Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields

1. “We Are Met on a Great Battle-Field”: Race, Memory, and the Gettysburg Address

1 “We Are Met on a Great Battle-field” Race, Memory, and the Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, a pivotal symbol of Civil War memory, is best known for two events: the battle itself, fought July 1–3, 1863, and Abraham Lincoln ’s Gettysburg Address, delivered at the Gettysburg National Cemetery dedication a little over four months after the battle. Although Civil War enthusiasts still revel in the specific decisions made by men named Bragg, Rosecrans, and Burnside at places such as Chickamauga, Stones River, and Spotsylvania, the battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s address have increasingly served to condense fading public memories of a long and bitter war fought over 150 years ago. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is widely recognized as one of the most eloquent and masterful orations in American history, yet its meaning remains seemingly transparent.1 Its universality, for example, was the rationale for its inclusion in New york City’s first commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an event carefully managed to avoid any semblance of local or national party politics.2 The speech’s sweeping ambiguity, brevity, and eloquence, however, have actually enhanced its utility as a polysemic text appropriated to suit a variety of competing political and ideological interests since its delivery. By tracing the speech’s history in public memory, for example, Barry Schwartz finds that the address has been appropriated to serve the often contradictory interests of those who supported Reconstruction, post– Civil War regional reconciliation between whites, Progressive reform, World Wars I and II, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.3 Despite its continued influence and history of complex appropriation and reception, rhetorical scholars have limited their scholarship on the address to studies of its original production, internal rhetorical dynamics , and immediate reception.4 for example, scholars have attributed 26 / Race and Memory the speech’s sacred qualities to its internal eloquence and organic structure , citing a universal narrative of redemption and salvation as a formal source of its appeal. These studies, while fruitful for their explication of the speech’s aesthetics, unwittingly contribute to the perception that the Gettysburg Address has conveyed, through its stylistic artistry, unchanging , transcendent meanings since its delivery in November 1863.5 This chapter attempts to expand our understanding of the address by examining the ongoing rhetorical struggle to gain interpretive dominance over its meaning and public memory.6 Conflicting interpretations of the address are perhaps most salient in white and African American public memories of the Civil War, whereby select fragments from Lincoln ’s address have consistently been used as warrants to support either a harmonious vision of postwar regional reconciliation between whites or a commitment to postwar racial justice and equality. Developed in the late nineteenth century,the dominant national “reconciliationist ” memory of the war accelerated reunification between northern and southern whites by emphasizing white martial heroism to the exclusion of blacks and questions of racial equality.7 Bitter partisan memories of the CivilWar gave way during this period to a dominant interpretation of the battlefield—this commemorative tradition’s symbolic center—as a site of regional healing and transcendence. Dramatized in emotional veterans’ reunions, patriotic speeches, public sculpture honoring the common soldier, and inscrutably detailed battle narratives, reconciliationist memory invited audiences to ignore or forget race-related causes and consequences of the war by commemorating the equal valor and heroism exhibited by white Union and Confederate soldiers in battle.8 Lincoln, too, emerged during this time as Savior of the Union, and the epainesis of his address (lines 6–15) was often used to support the reconciliationists ’ claim that Lincoln eulogized the manly courage and sacrifice of white Northern and Southern common soldiers alike in his speech.9 There were those, of course, who did not stand to benefit from what at the turn of the twentieth century had become a reinvigorated ethnic nationalism constructed through the nostalgic pathos of depoliticized battlefield memory.White reconciliation went hand in hand with racial discrimination, as evidenced most vividly by Jim Crow laws, the soaring popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, and films such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Try as they might, African Americans could not popularize Gettysburg Address / 27 a memory of the war as Northern triumph over slavery and racism until later in the twentieth century. Civil War battlefields and the ideology of white reconciliation—their lockstep had forced its critics to...