In "The Road to the Gettysburg Address" I argue that cemetery dedication addresses before the Civil War are part of a Whig constitutional culture. Those addresses see cemeteries -- often organized as private charitable corporations -- as vehicles for moral uplift. They aim at fulfilling a sacred trust -- the proper burial of the dead -- and they seek to do this by taking a place of natural beauty and improving it by cultivation. The cemeteries do not just fulfill moral duties; they teach lessons about duty and patriotism. The cemeteries are republics on a micro scale.
I've been hearing some skepticism from colleagues. At best they'll concede that a lot of judges and Whig politicians gave dedication addresses. Sure, Supreme Court Justices Joseph Story and John McLean gave dedication addresses at Mount Auburn in 1831 and Spring Grove in 1849; Whig politician Daniel Barnard gave one at Albany in 1849, and Whig novelist (and lawyer) John Pendleton Kennedy gave one in Baltimore in 1839. So maybe they'll concede that the cemetery dedication addresses -- and the rural cemeteries themselves -- were related in some way to Whig constitutional ideas. But the addresses anything more than a charming adjunct to Whig oratory?
What legitimizes this project and validates my methodology, I suppose, is Lincoln's address at Gettysburg. Everyone accepts that the Gettysburg Address reveals a lot about the constitutional functions of the War and that it helped set our nation on the course towards a new constitutional vision. The addresses I study aren't nearly as great as Lincoln's. A lot aren't great oratory (i.e., that's my understated way of saying they're really bad) and only a handful are better than decent. Story's is one of them, Barnard's is another, I think Amory Mayo's is another. Pure numbers are helpful on this score -- there were in the neighborhood of seventy published addresses and a lot of pageantry around the dedications, too. They help to establish the persistent of Whig ideas of constitutionalism through cemeteries organized by charitable corporations. The number of addresses, the consistency of themes, and the few good addresses contribute to the legitimacy of this as a way of understanding the contours of Whig constitutional thought and as seeing the addresses and the cemeteries as vehicles of propagating constitutional thought.
There is one other source that legitimizes the antebellum cemetery as site of constitutional thought: I want to draw on Lincoln before Gettysburg here, to show that Whigs (then Republicans) saw cemeteries as central parts of their constitutional world. For Lincoln's first inaugural address concludes with an appeal to the sentiments of Union that were nurtured by -- among other images -- patriot graves. "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." Lincoln taps into the affection for historical sites -- the Revolutionary war battlefields and graves. And though he does not mention them, memory was also preserved by the monuments that were beginning to appear -- like the Washington monument then under construction in the District of Columbia, as well as the Washington Equine Statue in Richmond, and the Washington statutes that were in Lexington, Virginia at VMI, and the Columbia, South Carolina state house. The distinguished constitutional historian Michael Kammen titled his 1991 book about the respect and affection for history in American culture Mystic Chords of Memory.
Sometime soon I want to talk about another cemetery address or two and also how cemetery dedication addresses can contribute to the project of studying public constitutional thought. The image is of the Soldier's National Memorial at Gettysburg, which is supposed to mark the spot where Lincoln delivered his address (though subsequent research has revealed a different location, which may be in the Evergreen Cemetery.)
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