[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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