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Abstract
This essay examines accounts of visits to Civil War prison sites, cemeteries, and battlefields that were generated by the popular speaker Anna E. Dickinson during an 1875 lecture tour of Southern states. An ardent Unionist, Dickinson visited places that she believed to exemplify Union sacrifice and Confederate wrongdoing. We analyze her accounts—captured in letters to her mother—in order to understand how this rhetorically skilled public figure used these visits as opportunities for invention and interpretation, generating textual responses oriented toward public memory-making. We argue that her letters enact what we call a pilgrim-critic persona, which both demonstrates an affective connection to places and undertakes a critical investigation of what happened there. Employing the concept of the pilgrim-critic enables this analysis to contribute to rhetorical studies of public memory by highlighting the inventional resources used when visitors interpret their experiences of memory places.
Notes
[1] Anna E. Dickinson to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 25 April 1865, in reel 3, frames 431, 429, 424, in Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as AEDP). Dickinson began this letter in Macon, Georgia, on 25 April and completed it in Nashville, Tennessee, on or before 30 April (AEDP 3:393, 448–49). Cf. Hebrews 10:23. On the cemetery at Salisbury, see Dean W. Holt, American Military Cemeteries, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2010), 258–61.
[2] “Anna E. Dickinson,” South-Bend Daily Tribune, 18 May 1875: 4.
[3] Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Remembering and Forgetting the ‘Final Solution’: A Rhetorical Pilgrimage through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 1 (2004): 65–66. A. Cheree Carlson and John E. Hocking also use the term “rhetorical pilgrim” to describe those who leave responses at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial; Carlson and Hocking, “Strategies of Redemption at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 52, no. 3 (1988): 204.
[4] AEDP 3:520. The letters are at AEDP 3:349–92 (begun at Raleigh), 393–449 (Macon), 449–89 (Nashville), 489–509 (Evansville). One segment of the Raleigh letter is misfiled, and it appears at 5:638–44. Historian J. Matthew Gallman published an edition of the letters in 2011: Anna E. Dickinson, A Tour of Reconstruction: Travel Letters of 1875, ed. Gallman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). This essay quotes our own transcriptions of Dickinson's letters, since our reading occasionally disagrees with Gallman's. Details about the Library of Congress's ten-thousand-item Dickinson Papers, comprising correspondence, speech texts, plays, newspaper clippings, photographs, legal and financial records, and other materials, appear in the finding aid, available online: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms006005.
[5] Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, eds. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 23, emphasis in original.
[6] Elizabethada Wright notes that a cemetery is a unique memory place, “a physical embodiment of the methods of artificial memory recommended by ancient rhetoricians”; Wright, “Reading the Cemetery, Lieu de Mémoire par Excellance,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 31. See also Wright, “Rhetorical Spaces in Memory Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 51–81.
[7] Cicero, Quintilian, and the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium locate the ancient origins of the art of memory in the story of the poet Simonides of Ceos. For an excellent survey of these accounts, see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1–29.
[8] As the research on the plural dimensions of memory is vast, we offer only a few key references here. On social memory, see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40; and Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 17–44. On collective memory, see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 2 (1995): 214–39. On popular memory, see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998). On public memory, see Kendall R. Phillips, introduction to Framing Public Memory, 1–14. On initial links between memory and place, see Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 193–235; and Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, no. 26 (1989): 7–24.
[9] See, for example, Carlson and Hocking, “Strategies of Redemption”; Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial,” in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, ed. Thomas Rosteck (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1999), 29–83; Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 271–94; Hasian, “Remembering and Forgetting”; Carole Blair, V. William Balthrop, and Neil Michel, “Arlington-sur-Seine: War Commemoration and the Perpetual Argument from Sacrifice,” in Proceedings from the Sixth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, eds. Frans H. van Eemeren, J. Anthony Blair, Charles A. Willard, and Bart Garssen (Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 2007), 145–51; Cindy M. Spurlock, “Performing and Sustaining (Agri)Culture and Place: The Cultivation of Environmental Subjectivity on the Piedmont Farm Tour,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2009): 5–21; Michael S. Bowman, “Tracing Mary Queen of Scots,” in Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, Places, 202–15.
[10] Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering a ‘Great Fag’: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 435–60.
[11] Debra Hawhee, “Kairotic Encounters,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, eds. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 24.
[12] Erin F. Doss and Robin E. Jensen, “Balancing Mystery and Identification: Dolores Huerta's Shifting Transcendent Persona,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 4 (2013): 484.
[13] Carlson and Hocking, “Strategies of Redemption,” 204; Hasian, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 64.
[14] See Carlson and Hocking, “Strategies of Redemption”; Hasian, “Remembering and Forgetting”; Carole Blair, “Civil Rights/Civil Sites: ‘… Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters,’” Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, National Communication Association Convention, November 2006, 2; Catherine Ann Collins and Alexandra Opie, “When Places Have Agency: Roadside Shrines as Traumascapes,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 107.
[15] Victor Turner and Edith L. B. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1978), 1, 34.
[16] Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 2–3.
[17] Colin Morris, introduction to Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, eds. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10; Michael Winkelman and Jill Dubisch, “Introduction: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2005), ix; Alan Morinis, ed., Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 4.
[18] AEDP 3:509.
[19] David Zarefsky, “Knowledge Claims in Rhetorical Criticism,” Journal of Communication 58, no. 4 (2008): 632.
[20] AEDP 3:426.
[21] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 154–56.
[22] See Giraud Chester, Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson (New York, NY: Putnam's, 1951); and J. Matthew Gallman, America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[23] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Anna Elizabeth Dickinson,” in Eminent Women of the Age (Hartford, CT: Betts, 1868), 480.
[24] Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005), 157. Appendixes include transcriptions of two versions of “Whited Sepulchres” (221–38, 239–50) and excerpts from Dickinson's 1869 letters (251–55). Ray compares the phrasing of the letters and the speech (157–59).
[25] In May 1871, writing to her mother from Chillicothe, Missouri, Dickinson speculated that the appeal of “Jeanne d'Arc” to Southern audiences lay in its “martial” tone, its chivalric sentiment, and its “story of a weak and almost crushed people making triumphant headway against a powerful foe”; AEDP 2:168.
[26] AEDP 25:287–90.
[27] AEDP 3:509.
[28] Holt, American Military Cemeteries; G. Kurt Piehler, “Cemeteries, Military,” in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 108–9; Keith Eggener, Cemeteries (New York, NY: Norton, 2010), 19.
[29] AEDP 3:515.
[30] “Anna E. Dickinson”; “‘Dry Rot’: Anna E. Dickinson's Lecture on the Political Life of the Nation,” Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 21 May 1875: 8; “A Girl's Opinion: Miss Anna Dickinson Talks about National Politics,” Chicago Times, 21 May 1875: 7; “Dry Rot: Lecture by Miss Anna Dickinson at Farwell Hall,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 May 1875: 7; “Anna Dickinson Made Many Friends,” Evanston Index, 22 May 1875: 4; “Anna Dickinson: Her Views of the Political Situation—What She Thinks of the Southern Chivalry,” Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 5 June 1875: 12; “The Political Crisis: Miss Anna Dickinson at Farwell Hall,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 June 1875: 8.
[31] Anna E. Dickinson, A Paying Investment (Boston, MA: Osgood, 1876), 7, 21, 28–31, 37–38, 109–10.
[32] AEDP 3:515ff.
[33] See, e.g., “Anna E. Dickinson.”
[34] Blight, Race and Reunion, 2; William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 4.
[35] “Anna Dickinson,” Atlanta Constitution, 11 April 1875: 2.
[36] AEDP 5:641. On the Civil Rights Act, see Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Policies of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2002).
[37] AEDP 3:493. The flag is a prototypical condensation symbol; David Zarefsky, President Johnson's War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 10–11.
[38] Blair, Cities of the Dead, 4–5.
[39] Winkelman and Dubisch, “Introduction,” xxiv.
[40] Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 7; see also Brian Howell and Rachel Dorr, “Evangelical Pilgrimage: The Language of Short-Term Missions,” Journal of Communication and Religion 30, no. 2 (2007): 245, 252.
[41] Winkelman and Dubisch, “Introduction,” xxv.
[42] Winkelman and Dubisch, “Introduction,” xxvi–xxx; Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 12.
[43] See, e.g., AEDP 3:396, 425–26, 450.
[44] AEDP 3:425–26.
[45] AEDP 3:436.
[46] AEDP 3:488.
[47] Cf. Ray, Lyceum, 157–70.
[48] AEDP 3:436.
[49] At Richmond she retrieved data from a metal shield mounted on an upright cannon barrel; AEDP 3:369. Dickinson's numbers for the original interments at Richmond and Raleigh match those posted on shields present at the sites today, as the second author noted during visits in 2013.
[50] Dickinson's numbers for interments at Fredericksburg, Salisbury, and Andersonville and for the graves at Wilmington match those given by the federal inspector. On Fredericksburg and Wilmington, see U.S. Senate, The Report of the Inspector of the National Cemeteries for the Years 1870 and 1871, 42d Cong., 2d sess., 1872, S. Ex. Doc. 79, 33, 44. On Salisbury and Andersonville, see U.S. Senate, The Report of the Inspector of the National Cemeteries for the Year 1874, 43d Cong., 2d sess., 1875, S. Ex. Doc. 28, 57, 62. For information in public media, see, e.g., James F. Russling, “National Cemeteries,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 33, no. 195 (August 1866): 310–22; “Our National Cemeteries,” Chicago Tribune, 28 January 1867: 2; “Our Dead Soldiers,” New-York Tribune, 28 January 1871: 2.
[51] AEDP 3:355.
[52] “The last full measure of devotion” comes from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Dickinson does not quote Lincoln, but we find her perspective compatible with his 1863 phrasing.
[53] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, NY: Knopf, 2008), 102–36.
[54] AEDP 3:429–30; on Richmond, see 369–70.
[55] Cf. Carole Blair, V. William Balthrop, and Neil Michel, “The Arguments of the Tombs of the Unknown: Relationality and National Legitimation,” Argumentation 25, no. 4 (2011): 449–68.
[56] AEDP 3:400, 429, 485.
[57] Eggener, Cemeteries, 27.
[58] David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 44–64.
[59] The only potential exception is a comparative comment, written of the cemetery at Richmond: “No landscape gardening has been done, & the place has an angular & military look very different from that at Raleigh”; AEDP 3:370. Even this statement does not rise to the level of critique.
[60] AEDP 3:420, 501.
[61] AEDP 3:462–63.
[62] Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 320; see also 317.
[63] Blustein, Moral Demands, 305.
[64] AEDP 3:489; Blustein, Moral Demands, 320.
[65] AEDP 3:369–70.
[66] AEDP 3:380–81.
[67] AEDP 3:421.
[68] AEDP 3:487.
[69] AEDP 3:431.
[70] AEDP 3:436.
[71] AEDP 3:362–63.
[72] AEDP 3:378–79. Mahone died in 1895.
[73] AEDP 3:422–23.
[74] Benjamin G. Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 37.
[75] “Anna Dickinson Made Many Friends.”
[76] Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity, 46, 53.
[77] AEDP 3:379–80.
[78] Richard Slotkin, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 (New York, NY: Random House, 2009).
[79] AEDP 3:464.
[80] AEDP 3:434.
[81] AEDP 3:436.
[82] AEDP 3:500–501.
[83] Dickinson promises more detail later: “I have ‘news’ that will tell thee the whole story of the fight, when I get home”; AEDP 3:501.
[84] Similar formal features characterize her lecture “Jeanne d'Arc”; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “La Pucelle d'Orleans Becomes an American Girl: Anna Dickinson's ‘Jeanne d'Arc,’” in Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, eds. Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 100.
[85] AEDP 3:426–27.
[86] AEDP 3:427–29.
[87] Cf. Ray, Lyceum, 165.
[88] Dickinson's claims are compatible with postwar recriminations that circulated in the North about Salisbury and other Confederate prisons; Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity, 38, 40. She mentions Albert D. Richardson, who had published a memoir of his wartime experiences, including incarceration in and escape from Salisbury; Richardson, The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1865).
[89] AEDP 3:433–35.
[90] “Girl's Opinion.”
[91] “Anna Dickinson,” Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 31 May 1875: 3.
[92] Ray, Lyceum, 104, 147, 165, 180.
[93] “Anna E. Dickinson.”
[94] John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13–20.
[95] Blair, Dickinson, and Ott describe six unique features of memory places that make them fruitful objects of rhetorical analysis. First, the places become a special “object of attention and desire,” enticing visitors. Second, sites have a unique capacity to “construct public identities for visitors through rhetorical means.” These identities entail public actions, at the place and beyond. Third, the rarity, material nature, apparent permanence, and comparative accessibility of these sites render them particularly susceptible to becoming subjects of political controversy. Fourth, memory places uniquely mobilize power in ways that marginalize alternative perspectives and act conspicuously upon the bodies of those who visit them. Fifth, memory places synthesize the power of multiple memory techné, including visual, aural, and other modes. Finally, memory places “accrete their own pasts” that may or may not fit with dominant memories. Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction,” 25, 27, 29, 30.
[96] The tobacco warehouse formerly used as Richmond's Libby Prison was purchased in 1889 by a Chicago confectioner, who dismantled, moved, and reconstructed it in Chicago's South Loop. It operated as Libby Prison War Museum until it was razed in 1899. See the Chicago History Museum's online exhibition Wet with Blood: http://chicagohistory.org/wetwithblood/bloody/libby/index.htm.
[97] Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction,” 30.
[98] Hawhee, “Kairotic Encounters,” 24.
[99] AEDP 3:488.