| Abstrakt: |
The Civil War Soldiers' Monument in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, erected in 1874, represented an anomaly of postwar commemoration: fewer than five percent of all Civil War monuments overtly proclaimed the abolition of slavery as a Northern war goal. Although many leading historians have argued that the war's abolitionist and "emancipationist" memories were quickly overpowered by a romanticized "reconciliationist" view of the conflict in the decades after the Civil War, the Fitchburg Soldiers' Monument proudly proclaimed the town's commitment to a war fought for both the preservation of the Union and the emancipation of the nation's four million slaves. In this thought-provoking article, author Darren Barry explores how and why Fitchburg continued to embrace and champion an unabashedly emancipationist Civil War memory in spite of the nation's widespread and deliberate whitewashing of the war's fundamental issues of slavery and racial equality. This article is draivn from Barry's master's thesis, titled "Union and Emancipation -- Conflating Revolutionary Heritage with Abolitionist Practice: Civil War Collective Memory in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, 1861--1930.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
