builder, no. 21: 267. Google Books. Accessed April 25, 2019. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=s21TAA AAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA267. Cohn, Bernard. 1983. Representing Authority in Victorian India. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 165–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coopland, R.M. 1859. A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior and Life in the Fort of Agra During the Mutinies of 1857. London: Smith, Elder. Curzon, George Nathanial. 1906. Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from His Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-General of India, 1898–1905. London: Macmillan. Delhi Durbar Souvenir, 1903. 1903. Madras: Delhi Durbar Photographic Gallery. Duberly, Frances. 1859. Campaigning Experiences in Rajpootana and Central India, During the Suppression of the Mutiny, 1857–1858. London: Smith, Elder. Dunae, Patrick A. 1988. Education, Emigration and Empire: The Colonial College, 1887–1905. In “Benefits Bestowed”?: Education and British Imperialism, ed. J.A. Mangan, 193–210. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Forster, W.E. 1885. Preface. In The Citizen Reader, ed. H.O.  Arnold-Forster. London: Cassell. Garlick, A.H. 1896. A New Manual of Method. New York: Longmans, Green. George V, King of Great Britain. 1912. His Majesty King George’s Speeches in India: A Complete Collection of All the Speeches Delivered in India During His Tour as Prince of Wales and in Connection with the Recent Coronation Durbar. 2nd ed. Madras: G.A. Natesan. Goswami, Manu. 1996. ‘Englishness’ on the Imperial Circuit: Mutiny Tours in Colonial South Asia. Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1): 54–84. Handbook for Travellers in India and Ceylon including the Provinces of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras (The Panjab, North-West Provinces, Rajputana, Central Provinces, Mysore, etc.) The Native States and Assam. 1901. London: John Murray. Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon including the Provinces of Bengal, Bombay, Madras, the United Provinces of Agra and Lucknow, the Panjab, Eastern Bengal and Assam, the Northwest Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and the Central Provinces, and the Native States of Rajputana, Central India, Kashmir, Hyderabad, Mysore, etc. 1911. London: John Murray.

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Harden, H.S. Scott, ed. 1912. The Cruise to the Indian Empire and the Coronation Durbar 1911–1912 on the R.M.S. Dunottar Castle. London: Printed for Private Circulation. Heathorn, Stephen. 1995. ‘Let Us Remember That We, Too, Are English’: Constructions of Citizenship and National Identity in English Elementary School Reading Books, 1880–1914. Victorian Studies (Spring): 395–427. ———. 2007. Angel of Empire: The Cawnpore Memorial Well as a British Site of Imperial Remembrance. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8 (3). https://muse.jhu.edu/. Henton, Alexandra. 2011. The 1911 Delhi Durbar: A Remarkable Spectacle. The Field, November 17. Accessed April 25, 2019. https://www.thefield.co.uk/ features/the-1911-delhi-durbar-aremarkablespectacle-21754. Herbert, Christopher. 2008. The War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horn, Pamela. 1988. English Elementary Education and the Growth of the Imperial Ideal: 1880–1914. In “Benefits Bestowed”?: Education and British Imperialism, ed. J.A. Mangan, 39–55. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutchinson, George. 1859. Narratives of the Mutinies in Oude, Compiled from Authentic Records. London: Smith, Elder. Illustrated London News. 1857. The Infantry Parade-Ground at Cawnpore, the Scene of the Recent Massacre, 5–6, September 5. Ireland, William Wotherspoon. 1861. History of the Siege of Delhi. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies. History and Theory 41 (2): 179–197. Kaye, John William, and George Bruce Malleson. 1897. History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. London: Longmans, Green. Kipling, Rudyard. (1901) 1989. Kim. Edited by Edward Said. London: Penguin. Menpes, Dorothy, and Mortimer Menpes. 1903. The Durbar. London: A. and C. Black. Moberly, L.G. 1912. Impressions of Delhi. In The Cruise to the Indian Empire and the Coronation Durbar 1911–1912 on the R.M.S. Dunottar Castle, ed. H.S. Scott Harden, 13–17. London: Printed for Private Circulation. Steel, Flora Annie. 1897. On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1903. Side Lights on the Delhi Durbar. Saturday Review, 3, January 3. Wheeler, Stephen. 1904. History of the Delhi Coronation Durbar: Held on the First of January 1903 to Celebrate the Coronation of His Majesty King Edward VII Emperor of India. London: John Murray. https://archive.org/details/in. ernet.dli.2015.207681. The Gentlewoman. 1903. Where Is the Durbar Held, 16, January. Wilson, Jon. 2016. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. New York: Public Affairs.

CHAPTER 11

Nationalist Ironies: The Legacy of the Federalist Party and the Construction of a Unified Republic Asaf Almog

Introduction: The Excluded Party Speaking to Illinois Democrats in 1835, Stephen A. Douglas attacked the state’s Whig Party. In his speech Douglas described Whigs as “the old leaven of aristocratic federalism” (Douglas 1961, 29). Four years later, Democrat Ely Moore of New York likewise accused Whigs of embodying the Federalist legacy, allying with abolitionists at the expense of the nation. “To accomplish their purposes,” he continued, “the Federalists have availed themselves of every means in their power” (Stevens 1913, 189). One could find references to the Federalist Party in Democratic partisan rhetoric throughout the antebellum era, usually posited as part of a conspiracy against American democracy. As late as 1860 Stephen Douglas stated, “By their treason to the country the federalists had rendered their party so odious that it was necessary to seize upon some new element of agitation to revive their broken and sinking fortunes” (Douglas 1939, 532–533). A. Almog (*) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_11

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These statements referred to a party which had dissolved in 1823 and was thus long gone. The Federalist (sometimes called “Federal”) Party, one of the nation’s two major political parties in the Republic’s first decades, produced two presidents (Washington and John Adams) and several competitive presidential candidates. Even after its demise, however, the Federalist Party’s memory loomed large in American political culture, and was regularly invoked by politicians at times of political crisis. This fact, in itself, seems puzzling. In republican regimes, parties as such are seldom a subject of commemoration. Yet decades after their demise, Federalists remained active in American memory, though not in a way they would have approved of. Indeed, early republican and antebellum Americans often referred to Federalists as if the party were a living danger. The following chapter seeks to explain why. Several studies of antebellum political culture have observed that the Federalist Party served as a pejorative, as did other concepts associated with European aristocracy (Ashworth 1983; Baker 1998). While the following discussion builds on these studies, the chapter departs from scholars such as Ashworth and Baker by treating Federalists as enemies of a different kind. Previous studies treated Federalists as creatures of the past, as were—for Americans—the British Tory Party and Europe’s aristocratic classes. These treatments relied on a portrayal of the period between 1800 and 1815 as a time of slow, inevitable decline in the Federalist Party (e.g., Wilentz 2005). However, recent studies have established that the party resurged from 1808, and only the unexpected ending of the War of 1812 brought its demise. Moreover, the party was present in all but name in the 1824 election (Lampi 2013; Ratcliffe 2015). In addition, Federalist leaders came from the European-descended American elite, and their inclusion in the nation was never in doubt. Their exclusion as a party thus merits further explanation. A burgeoning of American nationalism followed the aftermath of the War of 1812. This nationalist tide included a concerted effort to define an American national consensus (Kammen 1991). The Federalist Party’s exclusion reflected this process. The new national consensus entailed, among other elements, a final break from the shadow of Great Britain. Rather than remaining a cultural and political dependent of the former mother country, an emerging majority of white Americans conceived of the United States as exceptional and believed that the American continent’s unique geographical conditions would allow them to maintain individual economic independence, in contrast with the system of privilege

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and aristocracy associated with Europe and particularly Great Britain (Onuf 2012). In addition, to use Elizabeth Varon’s phrasing, any reference to the legitimacy of disunion became “the most provocative and potent word in the vocabulary of Americans” (2008, 1). The chapter looks at the way depictions of the Federalists, and the memory of the party’s Hartford Convention in particular, were deployed after the party’s dissolution. This chapter examines the Federalist Party’s image and its role in the political debates of the early republic and the antebellum era. It begins with a brief discussion of the bitter partisan battles between Federalists and their enemies, the Democrat-Republicans. The chapter then looks at the circumstances of the Federalist Party’s demise at the end of the War of 1812, and the party’s subsequent legacy until the aftermath of the American Civil War. During this period, the Federalist image became a convenient reference point for demonizing political opponents across the political map. Significantly, too, the party’s usage of an early version of the “slave power” conspiracy argument ultimately played a crucial role in the story of the American Civil War and eventual emancipation. Yet Federalists were branded dangerous sectionalists by slaveholders and northern Democrats, and the Whigs, their closest political descendants, either ran away from their memory or outright disavowed their entire legacy. The usage of the Federalist Party as an “other” reveals a special irony of nineteenth-­century American nationalism: the party itself was regarded as outside the American Revolution’s republican legacy even as some of its core ideas ultimately came out victorious.

The Federalist Party’s Rise and Demise The Federalist Party developed out of a rupture between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the Secretaries of State and Treasury in Washington’s administration. Jefferson, with James Madison, established the DemocratRepublican Party. In response, Hamilton, John Adams, and others established the Federalist Party with Washington’s blessing. The partisan division reflected fundamental disagreements on the nature of the new nation. Federalists advocated the usage of a centralized national government to promote industrial growth as part of a diversified economy, while DemocratRepublicans favored an agrarian republic and a system of decentralized power, which would mostly remain in the states (Elkins and McKitrick 1993). The partisan division further echoed events taking place throughout the Atlantic. In response to the French Revolution and especially its infamous

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“Reign of Terror,” the parties divided in their support for Britain and the French Empire. Federalists soon associated Jefferson, who had openly sympathized with the French Revolution, with the wish to import the Jacobin tyranny of the mob (Cleves 2009). By contrast, Jeffersonians labeled their opponents aristocrats. According to the interpretation of the American Revolution’s legacy promoted by the Jeffersonians, “Republicanism was founded on political equality; aristocracy was based on favoritism, hierarchy, and special privilege” (Huston 1993, 1083). In other words, if the right to self-rule was the primary justification for the American Revolution, aristocratic Federalists were foes of the Republic itself. Thus, each party regarded itself as the American Revolution’s heir, while its rival was its nemesis (Robertson 2001). Jefferson’s victory in the 1800 election ultimately guaranteed that it was the demonization of the Federalist Party that was to endure. The parties’ initial division focused on controversies which applied to the entire Union. However, the rivalry increasingly reflected sectional divisions between southern states whose economy depended on slavery and northern states whose economies were more diversified. By the 1796 presidential election nearly all slave states endorsed Jefferson, while the New England region was strongly Federalist. This trend strengthened in the subsequent election (Ferling 2004, 88, 168). Jefferson’s victory in the 1800 presidential election partly resulted from the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which determined that each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a free person for the purpose of representation and taxation, thus giving additional voting power to states with large enslaved populations (Wills 2003). New England’s political leaders most commonly expressed sectionalist tensions in their calls to repeal the three-fifths clause. Injustice toward the northern states in terms of voting power, rather than the injustice of slavery, stood at the center of their arguments. Massachusetts Federalist Timothy Pickering continually referred to Jefferson as a “Negro president” and his Congress as “Negro Congress,” alluding to the role of slave representation in securing their election (Adams 1877, 346, 352–353, 408). From 1803 to 1815, Massachusetts Federalists devoted much energy to repealing the clause. These attempts foreshadowed the central “slave power” argument of slavery’s opponents: claims that slaveholders ruled the nation and sought to increase their collective power through national policies (Wills 2003). However, the Federalist antagonism to Jefferson failed. Jefferson proved a popular leader, especially after the Louisiana Purchase implemented his

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vision of an “empire for liberty.” The new Republic, Jefferson argued, would expand across the American continent and establish small republican governments at the state level. Federalists vehemently opposed the Purchase. According to the classic account of republicanism in the eighteenth century, a republic needed to be small so that the citizenry could effectively control its rulers, and with their emphasis on an active national government, Federalists saw territorial growth as a threat to this control. New England Federalist Fisher Ames quipped in 1803, “I have as loyal and respectful an opinion as possible of the sincerity in folly of our leaders. But, surely, it exceeds all my credulity and candor on that head, to suppose even they can contemplate a republican form as practicable, honest, or free, if applied when it is so manifestly inapplicable to the government of one third of God’s earth” (Ames 1854, 1:329). They further resisted the spread of slavery that the Purchase would potentially aid. Federalist opposition ended in failure, however (Gannon 2001). Scholars have surmised that the Purchase contributed to Jefferson’s landslide victory in the 1804 presidential election, in which he carried several New England states in addition to his southern base of support. After 1804 the Federalist Party appeared to be on the road to extinction. However, the party’s fate temporarily changed in 1807, after the Jefferson administration embargoed trade with Great Britain. Federalists strongly opposed the embargo. Jefferson’s measure proved highly unpopular in New England; the region depended on maritime trade, including trade with Britain and its Canadian colony, and thus the embargo directly affected its interests. As a result, support for the Federalists substantially increased in New England. Federalists maintained their vociferous public opposition to Republican policies during the War of 1812 and, as a result, faced increasing hostility elsewhere. Despite this hostility, throughout the war the party remained competitive in the national arena (Lampi 2013). Vibrant partisan rivalry, then, marked the period leading to the war as well as the war itself. However, the war’s end caused an unexpected turn of events. In late 1814, New England’s Federalists gathered in Hartford, Connecticut. The Hartford Convention’s stated purpose was to provide relief for New England states, which had especially struggled due to the financial implications of the embargo and the war. The delegates issued a report which condemned the war and laid out their grievances against the Madison administration. In addition, the report “proposed” seven constitutional amendments, the most significant of which was the repeal of the

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three-fifths clause (Mason 2002). Federalists never explicitly threatened to secede, but many believed the threat was implied. Unbeknownst to the Hartford delegates, however, the warring nations had signed the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, as the convention was adjourning. Meanwhile, in early 1815, Andrew Jackson’s forces, also unaware of the news from Europe, achieved victory in the Battle of New Orleans. While Jackson’s victory had no impact on the war’s outcome, the battle provided a sense of national triumph. The sudden change sealed the Federalist Party’s fate. The war’s end generated a new admiration for the conception of the Republic as “a coherent nation—a country with clear, secure borders and a well-defined sense of national unity” (Apap 2016, 2). In this new mindset, the Union was no longer understood to be a compact among the states, from which members could withdraw at will. Instead, such strife, especially during wartime, came to be seen as tantamount to treason (Varon 2008, 38–39, 44–45). Such a perception was quite recent. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 had allowed the possibility of disunion, and the possibility had been openly discussed in New England (Gannon 2001). In 1811, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts stated in the House of Representatives that his “love of our Union … depends upon the qualities of that Union,” and it cannot be made “universal.” Quincy stated, “I confess, the first public love of my heart is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts … the love of this Union grows out of this attachment to my native soil” (24 Annals of Cong. 542 (1811)). After the war, such notions were regarded as illegitimate. In this changed atmosphere, the Hartford Convention’s effect was immediate. In the following presidential election Republican James Monroe defeated Federalist Rufus King in a landslide. While the Federalist Party continued to compete in New England in the next decade, the party ceased to be a serious contender for national leadership.

“That August and Never-to-Be-Forgotten HARTFORD CONVENTION!!!”: Federalist Legacies in War and Peace, 1815–1848 In the aftermath of the War of 1812 the figure of Thomas Jefferson and the republican legacies he stood for became more adulated than ever before. “For the next three decades,” David Brown writes, “most Americans, whether Jacksonian or Whig, considered themselves

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Jeffersonians” (Brown 1999, 17). Jefferson had cast Federalists as aristocrats for decades, and the war reinforced this image for several reasons. First, the Federalist Party had taken a traditionally pro-British stance. Hostility toward Britain intensified after the war, and Federalists suffered as a result. In addition, the war had broken Native American power east of the Mississippi, thus paving the way to the West and to the glorification of the American frontier. New England’s Federalists had been hostile to the frontier throughout the previous decades. Now the region’s representatives retaliated. Aristocratic interests, argued men such as Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, stood at the heart of the reluctance within New England’s elite to allocate land to the growing frontier (Childers 2018, chapter 3). The Missouri Crisis (1819–1820) and its aftermath sealed the Federalist Party’s fate by connecting the party with dangerous sectionalist rhetoric once again. For the first time since 1789, slavery became an overt topic of contention. Responding to the request of the Missouri Territory to be admitted to the Union, Representative James Tallmadge proposed to prohibit slave importation into the state and to demand that the state begin a plan for gradual emancipation as a condition of its admission. As the debate intensified, many northern representatives escalated their rhetoric and bluntly attacked the institution of slavery itself. Meanwhile, southern representatives increasingly felt betrayed by northerners and pushed toward a stronger defense of the institution (Wood 2017). While partisan affiliation played a small part in the controversy, some southerners identified the antislavery agitation with a cynical Federalist attempt to recreate divisions and thus resume power. Thomas Jefferson’s assertions in this manner were both representative and highly influential: Jefferson famously stated, “The Missouri question is a meer [sic] party trick” in which “the leaders of federalism defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism… are taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people to effect a division of parties by a geographical line” (Jefferson 1820). The spirit of Jefferson’s charges would endure. One example appeared two years later: in 1822 the authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, arrested Denmark Vesey, a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and charged him with plotting a slave rebellion. Shortly thereafter, South Carolinian Edwin C. Holland implied that the “insults” against the slaveholding states during the Missouri debates had encouraged the plot. Holland blamed “the Hartford Convention, that scorpion nest of

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sedition and intrigue,” as “the origin of those profound and flagitious schemes, the true character and color of which have been so thoroughly developed” (Holland 1822, 10). The Federalist Party disintegrated in 1823. The word “Federalist,” however, remained a potent insult in the country’s political rhetoric, conveying allegations of treason, aristocracy, and elitism. As populist Andrew Jackson built support for a new Democratic Party in the South and West in the late 1820s, his supporter William Peter Ness attacked Henry Clay of Kentucky for betraying his Western identity and collaborating with John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts and his political supporters. As the son of John Adams, the sole Federalist president, Adams immediately became suspected of sympathy for Britain and the Hartford Convention’s legacy, even though he had left the party as early as 1807. “Now let Henry Clay and his worthy allies of the East,” Ness stated, “and his co-adjustors in corruption, boast of their victory over the subdued spirit of the WEST! The Hartford Convention is triumphant; its instigators and abettors now lord it over that country which twelve short years ago, they would have sold or betrayed to the enemy” (Ness 1827, 9). While Jackson’s electors came from the Deep South and the West, the Federalist Party gained opponents in New England as well. Jackson’s supporters aimed, in the phrasing of a Vermont journal, to remember “that august and never-to-­ be-forgotten HARTFORD CONVENTION!!!” (Freedom’s Banner, June 25, 1828, 4). Jackson’s victory in 1828 paved the way for the establishment of a new party system. The Jacksonians retained the Democratic Party’s name, while Jackson’s opponents established the Whig Party in 1833. Whigs differed from Federalists in important ways. The party’s leaders presented themselves as enemies of sectionalism, celebrated the cause of the Union, and appealed to the South and West as well as the Northeast. The victory in the Battle of New Orleans had seemed to erase sectional tensions. In subsequent decades, although South Carolinian John C. Calhoun and his supporters adopted a sectionalist rhetoric, most statesmen framed their rhetoric within a thoroughly nationalist mindset. Until the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War, a large center in American politics debated issues such as the banks, tariffs, and internal improvements. These issues pertained to both sections of the Union, and thus the partisan contest contained the sectional divisions. In addition, both Whigs and Democrats vowed to celebrate the Union as perpetual (Childers 2018).

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Yet some aspects of the partisan division were reminiscent of the earlier party system. Whigs drew their support from commercial communities and came to be identified with the cause of reform, especially associated with New England. For many outside of New England, “reform” signaled elitist control. For the Jacksonians, Whigs embodied a fundamental threat to democracy, namely, aristocracy (Watson 1990). Democrats sought to present Whigs as successors to the Federalists. Indeed, they mocked the presumption of men such as New Englander Daniel Webster to be the heirs of the British Whig Party, which had inspired the American Revolution in the eighteenth century. “Ask the Northern section of the opposition if the nullifiers are Whigs,” stated Georgia Democratic Senator John Forsyth. He added, “Ask the Southern section if the Hartford conventionists are Whigs—a few years since they were a disgrace to the country [and] the open enemy of the Constitution.” Democrat Felix Grundy of Tennessee added, “Where are the ‘blue light’ gentry, who gave private signals to the enemy to enable them to murder our citizens?” (Register of Debates, 1654–1655, 1559). In partisan debates across the nation, the Democrats, self-appointed heirs of the Jeffersonians, accused their Whig rivals of being nothing but Federalists in disguise. John Forsyth, son of the Georgia senator and editor of a prominent Democratic newspaper in Alabama, argued that “under all the names and types assumed by political parties in this country, since the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there has been but one great dividing line of principle running between them. American politicians have been either Federalists or Republicans.” Forsyth stated, “The objects of the two parties have been the same. The Federalists, nationals, or Whigs, by whatever different names called, have always distrusted the people, and had no faith in Republicanism” (Burnett 2006, 15). Northern Democrats similarly argued that Federalists and Whigs were one and the same. In Aristocracy in America (1839) German immigrant Francis Grund of Pennsylvania, an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic Party, condemned “the Whigs, alias Tories, alias National Republicans, alias Federalists” (Grund 2018, 168). During the 1840 presidential campaign Democratic newspapers throughout the nation sought to connect their Whig opponents with the Federalist Party. The Ohio Statesman reprinted old newspaper articles, dating back to 1799. These articles reported the Federalist Party’s use of the army to attack proponents of liberty poles, a symbol of the Revolutionary battle against Great Britain. The Ohio Statesman’s editor stated, “By these recollections we wish to

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impress upon our thinking republican fellow-citizens the fact, that the present party which is organized under the name of ‘Whig,’ is in body and soul the same, which heretofore was known as the Federal party, and was guilty of such monstrous crimes” (Ohio Statesman, August 12, 1840, quoted in Lurie 2019, 200). Nearing the 1840 presidential election the Massachusetts Democratic Party issued a long pamphlet detailing the connection between contemporary Whigs and the leaders of the Hartford Convention (Greene and Hallett 1840). During this period a different Federalist stance resurfaced. As part of another nationalist tide, resembling the events of 1815, the emerging “Young America” movement began an enthusiastic public campaign for the annexation of the Republic of Texas, which had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836. In an influential article John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, celebrated the eradication of past traditions and stated that the United States was “The Great Nation of Futurity.” According to his vision, “the far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True” (O’Sullivan 1839). Whigs had far less faith in such visions. Like Federalists in the century’s early years, Whigs believed that a larger state would endanger republican society. In the case of Texas, Whigs had other major concerns: that annexation would cause a war with Mexico (as it ultimately did) and that the acquisition of a large slaveholding territory would reopen the Union’s sectional tensions (Howe 1979; Shelden 2012). These views resembled the Federalist Party’s reasons for opposing the Louisiana Purchase (Greenberg 2015). Democrats saw this resemblance: in publications throughout the antebellum era Democrats argued for a “perfect identity” between “modern Whiggery” and “ancient Federalism.” Federalism was “an essential ingredient” of the Whig Party, Democrats maintained, and Whigs were “Hartford Convention Federalists.” With them “the spirit of federalism [was] again revived… The principle, the foundation underlying both parties, was the same.” However, in making such portrayals Democrats obscured the stark differences between Federalist sectionalist rhetoric and Whig adulation of the Union (Silbey 1991, 94). Finally, the annexation of Texas and the subsequent war against Mexico resurrected the deadliest

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charge against the Federalist Party: that of wartime treason. After the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, Whigs overwhelmingly opposed the war. Public debate on the war brought increasing invocations of Federalism and the Hartford Convention in public and private. Tennessee’s Democratic newspapers, for instance, began to refer to the state Whigs as Federalists (Johnson 2018, 167; Schroeder 1973, 29). The rise of antislavery sentiment in the North added another dimension to attacks against the Whigs. While the opposition of most Whigs to the war reflected a principled rejection of territorial extension, a group of party members from the northern states, the self-styled “Conscience Whigs,” argued that the war was motivated by the “slave power,” a conspiracy by slaveholders to expand the institution and strengthen their hold on the nation. The party’s conservative members, however, saw no reason to agitate the problem of slavery and thus antagonize slaveholding Whigs. Meanwhile, William Lloyd Garrison’s marginal-but-loud abolitionist movement further sought to take advantage of the disagreement. When Whigs called for a special convention to debate the war, Garrison and his supporters registered as Whigs in order to attend (Brauer 1967). The attendance of Garrisonian abolitionists allowed opponents to connect the Whigs still more directly with abolition and Federalism, particularly because the Massachusetts-born Garrison had himself once been a vocal Federalist supporter (Mason 2009). The Democratic newspapers in Massachusetts derisively referred to the convention as a “second edition” of the Hartford Convention (Pittsfield Sun, January 23, 1845, quoted in Brauer 1967, 124–125). Whigs dreaded the shadow of the Hartford Convention. As Henry Clay observed, “the exceptionable conduct of the federal party, during the last British war, has excited an influence in the prosecution of the present war, and prevented a just discrimination between the two wars.” After mentioning the Hartford Convention’s memory, Clay publicly wondered, “Has not an apprehension of a similar fate, in a state of a case widely different, repressed a fearless expression of their real sentiments in some of our public men?” (Hughes 1847, 197). Public debates among Whigs gave credence to Clay’s conjecture. During a debate in the House of Representatives, Robert C. Winthrop, a leading “Conservative Whig,” attacked Joshua Giddings of Ohio and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, hardline Conscience Whigs. Winthrop found Giddings and Sumner’s passionate rhetoric objectionable. To buttress his point, Winthrop read a letter that John Jay, a leading Federalist,

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had written to fellow Federalist and Hartford Convention hardliner Timothy Pickering in 1814. In it, Jay expressed his continued opposition to the War of 1812, but opposed a plan hatched by Pickering and others to sign an independent peace treaty with Great Britain. Whig opponents of the Mexican-American War should follow Jay’s footsteps, Winthrop argued (Cong. Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd Sess. 143 (1847)). The Hartford Convention’s ghost was alive for Winthrop as well.

Remembering the Federalist Party During Sectional Tensions, 1848–1861 The Mexican-American War resulted in an American victory, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo dramatically enlarged the United States. Debates over the new acquisitions intensified the debates over the extension of slavery. Opponents of slavery’s extension left the major parties and formed the Free Soil Party, which argued that extension perpetuated slaveholders’ control of national politics. In 1854, disgruntled Northern Whigs and Democrats established the Republican Party. The party increased its rhetoric against the “slave power” (Brooks 2016), and for the first time since 1815, sectional positions became part of a major party’s official platform. Indeed, the Republican antislavery argument resembled the one made by New England Federalists several decades earlier (Richards 2000, 6; Malavasic 2017). Proslavery forces certainly saw the parallels to 1815. Southern secessionists invoked the Hartford Convention’s memory as a sign of continuous northern aggression. Since the 1830s, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama had drawn a direct link between various positions taken by Federalists and Whigs. Yancey argued that there was a commonality among the Federalist opposition to the Louisiana Purchase, the Hartford Convention, the Missouri Crisis, and the aftermath of the MexicanAmerican War. All were part of a northern conspiracy, he argued (Walther 2006, 43, 75, 132–133). Northern Democrats similarly compared Republicans with the Federalist Party. Their rhetoric alluded to Jefferson’s charges during the Missouri Crisis: namely, that Republicans were motivated by sectional interests at the expense of the nation. Massachusetts Democrat Benjamin Hallett drew a direct comparison between “the Hartford Convention and [the] black Republican convention.” Hallett particularly emphasized one similarity between the movements:

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“[Federalists] then denounced, just as our opponents do now, ‘the preponderance of the slave power.’” Hallett called for the destruction “of this second Northern conspiracy” (Hallett 1856, 4, 6, 7). Republicans, on the other hand, sought to connect themselves not to Federalism but to the party of Jefferson. In well-known speeches, Abraham Lincoln and William Henry Seward implicitly defined themselves against the Federalist Party’s legacy. Lincoln extolled the Sage of Monticello’s political virtues and argued that the modern-day Republican Party followed his principles. “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln stated, for introducing “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” Lincoln referred to the Declaration of Independence. The majority of his statement, however, alluded to the 1800 presidential election between Adams and Jefferson. Like Jefferson’s party, Lincoln promised, the Republican Party supported “both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3:375–376). Seward made a similar claim in his famous 1858 speech, in which he argued that there was an “irrepressible conflict” between the slave and free labor systems. The new Republican Party “avows now, as the Republican Party of 1800 did, in one word, its faith and its works, ‘Equal and exact justice to all men’” (Seward 2004). As Stephen Douglas’s statement quoted in the beginning of the chapter illustrates, Democrats persisted in their charges. Some made even more pointed attacks. Commenting on Seward’s campaign seeking the Republican Party’s presidential candidacy, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Democratic New York Herald, sarcastically commented, “It is hoped that the New York Senator will keep the ‘Massachusetts school’ of politics as his text throughout his Western tour.” Bennett drew a link between the “Massachusetts school,” the Hartford Convention, and radical abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, an event that had quickly come to symbolize reckless extremism. Bennett stated, “By steadily adhering to the John Brown and Hartford Convention platform, [Seward] can materially assist the Union movement” (New York Herald, September 4, 1860). While they might see Republicans as dangerous sectionalists, however, when the nation fractured, northern Democrats overwhelmingly sided with the Union. As the secession crisis escalated, leaders of the southern states continued to invoke the Federalist Party as evidence of the northern states’ anti-­ southern provocations. For instance, in the final House debates over secession in February 1861, Missouri Representative John Richard Barrett

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once again cited Jefferson’s accusations against the Federalist Party during the Missouri Crisis. In these same debates, Texas Senator Louis Trezevant Wigfall echoed the New York Herald and connected Seward with the “Massachusetts school of politics” (Pitcaithley 2018, 297–298, 327–328).

Conclusion In the aftermath of the Civil War, as attempts to transform southern society through “Reconstruction” failed, a growing portion of the nation sought reconciliation between the previously warring sections. An increasingly unified “white republic” emerged as slavery’s legacy was set aside in the name of unity (Blight 2001). Amidst this atmosphere of consensus, in 1877 renowned historian Henry Adams, the great-grandson of Federalist John Adams, published an elaborate documentation of the “secessionist” plots which New England’s Federalists had contemplated in the first decades of the century. Adams presented these as being similar to the rebellion the Union had defeated a decade earlier. In Adams’s telling, New England Federalists were precursors to the southern secessionists in their preference for sectional interests over the nation’s unity (Adams 1877). However, Adams omitted critical aspects of the story behind the Federalist protests against the Jefferson administration. Specifically, opposition to slave representation had no role in his account of the plots. This omission is particularly striking since the antislavery politics after the Mexican-American War had arisen in order to battle the “slave power.” Adams was keenly aware of that, since his father, Charles Francis Adams, had been the vice-presidential candidate of the Free Soil Party in the 1848 presidential election. As Leonard Richards has demonstrated, Free Soilers’ stance had its origins in the Federalist Party’s protests during the early republic (Richards 2000, 6). But Adams was not an impartial historian looking to excavate the bare facts of the past. Like other historians of his generation, Adams sought to create a past usable for (white) national harmony and justify the exceptional meaning of America (Kelley 2003, chapter 11). Neither emphasis on the sectionalist battles of the past nor celebration of the Federalist Party’s legacy were compatible with Adams’s ideology. After 1865 Adams increasingly opposed radical voices which supported racial equality (e.g., O’Brien 2005). Moreover, Adams considered Jefferson the apostle of American democracy and opposed the legacy of Hamiltonian Federalism (e.g., Wills 2005). Thus, by 1877 Adams preferred to emphasize

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commonalities among the sections of the “white republic.” The war, Adams and others contended, was fought for the Union and Jeffersonian egalitarian democracy, rather than for slavery, and southerners were thus “guilty” of backwardness and nothing more. Four years after Adams published the Documents, the irony came full circle. In his new memoir Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate States, contended that the sectional crises and the act of secession continued a pattern of sectional disharmony which was as old as the Republic. Davis sought to establish that slavery had been simply an excuse for secession, while sectional tensions, dating back to the early republic, were the war’s real cause. The memoir extensively cited Adams’s documentations of New England Federalists’ contemplations of disunion. Specifically, Davis quoted a letter in which Timothy Pickering predicted that “the British Provinces, even with the assent of Britain, will become members of the Northern Confederacy” and added that “the black and white populations will mark the boundary” between the separated territories (Adams 1877, 338). Davis stated, “Substituting South Carolina for Massachusetts; Virginia for New York; Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama for New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island; Kentucky for New Jersey, etc., etc., we find the suggestions of 1860–1861 only a reproduction of those thus outlined almost sixty years earlier.” Thus, the Civil War “was the offspring of sectional rivalry and political ambition,” Davis argued, and it would have arisen “if there had not been a Negro in America” (Davis 1881, 1:72, 79). Remarkably, neither Adams nor Davis interrogated what Pickering meant by “black and white populations.” Subsequent scholars similarly left the statement unexplained. Indeed, many scholars have viewed the Federalists’ references to slavery as disingenuous and thus sought to downplay the subject’s place in their arguments (e.g., Banner 1970, 104–109; Wood 2009, 532–533). However, as Peter Onuf has observed, in the early republic “Americans contested slavery even when they thought they were arguing about other issues” (Onuf 2011, xvi, xiii). Pickering’s reference, combined with many deployments of arguments against the three-fifths clause by New England Federalists, suggests that Pickering indeed pointed to slavery as the nation’s fundamental division, and thus that both Adams and Davis overlooked his actual meaning. Davis’s contention resonated with charges made by Jefferson, and then by William Lowndes Yancey and other southern secessionists. Other Confederate apologists later repeated Davis’s argument (e.g., Pickett

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1900, 152). The secession plans of the early republic thus became a useful tool for the myth of the “Lost Cause.” In addition, many modern scholars, while feeling no love for southern apologists, have offered a similar interpretation of the Federalist arguments. New England Federalists thus became an instrument to defend men that Federalists themselves would have deemed enemies of the nation, even as Federalists were being disavowed by their own ideological descendants.

References Adams, Henry. 1877. Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800–1815. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Ames, Fisher. 1854. Works of Fisher Ames. Edited by Seth Ames. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 24 Annals of Cong. 542 (1811). Apap, Christopher C. 2016. The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press. Ashworth, John. 1983. “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846. London: Royal Historical Society. Baker, Jean H. 1998. Affairs of Party: The Political Structure of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University Press. Banner, James M. 1970. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Structure in Massachusetts, 1789–1815. New  York: Alfred A. Knopf. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brauer, Kinley J. 1967. Cotton Versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Brooks, Corey M. 2016. Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, David. 1999. Jeffersonian Ideology and the Second Party System. The Historian 62 (1): 17–30. Burnett, Lonnie A. 2006. The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Childers, Christopher. 2018. The Webster-Hayne Debate: Defining Nationhood in the Early American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2009. The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cong. Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd Sess. 143 (1847). Davis, Jefferson. 1881. The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

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Douglas, Stephen A. 1939. The Montgomery Address of Stephen A.  Douglas. Edited by David R. Barbee and Milledge L. Bonham, Jr. Journal of Southern History 5 (4): 527–552. ———. 1961. The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas. Edited by Robert W. Johannsen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. 1993. The Age of Federalism. New  York: Oxford University Press. Ferling, John. 2004. Adams Versus Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. New York: Oxford University Press. Freedom’s Banner. 1828, June 25. Gannon, Kevin M. 2001. Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan of Destruction’: New England Federalists and the Idea of a Northern Confederacy, 1803–1804. Journal of the Early Republic 21 (3): 413–443. Greenberg, Amy S. 2015. ‘Time’s Noblest Empire is the Last’: Texas Annexation in the Presumed Course of American Empire. In Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution, ed. Sam W.  Haynes and Gerald D.  Saxon, 139–164. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Greene, Charles G., and Benjamin Franklin Hallett. 1840. The Identity of the Old Hartford Convention Federalists with the Modern Whig, Harrison Party. Boston: Boston Morning Post. Grund, Francis J. 2018. Aristocracy in America: From the Sketch-Book of a German Nobleman. Edited by Armin Mattes. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Hallett, Benjamin. 1856. The Remedy for Kansas: Address to the Democrats of Cheshire County, at Keene, New Hampshire, Fourth of July, 1856. Boston: Boston Post. Holland, Edwin C. 1822. A Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against the Southern and Western States. Charleston: A.E. Miller. Howe, Daniel Walker. 1979. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hughes, Jeremiah, ed. 1847. Niles’ National Register. Baltimore: Jeremiah Hughes. Huston, James L. 1993. The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of Distribution of Wealth, 1765–1900. American Historical Review 98 (4): 1079–1105. Jefferson, Thomas. 1820. Letter to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, September 30. Founders Online. National Archives. Accessed April 11, 2019. https://founders.archives.gov/. Johnson, Timothy D. 2018. For Duty and Honor: Tennessee’s Mexican War Experience. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Kammen, Michael. 1991. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Kelley, Donald R. 2003. Fortunes of History: Historical Enquiry from Herder to Huizinga. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lampi, Philip J. 2013. The Federalist Party Resurgence, 1808–1816: Evidence from the New Nation Votes Database. Journal of the Early Republic 33 (2): 255–281. Lincoln, Abraham. 1953–1955. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lurie, Shira. 2019. Politics at the Poles: Liberty Poles and the Popular Struggle for the New Republic. PhD diss., University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Malavasic, Alice Elizabeth. 2017. The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mason, Matthew. 2002. ‘Nothing Is Better Calculated to Excite Divisions’: Federalist Agitation Against Slave Representation During the War of 1812. New England Quarterly 75 (94): 531–561. ———. 2009. Federalists, Abolitionists, and the Problem of Influence. American Nineteenth Century History 10 (1): 1–27. Ness, William Peter. 1827. A Concise Narrative of General Jackson’s First Invasion of Florida. New York: E. M. Murden & A. Ming, jr. New York Herald. 1860. The Campaign Commenced in Earnest. September 4. O’Brien, Michael. 2005. Henry Adams and the Southern Question. Athens: University of Georgia Press. O’Sullivan, John. 1839. The Great Nation of Futurity. Democratic Review 6 (Nov.): 426–430. Onuf, Peter S. 2011. Foreword. In Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, xi–xvi. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2012. American Exceptionalism and National Identity. American Political Thought 1 (1): 77–100. Pickett, LaSalle Corbell. 1900. Pickett and His Men. Atlanta: Foote and Davies. Pitcaithley, Dwight T., ed. 2018. The U.S. Constitution & Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Ratcliffe, Donald J. 2015. The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Register of Debates. United States Senate, 23rd Congress, 1st Session. Richards, Leonard L. 2000. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Robertson, Andrew W. 2001. ‘Look on This Picture … And on This!’ Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820. American Historical Review 106 (4): 1263–1280. Schroeder, John H. 1973. Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Seward, William Henry. 2004. Irrepressible Conflict. Reprinted in Michael F.  Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War, 150–156. New York: Hill and Wang. Shelden, Rachel A. 2012. Not So Strange Bedfellows: Northern and Southern Whigs in the Texas Annexation Controversy, 1844–1845. In A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Political History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Rachel A. Shelden, 11–36. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Silbey, Joel H. 1991. The American Political Nation, 1838–1893. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stevens, George A. 1913. New York Typographical Union No. 6: Study of a Modern Trade Union and Its Predecessors. Albany: Lyon Company. Varon, Elizabeth R. 2008. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Walther, Eric H. 2006. William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Watson, Harry. 1990. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Hill and Wang. Wilentz, Sean. 2005. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W. W. Norton. Wills, Garry. 2003. “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ———. 2005. Henry Adams and the Making of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Wood, Gordon S. 2009. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815. New York: Oxford University Press. Wood, Nicholas P. 2017. The Missouri Crisis and the ‘Changed Object’ of the American Colonization Society. In New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, 146–165. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

CHAPTER 12

German Domestic Pedestrian Tourism and the Rhetoric of National Historical Memory, Empire, and Middle-Class Identity 1780s–1850s Johann J. K. Reusch

In 1831, German authorities warned against pedestrian tourists, calling them “suspicious … and to be interrogated” because “touring on foot makes them similar to beggars and vagabonds, even though they might have valid passports” (Provincial-Gesetzsammlung Koenigreichs Boehmen fuer das Jahr 1831, 272). Such warnings reflect the fact that pedestrian tourism became increasingly common in Germany during the early nineteenth century. Touring on foot was influenced by fashions of tourism in Great Britain, enabled by improved infrastructure and the expansion of the middle class, and embraced—though with some ambivalence—as a means of building a distinctively German national identity. Even before the 1830s, pedestrian guidebooks dismissed anxieties about the increase in foot travel. As one foot  travel aficionado and author commented: “hopefully any

J. J. K. Reusch (*) Division of Social and Historical Studies, University of Washington at Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_12

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prejudice against pedestrian tourists will soon disappear everywhere, since one begins to recognize more and more the advantages of this kind of travel, and a honest traveler on foot (gentleman traveler) no longer, as in the past, constitutes a rare phenomenon” (Lohmann 1805, xxxii). Despite resemblances to tourist practices in Great Britain, the rise of pedestrian travel in the early nineteenth-century German states was rooted in specifically German historical circumstances: The early nineteenth century saw the French invasion and occupation of the German states, followed by the Wars of Liberation fought against France from 1812 to 1815. The decades following Napoleon’s defeat witnessed efforts to unify the German states, efforts punctuated by deep political divisions over the legacy of the French Revolution, struggles for dominance among the most powerful of the states, and efforts to build a sense of pan-­Germanic identity, all taking place in a period of profound social and economic change. Within this context, the fashion for foot travel played a key role in the shaping of German memory and national identity (Hagemann 2015, 25). Yet it was a practice whose meaning was fluid, offering a variety of visions of German national identity, both past and future, which were embraced by both state authorities and members of the middle class, for different and sometimes conflicting purposes (Smith 1999, 180; Halbwachs 1967; Assmann [1992] 2018). Walking, strolling, promenading, flaneuring, hiking, and even non-­ technical mountaineering, as aspects of pedestrian tourism, are considered here as a specific form of touring that existed in overlapping and hybridic forms with other means of touristic transportation. Even as general modes of transportation accelerated at a rapid pace during the early nineteenth century—as a result of improving infrastructure, increasing numbers of postal coaches that doubled as transportation and, as early as the 1820s, railroad service—ambulatory activities remained interspersed with them. Although the majority of tourists did not arrive at their destinations on foot, travel accounts, guidebooks, vedutas, and guidebook illustrations emphasized the consequent pedestrian ambulation as the most patriotic form of travel. Even if tourists traveled other than on foot to tourist sites, advocates held that the authentic experience had to, and did, include segments traversed on foot. The practice became embedded in a prescribed form of national reverence and signified physical fitness, health, and a specifically Germanic aesthetic of sublime ruggedness; the last developed in opposition to French culture and reflecting engagement with the memory of a German past, combined with a quest for an equally prototypical cultural, national, and middle-class identity in the present (Grass 1796, 22–23).

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The use of the English term “gentleman traveler” in an 1805 guidebook points to Britain as the inspiration for the German pedestrian tourist trend and suggests that the German middle class identified and embraced such a label, especially in the absence of an equivalent term in German, where the designation “Herr” (“Lord”) other than as a formal address was fraught with a problematic feudal heritage. There can be no doubt that the popularity of British antiquarian and Picturesque tour books and Romantic poets who were widely read in Germany stimulated German pedestrian tourism and related cultural production, as did the presence of British travelers (Reusch 2018). Tourism in Germany in the early nineteenth century was also tied to increased mobility following war and political change and—as in Britain—changes in infrastructure and the natural environment as a result of industrialization. The increasing popularity of domestic pedestrian travel occurred in tandem with the expansion of the middle class and thus ideas of national identity that were particular to that class. As the noble cavalier associated with luxury travel gave way to the class-transcending gentleman tourist on foot, and the expanded road infrastructure, postal coach service, and train service were increasingly used by the lower strata of society, pedestrian travel became a choice for more affluent travelers, rather than a necessity for the poor (Wallace 1993, 62). There were similarities between British and German regional pedestrian travel with regard to the appreciation of national landscapes and rural peasant cultures, as well as an increasing awareness of the health benefits conferred by walking. However, the differing historical conditions between the French Revolution and the decade following the German Revolution of 1848 linked German pedestrian tourism more closely than its British counterpart to a struggle for national, class, and cultural identity (defined by a pan-Germanic ancestry), as well as national education and patriotism. In Germany, as a consequence of the more radical transition from feudalism to modernity, resulting from delayed industrialization and other adverse conditions, pedestrian tourism after the middle of the eighteenth century also played an important role as a vehicle of middle-class emancipation from absolutism (Hachtmann 2007, 48–49). The increase in pedestrian tourism, as well as tourism in general, is difficult to measure in exact numbers. Data on pedestrian tourist visits was not collected until the second half of the century when tourism was considered an industry (Fremdenverkehr). Nevertheless, visitor logs, the Stamm- or Fremdenbuecher, at popular German tourist sites requiring pedestrian access, illustrate a steady growth in the numbers of pedestrian

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tourists between the 1780s and the 1840s. While pedestrian travel was also associated with the touring of cities and easily accessible locations, sites that were located in mountainous regions appealed to a sense of discovery and natural German authenticity; visiting them was deemed more prestigious and patriotic by segments of the urban middle class. Most popular were sites which, though reachable only on foot, were near accessible road infrastructure from which excursions could be conducted, such as those located near mineral baths and health spas. Among the most visited mountainous regions in Germany were the Harz Mountains, the Riesengebirge (Gigantic Mountains or Mountains of the Giants), the Bavarian/Austrian Alps, and the castles on the cliffs along the Rhine valley. Annual entries in the visitors’ logs on Brocken Mountain in the Harz Mountain region show an increase from 421 to 1920 individuals and families between 1780 and 1829 (Intelligenzblatt 1839, 52). One guidebook author, writing during the early 1840s, similarly estimated annual visits to the Brocken alone to exceed two thousand tourists per year (Anonymous 1845, 17). The visitor’s log at St. Bartholomew Church in the Berchtesgaden Alps  by Kœnigsee, just south of Berchtesgaden  and the Austrian city of Salzburg, demonstrates a similar increase from 320 visitors in 1826 to 860 in 1840 (Richter 1893, 265). Nearly half a million passengers booked Rhine tour boats during the late 1830s, which provided opportunities for tourists to climb up the castles and fortifications along the river (Lambert 1935, 129; Tuemmers 1994, 198; Wolbring 1996, 88–89). Visits to the Riesengebirge destinations are described as increasing by the thousands (Herlossohn 1841, 42). The general growth of interest in tourism among the German public is further reflected in the increasing German-language print production of some six thousand articles related to the subject between 1801 and 1859 (Koshar 2000, 23). During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Germans came to understand physical fitness as an essential aspect of an original ethnic German culture that was threatened by French acculturation. Figures of rural peasants, tribal ancestors, and medieval knights, with their physical prowess in self-sustaining survival and military skill, were combined into the ideal of the indefatigable German that, enhanced with superior education, provided a model for the German citizen of a modern imperial nation. In the prevailing context of German nationalism and imperial aspiration, pedestrian domestic tourism was seen as a community-­building, educational, and patriotic activity. Germans wishing to learn about their country “would be educated best by reaching their destination on foot … Touring

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on foot allows one to get to know the most people of different classes and can converse with them on the way … remembering all in later years” (Weyh 1866, 371). Participation in the shared experiences of touring the fatherland, conversing with fellow Germans, and drawing information from commonly used popular guidebooks aided in the development of a communicative memory that thus (re)inscribed and consolidated cultural memory. The communal experience of a shared belonging subverted individual and autobiographic memory into commonly mediated knowledge enhanced by guidebooks and destination sites. Such objectified forms of culture (Assmann and Hoelscher 1988, 11) enshrined oral history and destination sites and reverberated in the contemporary literary production of the same key themes. As one educator and ardent foot traveler proposed, “touring on foot also advances indirectly the knowledge about the fatherland, which appears evermore so important, because only through geographic and historical familiarity can love for the fatherland grow; for what one does not know, one cannot love” (Boclo 1815, 81). Such holistic interaction with the fatherland was furthermore undergirded by contemporary publications which argued that physical exercise, by providing both movement (Froelich 1802, 19) and fresh air, was beneficial for the health of the nation. Proponents of pedestrian tourism argued that “in elevated areas that are covered in evergreen and deciduous forests … the air is the purest for the healthy as well as the sick” (Waechter 1818, 29). The specific emphasis here on evergreen and deciduous forests as pedestrian tour destinations tied them directly to the contemporaneous preoccupation with German forests as the “pure (sacred)” vestiges of ancestral habitats. The German forest was considered an irreplaceable resource and its decline, as a result of deforestation incurred through requisition for the Napoleonic War effort and increasing industrialization, was intensely politicized (Ernst 2000, 37). Between 1750 and 1850, the German forest reached its worst state in recorded history (Otto 1994). Professor of history and ardent nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), touring on foot, noted the vanishing of the German forests in the western border region of the Eifel. Blaming change on the French, he also perceived a loss of the German language in the area and warned that it, like the natural German habitat, had become “chewed up, mutilated, and barren” (Arndt 1846, 231). Arndt suggested that German culture would experience the same fate if not preserved and kept alive for pedestrian touring. Arndt’s comments are reflected in the work of cultural and social geographers who have argued that landscape constitutes a

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symbolic construction that privileges direct human experience and expression of collective social order within a specific historical, geographical, and environmental context. Symbolically charged landscape, according to these scholars, provides a context for socio-political identity, culture, and community action (Mitchell 2000; Olwig 1996, 645; Schama 1995). The “elevated places” recommended by German national wellness publications and pedestrian guidebooks not only constituted the pure and healthy ancestral habitats embraced by Arndt: they also offered, as pedestrian guidebooks suggested, proximity to “Valhalla, the realm in the sky” (Ertl 1842, 190), the mythical resting grounds of Germanic warriors. Mountains and the ascent of them provided access to the spirit of the heroes of distant German history and mythology, thus serving as a vehicle for the celebration of a shared heroic pan-Germanic past and its lore, through tactile pedestrian engagement with the presumed natural habitat of the ancestral Germanic tribes. Whereas in Britain the peripatetic experience of pedestrianism was defined predominantly in aesthetic terms (Urry 2002, 202), in Germany it was associated with the urgent need for the (re)construction of a shared identity and cultural survival, first in the face of defeat and occupation, and later as a unifying imperial culture that camouflaged recent inner-German histories of military defeat and fratricide  linked to conflicting state alliances with France during the Napoleonic Wars. For Germans, the longing for a secure and empowering collective national identity during and after a period of profound social and political turmoil led to a physical search for a native culture, rooted in early times and uncontaminated by outside influences. Travel to less “civilized” locations promised connection with an idealized wandering German tribesman who served as a figure of alterity that had in recent history come increasingly into conflict with contrary aspects of bourgeois identity. That bourgeois identity had been shaped through upwardly mobile imitation and absorption of aristocratic (especially French rococo) culture prior to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The idealized figure of the wandering tribesman was imitated by pedestrian domestic tourists in an attempt to escape from the rapid transformation of social, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions of early modernity (Reusch 2008). Foot travel provided access to remote locations where peasants still embodied prototypically German customs and dress that modeled a way of life that existed in strong contrast to popular perceptions of French bourgeois culture as foreign. Peasant folk costumes served as an inspiration for pedestrian traveling outfits, as well as for the uniforms of the

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volunteer units fighting French occupation and the design of the invented “old-German national dress,” which, cobbled together from historic references, became a symbolic statement of nationalism and rejection of foreign and upper-class fashion (Karrer 1847, 107; Schneider 2001, 17–18; Wagner 2018, 163–248). Prototypical Germanic physical qualities were also embodied in the figure of the poet and writer Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810), hailed in guidebooks as “our greatest pedestrian traveler.” As a young man Seume had been pressed into service by the Hessian auxiliary forces contracted by the British crown during the American Revolution, where he encountered, and felt kinship with, indigenous Americans. Inspired by Huron tribesmen, Seume accredited his physical fitness to a simple, if not primitive, lifestyle. During the early 1800s he conducted several tours on foot that contained segments of close to four thousand miles, descriptions of which were published as travel accounts and guidebooks (Drews 1999, 202; Seume 1826; Solheim 2018, 49). Pedestrian guidebooks and travel logs differentiated strongly between Seume as “one extreme, and the postal coach tourists on the other” where the more primitive form of “traveling on foot … makes one more human.” Pedestrian tourism allowed “one who traverses the country on foot … and comes into contact with people of all classes … to say I have lived with and among them” (Schultes 1815, 6). Even though “in cities one would be critically looked up and down by any waiter and most likely turned away, country folk are more prone to embrace the pedestrian tourist” (Weber 1834, 450). Guidebooks similarly conflated the figure of the German peasant with the ideal of the Noble Savage as a symbol of alterity, portraying peasants as embodiments of a true national and cultural identity in the form of the original German. This perception concurred with German anthropological theories that the indigenous peoples of the northern hemisphere came close to prototypical Germanic tribesmen of the past, “uncontaminated” by French culture (Zantop 1999, 114). Lack of knowledge about the travel behavior of ancient Germanic tribesmen was readily compensated for with information gleaned from Seume’s description of Native Americans and offered in guidebooks as survival skills for German pedestrian tourists: “If lost in the woods do as the Indians do, and examine the bark of trees: the rough side always indicates North” (Reichard 1811, 112). Pedestrian travel accounts thus emphasized the benefits of such simplified if not primitive lifestyle: “A simple breakfast in the garden of a rural inn tastes better than the dejeuner de la fourchette in a hotel … or the quickly

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downed bouillon while changing out the horses [at the postal coach stop]” (Boclo 1815, 51). Simple food nourished the German character better than fanciful decadent French cuisine. The rejection of a luxurious lifestyle by the pedestrian tourist was a recurrent and noteworthy element of travel accounts, which taught the need to return to basics in order to recapture the fading spirit of German cultural identity by living like the rural natives: “A little cooked milk, butter, and bread were our dinner; then we went to sleep outdoors. A bit of dried mountain grass, covered with burlap was our bed” (Grass 1796, 22–23). Corruption of original German culture through imported “hedonism, slovenliness, weakness, eyeglass adornment, and effeminate fashion” (Eilers 1858, 89) was linked to the political and social disintegration that ran counter to early nineteenth-century German nationalism. This was reflected in the lamenting assessment of the failure to transition the waning Holy Roman Empire during increasing Prussian-Austrian dualism and  a time of French occupation into a modern unified nation state by the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in 1802: “Germany no longer is a political entity … In the lasting European seesawing between barbarism and culture, in such transition has the German state failed … it has dissolved” (1998, 153). In evoking a nostalgic memory of a bygone simpler and allegedly more authentically “German” era, the practice of pedestrian tourism allowed participants to imagine a Holy Roman Empire which provided German political identity while allowing the middle class to flourish. Reaching back to the Middle Ages and the Holy Roman Empire was seen not as a mere romantic nostalgic construct, but as a model of imperial identity for the future of the German states that were recovering from the profound political, cultural, and identity changes that were ushered in by the French Revolution and its aftermath. In fact, much commemoration of the past in tourist guidebooks invoked the taking of the empire from the colonizing Romans by Germanic tribal chieftains: “our ancestors, the Teutons” (Ertl 1842, 92). In addition to ancient German tribal ethnicity, language, and geography, German identity thus became defined by the memory of an earlier imperial history. The need to preserve and engage with a shared memory through walking tours was felt across the German states. Despite the national identity crisis (Hegel 1998, 153), as well as territorial changes, population migrations, and political power struggles of the major states, those who ventured through the German-speaking lands as tourists, until the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, identified their homeland as Germany (Teutschland), not Prussia, Austria, or Bavaria. Accordingly, even the most reputable guidebooks, such as Baedeker, continued to combine Austria

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and Prussia into a linguistically, culturally, and ethnically cohesive entity (Baedeker 1862). The imperial visions pursued independently by Prussia and Austria filtered into the experience and memory of touristic excursions to relevant domestic sites which became mnemonic devices for associating and internalizing a history that promoted and justified a claim to empire. In the context of the romantic engagement with the Middle Ages, tourists ascended the mountaintop strongholds of German medieval knights as part of a celebration of the German past, but also as its reinvention. Tourists gazing down from these sites were able to relive how, “like eagles on the mountains in their fortresses,” the knights “gazed with proud disdain down upon those leading a life not dedicated to service in arms, trudging forward wearisomely and miserably” (Lehmann 1855, 97). This allowed middle-class travelers to ascend literally to the same level and symbolically close the historically unsurmountable gap between serfs and nobles by reenacting and performatively reinventing history through the construction of an equalizing national memory. The physical ascent to the symbolic strongholds of nobility also mirrored the upward movement of the urban peasantry toward the formation of the middle class during the Middle Ages. It was at the medieval height of the Holy Roman Empire that German towns saw a rapid empowerment of their burghers. Thus the memory of a vast Germanic Empire was associated with nostalgia about the flourishing of the middle class in the context of freedom of physical movement, which for feudal peasants had been inaccessible. Physical movement was linked with social mobility: in order to advance to master and member status in a guild, journeymen toured the country on foot to learn the tricks of the trade under different masters of a craft. Middle-class touring, therefore, became associated with the act of journeying that began during the Middle Ages and lasted until the restrictions and ultimate dissolution of the guild system in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Wandergern 1846). Medieval references commemorating a national past in tourist guides and sites reverberated with nostalgia for the social role guilds had played in pre-modern towns. This included forms of welfare schemes and social security endowments for guild members, including journeymen (van Leeuwen 2016, 80). Furthermore, guilds provided a sense of communal belonging, undergirded by economic, political, and citizen rights (Hoogenboom et al. 2018; Husung 1983; van Leeuwen 2012, 61–90). Neither the middle class, nor the governments of the German states, were interested in keeping alive memories of the oppressive aspects of feudal histories until they served the rhetoric of the more radical segments

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of the former during the Revolution of 1848, when it became apparent that the aristocratic rulers of the German states were unwilling to guarantee parliamentary reform and constitutional rights. Thus these memories were excluded from the national story and replaced by a shared nostalgia that served to bridge past, present, and a vision of the future (Sandner 2001, 7–8). In this context, the edited memory of the Holy Roman Empire served as a model of a unified and expanding nation-as-empire not only for the middle class but also, even more prominently, as an aspiration for all of the major German states. It got absorbed as a mnemonic foundation into the nationalist patriotic consciousness of an upwardly mobile middle class as part of a process that shaped a national imperial historical memory and identity. Even supporters of the radical nationalist movement considered by the German states as a threat to the political system, such as Arndt, viewed the memory evoked by visits to historical sites as a foundation for a national ideology. Arndt was put on trial and removed from the faculty of the University of Greifswald for his attack on the feudal practices still continuing in the remote East on the estates of powerful Prussian aristocrats, the Junkers. In a pedestrian guidebook, Rhein- und Ahr- Wanderungen (Pedestrian Tours through the Rhine and Ahr Regions) (a pedestrian tour originally undertaken in 1830), Arndt proposes acquiring a memory of a national past through touring historical sites and natural settings as an identity-forming imperative: In paradisiacal nature, on these fields of the most grandiose history does one inquire about the deeds and accomplishments of the past; through their memory, one aims to populate and vitalize the present; through the ancestors one wants to interpret as much as possible, the course of life of contemporary society; even nature one wants to observe and explore through devout historical perception. (1846, 4–5)

“Vitalization” for Arndt and other radical nationalists like Friedrich Ludwig Jahn meant physical fitness as an aspect of pedestrian tourism and was also considered to be a nationalizing/patriotic activity by the ultranationalist Gymnastics Movement (Turnerbewegung). In the absence of political parties, nationalist athletic clubs and sports teams became sites of subversion that functioned as clandestine forces of opposition to the ruling class. These political developments explain the aforementioned suspicion of pedestrian travelers by German authorities and especially why their

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police units tried to discourage pedestrian tourism during the period leading up to the German Revolution of 1848. The head of the secret police unit in Gera authored a text about the “Dark Side of Society” discouraging “traveling on foot because it requires sleeping in dubious rural guesthouses, where one has to sleep on straw or a suspicious bar room where most likely no locks exist to provide safety for the night” (Hirt 1856, 107). Indeed, organized physical activities, including aspects of pedestrian touring, had been outlawed under the Turnverbot throughout the German Federation as early as 1820, because of their promotion by radical nationalists who were seen as a threat to the aristocratically governed states. Even though the ban remained on the books until 1842, several cities and states began to lift it in order to diffuse its highly repressive political divisiveness and to appropriate touring for their own purposes. It is in this context that historians have pointed to the political complexity of physical exercise activities and cautioned against their singular categorization as a socially inspired movement of organized nationalism. Rather, physical exercise practices, including pedestrian tourism, were also claimed by the monarchist states for their own objective of directing nationalism toward building support for military and imperial ideologies (Krueger 1996, 18; Schodrok 2013, 10). Indeed, in a show of masculine pedestrian prowess, King Frederick William III of Prussia ascended Brocken Mountain, the tallest mountain north of the Alps, during the Napoleonic campaigns of 1805. He was followed by other German royals, such as the future German emperor William I in 1821. Tourists who completed the physically challenging ascent of the Brocken were awarded small flower bouquets by the staff of the aristocratically owned mountain inn. This bouquet was attached to the hatband of the hiking hat “as a memento … and a sign to others that one had already visited the highest outcropping of the mountain chain” (Hoffmann 1827, 192–193). This award echoed the pinning of medals that were awarded by the king to volunteer or drafted citizens for bravery during the Wars of Liberation. Similarly, an Alpine pedestrian tour by the Bavarian crown prince and subsequent king Maximilian and his brother Otto was covered by the media with particular emphasis on the fact that they had bravely defied adverse weather conditions (Oesterreichischer Beobachter Mai 8 1829, 566). The act of summiting mountains allowed for a symbolic display of the masculine values inherent in the authoritarian military culture of empire that was echoed by the patriarchic structure of German society. German

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pedestrian tourists were meant to understand physical exercise as a mandate to imitate patriotic virtues and examples. They could associate themselves directly with “the liberation of the fatherland by the German people” by scaling mountain peaks, thus ritually reenacting the symbolic ascension of Montmartre during the Battle of Paris in 1814 (an iconic memory of Napoleon’s final defeat) as well as the associated values of bravery and battle-grade strength, while also experiencing the rightful, historical, and prototypical habitat of the Germanic tribes and knights. Such commemoration of the Wars of Liberation highlighted the interdependence of state and citizens in shared military objectives and underlined the new national identity of empire and citizen-soldier. The mythical dimensions of the traversing pedestrian citizen-soldier, however, are documented by the fact that middle-class participation in military campaigns had been limited during the early Wars of Liberation because they were fought by professional soldiers only; a mere fraction of the middle class had participated in the volunteer units or been called up through conscription during the 6th Coalition War of Liberation (Planert 2007, 460–469). Fewer than ten thousand volunteers were under arms at the height of the war, and actual recruitment of physically fit citizens was limited and plagued by desertions (Holleben and Caemmerer 1904, 104). Consequently, association with symbolic activities reflective of military experiences allowed members of the middle class to demonstrate their patriotism and prove themselves fit for battle despite their lack of actual battlefield experience. Guidebooks reiterated the connection between pedestrian tourism and military culture: “strict military discipline can be applied to young backpacking foot travelers … especially walking during rainy days … and the occasionally intentional lodging in impoverished guesthouses where, following a less than tasty dinner, a mat of straw awaits the fatigued [hiker]” (Boclo 1815, 55). In this context, state-sponsored national monuments celebrating victorious battles of the War of Liberation were erected to provide this military and patriotic context for the arduous ascent of mountain peaks. Created as destinations for pedestrian tourists, these monuments underlined the idea that hiking up mountains was an act of patriotic commemoration. In the Harz mountains, the fusion of nationalism and militarism was further enhanced by siting one such monument near romantic emblems of German natural ethnic identity, the lone oak tree and the mountain rock: “an [iron] cross erected by the current Prussian minister of state, Count von Stolberg Wernigrode, on a granite peak, at a height of 480 feet for the remembrance of his friends who died in the memorable battles with France, is

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best seen from the valley below on a cliff under a solitary oak” (Anonymous 1845, 17). Such monuments and emblems, when experienced in situ and enhanced by guidebooks, engaged touring Germans into the discursive politics that dominated and reiterated constructed historical memory. The strongest German states, struggling for imperial national dominance, imbued the rhetoric of popular German tourist sites, guidebooks, and rituals with that of state hegemony. Prussia in particular realized, during the Wars of Liberation, that heritage (defined as a shared memory of a shared past) could create a bond with the state and that this bond trumped military drill and experience. Prussia was thus especially eager to preserve, rebuild, and create natural and constructed national monuments (Swenson 2013, 52–53). The political use of historical memory here served to legitimize Prussia’s existing and aspiring imperial power and to negotiate the relationship between memory and (conscious) forgetting. Thus, charged and activated by ideological and social power, tourism served as an effective tool of political manipulation (Rudaitytė 2018, vii). At the same time, the repeated metaphor of the cross for military commemoration played into the defusing of denominational difference between German Catholics and Lutherans by manifesting the de-­ secularization of religious sites that made churches and monasteries mostly touristic, not religiously, motivated destinations. In the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, the erection of crosses was steeped in local communal syncretic beliefs; for tourists from other areas these symbols served as landmarks and scenic backdrops (Schaubach 1846, 33, 250, 294). In the context of their erection to commemorate German military resistance during the Napoleonic wars, mountaintop crosses could be interpreted by viewers as symbolizing the transition from the Holy Roman Empire of the past to the secular empire of the future for a less devout middle class, yet retaining the traditional icons of the divine rights of the monarchy. For German visitors pedestrian tours ascending to these crosses became equated readily with military foot marches. Consequently, pilgrimages to sites of national commemoration entailed an understanding of the symbolism of iron crosses as commemorating a collectively intertwined familial, ancestral, tribal, and national memory. The insertion of familial memory added personal significance which, as studies in battleground tourism have demonstrated, is central to visits and activities that have emerged in response to traumatic histories and result in a secular form of spiritual experience (Keil 2005, 479–494;  Hayden  2017,  148–154). Guidebook entries contextualized the iron cross as aiding any brave tourist

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who dares “to walk onto to the utmost edge … as secure support and handhold” (Hoffmann 1827, 191). Thus tourism mediated for Germans, through immanent experience, the safety and security of benevolent imperial paternalism through its emblems, which furthermore served as land-­ marking points of reference—thus authoritatively guiding the citizen-tourist. For less able-bodied members of the middle class, often caricatured as overweight and out of shape in paintings and prints by contemporaneous artists like Carl Spitzweg, the pedestrian tour could be emulated through more conveniently located sites that provided even more polysemous prompts for (re)affirming national military and imperializing memory. Such was the Prussian National Monument of the Fallen of the Wars of Liberation (Preussisches Nationaldenkmal fuer die Befreiungskriege), located on a hill in the outskirts of Berlin. Here, entire urban families could gaze fearlessly from the superior vantage point of the conqueror, into the depths below them after having climbed the 217-foot-tall Kreuzberg (Cross Mountain) as an emulation of ancestral German habitat, crossed a stream under artificial waterfalls, and hiked through landscaped forested areas, modeled after the site near a celebrated battle against Napoleon in the Riesengebirge, which was a popular pedestrian tourist destination. The participatory nature of such highly prescribed, and group-based, touristic activities functioned akin to public rituals which facilitated the preservation of cultural memory (Greenblatt 1988, 16), and its social and cultural importance resembled historic precedent in ancient processions which (re)inscribed hegemonic rhetoric (Assmann [1992] 2018, 29–60). Repeated visits to specific sites aided the building and reaffirming of a national memory. This occurred through the process of didactically guided memorialization, via participation in a discourse prioritizing a specifically German civilization. Through domestic tourism the participating public was lured, if not coerced, through hegemonic discourse that sublimated via cultural trends, into joining into the “(re)discovery” of unknown locations within the “homeland,” and encouraged to excavate and preserve knowledge of the past toward (re)affirming German imperial identity for nineteenth-century political purposes. The middle class, through the patriotic performance of  pedestrian tourism, became engaged, even complicit, in this  construction and perpetuation of a dominant  national  and imperial memory and identity culture that was rhetorically enhanced through experienced site-specific monuments, tours, and narratives.

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Provincial-Gesetzsammlung Koenigreichs Boehmen fuer das Jahr 1831. 1832. Vol. 13. Prague: Schoenfeldsche Buchdruckerei. Reichard, H.A.O. 1811. Der Passagier auf der Reise in Deutschland, in der Schweiz, zu Paris und Petersburg. Ein Reisehandbuch fuer Jedermann. Vol. 1. Berlin: Gebrueder Gaedicke. Reusch, J.K. 2008. Germans as Noble Savages and Castaways: Alter Egos and Alterity in German Collective Consciousness during the Long Eighteenth Century. Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (1): 91–129. ———. (1999) 2018. Caspar David Friedrich and National Antiquarianism in Northern Germany. In Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, ed. M.  Myrone and L.  Peltz, 95–113. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Richter, E. 1893. Die Erschliessung der Ostalpen. Vol. 1, Die Noerdlichen Kalkalpen. Berlin: Verlag des Deutschen und Oesterreichischen Alpenvereins. Rudaitytė, R., ed. 2018. History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sandner, G. 2001. Hegemonie und Erinnerung: zur Konzeption von Geschichtsund Vergangenheitspolitik. Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 30 (1): 7–8. Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: A. A. Knopf. Schaubach, A. 1846. Die Deutschen Alpen: Ein Handbuch fuerr Reisende durch Tyrol, Oesterreich, Steyermark, Illyrien, Oberbayern und die anstossenden Gebiete. Vol. 3, Das Salzburgische, Obersteyermark, das Oesterreichische Gebirgsland und das Salzkammergut. Jena: Friedrich Frommann. Schneider, E.M. 2001. Herkunft und Verbreitungsformen der ‘Deutschen Nationaltracht der Befreiungskriege’ als Ausdruck politischer Gesinnung. PhD diss., University of Bonn. Schodrok, K. 2013. Preussische Turnpolitik. Berlin: Neopubli. Schultes, J.A. 1815. Briefe ueber Frankreich auf einer Fussreise im Jahre 1811 durch das suedwestliche Baiern durch die Schweiz über Genf Lyon Montpellier Cette durch die Cevennen ueber Clermont Moulins Nevers nach Paris und ueber Nancy nach Strassburg. Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer. Seume, J.G. 1826. J. G. Seume’s saemmtliche Werke. Edited by C.A.H. Clodius and C.J.V.F. Schnorr. Leipzig: J. F. Hartknoch. Smith, A. 1999. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solheim, B. 2018. Extremwandern und Schreiben: Ein kulturhistorischer Streifzug von Goethe bis Hesse. Wien: Boehlau Verlag. Swenson, A. 2013. The Rise of Heritage: Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuemmers, H. 1994. Der Rhein: Ein Europaeischer Fluss und seine Geschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck. Urry, J. 2002. Consuming Places. London: Routledge.

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van Leeuwen, M.H.D. 2012. Guilds and Middle-class Welfare, 1550–1800: Provisions for Burial, Sickness, Old Age, and Widowhood. Economic History Review 65 (1): 61–90. ———. 2016. Mutual Insurance 1550–2015: From Guild Welfare and Friendly Societies to Contemporary Micro-Insurers. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Waechter, J. 1818. Abhandlung ueber den Gebrauch der vorzueglichsten Baeder und Trinkwaesser nebst einem Berichte ueber den medizinischen Werth der Schwefelraeucherungen. Vienna: Carl Gerold. Wagner, E. 2018. Die Nationaltrachtdebatte im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Wallace, A. 1993. Walking Literature and English Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wandergern, H.L. [pseud.]. 1846. Der Handwerker in der Fremde. Eine vollstaendige Anleitung wie Gesellen sich sowohl auf ihren Reisen als auch in den Werkstaetten zu verhalten so wie ueber das Betragen welches sie auf Herbergen Polizeibehoerden und an andern Orten zu beobachten haben um sie zu gluecklichen Menschen und nuetzlichen Staatsbuergern zu bilden. 4th ed. Hanau: Edler. Weber, K.J. 1834. Saemmtliche Werke: Deutschland, oder Briefe eines in Deutschland reisenden Deutschen. Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Halbergersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Weyh, J.B.F. 1866. Stoff- und Mustersammlung zu Beschreibungen, Abhandlungen und Reden. Vol. 2. Augsburg: Kollmannsche Buchhandlung. Wolbring, B. 1996. ‘Auch ich in Arkadien!’ Die buergerliche Kunst- und Bildungsreise im 19. Jahrhundert. In Buergerkultur im 19. Jahrhundert: Bildung, Kunst und Lebenswelt, ed. D. Hein and A. Schulz. Munich: C. H. Beck. Zantop, S. 1999. Kolonialphantasien im vorkolonialen Deutschland (1770–1870). Berlin: Schmidt.

CHAPTER 13

The Art of Memory: Tracing the Colonial in Contemporary India Mira Rai Waits

A suburban park in India sits just to the north of the old city of Delhi (Fig. 13.1). Known as Coronation Park, these sixty acres of open space acquired their association with ceremonial displays of sovereignty in the late nineteenth century when the British colonial government staged the first British-created durbar here in 1877.1 Planned to mark the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, the decision to hold a durbar here was strategic. Durbar ceremonies in pre-British India were symbolic gift exchanges that took place at court between a monarch and their subjects. Their purpose was to reinforce sovereign power and authority. By holding a durbar in Delhi, the British intended to demonstrate continuity between their governance and India’s dynastic past in both practice and location, as leaders from the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and the Mughal Empire (1526–1857) had ruled from Delhi. They also hoped that the memory of British triumph would register with visitors to the durbar, since an important victory for colonial troops occurred at the site during the Indian Uprising of 1857–1858 (Cohn 1983, 187–188). Two more durbars were held at this site: the second celebrated the coronation of M. R. Waits (*) Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_13

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Fig. 13.1  Coronation Park, New Delhi, India, 2019. Photo by the author

King Edward VII in 1903; the third celebrated George V’s coronation in 1911. The latter also provided a venue for the new King-Emperor to announce the momentous decision to shift the British Empire’s Indian capital from Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) to Delhi and build a new capital district (present-day New Delhi). These durbars, as Bernard Cohn has shown, represent a pageantry of “invented tradition,” wherein existing local cultural traditions were re-packaged in order to configure an orientalist image of the power of the British Raj in the subcontinent (Fig. 13.2) (Cohn 1983, 187–188). Ironically, the vision of imperial majesty

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Fig. 13.2  Frederick Bremner, Retainers’ Review at the Delhi Durbar: State Elephants Marching Past the Viceregal Dais, 1903. British Library, London, UK. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Bridgeman Images

manufactured by the durbars was relatively short-lived. The British Empire in India collapsed in 1947, and with its end Coronation Park acquired a new purpose: the park was transformed into a repository of the monumental aftereffects of the British Empire. Several former imperial statues and plinths were moved to the park in the 1960s and can be found scattered throughout (McGarr 2015). Today, the park is a popular local spot. Teenagers can be seen taking selfies with friends, while the park’s open space has been appropriated for an array of recreational pastimes, including cricket, yoga, badminton, and running. This flurry of activity, however, occurs within a landscape that has been neglected, despite the fact that the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage and the Delhi Development Authority came together to re-develop the park and agreed that 2011—the centennial anniversary of the final durbar—would be the target year for completion of the park’s improvement (New Delhi’s 106th Anniversary 2017). Mohammad Shaheer, a well-known Delhi-based landscape architect, was hired to prepare an ambitious plan that included recreational spaces such

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as walkways, gardens, a restaurant, a playground, and a lake (Lahiri 2011). His revitalized vision of Coronation Park represented a concerted effort to simultaneously acknowledge the colonial history of the space, and decolonize that history by giving the space a new purpose. The logic of this vision, as Aparna Balachandran and Deborah Ruth Sutton have argued, was expressed through the juxtaposition of former imperial statues with pedestrian respites for intimate personal reflection—a pairing meant to challenge “the statues’ original embodiment of the physically remote and culturally aloof nature of imperial power” (Balachandran and Sutton 2017). However, governmental indifference and ambivalence have left this vision incomplete. Though the walkways, lighting system, lake, and restaurant building were completed in 2014—albeit three years behind schedule—they have been left untended; the lake, for example, remains dry, and the vast majority of people who visit the park have little interest in reflecting on the space’s colonial past and decolonialized present. In many ways Coronation Park’s layered incompleteness serves as provocation to reexamine the entangled concepts of memory and representation in India. Coronation Park boasts a long and dynamic history of past events and actors, but the site has also played a role in the fabrication of public memory in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Drawing from their perceptions of India’s past, British colonists set out to fashion the space into an apparatus for the production of ritual spectacles substantiating their identity as the rulers of India. Meanwhile, failed efforts to cohere a legible vision of Coronation Park in the postcolonial period reflect a wider ambiguity with regard to how India’s colonial past has been socially internalized. The notion that memory is embodied within social frameworks derives largely from the work of Maurice Halbwachs and his followers. In 1925 Halbwachs advanced an argument about memory, claiming that it is collective and produced through an active process in which an individual’s memories are localized in relation to their particular social environment (Halbwachs 1992). Collective memory, in other words, provides a vehicle for individuals to reconstruct the past within the present, appropriating and re-assembling past residues so that they acquire contemporary social meaning. Pierre Nora expands on Halbwachs’s argument, identifying representations as “sites of memory,” which reinforce the notion that memory is something that can be recalled physically and visually, and then commemorated by a public audience (Nora 1989). Indeed, modern memory, as Nora argues, “relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the

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immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image” (Nora 1989, 13). Theories on collective memory, however, have been widely scrutinized; Susan Sontag, for example, argues that memories do not persist beyond the individual. She pushes back against the idea of collective memory, claiming that our “common ideas of significance” derive from the manipulation of images in order to substantiate an ideology (Sontag 2003, 85). Efforts to understand memory as a collective enterprise would then, as Alieda Assmann suggests, be better served with more precise language that acknowledges the mediated processes that rely on “memorial signs” to construct identity (Assmann 2008, 55). There are, according to Assmann, numerous “symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places, and monuments” that contribute to the perception of a collective memory and give way to collective commemoration. However, our social obsession with defining and preserving “memorial signs” makes it difficult to disentangle the perception of a collective memory from its representation (Assmann 2008, 55). Consequently, modern memory is conflated with the archival and grounded in the preservation of a material object. As a result, one can speak of an “art of memory,” which, as Edward Said argues, ultimately becomes “something to be used, misused, and exploited, rather than something that sits inertly there for each person to possess and contain” (Said 2000, 179). This essay takes up the notion of an “[art] of memory,” exploring recent trends in contemporary artistic practice in India, as artists working within the last twenty years have recycled and re-presented residues from the country’s colonial past, focusing on the material trace of representations within colonial archives. These artists explore representations as “memorial signs” through performance and the production of objects designed to gesture to or mimic the past to reflect on the impact of colonial practice on postcolonial identities. Mumbai-based artist Nikhil Chopra, for instance, performs the part of Sir Raja, a fictional anglicized Indian prince living under the shadow of British colonialism. In his multi-­ faceted performance project, Chopra blurs the distinctions between different forms of representation to allow a persona to emerge that is exacting in its historical proximation, but materially tied to the present. His work differs from contemporaries, such as Bangalore-based artist Pushpamala N., whose performance-based photographs confront the representational legacy of colonialism directly. Chopra’s performances, instead, invoke the memory of colonial figures whose representational life reveals relationships of colonial ambivalence. Similarly, installations by the Delhi-based

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Raqs Media Collective reference the visual culture of colonialism in India in order to resurrect anthropologic traces of the colonial body and ponder the postcolonial state’s persistent interest in abstracted bodies. Raqs’s work also invites us to revisit the significance of Delhi’s Coronation Park through sculptural installations configured as monuments that trouble our sense of past, present, and future. Like the layered incompleteness defining the physical spaces of Coronation Park, the memory of colonial India persists within contemporary artistic practice. These artists’ work challenges the notion of time as linear, arguing that the specter of India’s colonial past continues to define postcolonial Indian identity and that the role of the artist is to conjure this specter of colonialism as “performative utterance” (Derrida 1994, 130). Recognition of the significance of the colonial past is nothing new—scholars widely acknowledge the discursive pervasiveness of colonialism in the postcolonial present. Within art history, the concept of the postcolonial has been critiqued for its tendency to give way to interpretations that focus too exclusively on how art talks back to the colonial discourse of the past (Mercer 2005, 19). This essay, however, considers the aforementioned artists as doing more than just talking back. Rather, they set out to dissolve and disorder original meanings, effectively blurring legible distinctions between past, present, and future to offer social commentary on the continuities between colonial and postcolonial. Indeed, such art is dialectical in terms of its refractory capacity to contain, as well as reveal, the fabrications implicit in the concept of memory.

Empire and Images of Ambivalence In 2010 the Saatchi Gallery in London organized an exhibition titled The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today that featured twenty-six Indian artists, both established and emerging, with over one hundred works. The exhibition was intended to highlight the flourishing international success of contemporary Indian artists; its playful title implies that new art from the subcontinent has achieved a kind of revenge, colonizing global art markets (Jumabhoy 2009). Chopra was among the many artists represented, as his work engages with the visual culture of the colonial past, specifically the aesthetics of a popular genre of colonial photography— princely portraiture. Certainly, there is a complex “debt” contemporary artists in India feel, rightly or wrongly, to the past (Khullar 2015, 11). Yet the notion of “striking back” does not fully address postcolonial artists’

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contradictory relationship with colonial legacies. Chopra invokes colonial imagery through performance to illuminate relationships of colonial ambivalence, and ultimately reveal how postcolonial identities remain in process as they relate to colonial pasts. The theory of colonial ambivalence, first explored by postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, explicates the antithetical sentiments of attraction and revulsion that characterize psychoanalytic relationships between colonizer and colonized (Bhabha 1994). Within a theory of colonial ambivalence, both colonizer and colonial subjects simultaneously participate in normalizing and destabilizing structures of colonial power; colonial subjects’ mimicry of colonial masters is therefore both compliant and mocking. Identity, in this situation, becomes a carefully constructed process that relies on human relationships and the cultivation of various forms of contradictory representations: For identification, identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality. The discursive conditions of this psychic image of identification will be clarified if we think of the perilous perspective of the concept of the image itself. For the image—as point of identification—marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split—it makes present something that is absent—and temporally deferred: it is the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition. (Bhabha 1994, 51)

In Bhabha’s work, images are sites of ambivalence—locations of disruption. Within colonial Indian archives there are many such sites, including the princely portraiture that inspires Chopra’s performances. An 1896 portrait of Sardar Singh, the Maharaja of Jodhpur, taken in the photographic studio of Bourne & Shepherd (one of the oldest commercial photography businesses in India, and one founded by British colonists), provides a good example of princely photography (Fig.  13.3).2 Indian maharajas or princes, who kept their titles under the British Raj, were effectively banned from mainstream Indian political life during the colonial period (Allen 2000, 204). Representations of maharajas, namely photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, produced largely at the request of the maharajas themselves, grapple with this precarious position. These men, attracted to the prestige associated with photography’s newness, frequently visited studios like Bourne & Shepherd to commission photographs in which they appeared in princely regalia

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Fig. 13.3  Bourne & Shepherd, H.H. The Maharaja of Jaipur, G.C.S.I., 1877. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

surrounded by studio props (carpets, chandeliers, drapery) laid out to suggest luxury and power. These portraits—fabrications in and of themselves—represent a visual negotiation of colonial ambivalence: the maharajas, deprived of any real political power under British rule, turned

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to photography—a technology first introduced by their colonizers—to perform an image of power. The desire for political recognition is made apparent in these images, as they represent a vision of power that does not exist outside of the image. Chopra, in a series of performances that took place from 2003 to 2008, returned to the memory of these maharajas generated in archival photographs, performing as the fictional character Sir Raja—“a wandering, romantic, solitary, melancholic, quintessential tough stereotype of an Indian prince” (Chopra 2010). Sir Raja is one of many of Chopra’s multiple personas and he often inflects his character performances with personal history.3 Chopra first developed the persona of Sir Raja—an Indian prince who has also earned an honorific British title—while studying in the United States. In his performances Chopra dresses in regalia similar to the clothing documented in the photographs of the maharajas. When Chopra takes on the persona of Sir Raja, he does so as a living portrait, appearing in public spaces that range from college warehouses to a New  York City subway station. His audience is similarly varied, comprised of frequent art-goers as well as strangers on the street. The warehouses and galleries where he stages his performances are adorned with ornamental trappings that resemble those once found in colonial photographic studios. On other occasions Sir Raja has appeared on horseback, riding through Kashmir, a region in India where Chopra’s family were aristocratic landowners living under colonial rule. His earliest performances as Sir Raja were tableau vivant performances, where he remained a still image, like the colonial photographs his work refers to. More recently, he decided to animate the persona. Through these many performances, Chopra manipulates colonial and personal representations to produce art endowed with the potential to confound memories. He claims, for example, that while in performance as Sir Raja in Kashmir an image of his grandfather’s landscape paintings was “etched in [his] memory,” thus his performance of this persona is governed by a personal memory of a representation (Chopra 2010). Chopra here signals to the power of representations in contouring memory. There is also an ambivalence at the heart of Chopra’s work that comes not only from his aesthetic return to the memory of the maharaja as ambivalent colonial subject in photographic representations, but also from the way that he comes back to the persona, appearing to kill and then resurrect him.

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After his work in Kashmir, Chopra performed Sir Raja’s death with the work The Death of Sir Raja III in 2005, which commemorated his own fabrication in a lavish tableau vivant. In this performance Chopra blurs the line between life and death, lying motionless for three hours a day for a series of three days in Mumbai’s Kitab Mahal, a former colonial building in Fort Mumbai. Sir Raja’s death was marked by the stillness of Chopra’s body, but it was a cyclical death that was repeated and further commemorated as a site of ambivalence through photography. A still from the performance shows Chopra resting on a mound of pillows and carpets, enclosed by drapery hanging from ceiling beams; a chandelier hung above illuminates his motionless body (Fig. 13.4). In looking back on this image, are we to mourn or celebrate the “death” of this fictional colonial character? Is this character really dead? Or is he a ghost/specter—“a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance” (Derrida 2013, 39)? Chopra wants his viewers to feel moved by the persona; he has described the “deep sense of melancholia” that comes from his performances, and

Fig. 13.4  Nikhil Chopra, The Death of Sir Raja III, 2005, performance, Kitab Mahal, Mumbai; costume: Tabasheer Zutshi; photo: Shivani Gupta. © Nikhil Chopra and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

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the effect is unsettling for viewers forced to witness this fictional death of a figure that appears as colonial subject (Punj 2013, 72). This unsettling effect also informs attempts to understand Chopra’s work in relation to colonialism. He is far less clear in his critique than other contemporary Indian artists, such as Pushpamala N., whose work engages with the memory of India’s colonial past and destabilizes it. Pushpamala N., in collaboration with British photographer Clare Arni, powerfully draws our attention to the pseudo-science and underlying racism of the colonial period, particularly as they pertain to gender, with The Ethnographic Series (2000–2004)—a work that was also included in the Saatchi exhibit (Fig.  13.5). The series, which is part of a larger project titled Native Women of South India (Manners and Customs), takes on the hubristic nature of imperial-era anthropology and its inclination to transform photography’s capacity for representing physical likenesses into a means of generating abstract and quantifiable data, such as bodily measurements. In her performances Pushpamala N. plays the role of colonial subject, producing photographs that resemble those that featured in “scientific” colonial studies, such as the photograph of “Woicha,” which belongs to one of the most ambitious colonial ethnographies of the late nineteenth century (Fig.  13.6). The study, directed by naval officer Maurice Vidal Portman, forced dozens of Andamanese (a group of tribal people living on the Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal) to submit to a rigorous physical examination that culminated with a photograph that colonial officials believed had the ability to yield knowledge about native subject difference. Postcolonial scholars have critiqued Portman’s study from a number of perspectives, most notably its construction and commemoration of the Andamanese as a “dying race” and its eroticization of the “savage” body (Pinney 1997; Sen 2009). In general, Portman’s study has come to be read as emblematic of fallacious colonial impulses that sought to commemorate colonial differences through representation. Pushpamala N.’s work returns to that impulse, inserting the violence of colonial “science” into the art gallery and using her position as an artist to reveal the role that the visual played in normalizing racist studies from the colonial period. While her work has much in common with Chopra’s— both artists force the viewer to recall colonialism—it is less about recognizing how the memory of the past continues to have a muddled relationship with the present, and rather about faithfully replicating colonial representations in order to undermine them. Her sets, populated with authentic objects, such as the stand that extends her arm, take months to

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Fig. 13.5  Pushpamala N. in collaboration with Clare Arni, Toda (after 1898 British anthropometric study), The Native Types, Native Women of South India ~ Manners and Customs, 2000–2004. © Pushpamala N.

construct. Likewise, there is an exacting precision in the processing of her photographs, which reproduce the sepia tone from late nineteenth-century photography. In resurrecting the presumed precision of nineteenthcentury colonial photography through performance, Pushpamala N. forces her viewer to come face to face with the artificiality of representations from the colonial period. Colonial photographs that purported to provide neutral, “scientific” evidence were actually carefully posed images designed

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Fig. 13.6  Maurice Vidal Portman, “Woicha,” a forty-two-year-old woman of the “Pucaik-War Tribe,” 1890s. © The Trustees of the British Museum

to reduce an individual to racial data. In exposing her own body to the data-­driven aesthetic of the colonial period, Pushpamala N. confronts the lack of control that colonial subjects had over their representation, and the power relations that shaped these supposedly neutral, “scientific” depictions of race. Her gesture is agentive, but does not “strike back” or retaliate as much as it embodies the memory of colonialism to bring the fabricated identities of the original subjects to the forefront of contemporary consciousness. She reveals the power of the artist in exposing the

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mediated processes through which racist “memorial signs,” such as colonial “scientific” photographs, operated. In contrast, Chopra’s performances are less about revealing the fallacies informing representations from the past; rather his work emphasizes how our relationship to the past is often marked by ambivalence—reality, as he puts it, “gets mixed up” (Punj 2013, 71). Chopra’s performances represent living memories grounded in personal connections, but informed broadly by historical systems of representation. He performs the role of the “historic agent of memory,” playing within this liminal space of life and death (Enwezor 2008, 46). His work not only forces the viewer to confront colonial death in the living present, but those familiar with imagery from India’s colonial period may also recall the oft-repeated image of the death of Tipu Sultan, known as the Tiger of Mysore, who was killed fighting the British in 1799. Tipu’s defeat marked an important turning point in the history of nineteenth-­ century British rule in India as it paved the way for greater colonial control. Tipu remains a historical figure whose legacy is contested. Rendering him despotic within an orientalist visual culture, colonial prints and engravings of Tipu’s death circulated in the nineteenth century and emphasized the ruler’s fallen body (Fig. 13.7). In a print by Sir Samuel Reynolds, Indian and British soldiers can be seen discovering the slain Tipu. The soldiers gather around the body with torches, bearing witness to the death—a witnessing that doubles through the process of reprinting and distributing the image. On the one hand nineteenth-century colonial viewers could celebrate this image simply as it represented the fall of an anti-colonial “despot.” On the other hand the print expresses a romantic fixation with the death of the colonized as a subject worthy of representation and commemoration. A British soldier lifts up the lifeless right arm of his fallen foe to confirm death, but the print suggests that the mood of Indian and British soldiers alike is reflective and somber as they gather around the body. Throughout the nineteenth century the British remained interested in Tipu; his memory, as it was represented through images and objects, was marked for nineteenth-century audiences by a mix of revulsion and fascination.4 In Chopra’s work, similar to the many images of Tipu’s death, Sir Raja’s fallen body is the subject, illuminated by chandelier light instead of torchlight. Of course that body belongs to Chopra, who will awaken and go on to play other personas, but even with this death the persona of Sir Raja lives on in representation. Chopra’s “[art] of memory” does not “strike

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Fig. 13.7  Print made by Sir Samuel Reynolds, The Finding of the Body of Tippoo Sultaun, 1800. Mezzotint and Etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum

back” at empire; rather it reveals the difficulties of that gesture because the history of the empire itself remains a part of former subjects’ and their descendants’ identities. History, as Jacques Derrida discusses in Specters of Marx, does not march forward; rather it is repeatedly inhabited by ghosts of the past and future (Derrida 1994). Consequently, Chopra’s performative gesture of death and resurrection cannot fully resolve these ghosts of the past and future, particularly when they are marked with ambivalence. Time in his work is cyclical, at least in regard to memory. For the descendants of colonial subjects, representations will continually reiterate the identities of their predecessors. By calling attention to time’s cyclical nature, Chopra makes the larger argument that it is the role of the artist, in engaging with archival traces, to both remember and recognize the past in order to confront our assumptions about the solidity of our memories and thus our identities.

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Ghosts in the Archive Concerned with what lingers and what disappears, Raqs Media Collective presents us with The Untold Intimacy of Digits (UID), a one-minute looped projection that shows a disembodied handprint, digitally animated by ghost-like motion (Fig. 13.8). Initially exhibited in 2011 in New Delhi and Toronto, Untold Intimacy featured as part of the Raqs’s exhibition Surjection. Raqs is a Delhi-based collective, together since 1992, that includes artists Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The name, Raqs, refers to both the acronym “rarely asked questions,” as well as a word in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic that connotes movement. Much of their work takes the form of institutional critique and demonstrates a deep engagement with archives and historical objects.5 Their work can be thought of as a kind of “archival art,” which Hal Foster Fig. 13.8  Raqs Media Collective, The Untold Intimacy of Digits (UID), 2011. © Raqs Media Collective

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has characterized as art that “[seeks] to make historical information, often lost or displaced physically present” (Foster 2004, 4). Archival art inhabits history, but does not set out to displace it. Raqs treats archives as sites that encourage us to remember the past, but which also illustrate the point that the fallacy of collective memories, manufactured through archives, “remains unsettled by mnemonic ambivalence” (Enwezor 2008, 30). Untold Intimacy’s disembodied hand was in fact plucked directly from the British colonial archive; the handprint dates to 1858 and was taken in a village in colonial India when William Herschel, a British officer stationed there, needed to hire an Indian road contractor. Informed by his racial anxiety about the ineffectualness of Indian texts and the potential for Indians to impersonate one another and forge signatures, he decided that the signature of Rajyadhar Konai, the contractor he had hired, was not sufficient collateral to hold the man to his work. Herschel thus asked for a handprint to legitimize the contract (Fig. 13.9). Reflecting on this decision in a book he published on the subject in 1916, Herschel claimed that “there was nothing very original” about his idea, and that he simply

Fig. 13.9  Konai’s Hand, Bengal, 1858. From W.  J. Herschel, The Origin of Fingerprinting, 1916

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wanted to “try an experiment” where he could place an image of the body on an official contract; “many” he argued, “must have heard of some such use of a man’s hand” (Herschel 1916, 8). The image he produced recorded the outlines of Konai’s five fingers, as well as the papillary ridges of his palm skin. This most peculiar contract was the first recorded instance in which a British colonial administrator captured a visual record of the skin and papillary ridges of an Indian (Waits 2016). After this exchange, Herschel went on to experiment with fingerprinting, spending the next nineteen years in India fueled by the hope that fingerprinting would improve administrative relations between the British and their colonial subjects, since he believed it could streamline interactions as an efficient legitimizing apparatus that would do away with the need to rely on signatures and foreign languages. In 1888 Herschel made a decision that would prove to be transformative. He sent a sampling of his fingerprint specimens, including Konai’s handprint, to Francis Galton for further study. Galton, a half-cousin to Charles Darwin, studied Herschel’s experiments and eventually concluded that fingerprints were accurate visual markers of identity because impressions of the papillary ridges of one’s skin were specific and unique to that individual (Waits 2016). Galton went on to publish a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis, using his own fingerprints as frontispiece to his work (Galton 1892). His book encouraged the inclusion of fingerprinting in forensic science, and the model he developed—specifically his breakdown of whorl, loop, and arch as identifiers—is still used today. Following this intervention, the technology of fingerprinting was born (Sengoopta 2003). Galton’s life’s work is housed in the Galton Archive at University College London; Konai’s original handprint resides within, and it was here that Raqs encountered the image and became fascinated by it. I want to stress the significance of Konai’s handprint as a representation. The visual properties of corporeal prints seem limited when first viewed; beyond the whorls, loops, and arches recorded in ink, fingerprints appear to reject the aesthetic categories of art historical analysis, as the forensically significant properties limit analysis when treated as image. However, a handprint or fingerprint is significant as a representation precisely because it looks like the physical part of the body and requires the presence of the body to make it. Prints share much with photography in that they are both iconic and indexical when analyzed in terms of their semiotic history, and both serve as records of the body’s temporality.

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The colonial Indian context of their origin is also key in recognizing the significance of fingerprinting within the regimes of nineteenth-century visual technologies. In pre-British India, corporeal prints were taken to produce a tangible temporal presence. Handprints and footprints, for example, were often taken of young children and the elderly in both Hindu and Muslim communities to serve as records of life. A more formal practice known as tep-sai, which recorded the tips of one’s fingers, was also employed in order to authenticate letters and documents for the illiterate in Bengal (Waits 2016). And while the arrival of the British brought an initial preference for utilizing photography to capture identity, fingerprinting provided a cheaper and more efficient way of producing physical likenesses that were small and thus well-suited to ordering within an archive. Fingerprints were seen as reliable representations that became key to negotiating the terms of colonial surveillance. Herschel elaborated on this uncanny effect of corporeal printing, when describing his initial decision to fingerprint Konai. He wrote that he hoped “to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter” (Herschel 1916, 8). In 1916 Herschel could write with the luxury of hindsight. The scientific validity of fingerprinting was well established and fingerprinting had already become an integral part of criminal identification systems around the globe. However, there was something astute about Herschel’s reflection on his decision to take Konai’s handprint in the mid-nineteenth century. He appears to have had some sense of the spectral nature of corporeal printing—this sense that a print represents an uncanny confrontation with one’s body—when he described fingerprinting’s potential to act as a kind of policing device. The spectral nature of corporeal printing, along with its “textual” authority, placed fingerprinting in a position of unquestioned authority that was not granted to any other visual medium at the time. Viewed in this light, Raqs’s decision to move Konai’s handprint from the archives into the realm of contemporary art is particularly telling, not only with respect to its aesthetic potential, but also in regards to its spectral promise. Untold Intimacy produces an encounter with a 10 × 7-foot digital icon, which has made the human body strange and unfamiliar. Raqs’s mobilization of the colonial archive transforms our interaction with Konai’s handprint into what curator Okwui Enwezor described as a “highly structured form of witnessing” (Enwezor 2008, 30). In Raqs’s version, Konai’s body is further disembodied from the original image; Raqs presents us with an enormous floating hand with no connection to

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its contractual context or function as corporeal signature. There is instead something hypnotic about the blue-black handprint’s repetitive gesture; through digital animation the fingers appear to slowly curl and extend, counting an untold sum. Indeed, the work interrogates the colonial subject-body’s potential to communicate. In re-contextualizing the trace of Konai’s body within the white cube of the gallery, Raqs claims: In every sum figured by power, a remainder haunts the calculation. Not everything adds up. A people are never equal to a listing of their bodies. They are something more and something less than a population. Counting counter to the reasons of state, Raj Konai, a peasant from nineteenth century Bengal, the owner of the floating trace of a disembodied hand indexed in a distant archive, persists in his arithmetic. (Raqs Media Collective 2011)

Raqs forces us to consider memory as well as history here. What does it mean when colonial bodies, or even bodies in general, exist in the archive indefinitely, as something other than the self, returning as remainders to haunt the spectator? In a 2012 press release for the Raqs Media Collective: Guesswork exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery, a potential answer recognizes the impossibility of corporeal abstraction as a means of commemoration: “It haunts its way into our imaginations as a countdown towards infinity, a quiet subversion of the vanity of quantification—the futile hope that a human being can be reduced to numbers” (Frith Street Gallery 2012). In this work, Konai is a ghost or specter, both visible and invisible, something, but also nothing. The image of Konai’s handprint, which represented one of the first examples of an individual body becoming representable within a state apparatus, exists today as an intimate, yet intangible figure. Futility or the impossibility of deciphering seems to be at the heart of Raqs’s larger message. As Natasha Eaton has argued, the handprint not only gestures to India’s colonial past, but also recalls the Open Hand Monument, an icon well known in Indian national memory, which sits in front of a sunken gathering space in the Capitol Complex of the postcolonial Indian city of Chandigarh—a city constructed following India’s independence from Britain (Eaton 2015) (Fig.  13.10). Designed by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, the Open Hand Monument was meant to symbolize peace and reconciliation, and its sunken gathering space was designed to promote dialogue and debates (Bharne 2011, 103). However,

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Fig. 13.10  Open Hand Monument, Chandigarh, India, 2015. Photograph ID 127733108. © Saiko3p | Dreamstime.com

its hopeful message has been undermined by the urban reality of the city in the decades that followed its construction. For many years, the monument stood in isolation as the Chandigarh city government had a ban in place limiting who could access the space around it (Bharne 2011, 107–108). The ban was lifted in 2010, making the monument somewhat more accessible to the public, but it, along with sites like Coronation Park, continues to hold an ambivalent position within postcolonial Indian society (Bharne 2011, 108). In relation to Untold Intimacy, the monument also reveals an emptiness that comes from disembodiment; Le Corbusier’s

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abstracted body is aloof and disconnected from social realities, standing apart from the public the architect hoped to reach. When viewed in relation to prominent symbols of Indian nationhood, the power of Untold Intimacy resides in its recognition of how representations produce new identities that do not necessarily conform to an image’s original meaning. Untold Intimacy invites Konai’s abstraction to become our own, so that our encounter with his handprint is an encounter with our own bodies as they become unfamiliar when given new meanings. In this work the archive is a site for memory, but Raqs, like Chopra, foregrounds its engagement with archives in unsettling our sense of the past. It is no coincidence that by creating the anacronym UID, Untold Intimacy prompts viewers to recall the Government of India’s Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI, and its Aadhaar program. Aadhaar, established in 2009, collects photographs, fingerprints, and iris scans from Indian citizens and stores them in a Central Identity Data Repository. In exchange for their biometric data, citizens are given a unique twelve-digit number that can be used nationally as a universal form of identification. Civic identity is at the heart of this new technology because Aadhaar fundamentally promises to extend services, spaces, and citizenship privileges. With Aadhaar, social and physical mobility is now inscribed through the body; one’s biology in the form of biometric information can facilitate social and economic movement. In many ways, this program appears revolutionary not just in terms of its ideology, but in light of the active participation it has generated among the Indian population; the program has emerged as the largest biometrics database on earth. Its appeal stems from the idea that a citizen’s individuality will be documented on the basis of supposedly neutral biometric information, rather than the historically value-laden categories of caste, religion, and language. Yet a question lies behind Aadhaar’s appeal, concerning whether the program truly represents a radical break with historical models of civic engagement or whether it is simply a revival of colonial models of governmentality. British colonists’ desire to bring modern forms of governance to India went hand-in-hand with their interest in classification and attempt to represent and gather knowledge about the people they were putatively trying to lead out of despotism toward a higher level of civilization. Herschel’s confidence in the spectral nature of corporeal printing, along with projects like Portman’s study, reveals an overwhelming tendency during the colonial period to conflate bodily representations and racial data with identity. A similar rationale informs the Aadhaar program, which has

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proven to be problematic for many of India’s most marginalized citizens. Not only does Aadhaar raise concerns about the Indian government’s potential to monitor its citizens, but having an Aadhaar number is now mandatory for people who rely on government benefits (Goel 2018). If a person cannot provide their biometrics, which in regions without electricity, internet connections, and operational servers often proves difficult, they fail to exist according to the government, without the spectral trace of their body lingering in the new archive. In alluding to Aadhaar, Raqs prompts us to consider the fallacy of what might be thought of as India’s bright techno-driven future, suggesting that colonialism continues to haunt India. While the growth of surveillance states is a global concern, in India—a nation that can trace its surveillance state’s origins to Konai’s handprint—the potential danger surrounding biometric identification as the determinant of civic identity is particularly problematic. India’s colonial past exposes some of the most troubling social problems—particularly racism—that have informed modern surveillance. In transforming an archival colonial-subject body into a digital icon that doubles as an Aadhaar entry, Raqs muddles clear historical divisions between subject/citizen and colonial/postcolonial. Herschel’s handprint, taken to frighten Konai into accountability, is a metaphor for the ways in which Aadhaar relies on the body to bequeath citizenship. Konai is commemorated for India, a contradiction “at the heart of the living present,” simultaneously “visible and invisible, phenomenal and nonphenomenal” (Derrida 2013, 39). Ultimately, while India’s colonial past might seem removed, its impulses linger, taking new forms that condition the future.

Conclusion Contemporary Indian art provides a mechanism for acknowledging the spectral relationship between the past and the present. Chopra, Pushpamala N., and Raqs contend with the memory of colonialism as it manifests in representations, addressing its impact on historical and contemporary identities. Their work resonates even beyond India, as they imply that one of the lasting legacies of colonialism—a fixation on representation as a means of commemorating identity—is also the problem of modernity itself. Furthermore, their work reveals how representations, when configured as an “art of memory,” are fallacies—“[representations] of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition” that nevertheless cast an uncanny shadow over the present (Bhabha 1994, 51).

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A final play on the representation of colonial/contemporary memory can be observed in the 2015 Raqs installation Coronation Park (Fig. 13.11). The work first appeared in the Giardini at the 56th Venice Biennale as part of Enwezor’s curatorial project All the World’s Futures. It taps into the “culturally aloof nature of imperial power” that defined the physical site of Coronation Park during the imperial durbars, as well as the postcolonial ambivalence or incompleteness surrounding India’s colonial legacy that manifests in the site’s use today. The Raqs version of Coronation Park references the Delhi park’s forgotten collection of imperial statuary, as visitors wander around an assemblage of white fiberglass statues, black foundations, and inscriptions that come together as nine sculptural installations. The sculptures are all incomplete—faces, torsos, appendages, and at times even entire bodies are missing—but the parts that remain visible invoke the trappings of the Raj at its apex: elongated robes and regalia adorn the figures so that they appear disturbingly authentic as impersonations of Raj-era imagery. In this work Raqs clearly questions the nature of power as

Fig. 13.11  Raqs Media Collective, Coronation Park sculptures on display at the Venice Biennale, 2015. © Raqs Media Collective

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it is expressed in commemorative objects. In the wake of transnational movements calling for the removal of monuments, such as the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign in South Africa and the protest against Confederate monuments in the United States, Coronation Park reads globally as commentary on the hollowness of public monuments as “memorial signs,” and on their connection to social identity. Something is missing from this installation; our memories get muddled. Raqs gives us an interstitial moment where past, present, and future collide. This collision of time is further articulated in the inscriptions on the foundations, which were taken from a 1936 George Orwell essay, titled “Shooting an Elephant.” This essay has come to serve as a metaphor for the futility of Western imperial projects, given the nature of power as a destructive force. In Orwell’s story, a British police official stationed in Burma is forced to shoot an elephant despite his personal inclination to let it live. Hated by the village he governs, Orwell’s officer shoots the elephant because the villagers want him to; he expresses the power that comes with his position, but it is an empty and ambivalent power. On the Raqs sculpture, representing a “king without a face,” the inscription reproduces the following Orwell lines: “And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility” (Orwell 1945, 8). Orwell is of course commenting on the failure of Western imperialism; power in his story is nothing but a futile performance. However, Raqs chooses to “memorialize” Orwell’s message, casting an ambiguous shadow over the story as well as the park. While the history of Western imperialism represents hubristic futility, its memory lingers, lodged within representations that are simultaneously solid and incomplete. Coronation Park forces viewers to come to terms with memory’s persistence, for though subject to fabrication, our collective memories, as representations, constantly return to shape our identities.

Notes 1. The word “durbar” derives from a Persian term meaning “court.” 2. Sardar Singh, whose power in Jodhpur was restricted by British colonial officials, nevertheless played a significant role in extending the railway— another colonial technology—from Jodhpur to Hyderabad. 3. For example, a loose representation of Chopra’s paternal grandfather, Yog Raj Chopra, an amateur landscape painter from Kashmir, frequently appears in the artist’s work.

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4. Many of Tipu Sultan’s material possessions were looted by soldiers in the immediate aftermath of his death, but one object—a semi-automaton tiger that mauls a European soldier—was sent to London and put on display commemorating the conquest of Tipu Sultan and the fall of a “despot.” During the nineteenth century, the tiger was one of the most popular exhibits in the East India Company’s museum. This object, known as Tipu’s Tiger, now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, continues to be a work of great curiosity. 5. In 2017 Raqs produced film-like video-objects at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Tipu’s Tiger that set out to transform the eighteenth-century relic into a meditation on history and its potential.

References Allen, Charles. 2000. India of the Princes and Maharajas. In India Through the Lens: Photography 1840–1911, ed. Vidya Dehejia, 199–225. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Assmann, Alieda. 2008. Transformations Between History and Memory. Social Research 75 (1), Collective Memory and Collective Identity: 49–72. Balachandran, Aparna, and Deborah Ruth Sutton. 2017. Delhi’s Coronation Park Highlights How Urban Governance Ignores Both History and the Public. The Wire, September 28. https://thewire.in/history/coronationpark-confederate-statues. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Bharne, Vinayak. 2011. Le Corbusier’s Ruin: The Changing Face of Chandigarh’s Capitol. Journal of Architectural Education 64 (2): 99–112. Chopra, Nikhil. 2010. Sir Raja III—What Will I Do with All this Land. www. nikhilchopra.net; http://www.nikhilchopra.net/home/?cat=3. Cohn, Bernard S. 1983. Representing Authority in Victorian India. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 165–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. Spectrographies. In The Spectralities Reader, ed. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 37–52. New York: Bloomsbury. Eaton, Natasha. 2015. Subaltern Rustle: Raqs Media Collective, the Colour Blue and the Colonial Archive. Marg-A Magazine of the Arts 68 (1): 12–21. Enwezor, Okwui. 2008. Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument. In Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Photography, ed. Okwui Enwezor, 10–51. New York; Göttingen: International Center of Photography; Steidl.

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Foster, Hal. 2004. An Archival Impulse. October 110 (Autumn): 3–22. Frith Street Gallery. 2012. Raqs Media Collective: Guesswork. www.frithstreetgallery.com; https://www.frithstreetgallery.com/exhibitions/5637-raqs-mediacollective-guesswork. Galton, Francis. 1892. Finger Prints. London: Macmillan. Goel, Vindu. 2018. ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances. New York Times, April 7. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated with annotations by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herschel, William. 1916. The Origin of Fingerprinting. London: Humphrey Milford. Jumabhoy, Zehra. 2009. Introduction. In The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, ed. Mark Holborn, 17–79. London: Saatchi Gallery/Jonathan Cape. Khullar, Sonal. 2015. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lahiri, Tripti. 2011. Delhi Journal: At Coronation Park, Size Matters. The Wall Street Journal, December 9. https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/12/09/ delhi-journal-at-coronation-park-size-matters/. McGarr, Paul. 2015. ‘The Viceroys are Disappearing from the Roundabouts in Delhi’: The Fall and Rise of British Symbols of Power in Post-Colonial India. Modern Asian Studies 49 (3): 787–831. Mercer, Kobena. 2005. Introduction. In Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer, 6–23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. New Delhi’s 106th Anniversary: Coronation Pillar Wears Defaced Look. 2017. Economic Times, December 12. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ news/politics-and-nation/new-delhis-106thanniversary-coronation-pillarwears-defaced-look/articleshow/62041742.cms. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26 (Spring): 7–24. Orwell, George. 1945. Shooting an Elephant. In Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 3–12. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Punj, Rajesh. 2013. Interview: Ancestral Figures Revisited: Chopra’s Multiple Personas Invite Audiences to Join Him as He Remixes Reality. Flash Art International (Nov./Dec.): 71–73. Raqs Media Collective. 2011. www.raqsmediacollective.net; https://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx#. Said, Edward. 2000. Invention, Memory, Place. Critical Inquiry 26 (Winter): 175–192. Sen, Satadru. 2009. Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M. V. Portman and the Andamanese. American Ethnologist 36 (2): 364–379.

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Sengoopta, Chandak. 2003. Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Waits, Mira Rai. 2016. The Indexical Trace: A Visual Interpretation of the History of Fingerprinting in Colonial India. Visual Culture in Britain 17 (1): 18–46.

Index1

A Aadhaar, 262, 263 Abolition, 213 Abolitionists, 203, 213, 215 Abry, Edward, 72 Adams, Henry, 216 African Americans benevolent societies, 145, 151 cemeteries, 146, 151, 154, 158, 159 church, 1, 76n5, 146, 157 masons, 145 militia, 145, 151, 152, 155 politics, 159 Aiken, D. Wyatt, 147, 152 Album, 5–7, 11, 193 Album-writing manuals, 53, 54 Aldine Press, 48, 51, 52 Alpinism, 233 Alterity, 228, 229

Andersonville prison camp (Georgia), 126, 137, 138, 139n1, 140n7 Apartheid, 173, 175 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 227, 228, 232 Assmann, Aleida, 4, 245 As Thousands Cheer, 71 Austria, 110, 230, 231 B Ballantyne, Robert M., 82, 85, 92, 93 Barry, Charles Ainslie, 72, 77n9 Bavaria, 230 Bax, Arnold, Sir, 70 Belle Isle prison camp (Richmond, Virginia), 129, 138, 140n4 Bennett, Cyril, 22, 25–27, 31, 33, 33n2 Berlin, Irving, 71 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 148, 157

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 K. H. Grenier, A. R. Mushal (eds.), Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5

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INDEX

Biometric data, 262 Birthdays commercialization of, 72, 73 history of birthday celebrations and parties, 7, 67, 71, 75, 76 party games, 71 royalty, 71, 76n3 Black, Isaac, 154 Blank book, 42, 47, 49, 51, 54 Boggs, Samuel, 138 Bookseller, 7, 42, 47, 48, 51, 55n3 Boursnell, Richard, spirit photographer, 23 Boyce, William, 67 Bradley, Mamie Till, 158, 159 Brahms, Johannes, 7, 61–76 Brewster, David, Sir, 23 British Empire, 9, 184, 190, 196, 242, 243 Brittany, 97, 99, 100, 105, 109, 115, 118n1, 118n3 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12n1, 158 Buguet, M. Ed., spirit photographer, 24 Burial at sea, 82–84, 89, 90 Bushman’s Pass (Langalibalele Pass), 165–169, 171–174, 177, 178 Butin, Ulysse, 113, 114 C Camp Douglas (Chicago, Illinois), 127 Campe, Johann Heinrich Campe, 67 Carroll, J. (Captain), 154 Cashmere (Kashmir), 190, 191, 199n6 Castle of Good Hope, 175, 176 Cavada, Federico Fernandez, 134, 135 Cawnpore (Kanpur), 187, 189–194, 197, 198, 199n6, 199n7 Cemetery, vi, 103, 105, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159, 159n4, 160n7, 160n12, 191

Cenotaphs, 103, 106 Centennial, viii, 173, 243 Cesti, Antonio, 67 Chapel, 90, 91, 95n4, 97, 98, 102–105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116 Character, 22, 25, 29, 31, 40, 41, 43, 44, 53–55, 64, 84, 105, 131, 210, 230, 249, 250 Childhood, 7, 54, 62, 66, 71, 72, 76, 76n5 Chopra, Nikhil, 10, 245–247, 249–251, 254, 255, 262, 263, 265n3 Civic celebration, 8, 183–198 Civil Rights Movement, 158, 160n16 Civil War, American, vi, 2, 5, 8, 11, 40, 48, 49, 51, 52, 91, 125–131, 134–137, 139, 140n2, 140n6, 145–147, 150, 152, 153, 205, 216, 217 Coalition War, 234 Cod, 99–102, 110, 118, 118n1, 119n4 Coker, Simon, 155 Collective memory, vi, ix, 4, 105, 128, 136, 140n2, 172, 244, 245, 257, 265 Colonialism, 6, 12n1, 176, 245, 246, 251, 253, 263 Commercialization birthdays, 72, 73 holidays, 73 music publishing, 72 Commonplace book, 41, 42, 55n1 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 23, 24 Consumerism, vi, vii, 4, 7 Cooper, Joseph Thomas, 72 Coronation Park, 11, 241–244, 246, 261, 264, 265 Culture of sentiment, 4, 5, 7, 47

 INDEX 

D Dark tourism, 11, 127, 128, 131 Davis, Jefferson, 217 Delhi, 183, 184, 186, 189–191, 193, 195, 198, 241, 242, 246, 256 Demarest, Albert Guillaume, 113, 114 Democratic Party, 146, 152, 155, 210, 211 Dietrich, Albert, 65 Durbar, 9, 11, 183–198, 198n1, 198n2, 241–243, 264, 265n1 Durnford, Anthony, 168, 169 E Ecocriticism, 83, 99 Ecomaterialist, 83, 87 Elgar, Edward, 70 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 67, 70 See also The Triumphs of Oriana Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, 70 Mother of (see Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth (Mother of Queen Elizabeth II)) Ellenton Riot, 155 Elmwood Cemetery, 151–153, 159n4 Emanuel A.M.E. Church massacre (Charleston, South Carolina), 1–3, 8, 11, 12n1 Environment, 3, 83, 92, 225, 244 Ethnicity, 230 F Faber, Bertha, 66 “F.A.E.” Sonata, 65 Fakery, 24, 25, 34n4 Federalist Party, 9, 10, 203–218 Ferdinando IV, King of Naples, 70 Feudalism, 225 Fingerprinting, 258, 259

271

Fishing industry, 102 Fitness, 224, 226, 229, 232 France, 5, 102, 118n3, 224, 234 Freedmen’s Bureau, 147 French Atlantic, 7, 12, 118n1 Friedrich of Anhalt-Dessau, Crown Prince, 67 G Galton, Francis, 258 Gender, x, 3, 29, 41, 46, 251 Géniaux, Charles, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 117, 118 Géniaux, Paul, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 109, 117, 118 George VI, King of the United Kingdom, 70 Germany, 5, 11, 61, 66, 73, 77n11, 78n12, 130, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230 Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, 64 Gift book, 43, 47, 48, 52, 54 Gift economy, 99, 104, 108–113, 116, 118 “God Save the King,” 70 “Good Morning to All,” see “Happy Birthday to You” Great Tunnel Escape, 135, 136 Grimm, Julius Otto, 63–66, 72, 73, 75, 77n10 Guidebooks, vi, 9, 10, 52, 54, 190, 194, 223–230, 232, 234, 235 Guild system, 231 Gunther, Charles F., 130, 131, 134, 139 H Hamburg Riot, 155 “Happy Birthday to You,” 66, 70–72 Harpoon, 81, 82, 84–87, 91, 93, 94

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INDEX

Hart, Moss, 71 Hart, Robert Eber, 157 Hartford Convention, 205, 207–210, 212–215 Haunted Museum, 24 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 62 Haynes, Wade, 146, 156–159 Hayward, John Henry, 53 Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 230 “Here’s a Health Unto His Majesty,” 70 Herland, Emma, 105, 106, 108, 116 Herschel, William, 257–259, 262, 263 Hiking, 224, 233, 234 Hill, Jessica M., 71 Hill, Mildred, 70 Hill, Patty Smith, 70 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 64 Holy Roman Empire, 230–232, 235 Hornung, E. W., 22, 23, 31, 33 I Imperialism, vii, 186, 197 India, 5, 9, 11, 183–185, 187–190, 194, 196, 197, 199n5, 241–265 Indian Uprising (1857), 9, 183–198, 241 Individualism, importance of, 53 Industrialization, 4, 5, 44, 225, 227 J Jackson, Andrew, 208, 210 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 232 Jefferson, Thomas, 205–209, 214–217 Joachim, Joseph, 62, 63, 65 Johnson’s Island, 127 K Kinderfest, 66 Kipling, Rudyard, 190

L La Blache, Luigi, 65 Landscape, 9–11, 153, 154, 166, 191, 225, 227, 228, 243, 249, 265n3 Langa (township), 174, 175 Langalibalele, 9, 11, 166–170, 172–178, 179n1, 179n3 Langalibalele Incident, 9, 11, 165–178 Laurens Riot, 150 Le Goffic, Charles, 101–103, 110, 118n2 Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke of Austria, 67 Levy, Amy, 22, 23, 28–31, 33, 33n2, 35n9, 35n10 Libby Prison, 10, 11, 125–129, 131–135, 137–139, 141n8 Liszt, Franz, 62 Lost Cause, 153, 218 Loti, Pierre, 102–108, 110 Lucknow, 189, 190, 195, 199n7 Lynching, 154, 158 M Maharaja, 247–249 Maritime culture, 112 Marochetti, Carlo, 192–194 Martyrdom, 149, 151, 158 Matshana, 167, 168, 170, 172, 177 Meissner, August Hermann Bernhard, 73, 75 Melville, Herman, 7, 82, 84–86, 89 Memento mori, 6, 27, 34n5, 92 Memoirs, 126, 128, 135, 141n8, 217 Memorial, v, ix, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 22, 25, 33, 42, 51, 84, 88, 90–92, 95n4, 116, 126, 128, 131, 132, 134, 139, 149–151, 153–155, 159, 165, 166, 171, 174, 189–191, 193, 194, 197, 198

 INDEX 

Memorial Day, 153 Mendelssohn, Felix, 72, 73 Middle Ages, 78n12, 112, 230, 231 Middle class, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 40–44, 47, 53, 62, 72, 76, 223–226, 230–232, 234, 236 Moby-Dick, 81–94, 95n1, 95n2 Mombach, J. L., 72 Montgomery, James, 53, 56n6 Monuments Cawnpore Memorial Well, 189, 192–194, 198 Confederate, 2, 265 Coronation Park, 11, 241–244, 246, 261, 264 John Nicholson, 190, 191, 197 Kreuzberg, 236 Natal Carbineers monument, 165–168, 171, 173 National Heritage Monument, Pretoria, South Africa, 176–178 Open Hand Monument, 260, 261 Prussian National Monument of the Fallen of the Wars of Liberation, 236 Randolph Monument, 146 Moran, Frank, 135, 136, 141n8 Mother Emanuel, see Emanuel A.M.E. Church massacre (Charleston, South Carolina) Mountaineering, 224 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 67, 69 Mumler, William H., spirit photographer, 19, 21, 23, 24 Museums, vii, viii, 5, 8, 10, 11, 24, 110, 116, 125–134, 137–139, 140n5, 266n4 Music, viii, 5, 7, 61–76, 77n10, 77n11, 145, 151 Musical humor, 62 Mutiny pilgrimage, 189–195, 197

273

N Nana Sahib, 187, 191, 199n7 Napoleonic wars, 10, 227, 228, 235 Nash, William B., 151, 154 Natal Carbineers, 165–168, 171–173 Nationalism, 1, 9, 185, 197, 204, 205, 226, 229, 230, 233, 234 education, 226 history, 1 identity, 234 landscape, 225 monuments, 234, 235 music, viii Natureculture, 83 New England, 206–211 New Orleans, Battle of, 208, 210 Nicholson, Brigadier General John, 190, 191, 197 Nora, Pierre, vi, 2, 244, 245 Nostalgia, 44, 101, 103, 231, 232 Novels, viii, 2, 5–7, 23, 28–31, 33, 34n3, 35n9, 82, 83, 91, 92, 95n2, 102, 105, 107, 116, 186, 187, 190, 191, 196 O Ogilvie, J., 53 P Palestrina, Giovanna Pierluigi da, 72 Palimpsest, 81–94 Pan-Germanic identity, 224 Parlor culture, 62, 76 Parry, Hubert, Sir, 70 Patriotism, 10, 185, 186, 225, 234 Peasant culture, 225 Pedestrian tourism, 223 Pensions, 135, 136

274 

INDEX

Perrin, Wade, 150, 151, 160n7, 160n8 Photography death, 20, 22 ethnographic, 10 memorial practices, 22 postmortem, 6, 20–33 spirit, 6, 20–33 Pietermaritzburg, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 178 Polka, 64, 65, 72, 74, 75, 77n10 Postmortem photography, 6, 20–33 Prang, Louis, 48 Prisoners of war, 128, 137, 140n4 Procession, 2, 8, 9, 12, 113, 145, 151, 152, 155, 177, 236 Prussia, 230, 231, 233, 235 Public history, vii Publishing industry, 47, 48 Purcell, Henry, 67 Pushpamala N., 10, 245, 251–253, 263 R Race, 5, 8–10, 46, 147, 157, 158, 179n1, 195, 197, 253 Racial violence, 2, 8 Racism, scientific, 146, 157–159, 251, 263 Randolph, Benjamin F., 8, 145–159, 160n7, 160n12 Randolph Cemetery, 8, 145–159 Randolph Day, 8, 155–157, 160n14 Ransier, Alonzo J., 150, 151, 153, 154 Raqs Media Collective, 246, 256, 260, 264 Reconciliation, 8, 128, 132, 216, 260 Reconstruction, 8, 145, 146, 149, 151–159, 216 Reese, Alonzo, 154 Regionalism, 100, 101

Relics, vi, 127, 130, 131, 133, 137, 266n5 Religious imagery, 98, 107 Reményi, Eduard, 62 Republican Party, 147, 150, 155, 214, 215 Rhetoric, 5, 203, 209, 210, 212–214, 223–236 Robben Island, 165, 170, 174 Romanticism, vi Rossini, Gioachino, 69 Royer, Henri-Paul, 115 S Sasportas, Thaddeus K., 149 Schall, Johann Eberhard Friedrich, 67 Schumann, Clara, 62 Schumann, Robert, 65 Scott, Robert K., 148 Scrapbook, 41, 42, 47, 49, 52, 54 Sectionalism, 210 Sentiment, 4–7, 40–42, 44, 47, 53–55, 171, 185, 186, 197, 213, 247 Sentimentality, 6, 62, 76 Separate spheres, 40 Seume, Johann Gottfried, 229 Sharpeville Massacre, 175 Shepstone, Theophilus, 167, 168, 179n3 Slavery, 12n1, 206, 207, 209, 213, 214, 216, 217 Smalls, Robert, 150 South Africa, 5, 9, 11, 165, 166, 173–178, 184, 265 South Carolina, 1, 8, 145–149, 153–157, 159, 160n15, 209, 217 Southworth and Hawes, 28 Souvenirs, v, vii, ix, 5, 100, 127, 131, 139, 187–189, 191 Spirit photography, 6, 20–33

 INDEX 

Stanford, Charles Villiers, 70 Style hongrois, 63 Sydney Park Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 157 T Tableau vivant, 249, 250 Tallis, Thomas, 67 Technology, 5, 7, 10, 11, 31, 34n3, 249, 258, 262, 265n2 Telemann, Georg Philipp, 67 Textbooks, 42, 54 Till, Emmett, 158 Tillman, Benjamin, 155, 156 Tipu Sultan, 254, 266n4 Tourism mutiny pilgrimage, 189–194 pedestrian, 11, 223 Travel, vi, 5, 9, 10, 31, 43, 86, 110, 112, 178, 186, 189, 190, 193, 198, 223–226, 228–230 Trick, see Fakery The Triumphs of Oriana, 70 V Van Gogh, Vincent, 107, 108, 110, 116

Vasserot, Pierre, 117 Veterans American Civil War, 125 1857 Indian Uprising, 183 Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, 66, 70, 241 Visual culture, 99, 115, 246, 254 Votive boats, 98–118 Votive paintings, 116 W Walter A. Johnson Postmortem Collection, 22 War of 1812, 10, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214 Wars of Liberation, 224, 233–236 Wars of the Coalitions, 234 Wells, Ida B., 158 Wendell Holmes, Oliver, 25 Whales, 7, 81–94 Whaling, 7, 82, 83, 88, 91, 92, 94 Wiseman, Debbie, 70 Y Young, Alfred, 70 Younge, Sophia Elizabeth, 71

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