Cemetery Dedication Addresses and Pre-Civil War Constitutionalism

We're past the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg battle and that means the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address is close.   Lincoln remade the world with that address, and remade it in terms of constitutional aspiration, as well as oratory.  As I suggested a while back, dozens of addresses given at the dedication of rural cemeteries in the three decades before Lincoln's address also spoke to public constitutional ideas.  While none of them approached the eloquence or importance of Lincoln, they too helped support a remaking of the public's understanding of constitutional values.  

I want to talk some about the role that cemetery dedication addresses before the Civil War; I now have a working draft of my paper is up at srrn.  Here is my abstract:

“Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery” joins the growing literature on public constitutionalism by focusing on seventy addresses given at cemetery dedications from Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story’s address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1831, through the addresses of Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in November 1863. The addresses were part of a vibrant public discussion of constitutional principles, which spanned such diverse occasions as July Fourth celebrations, arguments in great constitutional cases (like Daniel Webster’s Dartmouth College argument), dedication of public monuments (like Daniel Webster’s speech at the placement of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1824), lyceum addresses, and college literary society lectures.

For Americans, especially those of the Whig Party, the Constitution was a key component of culture and a key unifier of the nation. Rural cemeteries provided support for such constitutional values. They brought beauty and order to the landscape; they served to mediate an impersonal, commercial world and brought uplift through the lessons of morality and patriotism that people learned when they visited the cemeteries. The cemetery supported constitutional values of Union, respect for property, and obedience to the rule of law. For visitors to the cemetery learned about the importance of each of those values at the cemetery. It was an instructor of values; its ordered lanes and graves also served as a sign of the health of the Christian republic. For the cemetery fulfilled duties owed the past. The cemetery inspired sentiments of love of family and country. People would leave the cemetery inspired to preserve the United States as a Christian republic. Finally, these abstract ideas were promoted through private charitable corporations. Those private organizations brought the community together to promote the republic. The cemeteries were, thus, one important institution – along with the schools, churches, civic associations, and businesses – that helped create and preserve the Union.

The cemetery dedication addresses, like other addresses designed to promulgate constitutional ideas, mixed appeals to economics, morality, religion, and political theory with legal and constitutional ideas. Rural cemeteries promoted Whig constitutional ideals about order, patriotism, and Union. Those values were at the center of the debate over the response to secession and they were put into practice by soldiers along Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg in 1863. Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, thus, reflects the appeals to sentiment and Constitution that were so frequently invoked in the thirty years before the War. This article reveals an important and neglected role of oratory in disseminating constitutional ideas, as well as the significance of rural cemeteries to public constitutional thought. This hidden history reveals how those ideas mobilized support for Union and, thus, how public constitutional thought affects the actions of voters, jurists, and politicians.

I want to talk a lot about the dedication addresses and their constitutional vision in subsequent post; and I also want to talk about how this particular study can show about the possibilities of studying public constitutional ideas.  That is, I think there is something to say about the addresses as sources of history and also about their implications for writing constitutional history (and maye even something about them for constitutional theory, too, though that is not an area I work in).  In case you'd like to see what they look like, some of the addresses are available at the internet archive.  I recommend Justice Joseph Story's 1831 address at Mount Auburn as one of the better ones.  You might also enjoy Amory Mayo's 1858 address at Green Hill, which discusses the cemeteries as  contributing to the creation of the republic.  Also, here is a podcast of a talk I gave around this paper at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The illustration is of Concord on April 19, 1775.  I love this because it has the cemetery in the foreground and thus links the cemetery to the start of the Revolution,  It is by an unknown artist in the collection of the National Gallery.

Update as of August 23: Over at Environment, Law, and History David Schorr talks about "Cemetery Constitutionalism" and Aaron Sachs' work on Mount Auburn.

Comments

[a legal historian]

Al,

This is a very good paper. As always with you a very creative use of sources. I've heard a lot about Lincoln's address and some about Everett's and Story's, but nothing about the others. Some are deservedly obscure, but collectively you use them to tell a compelling story and to reach well beyond the cemetery setting. Cemeteries and constitutionalism. Who knew?

You focus a lot on Whig thought here. Why? Did Whigs really think differently about the Union from Democrats?