Some of my primary sources of evidence for the first third of University, Court, and Slave are addresses given at colleges before the war. These addresses have the virtue that they pull together lots of ideas in a fairly short compass, so you can get a sense of what the speakers are thinking and how they put together their vision of law, history, economy, and political theory. Lots of good work has been done on July Fourth orations and I'm looking at a parallel set of data and questions. Still, many of the addresses aren't all that helpful on the issues I'm concerned with -- such as John Albert Broadus' "Education at Athens," an address he gave to the UVA alumni back in 1856. One can learn something about his attitudes towards broad classical education there, but I found that of very little help on my project, of jurisprudence. However, I noticed in the collection of Broadus' speeches that was published in the 1880s, there is an address that I have spent some time with -- and found of much use for a separate project on cemetery dedication addresses. It is Broadus' address on "Confederate Dead" at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville in 1886. It's part of the reconciliation of North and South, which lays blame on both sides for the war. I am am particularly interested in this paragraph:
It is useless now to raise the question who was right. Perhaps in some respects each side would now acknowledge that the other was nearest right; perhaps in some respects both sides were wrong. Whenever the "impartial historian" arises—he has not arisen yet; certainly he has not published anything in the Century Magazine or in the Personal Recollections of any statesman or soldier—and if he should speak out now, he would probably offend both sides, or else would be neglected as tame and dull—but when he arises he may possibly hold that one side was nearest right according to document and argument, and the other according to the slowly changing condition of our national affairs. Of one thing I feel certain, neither side can claim any monopoly of good intentions, of patriotic aims, nor even of wisdom.
Lots of insight there in the differeing modes of constitutional interpretation in the years leading into Civil War, though I still remain skeptical of the Southern case of constitutional interpretation in the 1850s. Seems to me that where in the pre-war era the cemetery itself was part of creating a constitutional culture that in the post war period cemeteries were sites for the discussion of reunification than actually parts of that reunification. I hope to talk some more about the changes in the nature of cemetery addresses pre and post war sometime soon.
I have not visited Cave Hill, though I hope to sometime soon, maybe even this summer if I can free up some time; so I've illustrated this post with a picture of the gate to the Confederate section of the Blanford Cemetery in Petersburg, about which there is much more that needs to be said soon -- including that it has monuments to both the US and the Confederacy in it. And headstones that go back before the Revolution as well.
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