Secessionist Commemoration and Its Aftermath
Secessionist Commemoration and Its Aftermath
This chapter discusses Charleston secessionists’ campaign to honor John C. Calhoun. It highlights the role of the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association (LCMA), one of the first southern women’s groups to assume a leading role in civic memory. It argues that as a secessionist project that survived the death of the Confederacy, the Calhoun Monument illustrates the postwar adjustments of white southern commemoration. Waning enthusiasm for the Nullifier fostered a proposal to channel the LCMA’s funds to the Home for Mothers, Widows, and Daughters of Confederate Soldiers, an institution established by LCMA leaders. Only when frustrated in this attempt to implement a more expansive view of women’s commemorative citizenship did the LCMA commission a statue of Calhoun. As an artifact of secession as well as a tribute to the Lost Cause, the Calhoun Monument encouraged ruminations on the fluidity of personal identity and the self-destructiveness of racial slavery that Confederate commemoration ordinarily aimed to suppress.
Keywords: secessionists, John C. Calhoun, Calhoun Monument, Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association, southern women’s groups, Confederate commemoration, personal identity, racial slavery
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