Sentinel Songs: Monuments, Poetry, and the Lost Cause Narrative in Collective Memory

Abstract

Over the past few years, Confederate monuments have become a regular and controversial topic in American discourse. To explore the historical and cultural contexts of these contentious monuments, this paper examines primary source material spanning approximately seventy-five years in the postbellum American South. With poetry possessing a far more ubiquitous presence in the 19th-cen­tury American public sphere, analysis of patterns in poetic discourse reveals larger contextual evidence about the monuments and the culture that erected and dedicated them. By tracing patterns in both the poetry and ceremonial rhetoric of monuments and monument dedications across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I employ Halbwach’s collective memory theory to under­stand contemporary monument sentiments. Within the theoretical framework of collective memory, poetry, rather than serving a purely artistic social function, acts also as a “memory carrier” that transmits collective traumas and ideologies to future generations. Consequently, the ritual of monument memorialization seems to have preserved the mythos of the Confederate Lost Cause among Southern whites to the present day.