No Holier Spot of Ground: Confederate Monuments & Cemeteries of South Carolina
When I received Kristina Johnson’s new book for review, I guessed from its title that the book was probably a guide for travelers who wanted to take in every Confederate memorial in South Carolina. I guessed wrong. As Johnson makes clear in the introduction, it’s not an inventory of Confederate monuments and cemeteries in the Palmetto State. Instead, it’s a story of how South Carolinians came together after the Civil War to establish memorials to honor their Confederate dead and, as time passed, to vindicate the Confederate cause. Johnson identifies several different periods of what she calls Confederate “monumentation,” beginning with the Reconstruction era when South Carolinians, under the watchful eye of Federal occupation troops, placed a handful of Confederate memorials on private property and were careful not to use inflammatory inscriptions. Also during this early postwar period, South Carolinians worked to remove their dead from graves at Gettysburg and other out-of-state battlefields and to rebury them in newly dedicated Confederate sections of South Carolina cemeteries. With the end of Reconstruction and re-establishment of Home Rule in 1876, South Carolinians became bolder in their Confederate memorial expressions. New memorials were placed at prominent public places. Some featured Rebel soldiers in defiant poses, often facing north (to defend the Southland against Yankee invasion) with arms at the ready. Inscriptions on Confederate memorials of this era proclaimed not just the bravery of Confederate soldiery but also the righteousness of the Confederate cause. The wave of nationalistic, patriotic sentiment that rolled over the South during the Spanish-American War and World War I, coupled with the coming of age of a new generation of South Carolinians, manifested itself in more reconciliatory Confederate memorials, including at least 10 statues of soldiers with shoulder arms at parade rest. But reconciliation had its limits, and many monuments of this period still defended the Confederate cause. Johnson argues that the “horrors of World War I made it more difficult to romanticize war through passive soldiers.” Thus, new soldier-topped Confederate monuments disappeared in South Carolina after the early 1920s and gave way to monuments with either a “slab” or structure design. These modern monuments of rectangular stones or bronze tablets, Johnson writes, lack the “intrinsic messages” conveyed by their predecessors and often stand alongside other war memorials. One of the most interesting parts of the book is the chapter on the Beaufort National Cemetery near the South Carolina coast, which dates from 1863 and was the first Federal military cemetery to permit the burial of Confederates within its boundaries. The author is a young historian and museum curator with experience in interpreting Civil War monuments gained while serving as a Gettysburg park ranger. In writing No Holier Spot of Ground, Johnson spent several years digging out primary and other source materials, tromping about South Carolina’s countryside, and taking photographs of Confederate monuments and cemeteries, most of which are of good quality and enhance the text. Her writing style is a bit academic for this reviewer’s taste, but still quite passable. This reviewer recommends No Holier Spot of Ground to readers with an interest in Confederate monuments or cemeteries who seek a better understanding of the shifting historical contexts in which they were erected or laid out. Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard.
|
Illustrated, photographs, endnotes, index, 160 pp., 2009, The History Press,