Lincoln helps to make the case that cemetery dedication addresses before the Civil War reveal something about the nature of constitutional thought. Some of the addresses make the case, too. Unsurprisingly, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story's 1831 address at Mount Auburn is pretty transparent for what it says about constitutional values. Whig politician Daniel Barnard's address, which employed key Whig terms -- like sacred trust, duty, and sentiment -- appears as part of Whig movement for law to order the Republic. That's true to a lesser extent with Supreme Court Justice John McLean's address at Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery. Those are all by judges or lawyers.
Often the addresses were given by ministers and they, too, tell us something about how cemeteries fit into the constitutional world -- but those addresses also often operate at a much higher level of generality. Unitarian Minister Amory Mayo's 1858 dedication address at the Green Hill Cemetery in Amsterdam, New York, The American Cemetery, is explicit about how cemeteries contributing to a "Christian Republic." Mayo's address provided a detailed sense of the connections of the cemetery to the United States as a nation and to constitutionalism. Partly this was through a sense of history. For the cemetery revealed how much civilization had progressed since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The land was no longer inhabited by Native Americans. Through “patient fortitude” the valley’s settlers had “subdued the wilderness” and with “patriotic devotion saved” the valley “for the heritage of freemen.” Mayo was forward-looking, too. He predicated that 150 years later (in 2008), that the far-off generations would find “a garden valley more enchanting that any Eden of the past, peopled by a race that in power and opportunity shall surpass our largest prophecy.” The cemetery promised to grow in beauty over the generations and appeal “to the holiest and calmest sentiments of our being, through the spectacle of enchanting natural scenery, and the associations of the beloved on earth....”
Mayo explained that the cemetery was part of establishing the principles of democracy and republicanism because it brought people together in death. The cemetery was a symbol of republicanism and a creator of it:
All things are tending, at least in the more advanced portions of our country, to a broad and pure republicanism, founded on the Christian law of love; and what emblem can be more significant of this happy tendency than the American Cemetery, constructed by the money, taste and sentiment of the whole people; containing the dust of the earliest generations removed thither with pious care; receiving the body of every citizen when his earthly work is done, and he steps down from his little eminence of worldly distinction, to mingle with the great democracy of death.
The Green Hill address provided an elaborate explanation of the country’s tendency toward “a broad and pure republicanism, founded on the christian law of love” and how cemeteries functioned to foster that principle. “Containing the dust of the earliest generations removed thither with pious care, receiving the body of every citizen when his earthly work is done, and he steps down from his little eminence of worldly distinction, to mingle with the great democracy of death.” The cemetery represented “a most significant type of the great democratic idea, on which our society is founded, as a powerful aid in teaching the people the Christian view of life and death, as a perpetual preacher on the relations of those who live in this world, and in the world of souls.” It was a teacher because the cemetery represented “that true equality of man founded on respect for his nature, and that union of all men for the common Welfare which is the foundation stone of our national existence.” It illustrated those principles by leveling distinctions.
Friend and foe, rich and poor, wise and simple, good and bad, honored and obscure, are all here. Whatever they may have been or may have done above-ground, our gentle mother earth opens her bosom to the least and greatest alike. However separated by the accidents of conventional society, Nature, the most illustrious hostess, keeps open house for all. From these green graves a voice shall speak to us, saying, "Man is worthy of respect as man."
The cemetery would serve as an instructor about how a republic should function.
Come to this hill side from the selfish competitions that divide man from man, and learn from the way our mother treats her every child, to reverence all men for their manhood derived from God, to live for each other, counting any superiority of native faculty, a culture, or character, as a trust to be used for the uplifting of the whole, to make society in this Community, in our beloved country, one family, bound together by respect for the nature and rights of all—a republic on earth, fit emblem of the kingdom of God in heaven.
For Mayo, the cemetery was part of a larger mission of what he called “a true Christian civilization.” The cemetery’s civilizing mission was one piece of a much larger mosaic. That cemeteries were part of the world of the market, commercialization, religion, civic organizations, and reform movements appears perhaps most clearly in Mayo's book Symbols of the Capital: Or, Civilization in New York. Published the year after his Amsterdam dedication address, Symbols of the Capital places the cemetery into the context of New York culture, for it has chapters on free labor, modern inventions like the canal and railroad, the higher law critique of the fugitive slave act, art, the penitentiary, women’s rights, and churches. All of that was capped off with a final chapter on cemeteries, which supplemented Mayo’s dedication address. The cemetery was part of a system of public and private institutions and individual and collective action, all of which pointed towards republicanism founded on Christian principles. Those elements interacted, from art that served to provide the refinement that is the foundation of the state, to free labor, and human inventions that improved life and provided and preserved a republican government. At the center of this was commerce, which served as the advance guard of Christianity. For commerce, Mayo wrote, “turns out a pioneer of civilization and Christianity. Every blow of the spade or sweep of the mower on the uplands and in the valleys of New York, is felt in the spiritual experience of these who dwell in far-off lands.” Mayo saw in commerce the workings of God. And he turned to images of commerce to illustrate God’s presence in the United States in language that reminds me in many ways of a market-based version of Walt Whitman's Leave of Grass:
Were I challenged by the skeptics to show my strong reasons for the faith in God, and moral obligation and immortality, I do not think I should detain him in my study among the volumes of dead divines, but I would lead him to the very throbbing heart of this world's activity, to the decks of those steamers freighted with the science and burdened with the hopes of two continents. There I would stand, as these messengers ploughed their way through the waves, breasting an ocean of incredulity more chilling than the surges of the cold Atlantic, I would bid him mark the demeanor of those toil-worn men; their fidelity, their silent and sacred obedience to every command, the faith of their leader unsubdued by failure. Mayo carried the story farther than many. He linked the bustle of American commerce to the cemetery. For the cemetery was nearby the city, though separated from it. It was a place where visitors would think of life rather than death. How admirable, then, is the sentiment that often places the Rural Cemetery within sight of all the agencies of our new civilization. Walking among its silent graves, you can almost hear the hum of the machinery that crowds the adjacent stream; the meadows are sown and harvested beneath your eye; the spires and roofs of the city gleam in the distance, or the village streets are vocal below; the near river or blue ocean afar glitter with flitting sails; the thunder and the scream of the lightning train startle the echoes of innumerable ravines, and swift as thought, fly tidings of humanity over the glittering wire. All is life around; oh, yes, and there is no death here.
The cemetery, then, was part of a world of the “Christian republic” – a place where commerce and religion intersected and where people mixed and where we learned lessons of republicanism. Of course now, more than a century later what the cemetery is teaching is is, trustees shouldn't violate their fiduciary duties. So much for Mayo's vision, huh? Tragically, this is a pretty common lesson for cemeteries.
The illustration is of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I use it because I don't have a good one from Green Hill and also because I think it illustrates well the well-ordered Republic at Mayo discusses. I talk a lot more about this in "'These Great and Beautiful Republics of the Dead': Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery." I plan to talk about the conflicts between the visions of constitutionalism and political theory in the addresses -- I'm going to put Increase N. Tarbox' address in opposition to Ralph Waldo Emeron's address at Sleepy Hollow. And I also want to talk about a southern address or two, such as Oliver Baldwin's address at Hollywood Cemetery and maybe John Pendleton Kennedy's 1839 Baltimore address. Soon, too, I hope to be talking about how these addresses fit into the literature on public constitutionalism.
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