SARAH TRYPHENA PHILLIPS LECTURE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND HISTORY

Reconstructing the National Body: Masculinity, Disability and Race in the American Civil War

Professor Susan-Mary Grant, Professor of American History, School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University

Thursday 4 October 2007

The American Civil War is the fulcrum of American nationalism. It was, according to Robert Penn Warren in 1961, America’s ‘felt history,’ and in 1989 was described by historian Shelby Foote as the ‘cross-roads of our being.’ Its lasting influence on American society, on American nationalism, indeed on how modern America responds to crisis was highlighted in the tragedy of 9/11; at the Memorial Service for the dead, Americans sang ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ the original words of which promised ‘as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,’ as the Union went marching on. In the nineteenth century, as now, however, it was perhaps easier to send men into battle than it was to welcome them home again.

The role of the soldier/veteran in the development of post-Civil War nationalism, both at the time and in the historiography since, has taken second-place to the memorialisation and valorisation of the war dead. This lecture explores the ways in which the Civil War veteran was incorporated into the revived national body within the broader context of nineteenth-century concepts of masculinity, particularly as these related to race. The contradiction involved in commemorating the whole but dead white soldier while simultaneously downplaying the role of the living black and disabled veteran went to the heart of nineteenth-century American national identity: the new national body could not be conceived of as damaged or altered by the war, but was presented as arising intact from the struggle, if anything stronger than before.

Professor Susan-Mary Grant. Her publications include The War for a Nation: The American Civil War New York: Routledge New York, 2006. She co-founded the British American Nineteenth-Century Historians’ Association.

Lecture Chair: Professor Richard Gray, FBA, Professor in the Department of Literature, University of Essex

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