[Following up
Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American
histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]
On the
invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes.
In May 1876, New
York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music invited Confederate veteran, lawyer, and
Democratic politician Roger
A. Pryor to deliver its annual
Decoration Day address. As Pryor noted in his remarks, the invitation was
most definitely an “overture of reconciliation,” one that I would pair with the
choice (earlier that same month) of Confederate veteran and
poet Sidney Lanier to write and deliver the opening
Cantata at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Indeed, reunion and
reconciliation were very much the themes of 1876, threads that culminated in the
contested presidential election and the end of Federal Reconstruction that
immediately followed it (and perhaps, although historians have different
perspectives on this point, stemmed from that election’s controversial
results). In any case, this was a year in which the overtures of reconciliation
were consistently heard, and we could locate Pryor’s address among the rest.
Yet the remarks
that Pryor delivered in his Decoration Day speech could not be accurately
described as reconciliatory—unless we shift the meaning to “trying to reconcile
his Northern audiences with his Confederate perspective on the war, its causes
and effects, and both regions.” Pryor was still waiting, he argued, for “an
impartial history” to be told, one that more accurately depicted both “the cause
of secession” and Civil War and the subsequent, “dismal period” of
Reconstruction. While he could not by any measure be categorized as impartial,
he nonetheless attempted to offer his own version of those histories and issues
throughout the speech—one designed explicitly, I would argue, to convert his
Northern audience to that version of both past and present. Indeed, as I argue
at length in
my first book, narratives of reunion and reconciliation were quickly
supplanted in this period by ones of conversion, attempts—much of the time, as
Reconstruction lawyer and novelist Albion
Tourgée noted in an 1888 article, very
successful attempts at that—to convert the North and the nation as a whole
to this pro-Southern standpoint.
In my book’s
analysis I argued for a chronological shift: that reunion/reconciliation was a
first national stage in this period, and conversion a second. But Pryor’s
Decoration Day speech reflects how the two attitudes could go hand-in-hand: the
Northern invitation to Pryor could reflect, as he noted, that attitude of
reunion on the part of Northern leaders; and Pryor’s remarks and their effects
(which we cannot know for certain in this individual case, but which were, as
Tourgée noted, quite clear in the nation as a whole) could both comprise and
contribute to the attitudes of conversion to the Southern perspective. And in
any case, it’s important to add that both reconciliation and conversion differ
dramatically from the original purpose of Decoration Day, as delineated so
bluntly and powerfully by Frederick Douglass in his 1871 speech: remembrance,
of the Northern soldiers who died in the war and of the cause for which they
did so. By 1876, it seems clear, that purpose was shifting, toward a
combination of amnesia and propaganda, of forgetting the war’s realities and
remembering a propagandistic version of them created by voices like Pryor’s.
Next Decoration
Day history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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