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In comparison to the chapter, “The Burnt District: Making Sense of Ruins in the Postwar South” by K. Stephen Prince in Gregory Downs and Kate Masur’s The World the Civil War Made, which examined how northerners have turned to look at ruins and war-torn landscapes in order to make sense of the South after the American Civil War, Thomas J. Brown’s “Monuments and Ruins: Atlanta and Columbia Remember Sherman” specifically looked at the burning of the cities in Atlanta and Columbia and how civic memories of the events eventually took on different shapes after the war. While Prince’s chapter focused on the legacy of the Civil War through the use of images and discussions of ruination in postwar South, Brown’s article discussed the ways in which American memory of the Civil War turned from monuments and ruins to other forms of commemorations instead. Despite their differences, however, by linking national memory of the war to the use of public spaces for mourning in order to commemorate the war dead, both Prince and Brown successfully argued their points while simultaneously showcasing the significance of monuments and ruins in their works.
As depictions of the ruined South became an integral part of northern print and visual culture, “southern ruins [soon] appeared in newspaper articles, speeches, sermons, travel narratives, photographs, and illustrations”[1] throughout the North. Instead of concentrating on the rebuilding of southern cities and its towns and plantations, K. Stephen Prince’s chapter in The World the Civil War Made looked at ways in which images and discussions of ruins have played significant roles in the legacies of the American Civil War. Furthermore, Prince asserted that the “treatment of southern ruins in the print and visual culture of the North… help capture the complex range of emotions—pride, resolve, conceit, optimism… [And] as they gazed on images of southern ruination, northerners pondered the meanings of war, but they also looked to the future.”[2] After years of infighting and bloody war, northerners essentially saw themselves faced with an opportunity to fundamentally change and rebuild the South anew for the future. Prince further goes on to claim that by rebuilding the South’s economic base, political structures, and even social order, “the South—defined as a place—would be re-created, but so would the South as an idea. Out of the ashes of the Civil War, a new South would emerge.”[3] Similar to Brown’s article, Prince also looked at the burning of Atlanta in November 1864 in addition to the devastation that took place in the cities of Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond. As one of the first widely photographed conflict in American history, the ruinations of Southern cities were well depicted and featured throughout several illustrated weeklies including Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.[4]
Focusing on the fires that burned Atlanta and Columbia, Thomas J. Brown commendably highlighted the differences and similarities between the two cities during and after the Civil War. Brown stated that while “Atlanta tended to build monuments to its renewal; Columbia preferred to highlight ruins of its lost glory… monuments of Atlanta [often] address national audiences while… ruins of Columbia appealed to local elites.”[5] He further pointed out in his article that the wartime experiences of Atlanta and Columbia differed significantly from one another as one hard-fought campaign became the Union goal while the other, a “whirlwind.” While Atlanta brought forth fierce fighting between Union soldiers and Confederates along with many casualties, “the destruction of Columbia revolved around face-to-face encounters between Union soldiers and local residents. Confederate military and civilian casualties were minimal.”[6] In addition to including powerful images of the fire and its aftermath in both of Columbia and Atlanta, Brown also included diarists and letter writers who commented on what they saw. According to Brown, “Atlanta had burned as Union soldiers left the city, but Columbia burned shortly after they entered the city… these descriptions soon entered into print alongside dispatches from northern journalists who visited the South at the end of the war.”[7] Illustrated weeklies such as Harper’s Weekly published graphic illustrations of the fire its aftermath while famous photographers from George N. Barnard to Richard Wearn either included powerful pictures of destroyed buildings in books or documented the damage in a series of photographs.
The idea of commemorating the American Civil War through memorials and ruins also played an important role in creating memory of the war in both Atlanta and Columbia. Not only did “commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia illuminate the resolution and persistence of the sectional tensions that exploded in the Civil War”[8] but monuments also helped shaped American literature and writers throughout the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. On the other hand, the idea of the Lost Cause, a set of beliefs that sought to describe the goals of the Confederate as a heroic one–despite their defeat by the Union, became an important symbol of Confederate memory and commemoration in Atlanta and Columbia after the war. Brown argued that Atlanta and Columbia had “established many places of Confederate commemoration during the seventy-five years after the Civil War… [and] these sites did not all center on the burning of the cities, but local trauma figured prominently even when the capitals tried to look back broadly at the war records of Georgia and South Carolina.”[9] In the end, while memory in Atlanta and Columbia turned from monuments and ruins toward new ways to commemorate the war through battle flags, license plates, and even costumed simulations of the battles fought in the conflict, Brown ends his article by stating that the burning of the two cities ultimately demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities of memory and remembrance in the postwar era.
[1] K. Stephen Prince, “The Burnt District: Making Sense of Ruins in the Postwar South,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 106.
[2] Ibid, 108.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 112.
[5] Thomas J. Brown, “Monuments and Ruins: Atlanta and Columbia Remember Sherman,” Journal of American Studies (2016): 1-2.
[6] Ibid: 2.
[7] Ibid: 8-9.
[8] Ibid: 26.
[9] Ibid: 4.