The American South: Commemoration, Sectionalism & Nationalism in the Post-Civil War Era

This study analyses post-Civil War reunion and reconciliation, using white Southern engagement with commemorative activity as a lens through which to explore the tensions that lay behind the development of a post-Civil War American identity. It presents Fourth of July celebrations in the Reconstruction-Era South as highly politicized contested spaces and demonstrates that resumption of white Southern celebration of the Fourth was contingent on the political success of the Democratic Party. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a world’s fair celebrating one hundred years of American independence, provides the thesis’ central case study. The thesis demonstrates that discourse around the Exhibition reflected the fractured state of American nationalism in the 1870s. Some Southerners dismissed the Centennial outright, others engaged with it conditionally and pragmatically but this ostensibly unifying and celebratory fair served as an arena for reflecting deep sectional and partisan divisions. Running alongside this is a parallel narrative focused on African Americans. The thesis will examine, in a comparative light, African Americans’ engagement with national identity, and their use of commemoration to stake a claim to full citizenship and American identity in the post- Civil War era.