Tennessee Civil War Monuments , livre ebook

TENNESSEE CIVIL WAR MONUMENTS
TENNESSEE CIVIL WAR MONUMENTS
An Illustrated Field Guide
TIMOTHY S. SEDORE
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Timothy Sedore
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sedore, Timothy S. (Timothy Stephen), author.
Title: Tennessee Civil War monuments : an illustrated field guide / Timothy S. Sedore.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019020824 (print) | LCCN 2019021899 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253045614 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253045645 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253045607 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Tennessee-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Monuments-Guidebooks. | Confederate States of America-Monuments-Guidebooks. | Monuments-Tennessee-Guidebooks. | Monuments-Southern States-Guidebooks. | Soldiers monuments-Tennessee-Guidebooks. | Soldiers monuments-Southern States-Guidebooks. | War memorials-Tennessee-Guidebooks. | War memorials-Southern States-Guidebooks. | United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Monuments-Guidebooks. | Collective memory-Tennessee.
Classification: LCC F437 (ebook) | LCC F437 .S43 2020 (print) | DDC 973.7/6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020824
1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20
Pages ii and iii : Union common soldier, monument to the 77th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on the Shiloh battlefield ( Chapter 1 [1.10.4]), erected 1902.
Pages xviii and 1 : The Confederate common soldier at Gallatin, Tennessee ( Chapter 4 [4.23.1]), erected 1903.
Dedicated to my wife and fellow traveler, Patricia Faith, hope, love .
Dedicated to my parents, Michael and Annie M. Sedore, from the North and from the South, respectively, who formed a union that lasted fifty-six years .
In memory of Michael Sedore s service, US Army Air Force, 1941-1945 .
Contents
List of Maps
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Shiloh National Military Park: Witness and Testimony
2. Chattanooga, Including Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park: Nov. 25, 1863 5 P.M.
3. East Tennessee: The Loyal and True
Sullivan County
Washington County
Greene County
Unicoi County
Cocke County
Claiborne County
Hamblen County
Knox County, Including Knoxville
Monroe County
Polk County
Bradley County
Bledsoe County
4. Middle Tennessee: Valorous Gray, Glorious Blue
Cumberland County
Van Buren County
Warren County
Smith County
DeKalb County
Grundy County
Franklin County
Lincoln County
Wayne County
Moore County
Coffee County
Bedford County
Cannon County
Marshall County
Giles County
Maury County
Williamson County, Including the Franklin Battlefield
Rutherford County, Including Murfreesboro and Stones River National Battlefield
Wilson County
Trousdale County
Macon County
Davidson County
Sumner County
Robertson County
Montgomery County
Stewart County, Including Fort Donelson National Military Park
Dickson County
5. West Tennessee: History Is an Impartial Witness
Benton County
Henry County
Weakley County
Obion County
Dyer County
Gibson County
Lake County
Tipton County
Henderson County
Decatur County
Madison County
Haywood County
Hardin County
Hardeman County
Shelby County, Including Memphis
McNairy County
Chester County
6. Conclusion
Selected Sources
Index
Maps

Map 1. Regions of Tennessee

Map 2. The Shiloh Battlefield

Map 3. Chattanooga and Hamilton

Map 4. East Tennessee

Map 5. Middle Tennessee

Map 6. West Tennessee
Preface
F IVE SUMMERS OF TRAVEL across the Tennessee landscape led to the field research for this book-the words, images, and settings of some four hundred outdoor Civil War battlefield monuments, courthouse and town monuments, and cemetery and city monuments, including obelisks, statues, arches, shafts, reliefs, stelae, columns, and pyramids.
Five summers may seem like a long time for a project of this scale; I recognize that I might have done this work more quickly or efficiently. However, as a full-time professor in New York-some six hundred miles from Bristol, Tennessee, and one thousand miles from Memphis-I did not have the leisure to linger in Tennessee and complete this task in one or two visits. I took a more measured approach. Between each summer s venture, I examined the texts of these monuments one by one, on a day-to-day basis. The interpretation of the monuments was written by hand-free hand-from successive drafts, during the fall, winter, and spring of the intervening academic years, as time permitted. Much of the work was done while commuting via the Long Island Railroad and New York City subway to my office and teaching position. I took into consideration the rhetoric and aesthetics of inscription, adornment, materials, statuary, images, iconography, setting, location, and other contextual elements. My goal was to posit a critical analysis of a heretofore uncollected canon of multifarious verbal, imagistic, and iconographic American rhetoric.
I systematically covered the Tennessee landscape: I walked the ground where each monument stands; I examined the monuments texts in person-in situ. I then wrote this book in order to understand the Civil War monument as a text-words, images, and context. The idea of monuments as texts may suggest to readers that the medium of monumentation is bloodless, abstract. For my part, the experience I had with the words and images of Civil War monumentation on the sites on which they were erected brought me as close to the events of the war and the wartime generation as a mortal human in the twenty-first century can obtain.
In fact, the dynamics of American Civil War monuments resonate with life in the twenty-first century in ways that should not be surprising. In a sense, the conflicts that led to the war are still incendiary, like an explosive device left over from a previous war that remains undetonated. Of course the military conflict is over, and the war changed many things. It was not fought in vain. It formally ended slavery. It freed many. It did not resolve all of the issues that led to it, however, and it came at a cost that is still being paid. The war resulted in an estimated 618,000 deaths. Men were killed, disabled, or died of disease on a regular basis. It was a disaster on the scale of the world wars of the twentieth century. Indeed, parallels to the American Civil War may be discerned from a letter written by the French novelist Francois Maurial to the artist Jacque Emile Blanche in July 1918, just months before the end of World War I. The same words might have been written in Richmond or New York in 1865: We are all in the same boat, he observed, it is an era organized for death, and those who escape it for reasons of age or infirmity can no longer bring order to their lives nor peace to their thoughts.
The monument archive presented here may seem static, the medium of monumentation may seem inert, but it is not. The monuments in this book are trans-liminal: they cross horizons between life and death, as well as between the past and the present.
By coincidence, I completed the field research for this book on August 9, 2017, just one day before violence erupted near the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. White nationalists in Charlottesville protested the city s plan to remove the statue; counterdemonstrators opposed them. The event descended into violence, resulting in the death of a counter-demonstrator and two state troopers. Four Confederate statues had already been removed from public sites in New Orleans, Louisiana, in May 2017. Four Confederate statues were removed from public sites in Baltimore, Maryland, later that month. Also in August 2017, administrators at Bronx Community College, the City University of New York, arranged to remove busts of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson from the Hall of Fame. In December, city officials arranged for the statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest to be removed in Memphis.
I do not know what the future holds for this medium of commemoration, but this monumentation archive is current and accurate as of 2018-153 years after the war s end. Monuments seem staid and stable, but the conflict they commemorate still inflames public feelings. We should wish that the dead could rest, that their graves would be undisturbed, but this may not be the case. Looking forward, how future generations judge this subject will, of course, be their privilege and responsibility. Looking back, as I note in other books I have written on this subject, I cannot