I thought about calling this post "The Constitutional Significance of the Washington Monuments," but that's what I'll call the short paper I do around the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument in 1848 and then other Washington monuments around the country.
I'm off for my final research trip of the summer. This has been a summer of much work and as yet not as much progress as I'd hoped, but with some luck I think my paper on jurisprudence at Washington College (and a little bit at VMI, too) will come together. All sorts of cool things going on in Lexington that I'll be talking about as I push that paper forward. Let me just say they relate to everything from the social history of slavery, restraints on alienation in a will, a contract between an owner and his slaves for freedom, nineteenth century landscape art and the image of progress, to fireworks. And, yes, even monuments.
Right now I want to talk now about two monuments to George Washington in the state of Virginia -- the Equine Statue (pictured at the upper right side of this post) outside the capitol building in Richmond and the bronze statue of Washington at VMI (which is a replica of the Houndon marble statue of Washington inside the capital building in Richmond). Why am I doing this? I want to see what the dedication addresses said about Washington -- and thus learn a little about what the orators who dedicated the monuments highlighted about the values that they respected in Washington. This is a piece of my work on literary addresses and jurisprudence in Lexington, Virginia in the years leading into Civil War and I find this particular piece of the project exciting because we have Governor Wise's dedication of the Washington bronze statue at VMI in 1856 and then Senator RMT Hunter's 1858 dedication of the Richmond Equine Statue -- and Hunter also gave a graduation address at VMI in 1857.
Robert Bonner's outstanding book on the creation of Southern nationhood has a couple of very good pages on the range of ideas -- from Unionism to secession -- at the dedication of the equine statute. Though Hunter was an important figure during secession, his talk was on the Union side andn it was also about the power of monuments to inspire feelings of patriotism. So, too, was Wise's talk, which is conveniently at the internet archive in VMI's July 1856 report to the legislature. Both Hunter and Wise saw Washington as a figure of unification and nationhood -- though others tried to turn him into an icon of secession, with the idea that he stood for Virginia first above nation and for freedom above centralization. Unsurprisingly, I'm with Wise and Hunter -- and even more Edward Everett -- on this one. Everett went around the country in the mid 1850s speaking about Washington -- including in Lexington. Everett also spoke at the dedication of a cemetery in a small Pennsylvania town in November 1864.
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