Date of Award
8-16-2024
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
History
First Advisor
Mark M. Smith
Abstract
This dissertation explores the experiences and commemorative practices of nearly 200 northern passengers in Charleston, South Carolina, as they attended the flag reraising ceremony at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, and then organized the Sumter Club to celebrate that event annually. While some has been written about postwar Charleston during the first half of 1865, and a little more has been published covering this flag ceremony, the Northern view and their experiences with each have not been investigated, nor has anyone written an account of this club. This dissertation utilizes the theory and methodology of the history of experience, weaving together sensory and emotions history with other theories and methodologies, including gender, floriography, animal history, memory, and material culture, to treat these northern arrivals as biocultural historical artifacts experiencing life situated in a lived experience, free from presentist epistemologies. Their exposures to faith, abolitionism, union-making, the South, and ultimately with freedpeople of the South and in celebrating the return of the storied flag over the site of the Civil War beginning, allow us to grasp their world better as they sensed it, felt it, and why they commemorated what they commemorated. New insights into tourism, reconciliation, and reconstruction, as well as in Civil War memory-making, reveal deeper meanings while restoring their original interpretations, as expressed and experienced during those April days of 1865 and through the years of Sumter Club gatherings.
Rights
© 2024, Michael Edward Scott Emett
Recommended Citation
Emett, M. E.(2024). The Northern View of the Southern Shore: Experience, Reconciliation, and Commemoration in Postbellum Charleston, South Carolina. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/7721