Forgetting Why We Remember: David Blight on Memorial Day in Charleston, May 1, 1865

Paul Harvey

From historian David Blight (HT John Fea), an essay on Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865, an event of enormous symbolic significance at the time but forgotten afterwards in the "national reconciliation" mode of late 19th-century Memorial Days following their semi-official beginnings in 1868. Blight begins by describing how the "Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the Southern dead were honored as the true 'patriots,' defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order, and a 'cause' that had been overwhelmed by 'numbers and resources" but never defeated on battlefields."

But before the Civil War was over, black soldiers had established a meaning for that day consonant with their experience of fighting for freedom:

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished....

History Lessons: Creation of American Jewish Heritage

Paul Harvey

A bit later today or early tomorrow Chris Beneke will be posting his thoughts on Kevin Schultz's new and very important book Tri-Faith America. Before we get there, I thought I would call your attention to this new work on American Jewish history from Beth Wenger, reviewed in this month's Choice: History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage. This book is about the creation of history and meaning in American Judaism, about how "memory" becomes "history" and "heritage" within this religious community, and about how history creates identity. I'll post a brief bit from the book's website first, and then the review from Choice.

From the book's website:

Most American Jews today will probably tell you that Judaism is inherently democratic and that Jewish and American cultures share the same core beliefs and values. But in fact, Jewish tradition and American culture did not converge seamlessly. Rather, it was American Jews themselves who consciously created this idea of an American Jewish heritage and cemented it in the popular imagination during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. History Lessons is the first book to examine how Jews in the United States collectively wove themselves into the narratives of the nation, and came to view the American Jewish experience as a unique chapter in Jewish history.

Beth Wenger shows how American Jews celebrated civic holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July in synagogues and Jewish community organizations, and how they sought to commemorate Jewish cultural contributions and patriotism, often tracing their roots to the nation's founding. She looks at Jewish children's literature used to teach lessons about American Jewish heritage and values, which portrayed--and sometimes embellished--the accomplishments of heroic figures in American Jewish history. Wenger also traces how Jews often disagreed about how properly to represent these figures, focusing on the struggle over the legacy of the Jewish Revolutionary hero Haym Salomon.

History Lessons demonstrates how American Jews fashioned a collective heritage that fused their Jewish past with their American present and future

And now, the review from Choice:

Wenger, Beth S. History lessons: the creation of American Jewish heritage. Princeton, 2010. 282p bibl index afp ISBN0-691-14752-3, $35.00; ISBN 9780691147529, $35.00. Reviewed in 2011jun CHOICE.

American Jews created narratives about Jews in US history in order to establish a collective heritage. Wenger (Pennsylvania) demonstrates that these stories related a Jewish past to US histories in ways that were sometimes celebratory and sometimes critical, but they always sought to establish a place for Jews within US myths and thereby the US present. Wenger analyzes a "dual agenda" in which Jews both "wrote themselves into the narratives of American history" and narrated their own lives as hopeful endings to the "long history of the Jewish people." In exploring these narratives and counternarratives, Wenger provides fascinating primary sources, from didactic Yiddish poetry to letters hotly contesting the erection of a statue. The volume includes examinations of the particular political and cultural facets of US life that allowed Jews to "create" their own heritage and identity; the representation of US Jewish soldiers; children's literature; efforts at memorializing the Revolutionary financier Haym Solomon; and a standout chapter on Jews' relationships to US national holidays. Although Wenger's conclusions may not be surprising for those familiar with US Jewish history, her readings are subtle and compelling. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. -- S. E. Imhoff, Indiana University / Bloomington