Lincoln's Gettysburg Address helped secure the focus on equality and democracy in American constitutional thought. What interests me about the pre-Civil War cemetery dedication addresses is that they, too, spoke to constitutional values. Garry Wills' magnificent book about the Gettysburg Address began by talking about Justice Joseph Story's 1831 address at Mount Auburn's dedication. But the rest -- even Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1855 address at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery -- haven't received much attention. Down the road I want to talk about Emerson's address, because it is out of keeping with most of the others (no surprise). Right now I want to talk about the address that New York politician Daniel Dewey Barnard delivered at Albany's rural cemetery in 1844.
I'm drawn to this for several reasons. First, a rather mundane one -- some decades ago I was reading Phi Beta Kappa addresses for what they revealed about pre-War, Northern jurisprudence. A surprisingly large number were delivered by lawyers and judges. (A preliminary sketch of that project appears here and longer papers on southern oratory are here and here.) Some of the college addresses reflected ideas of rejection of irrational precedent made famous by Emerson's "American Scholar" address. Others, more numerous, supported hierarchy (and what I might term irrational precedent). I was interested in Barnard because he gave several Phi Beta Kappa addresses -- one at Amherst in 1839 and another at Yale in 1846. I pulled from the Widener stacks Barnard's dedication address at the Albany rural cemetery. I remember thinking this was an unusual kind of address (now I know that's not correct), but I was excited to see him talking about constitutional ideas in it. So I made a copy of it and stuck it in my filing drawer with the other pre-War oratory with the idea that I'd come back to it at some point.
Second and really more importantly, I'm interested in how this address fits with the rest of Barnard's constitutional thought. And he is a person who's left us an extended legacy -- for he was a central figure in the legal response to New York's anti-rent movement. That is, he was arguing in favor of the property rights of the "landlords" (really beneficiaries of servitudes -- but that's a story for another time). Barnard's oratory is useful in reconstructing the intellectual world of conservative Whigs, which focused on property and also on the state in promoting economic development and a well-ordered community. Barnard spoke and wrote across the range of property and civil government, I turn to him a lot. He's easy to put into opposition to Democrats who were less interested in property rights created by state-charters and also less concerned with order than were Whigs.
I focus on Barnard in my paper on pre-Civil War constitutionalism and cemetery dedication addresses as a way of showing how the cemetery addresses fit into a larger Whig world of constitutional thought and jurisprudence. For Barnard we can see the cemetery address as part of a well-developed world of thought.
In fact, Barnard's address drew upon key parts of Whig thought -- he spoke of the sacred trust and the duties owed to the dead to give them property, where they might return to the earth. This was a right grounded in natural law. He knew it was the law because it was founded on sentiment, even more than reason. The "sentiment which the mass of mankind entertain" is burial in the earth. Such sentiment was universal, or close to universal. For Christians it received the extra authority. "It has been the mode almost universally adopted. No law of nature that we know of, no law of propriety or convenience, no law of God, fordids it, or discountenances it. No discovery of science or of philosophy condemns it. On the contrary, without violent or strained constructions, it may be thought to have been the mode originally prescribed by the great Author of nature himself...."
There was an additional duty beyond burial in the erath -- which was to create beautiful places of repose. The cemetery's buildings would take the beauty of nature and refine it through cultivation. That beautiful place of repose reflected the values of a republic -- a place where there were people of different classes and political affiliation mingled, free from faction. "Yonder city, where, as every where in life, the harmonies of society are apt to be broken by petty feuds, by ungentle rivalries, by disturbing jealousies, by party animosities, by religious dissensions, shall, one after another, as death singles them out, send up her multitudinous populations to these grounds, and they shall have their respective places in amiable proximity to each other, peaceful, harmonious, undisturbed and undisturbing ...." In discharging this sacred trust of building a place of honor and repose for the dead, the living also discharged a duty to themselves and future generations. For the cemetery would "become a great moral Teacher; and many valuable lessons ... may be learned here -- lessons of humility, of moderation, of charity, of contentment, of mercy, of peace -- lessons touching nearly all that concerns life, touching death and touching immortality."
I want to talk soon about Emerson's Sleepy Hollow address, about Amory Mayo's 1858 address at Green Hill in Amsterdam, New York, which saw cemeteries as fulfilling the dream of a Christian republic, about cemetery addresses as a vehicle for studying public constitutional thought, and most importantly about how Lincoln's first inaugual address validates the study of cemetery dedication addresses. And if you want to hear more about this right now, I have a paper up on ssrn, "'These Great and Beautiful Republics of the Dead': Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery."
The image is an 1846 map of the Albany Rural Cemetery from the New York Public Library's collection.
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