Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
4 - American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
Summary
This essay considers rituals and language of public grief in North America between 1760 and 1812. It deals with traditions of public mourning that Americans inherited from Britain and examines their employment in service to the founding of the United States. The chapter also examines two occasions in the early nineteenth century when deaths in the South became national news and the objects of public mourning outside the region: the attack on the Chesapeake by the HMS Leopard shortly after it left Norfolk, Virginia, in June 1807, and the devastating Richmond Theatre Fire of December 1811. An ostensibly private catastrophe became public business, and performances of community grief were orchestrated by the city government, with the city's inhabitants playing key roles as well. The performances and texts of public mourning in the early nineteenth century consistently employed the language of nation and articulated a sense of common American identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Death and the American South , pp. 86 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014