Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America

By Teresa Barnett

A piece of Plymouth Rock. A lock of George Washington’s hair. Wood from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. Various bits and pieces of the past—often called “association items”—may appear to be eccentric odds and ends, but they are valued because of their connections to prominent people and events in American history. Kept in museum collections large and small across the United States, such objects are the touchstones of our popular engagement with history.

In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the history of private collections of items like these, illuminating how Americans view the past. She traces the relic-collecting tradition back to eighteenth-century England, then on to articles belonging to the founding fathers and through the mass collecting of artifacts that followed the Civil War. Ultimately, Barnett shows how we can trace our own historical collecting from the nineteenth century’s assemblages of the material possessions of great men and women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226059747

Book preview

TERESA BARNETT is director of the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, where she has worked for twenty years.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05960-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05974-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnett, Teresa.

Sacred relics : pieces of the past in nineteenth-century America / Teresa Barnett.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-05960-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-05974-7 (e-book)

1. Collectors and collecting—United States—History—19th century.   2. Souvenirs (Keepsakes)—United States—History—19th century.   I. Title.

AM305.B37 2013

790.1'32097309034—dc23

2013005613

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Sacred Relics

Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America

TERESA BARNETT

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

To Joyce Nelson

1935–2012

Objects created in the past are the only historical occurrences that continue to exist in the present.

JULES PROWN

So long . . . as we can preserve the material objects left to us which those great men saw, used, or even touched, the thrill of vitality may still be transmitted unbroken. In description one hundred and ninety years ago is almost as indefinite, as unreal to our adult ears as the once upon a time that was wont to usher in the fairy tales of early childhood; but give us the Treaty Elm, the residence of Penn, the Home of Washington, the strong box of Robert Morris, the walking stick of Franklin—what you will—material evidences of the public action, or even of the daily life and habits of the men of the day, and we can annihilate distance in time as in space.

FRANK ETTING, HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE OLD STATE HOUSE OF PENNSYLVANIA NOW KNOWN AS INDEPENDENCE HALL

Uncle Silas he had a noble brass warming-pan which he thought considerable of, because it belonged to one of his ancestors with a long wooden handle that come over from England with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or one of them early ships and was hid away up garret with a lot of other old pots and things that was valuable, not on account of being any account, because they warn’t, but on account of them being relicts, you know.

HUCK FINN

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1. Origins and Meanings

1 Beginnings

2 History’s Remains

3 The Sentimental Relic

PART 2. The Civil War

4 The Battlefield’s Remains

5 In Memory of Our Beloved Confederacy: Pathetic Relics of the Lost Cause

6 From Relic to Souvenir: Buffs’ Collecting of the War

PART 3. Conclusion

7 The Waning of the Relic

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

In this digital age an amazing abundance of online sources is available for the plucking, and I certainly used many digital collections in writing this book. Still, archives remain an essential component of historical research and one of its real joys. I particularly thank the Department of Special Collections staff at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the invaluable sources they provided from the William Wyles Collection on Lincoln and the commemoration of the Civil War; the staff of the Huntington Library, who helped me find a wealth of scrapbooks, catalogs, and ephemera that illustrated the nineteenth century’s passion for the commemorative; and especially Ruth Ann Coski of the Museum of the Confederacy, who was both inventive and indefatigable in identifying materials that would illuminate the use of relics in the postwar South.

This book could never have come into being without the help of Joan Waugh. In the increasingly pressured and hectic atmosphere of academia, her engagement with her students is exemplary. Her thorough knowledge of the history of the Civil War and its commemoration was an indispensable grounding for my own work. And her assiduous reviews of the manuscript and patient but unremitting insistence that I immerse myself in the literature and hone my arguments accordingly pushed me to rethink and revise again and again. I can only hope that the result in some small way compensates her for her efforts. I also thank Cécile Whiting for her faith in the book and her encouragement to see it through to publication. And it was from David Sabean that I learned to consider even the smallest minutiae of daily life worthy of historical interrogation. He has been both the most probing of critics and the most enthusiastic of champions, and like so many students who have passed through his classes, I owe him an inestimable debt.

Finally, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the support and feedback of my writing group. They were congenial and perceptive colleagues, superb cooks, and a welcome antidote to the isolation of solitary research. And Mary Casey was endlessly patient with what must have seemed an interminable process. Her support and love sustained me throughout, and I cannot thank her enough.

Introduction

On a recent trip to Colorado, seeking to learn more about the area’s history, I stopped in at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. Like most contemporary museums, its exhibitions follow current standards in displaying a limited number of well-chosen objects, carefully explicated and accompanied by contextualizing wall labels. But in the foyer the staff had chosen to stage an exhibition that reflected on the museum’s own collecting practices and how they had changed over time. There, among the apparently capricious collocation of objects that the museum had collected and displayed in its earliest years, one could see such things as

• a liquor decanter that supposedly had belonged to George Washington

• a framed twig from Connecticut’s Charter Oak

• a piece of wood from the cabin Lincoln was born in

• a swatch of fabric from Martha Washington’s wedding dress

• hardtack from the First World War

• a fragment of brick from the first San Diego Mission

• debris from a plane crash that killed two people in 1911

• a sliver of wood labeled Heart of the Stump of a Telegraph Pole of the First Telegraph Line Built in Colorado in 1867

By our own lights, these bits and pieces of the past may be just eccentric odds and ends that have little to do with a museum’s mission or with understanding history per se. But as the labels point out, the practice of preserving such objects was not peculiar to the Colorado Springs Museum. In fact, most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical collections were made up almost entirely of things that have come to be known as association items—objects, fragments of objects, and bits of nature valued solely because they had been associated, however tangentially, with a prominent person or event. These were things that the nineteenth century knew by the more direct and evocative term relics, and however arbitrary or eccentric they may appear to us, for well over a century they were the principal way the material past was preserved and exhibited.

The intimation that there was a category of things self-consciously called relics that represented the past in a very specific way first crystallized for me during my research on a highly eccentric local historian and collector named Christian Sanderson (1882–1966), who lived in a small town outside Philadelphia.¹ The things Sanderson treasured—pressed foliage and other fragments, as well as innumerable trivial objects connected to his own and the nation’s past—mark him as yet another example of that perennial figure of American popular lore, the obsessive hoarder. In reviewing Sanderson’s own accounts of his life and acquisitions, however, I came to realize that in his own mind he was not simply accumulating random things but was continuing an established tradition of collecting articles he specifically designated relics. He reported visiting exhibitions of such things, noted other collectors’ acquisitions, and described his own finds to others, confident that they too would find them meaningful. In other words, these things that most twentieth- or twenty-first-century viewers might consider random detritus had a recognized name and set of collecting practices. And if their exact functions and meanings were not immediately apparent, recognizing that the relic was an established cultural form at least suggested that with patience and study some of its meanings might still be retrieved.

With further research I began to understand that the relic’s apparent irrelevance to real history is itself a historically specific phenomenon. In a sense this book actually begins in its ending. It begins, that is, in the subject of my final chapter—in the early twentieth-century museum professionals’ refusal to admit relics as a legitimate form of representation. For if we understand relics as objects improper to the representation of the historical past, it is because those professionals defined their collections precisely in opposition to the relic. In its apparent triviality, its inability to offer any verifiable data about the past, the relic was positioned as the shadowy antimatter of the solidly informational historical artifact. It was the thing that was banished—that had to be banished—to make way for the twentieth century’s own historical things.

As I argue in the final chapter, the rejection of the relic was part of the more comprehensive rejection of the curiosity that was central to defining the collecting of professional museums in a variety of disciplines. In recent years discussions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets have worked to dispel the stigma of the haphazard and the indiscriminate that has long been attached to these collections and to reestablish them as a form of knowledge in their own right.² The historical relic is not strictly comparable to the curiosities assembled in the early modern Wunderkammern in that it was a fairly unsystematized form of popular collecting rather than a form cultivated by learned men that reflected the science and cosmology of its time. Still, in these pages I have followed the lead of those scholars by trying to re-create a sensibility in which the relic could have meaning. I wanted to consider these untheorized nineteenth-century fragments—untheorized even by those who collected them—as objects capable of supporting the kind of sustained attention the curiosity cabinets have received, to look back on objects that seem trivial, arbitrary, unconscious of historical meaning and recuperate them as relatively cogent forms of historical representation.

I say historical representation, yet I am well aware that of course relics are not historical in any accepted sense of that word. In fact they are firmly embedded in a network of objects and modes of meaning that bears little relation to our conception of how the material world represents the past. And that is precisely the point. For we usually trace the development of historical understanding primarily through academic channels and through written documents alone (albeit allowing for that subsection of the discipline we call material culture). Moreover, even within the museum, the one arena where objects are foregrounded, they are typically assigned to a particular discipline and framed to illuminate the tenets of that discipline. Their own complicated histories as objects and their functions within earlier systems of representation are thus obscured. My repeated references to relics as a historical form of representation, then, are intended to sketch an alternative genealogy of the historical—one that occurs in relation to the material world, that admits impulses other than the need to generate conceptual structures, and that may involve emotional connections, the relationship between the living and the dead, and the processing of mortality and loss. It is an approach that asks us to take seriously the relationships that old things as old things are capable of initiating and to understand the past not simply as something one takes an analytic stance toward but as something one makes an investment in. My case study is situated in the nineteenth century, but I do not presume that the tale of investments that lie outside the analytic concludes there. We have never been modern, Bruno Latour argues, and, equally, we have never been truly historical, if by historical we mean the entirely time-bound notion that our interest in the past does not extend beyond the imperative to map it in the most disinterested of ways.

Though such nonacademic modes of representing the past as monuments, festivals, and collecting have been the object of much scholarly attention in recent years, most such studies have focused on the way these representations served contemporaneous political or social agendas and not on historicizing modes of historical representation as symbolic forms in themselves. Moreover, within this plethora of literature I am aware of no serious study devoted to the form of the historical relic. The articles and relatively brief references in scholarly monographs that do focus on association items or numinous objects mostly either defend the value of such things in the most general sense without historicizing them or simply note, with some bemusement, the nineteenth century’s inordinate fondness for them.³ While such works have been valuable in calling my attention to the many facets of relic collecting, they have not necessarily provided much theoretical grounding for my project. Among the scholarly works that have proved helpful, I have already mentioned studies of the curiosity cabinets. In addition, I would cite the ever-proliferating scholarship on museums and collecting and the extensive work on sentimental literature, which has explored in great depth Victorian modes of feeling and sentimental identification that I argue are essential to understanding the relic’s function and efficacy.⁴ Finally, with their insistence on seeing objects, in Sandra Dudley’s words, not as background scenery to the drama of human life but as actors within it, theorists of the cross-disciplinary body of theory often referred to as the material turn or the new materialism have been immensely suggestive for my project.⁵ In his Art and Agency, Alfred Gell has argued that art should be seen as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.⁶ Similarly, I have tried to advance a conception of relics that understands them not simply as representations of the past but as the necessary means of negotiating affective transactions with the past—as objects that worked to do things that could be done in no other way.

The fact that relics are a relatively unexamined field of study explains why I have confined myself primarily to discussing the historical relic only as it developed in the United States. This by no means implies that the relic was a specifically American form. In fact, as my first chapter documents, it had deep roots in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe, and relic-collecting traditions flourished throughout the nineteenth century in Europe as they did in the United States. However, though discussions of European traditions would undoubtedly have been illuminating, casting my net wide enough to cover all possible manifestations of the relic would have been impossibly complicated and unwieldy.

In this connection, I should also note that, in concentrating on relic collecting in the United States, I have deliberately focused more or less exclusively on the practices of white Americans. The reasons are twofold. In the first place, primary sources of any kind on relics are difficult to find. My examples come from hours spent scanning memoirs and published diaries and letters and searching databases of nineteenth-century literature and texts, as well as looking at a range of museum catalogs and commemorative publications. During this period African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans were not publishing museum catalogs or commemorative bulletins, and though memoirs and diaries from individuals in those groups certainly exist, they are obviously far fewer than those by white Americans.

Second, and more important, I have focused on the relic tradition as a manifestation of white middle-class practices because that is in good part what it was. As I argue at length in these pages, the relic tradition was a historically specific phenomenon that had its roots in European collecting practices, participated in a more general European understanding of historical change, and was deeply implicated in middle-class sentimental ideology. Given the immense social flux and continuing growth of the middle class throughout the century, sentimental ideology had a marked aspirational quality, and its appeal certainly extended well beyond those who might have been classified as middle class based on income or economic circumstances alone. Nonetheless, Native peoples or African American slaves, for example, would have had little opportunity or reason to subscribe to sentimental values. And the things from the past individuals in those groups might have been attached to would have come out of culturally specific object traditions and could hardly have been neatly and unambiguously classed as historical relics.

The one group that very likely would have demonstrated some interest in relics were free African Americans, particularly as their own collective narrative intersected with the larger national narrative in the abolitionist struggle and in the Civil War and its aftermath. However, African Americans’ accounts of this period were often primarily contributions to the antislavery literature or the literature of racial uplift, not solely retellings of their experiences in the Civil War per se, and thus black accounts are less likely to mention battlefield collecting. That does not mean, of course, that African Americans never collected their own souvenirs of the battlefield or of the war’s heroes and political gains. Some white abolitionists preserved relics of John Brown, particularly the pikes confiscated from Brown when he was arrested, and it is certainly possible that black abolitionists kept such things as well. African Americans may also have preserved relics related to Lincoln. After Lincoln’s death, for example, Mary Todd Lincoln sent a cane that had belonged to the president to Frederick Douglass and another to the black minister and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet. She also gave several articles belonging to her or associated with the assassination to Elizabeth Keckley, the African American woman who worked as a seamstress for many members of Washington elite society, including Mrs. Lincoln. Both Douglass and Keckley clearly understood these objects as things of sentimental and historical value. In his thank-you note, Douglass invoked the language of sentimental memory, assuring Mrs. Lincoln that this inestimable memento of [Lincoln’s] presidency will be retained in my possession while I live—an object of sacred interest, and Keckley too used conventional sentimental terminology when she referred to the objects as sacred relics and as things too sacred to sell.⁷ Keckley also envisioned her relics as being of interest to a larger audience and at one point offered to donate them to Wilberforce University, a private black institution, where she thought they could be exhibited to raise money.⁸ In addition, African Americans seem to have preserved emblems of specifically African American struggles. For example, when Frederick Douglass assisted in the escape of three men who had killed a slaveholder attempting to recapture a fugitive slave, he was given the slaveholder’s revolver as a memento.⁹ How widespread the collecting of such artifacts was and whether any particular ceremonial practices were associated with them remains an open question. Again, blacks were in no position to establish museums or other public collections, so the wealth of catalogs and published descriptions of commemorative ceremonies that are such a rich resource for anyone examining the history of relics do not exist to the same extent for black communities.

Finally, even charting the development of the historical relic in the United States among white, largely middle-class Americans over the course of the nineteenth century is an immense undertaking, and I make no claim to have done so comprehensively. I have tried to outline the course of the relic from its rise as a distinct historical form to its eventual displacement by other forms of historical representation in professional museums as well as in popular collecting. But although my book spans a full century and more, still it might profitably be considered chapters in the history of the relic rather than a definitive and exhaustive narrative. I have focused on objects and collecting traditions that seem to illuminate important aspects of the relic’s history and for which sources were relatively available. It is fairly easy, for example, to say something about the immense number of Civil War relics, since such relics are referenced in countless diaries and letters, had whole museums devoted to them, and, particularly in the South, sometimes served as a focus of collective ritualistic observances. But it is much more difficult to discuss in great depth what Lincoln’s relics—to take one example—meant to those who preserved them, since only isolated, brief references appear in personal documents and catalogs, and I have never encountered any description of ceremonial observances focused on Lincoln-related objects. Thus I have devoted relatively little attention not only to Lincoln’s relics but to such central strands of the relic tradition as the relics of Washington or the relics of disasters and traumas other than the Civil War—the Deerfield Massacre, the Chicago Fire, or the Johnstown Flood, for example. In other words, this is not an exhaustive account of the relic but simply an attempt to put it on the scholarly agenda: to map the general contours of its history and define the conditions of its meaning.

The organization of the book is roughly chronological. Part 1 is devoted to a discussion of the relic as a form of representation. In chapters 1 and 2 I look at its origins in popular collecting and argue for its status as a specifically historical form of representation that was congruent with the nineteenth century’s new sense of historical time. I also argue there that because it was understood as a thing marked by its implication in historical processes, the nineteenth-century relic was qualitatively different from earlier kinds of objects it is often grouped with, such as the religious relic and the curiosity. In chapter 3 I then suggest that the historical relic cannot be understood apart from the cognate form of the sentimental token, and that it therefore functioned very differently than the kinds of historical objects that would later be instantiated in museums. It was a thing that could be interacted with on an intimate level and used to achieve certain emotional states. It created a relationship with the past rather than a stance versus the past.

Following this conceptual groundwork, part 2 is a case study of the nineteenth century’s most extensive popular relic tradition—the collecting of articles from the Civil War. In chapter 4 I discuss the multifarious forms collecting took during the war itself and the ways relics were used to process the war’s bodily horror. In chapter 5 I show how private practices of sentimental collecting and memory were institutionalized in the public memorial practices of white Southerners and used as a means of reworking their collective loss. There I explicitly try to demonstrate how relics performed both personal and political work—how indeed they did their political work by engaging their users’ most intimate psychic processes. Finally, in chapter 6 I describe the competing tradition of collecting pursued by turn-of-the-century Civil War buffs, which repudiated the sentimental tradition by casting the war’s artifacts as souvenirs of a collective male experience of battle. Although these souvenirs were still called relics, I argue that they were objects of a different kind and promoted a different kind of engagement with the past than the prototypical sentimental relic.

The final chapter outlines the waning of the relic in both popular and professional collecting and discusses the representational norms that came to replace it. In the turn of the century’s professionalized museums, it was supplanted by the ideal of a historical artifact modeled on the scientific specimen; in popular collecting and exhibitions it yielded to generic implements of everyday life, which referenced not specific historical moments but a more general, often preindustrial past. And over the first half of the twentieth century, it was also replaced by modes of apprehending the past that involved full spatial re-creations of vanished environments rather than investments in individual objects or fragments. In all these ways the relic was superseded, and its particular way of representing the historical past was thus rendered largely invisible.

In conclusion I should also note that, although I have chosen to construct a narrative that emphasizes the eclipse of the relic by other forms of historical representation—and though I think that narrative captures something essential about the relic’s historical specificity—it is also true that the relic’s story does not decisively end with the nineteenth century. In recent decades the association item has experienced a marked resurgence in public venues, particularly in contexts intended to convey the reality of mass trauma. Many of the objects on display in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC—the burned books and defaced religious artifacts, the shoes and other possessions of the dead—are strongly reminiscent of objects that appeared in the nineteenth-century relic museums.¹⁰ Similarly, the events of 9/11 have been commemorated in numerous public exhibitions by what can only be labeled contemporary relics: a flight attendant’s uniform, a firefighter’s helmet, fragments of the doomed planes, a scorched and bent stairwell sign from the World Trade Center, a clock stopped at the moment the flames reached it.

The reasons for the reemergence of these relic-like things are undeniably complex and include an alienation from impersonal, state-sponsored forms of commemoration; a reaction against the patent artificiality of themed historical environments; and the historical process by which the nineteenth century’s sentimental structures of feeling have been continued and reworked in our own therapeutic culture. In any case, the objects now on display in our history museums demonstrate that examining the nineteenth-century relic is not simply an abstruse exercise in antiquarianism but engages ways of transmitting the past that are reverberating anew in our contemporary culture. And though I have tried to document the relic as a manifestation of a specific historical period, I hope that, far from simply inducing wonder at those alien anthropological others, the nineteenth-century men and women who preserved such strange and often apparently arbitrary objects, this book will prompt its readers to look anew at our own scarcely articulated notions of what makes an object historical and of how things work to represent the past.

PART ONE

Origins and Meanings

ONE

Beginnings

The Reverend William Bentley (1759–1819) was among the most learned of the American republic’s early scholars. A Congregationalist minister who resided in Salem, Massachusetts, he read twenty-one languages, according to one biographer, and his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian was probably unexcelled in America.¹ His learning extended far beyond topics connected with Christianity and the ancient world where it had its genesis. The notebooks he bequeathed to the American Antiquarian Society, for example, included volumes on mathematics, ornithology, and natural history; meteorological observations; and general statistical notes relating to the United States during the years 1806–1811. In addition to these scientific and mathematical pursuits, Bentley was also interested in subjects we might now think of as anthropological, archaeological, or historical. From his somewhat secluded station in Salem, he participated in the larger world of his time, uniting an interest in antiquity and its venerable traditions with a knowledge of the specific flora, fauna, and human history of his own locale.

Although Bentley’s library was reputed to be second only to Thomas Jefferson’s, his studies were by no means confined to the written word.² As testified by the voluminous diary he kept for over thirty years, he was passionately interested in material objects and the meanings they could impart. He collected natural history specimens from around the world, donating most to the museum of the East India Marine Society.³ His diaries also contain numerous references to American Indian burials, which he often visited and examined for himself. Finally, he was fascinated with New England’s European American past as it persisted in old buildings, cemeteries, and artifacts, and his entries enumerate such finds as excavated fragments of Dutch delftware, furniture handed down as heirlooms in local families, a gun from 1698 found in the ruins of a blacksmith’s shop, and quaint caps and shoes that had survived from an earlier time.

Bentley’s fascination with the material world was not peculiar to him, nor was it uniquely American. The practice of assembling cabinets of natural history specimens was well established in England and on the Continent, and individuals such as Pierre Eugène du Simitière, the founder of one of America’s earliest natural history museums, and the better-known Charles Willson Peale only continued that tradition with American specimens. Likewise, an interest in objects from the past can be traced back several centuries before Bentley began collecting to British antiquarians’ fascination with classical antiquities, implements excavated from Anglo-Saxon barrows, old coins, armor, seals, and objects of daily use. In their investigations, as Graham Parry has noted, the method of enquiry moved from the study of texts to the study of objects and from a position where the past was recovered mainly by means of ancient authors . . . to where material objects became of greater significance and could be used to interact with the written record.⁴ And in a very real sense Bentley simply continued these practices, with the signal difference that instead of excavating Roman or Anglo-Saxon remains he sought out American Indian burials, and rather than tracing the history of British royalty, he marveled over the evidence of the Puritan forefathers and their times.⁵

Like his predecessors in England, Bentley exhibited what one commentator has identified as the typical antiquarian’s fanatical obsession with the historical significance of the individual object and a sense that the peculiarities of these objects offered a wealth of enigmatic meanings about the past.⁶ When he visited sites of Indian burials, he inevitably sought out whatever information he could gain on the circumstances of their discovery, noting the direction the skeletons had been facing, whether they were sitting or lying, and the artifacts found with them. Similarly, when he described the remains of a European American past, he sometimes displayed an almost inordinate fascination with the minutiae of physical characteristics. Looking at a woman’s shoe from the seventeenth century, for example, he took care to note in his diary that The heel and square toe were of the same length 2-1/2 inches. The sole leather was of the common thickness of English soles. The Straps were cut for Clasps. The heel tap of the same leather with the sole 1/2 inch.⁷

Though objects from the past often inspired interest because