One of my favorite things about my research on Civil War monuments is that it has given me a ready excuse to plan crazy road trips. There are thousands of soldier monuments, and they are spread all across the United States. From time to time over the past decade, I’ve planned out a route and hopped in the car to visit as many of them as I can. In densely-packed New England, I’ve hit as many as fifteen to twenty in a day, jumping out of the car to photograph a site and then heading on to the next destination, camping out or sleeping in roadside motels. Doing this, I’ve visited a lot of cities and towns that I might not otherwise have seen, and I’ve developed a keen appreciation for the open road.

This Monday, March 18, I’m looking forward to a one-day monument excursion that will involve visiting some monuments in states where I haven’t traveled extensively before. I’m leaving New Jersey on a flight to Memphis on Sunday afternoon, and I need to be in Montgomery, Alabama by Tuesday morning to meet my fellow Smithson fellows for a visit to the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice. In between, I’m planning to hit several key sites in Mississippi and Alabama: two monuments whose histories have been altered by car accidents, two more that feature a very early and highly idiosyncratic design for a Confederate soldier, and one whose days may be numbered depending on the outcome of student protests. I have twelve hours of daylight, and eight and a half hours of driving to do. If all goes well, I’ll be pulling into Camden, Alabama, my last site, just as the setting sun hits the golden hour, and then I’ll head off to rest my head at my motel in Montgomery in the twilight.

Weather conditions were ideal when I photographed this Confederate monument in Winchester, VA in 2012

When planning a trip like this, there are several variables that could contribute to success or failure. One is the weather: sunshine makes for the prettiest pictures, although an overcast day is also fine. Rain can mean dreary photographs with less legible details. For now, predictions for my trip suggest that Monday will be sunny and warm, which is music to the ears of this winter-weary traveler. But sun can also pose a problem if it is at an awkward position for photographing a particular site. Since I have a long way to go next Monday, I won’t have a lot of time to wait if the sun is directly behind a monument when I arrive to photograph it. I’ll have to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Other variables could include traffic conditions and time to eat and deal with other physical needs. Since I’ll be traveling mainly through rural areas, I’m hoping that I won’t run into too much traffic, and I’ll have my GPS to guide me through unfamiliar territory. And this is exactly the kind of trip that fast food was made for – I’m hoping to pick up something to eat in the car during my longest stretch of driving between Ripley, Mississippi and Demopolis, Alabama.

Wondering if I’m going to make it to all of my sites before darkness falls? I’ll be posting updates from the road throughout the day on Monday: look for me on Twitter (@SarahBeetham) and Instagram (@sdbeetham). I’m excited to take a break from my manuscript and spend some time on the open road.

My Facebook “On This Day” feed, February 25, 2019 (with my advisor Wendy Bellion)

Facebook’s “On This Day” feature is a funny thing: it sometimes reminds you to carve out some time in your day for a milestone that you might otherwise have overlooked. Five years ago today, on February 25, 2014, I defended my doctoral dissertation on the development of citizen soldier monuments in the wake of the Civil War. On the tail end of my first time through the academic job cycle, I was already aware that my prospects for employment the following fall were shaky. But I did not yet sense how difficult those job prospects would become – or the ways in which news on the national stage would transform the trajectory of my research and my career. Today seems like a great day to reflect on all of that.

Back in 2014, I knew the academic job market was tough and getting worse, but as a cockeyed optimist, I always thought it would work out for me. I cast a wide net geographically, followed Karen Kelsky’s advice on “The Professor Is In” when crafting my job docs, changed the font of my CV to Garamond, and set about building a publication record. When my first job cycle failed to yield a tenure track job or even a VAP, I started adjuncting. At one point, I taught at three different schools in the same semester, racking up miles between Central Jersey, northern Delaware, and Philadelphia, learning how to fill up the long commuting hours with podcasts. Dream jobs came and went. I made it to a few first-round interviews, but never a campus visit. And with each passing year (if you look at the statistics), my odds on the market got longer.

My family and me on the day of my hooding ceremony in May 2014 – wouldn’t have made it without them!

But at the same time, a weird thing was happening with my research. Suddenly, Civil War monuments were national news, and I had a new platform to share my work. I couldn’t get any art history departments to take my job materials seriously, but I was in high demand as a public scholar. I wrote an essay that has become the third most-read published in Public Art Dialogue, and I’ve heard that a lot of colleagues have found it useful in class discussions – just what I was hoping when I drafted it. Participating in the discussion about the future of Confederate monuments has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my career as a scholar, and I’m profoundly grateful for the training that has brought me to this point.

With Temple University graduate students on the Gettysburg battlefield (Photo courtesy of Peter Wang)

And in my seven semesters as a contingent professor, I’ve amassed a body of work of which I am truly proud. I’ve created syllabi and course materials for eight undergraduate courses and one graduate course. I’ve built a collection of nineteenth-century photographs to teach students how to identify daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and more. I’ve led field trips to cultural institutions throughout Philadelphia and to Washington, DC and Gettysburg. I’ve booked guest speakers and experimented with digital assignments on Twitter and Wikipedia. I’ve written short essays about pedagogy and thought a lot about how to optimize art history courses for art students’ needs. I’ve learned how to work under pressure and to make sure to be ready for class every day no matter how many commitments are tugging on my time. And best of all, I am no longer remotely afraid of any sort of public speaking. Exposure therapy works.

Five years out from my doctoral defense, I’m not sure what my next step will be. I think the tenure track is unlikely at this point, but I’m still hoping to stay in the classroom. With the help of my Smithsonian fellowship this year, I’m hard at work on my book manuscript, and currently talking to a few presses about publishing it. I have some entrepreneurial ideas that could keep me close to my academic roots, but I’m also wondering what else is out there. I’ve been listening to the great advice of lots of folks who have branched out into the #postac and #altac worlds. I’ve been turning this problem over and over in my head as I think about what the future holds, but today at least, I’m happy to look back.

I may not be where I hoped I would be by this point when I stepped out of my defense in February 2014. But I’m so proud of the work I’ve done to keep my head above water, and so grateful for the friends, family, and colleagues who have sustained me every step of the way.

So far, I’ve had an action-packed fall semester. I’ve recently relocated to Washington, DC to take up my post as the Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan Fellow awarded through the James Smithson Fellowship Program, based at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I’ll be spending the year working on my book, Monumental Crisis, and planning a new public-facing arm of my project (more on that to come!). For now, I’m spending weekdays in DC and weekends at home in New Jersey with my family, researching and writing and keeping up with all of the latest developments in the monument field.

This past week, I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama for the annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference, one of my favorite events to attend each year. At the invitation of Naomi Slipp, I filled in as a co-chair for her double session, “‘Little of Artistic Merit?’ The Art of the American South.” In my paper for the session, “Confederate Monuments: Southern Art or Southern Heritage?,” I debated whether Confederate monuments, most of which were manufactured outside the South, should be included in discussions of Southern art at all. I was pleased with how the session turned out, and received a lot of useful feedback for my paper. I’m looking forward to incorporating these ideas into my writing.

Birmingham also yielded a new subject of study for my book. On the walk from my hotel to the convention center, I passed Linn Park, home to the city’s Confederate monument. Erected in 1905, the monument is a tall granite obelisk, a common type for post-Civil War memorials. But in 2017, then-mayor William Bell ordered a black plywood wall built around the base of the obelisk, blocking the inscription honoring the Confederacy from view. Photographs of the uncovered obelisk are available online, but a visitor to the site today is left with a stark barrier obscuring the monument’s meaning. The painted plywood is matte black, absorbing all light – so different from the effect of the reflective black granite often employed in memorial designs today. Standing at approximately twelve feet high, the wall stymies any attempt to see over it to access the inscription. The effect in person is startling, disrupting the urban fabric and calling attention to its bleak nothingness.

Of all the interventions I have seen directed at Confederate monuments, this is one of the most interesting. The monument is in legal limbo – the city of Birmingham is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the state over whether the intervention violates a new state law prohibiting the alteration of monuments – and it remains to be seen whether the state will force the city to remove the wall. But in the meantime, the intervention poses interesting questions about a monument’s ability to convey meaning. The monument’s form – an obelisk – is an ancient one, a geometric mass with flat planes designed to display a carved message. The form itself carries associations dating back to ancient Egypt, but in an American context, the obelisk has been used for all manner of political, military, and funereal memorials. The shape is readily identified, but without the additional context provided by the inscription, it is a shape only. In shrouding the monument’s base, the city of Birmingham has prevented the monument from delivering its message. This removal of meaning reminds me of regulations in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, in which former Confederate soldiers were prohibited from wearing their old uniforms unless all buttons and insignia were removed. Without insignia connecting it with the Confederacy, a gray jacket is just a gray jacket. And without access to the inscription, the Birmingham obelisk is simply a gray shaft of stone, piercing the sky above a wall of nothingness.

And yet, these blank objects tug at our minds. We recognize a military jacket, and we know that the obelisk has an inscription that is just out of reach. Birmingham’s intervention forces us to engage with the monument and to make note of the wall’s obscuring power. Like the empty bases of monuments that have been hauled away in recent months, the wall calls attention to the very thing it conceals. Some opponents of the removal of monuments have argued that these objects serve as reminders of dark chapters in America’s past, and thus should be kept in place as teaching tools. Supporters of removal have countered that their power to elevate is too strong to leave them in place. Birmingham’s solution seems to thread both arguments: this intervention in the memorial landscape disrupts the Confederate narrative and forces us to confront its presence in civic life.

Silent Sam during a student protest in March 2018 (Photo credit: Adam Domby)

A little over a year ago, after activists in Durham, North Carolina tore down the local Confederate monument in an act of civil disobedience, I predicted that more monuments would follow. It took a little longer than I expected, but last night, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill toppled Silent Sam, the 1913 Confederate soldier monument that has long been a locus for controversy. At least as early as the 1960s, the statue was debated as a symbol of racism and white supremacy, and acts of vandalism and calls for removal have dogged the statue (For a complete timeline of events, click here).

But in the three years since the June 2015 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina reignited the debate over the future of Confederate monuments, the controversy surrounding Silent Sam has intensified. In July 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory signed a bill prohibiting communities from removing “objects of remembrance” commemorating “an event, person or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history” without permission from the General Assembly. Since then, student groups have increased pressure on the university to find a way to remove Silent Sam. The statue has also been defaced several times, notably in May 2018 when Maya Little painted the monument with a mixture of red paint and her own blood. It was in support of Maya Little that last night’s “Until They All Fall” rally was held.

Early in the evening, activists obscured Silent Sam with banners, and under the cover of these banners, they tied ropes around the statue and brought it down. It will now be up to the university and the North Carolina legislature to assess the extent of the statue’s damage and to decide what to do next.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have published excellent pieces covering last night’s events in Chapel Hill. The Post in particular spoke at length with Dr. Adam Domby, who as a graduate student in 2009 uncovered a shockingly racist speech given by Julian Carr at Silent Sam’s 1913 dedication, and the article is worth reading in full. But I’d like to call attention to remarks by Dr. Karen Cox, who has been an outspoken critic of the continued presence of Confederate monuments in public space:

“People seem to be at their wit’s end,” said Karen Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of “Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.”

“When people feel they’re not being heard, when people don’t have a place at the table, then this is the result,” she said.

By passing laws to control the handling of Confederate monuments at the state level, states like North Carolina have closed nearly all avenues for resolving the current debate through compromise. It should be up to local communities to decide how to maintain their public spaces and what to do with the monuments in their care. Instead, draconian laws prevent civil discourse, and extralegal action in the dead of night is the result.

It is time for these state “preservation” laws to be overturned so that communities can make their own decisions about their monuments through discussion and compromise. At this point, it is unlikely that amendment through new text or additional statuary will be enough to calm current unrest. But it is still possible to find a home for these statues away from public life, in which they can be warehoused and contextualized as the material culture of a divisive era. Those who wish to preserve the statues for their historical significance or artistic merit would do well to resist state laws that restrict local action and strangle debate: the alternative is a polarized landscape in which the events of Durham and Chapel Hill will likely continue to occur.

Civil War Monument, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia (Photo by the author)

The latest issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art is out, with a new contribution from me! A few months ago, I was asked to submit a short essay for this issue’s Bully Pulpit on Confederate monuments. The assignment was not to rehash the “keep them up”/”take them down” debate that has been ongoing for at least the last three years, but to find a fresh angle to think about what the current debate tells us about the materiality of monuments, the state of American memory, or any other aspect of monuments, memory, or history.

I was honored to be included along with three senior scholars whose work I have long respected and referenced. Dell Upton’s essay asks us to take a critical look at the ways in which unequivocally heroic monuments to white Americans have prevented us from having nuanced conversations about America’s fraught history. Renée Ater discusses the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama as a counter-monument that upends the Lost Cause narrative as presented in Confederate monuments. And finally, Kirsten Pai Buick exposes the role monuments play in papering over the violence of slavery, setting traditional American monuments in opposition to the more nuanced art of African-American women, including Mary Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, and Nona Faustine.

Alongside the work of these fabulous scholars, I argue that the current debate over the future of Confederate monuments fails to consider the long history of monumental alteration and destruction. Beginning with the mundane and unremarkable relocation of a Union Civil War monument from Mount Moriah Cemetery to Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, I write:

This is not an abnormal event in the life cycle of public monuments, which exist outdoors in public space and are subject to the forces of public opinion, historical revisionism, convenience, and weather. Contrary to popular perception, monuments are not immutable or unchanging edifices; instead, there can be adjustments and adaptations according to the circumstances of their environments.

For the rest of my essay, click here. To read the whole Bully Pulpit, which is full of provocative new ideas, click here.

Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895, this cast 1918 (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It’s been an interesting summer so far. For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of freelance writing, working on a group of catalogue entries on important American sculptures for a major new show on American art. The project has been stimulating: it’s a bit of a break from ruminating over monumental destruction, and I’ve had the chance to research a number of works that were familiar to me, but which I had never taken the opportunity to think deeply about.

One of those is Frederic Remington’s Broncho Buster. Remington’s art has never particularly appealed to me: I find the machismo more than a little off-putting, and the politics inherent in his work are quite upsetting as well. Remington was active as an artist at a particular moment in American history when the conquest of the West was drawing to a close and the imperialist era, signaled by the Spanish-American War, was just dawning, and his cowboys and Indians are completely tied up in that narrative. There’s a reason that Remington was drawn to the activities of the Rough Riders in Cuba during the War of 1898, and there’s a reason that Teddy Roosevelt was so fond of his work. The two men really suited each other.

That said, the story of how Remington became a sculptor is compelling. In late 1894, the sculptor Frederic W. Ruckstull was staying with Remington’s neighbor, Augustus Thomas. At the time, Ruckstull was working on an equestrian statue honoring Major General John F. Hartranft, and Remington often went to watch him at work. One day, Augustus Thomas observed how Remington was able to imagine the same figure from multiple viewpoints on paper, mentally turning the subject one way or another to suit his needs, and pointed out that with skill like this, Remington had the mind of a sculptor. Remington agreed, and with the encouragement of Ruckstull and Thomas, he began working in clay and finished The Broncho Buster shortly afterward. As a first effort, it is extraordinary, with dynamic action and virtuoso use of space. The sculpture went on to be one of the most popular in turn-of-the-century America, with hundreds of authorized and unauthorized casts.

James Edward Kelly, Defenders of New Haven (detail), New Haven, CT, 1910: This monument’s condition shows that bronze definitely does NOT endure forever!

While working on the sculpture, Remington made a striking statement in a letter to his friend, the novelist Owen Wister:

My water colors will fade—but I am to endure in bronze—even rust does not touch. I am modeling —I find I do well—I am doing a cowboy on a bucking broncho and I am going to rattle down through all the ages, unless some Anarchist invades the old mansion and knocks it off the shelf.

In other words, Remington was drawn to work in sculpture because he felt the medium made his work immortal. Of course, as a researcher with a keen interest in the destruction of sculpture, this jumped out at me. The whole premise of my book project is to undermine popular perception of monumental sculpture as permanent, unchangeable and unchanging. Bronze and stone sculptures change all the time, especially when they are outdoors. The materials weather over time and are subject to deliberate and accidental damage. Sometimes they are removed or relocated, either for political or practical reasons. For all of these reasons, sculpture is not the enduring substance of fame through the ages that Remington imagined in his letter.

Martin Milmore, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument (detail), Boston Common, Boston, MA, dedicated 1877: Remington’s anarchists?

But it’s also interesting that Remington imagined unnamed “Anarchists” as the possible downfall of his plan for immortality. As we’ve seen with Confederate monuments in recent months, the extralegal activities of actors opposed to a monument’s message can indeed cause lasting damage. The current move to replace or remove Confederate monuments has been ignited for multiple reasons, but chief among them is certainly the actions of individuals who no longer wish to allow the monuments to exist in their communities, and will ensure that their wishes are carried out by force if necessary. Remington’s politics certainly would not be aligned with today’s American Left, and if his cowboy sculptures had ever become monuments, they might be on the chopping block today.

I’m going to think about Remington in relation to my book project a bit more, and some of these thoughts might be making their way into the text somewhere. In all, this week has reminded me that sometimes it’s useful to step away from one’s main project in order to work in other directions for a little while. One never knows what might come from pursuing another path.

A few weeks ago, I taught a lecture on surrealism to my Introduction to Art History students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Of course, one of the works we discussed was René Magritte’s famous provocation, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) of 1929. You know the one: a picture-perfect illustration of a pipe with words in French that translate to “This is not a pipe” written beneath it. In case you need a refresher on the meaning of the original painting, here’s a great summary video by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker of Smarthistory:

As Harris and Zucker explain, this painting can be interpreted in several different ways. First, of course, there’s the obvious: Magritte is correct that this is not a pipe, because it is a painting of a pipe, making it a representation and not the real thing. Up until the early twentieth century, Western artists had been concerned mainly with illusionistic representations of the natural world, and with this painting, Magritte upends centuries of tradition. One might even see this painting as an attack on the very notion of language itself, as the word “pipe” is not an actual pipe any more than Magritte’s painting is: both are symbols that stand in for the real thing.

But there’s another way of looking at this painting that I think might be telling for some of our current discussions surrounding monuments today. Magritte gives us a perfect painting of a pipe, and a text that says it is not a pipe: which do you believe? Which message is stronger? Do you respond more to the tangible image, or the text? What does this tell us about words and images today?

When I look at this painting, I am powerfully reminded of the notion of recontextualizing problematic monuments by adding new plaques or inscriptions to place them alongside the darker aspects of their historic background. This has been suggested in some circles as an alternative to removing the monuments, as a way of preserving the built environment while providing necessary information about the past. I’ve long felt that this was not a workable strategy, and I think Magritte tells us exactly why. In other words:

Which is more powerful, the image or the text? Do you believe the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee set on a towering pedestal, one of the enduring symbols of heroism and power in Western art, or do you believe the text that tells you he is not worth celebrating? Is there any text or any plaque that could possibly counteract the visual impact of a monument? Or will the text always fade into the background?

To my mind, there’s no way to insert text alongside a monument that would counteract the power of the visual symbol, unless that text is written on a billboard or superimposed on the monument in some way. The equestrian statue and the triumphal column are too ingrained in our collective cultural heritage to allow for disruption in text. If we are going to seek just representation in our public spaces, we will have to find another way.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a historian roundtable by the On Monument Avenue blog, a project sponsored by the American Civil War Museum that explores the messy historical context of Richmond’s storied Monument Avenue. Monument Avenue, a City Beautiful-inspired boulevard of Confederate luminaries, is currently at the center of debates over whether to remove, recontextualize, or preserve Confederate monuments. The ACWM assembled a group of four historians and tasked us with answering the question Why now? Why are we only just now acting to revise the Confederate landscape?

Or, as the introduction to the roundtable put it:

As we finish tracing the histories that emanated from 1890, we would like to more directly address the histories that have led to this particular moment that we reconsidering Confederate monuments in Richmond and beyond. In short, why is this happening now? The 2015 Charleston murders are an obvious starting point. But we would like to explore several political and social contexts that may reveal that this much more than a response to a single horrific act, but one that represents deeper structural change in American society, in how we see ourselves and our collective past.

The other three entries are by Modupe Labode, Julian Maxwell Hayter, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and I highly recommend reading all three of them – I definitely learned a lot! My entry, “Undercurrents of Opposition and the Catalyst for Change,” explores how the Black Lives Matter movement and the Civil War sesquicentennial created an environment of opposition into which the Charleston shooting exploded as a spark for action. An excerpt:

The Black Lives Matter movement was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in 2013, in the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. It began as a hashtag on social media, but quickly became a powerful organizing tool for local communities mobilizing to protest police shootings of unarmed Black people. In the summer of 2014, national attention focused on protests in the city of Ferguson, Missouri after Mike Brown was shot by a police officer. Mass protests broke out again in Baltimore, Maryland in April 2015, less than two months before the Charleston shooting, after Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained in the back of a police transport van. When Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston in an act of explicit white supremacist violence, he galvanized a movement that was ready to mobilize for change.

Click here to read the whole post.

The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA, as it appeared on April 20, 2018

Another academic year is winding down, and as always, I find myself looking backward and forward. This past June, I welcomed my baby daughter into the world, and at first the plan was to keep to a light professional load this year to give myself time to adjust to the reality of being a parent. But then the events in Charlottesville, Virginia happened, and suddenly I found myself with just about as much work as I could handle.

First came the interviews: with the Washington Post, Mic, U.S. News and World Report, The Art Newspaper, and several other outlets. Then I began a series of public talks. This past fall, I traveled to Newark, Delaware to speak at the University of Delaware, to Columbus, Ohio for the Southeastern College Art Conference, and to Washington, DC to visit American University. My travels in the spring included the College Art Association in Los Angeles, the Midwest Art History Society in Indianapolis, and a special symposium on the long history of iconoclasm in art at the University of Virginia. That last event brought me to Charlottesville, where I visited the sites that figured so prominently in the events of last August (special thanks to Jalane Schmidt for an informative and candid tour!).

PAFA Students in “American Sculpture” discuss plaster models of sculptures by Hiram Powers with Smithsonian curator Karen Lemmey

While keeping up with my work on monuments, I also had a full year of teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In the fall, I taught two sections of the first half of the survey (Prehistoric to Medieval), along with my “American Art to 1945” class. In the spring, I had two sections of the second half of the survey (Renaissance to Modern). But I also had a chance to fulfill a dream, teaching my first-ever class on the history of American sculpture! The scale of the class was intimate, with only eight students (most of whom were practicing sculptors), which meant plenty of opportunities for in-depth discussion and field trips to see sculpture in the round. Some of the highlights included a walking tour of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia and a lovely afternoon with Curator of American Sculpture Karen Lemmey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). I learned a lot while prepping the lectures, and my students’ enthusiasm made Wednesday afternoons one of the highlights of my week. Definitely a semester to remember!

Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia

But even as I reflect back fondly on the past year of teaching, I also look forward to putting away my lesson planning and purple grading pen for the next fifteen months, because I will be going on leave! I am thrilled to announce that I have been awarded the Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan Fellowship through the James Smithson Fellowship Program at the Smithsonian Institution for the 2018-2019 academic year. I’ll spend the year working on my book project, Monumental Crisis: Accident, Vandalism, and the Civil War Citizen Soldier and learning all about public policy so that I can develop solutions for communities grappling with their problematic monuments. I’ll be in residence at SAAM, and I’m looking forward to returning to a cubicle in the Fellows’ Office. My plan is to split my time between DC and New Jersey so that I can be with my family on weekends, and I’m working on a bucket list of monuments, cultural institutions, and other sites to visit while I’m in DC – hoping to make the most of every day that I’m down there!

Indianapolis Soldiers and Sailors Monument, April 2018

This brings me to one final point: lately, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to take my work on monuments in a bit more of an entrepreneurial direction. There’s a lot of work to be done to document the monumental landscape as it currently stands and to negotiate what to do with statues that no longer align with community values. I’d like to do more to help: giving public talks, writing for the mass market, and designing workshops to think through monumental issues. I’m not sure how all of this will look just yet, but I’m hoping that this fellowship year will help me to develop a clear strategy for putting some of these ideas into practice. To that end, watch this space for big changes. Over the next few months, I’m hoping to increase the frequency of my posts on this blog and to overhaul the entire site to foreground some of my strategies for public outreach. I hope you’ll come along on this journey with me, and as always, I welcome all suggestions and leads! I look forward to diving into my research full-time and rethinking my place in the current monument debates.

Elizabeth Keckley, c. 1870 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

For the third year in a row, the National Museum of Women in the Arts is asking cultural institutions and individuals to tweet the stories of women artists using the hashtag #5womenartists. This year, the museum is asking for a special focus on women artists of color, and my post today is dedicated to one of the most poignant stories in American material history: that of Elizabeth Keckley.

Born a slave in Virginia in 1818, Elizabeth Keckley was the daughter of an enslaved mother and her white enslaver. Put to work as a nursemaid at the age of four, Keckley’s childhood and young adulthood were filled with the violence and depredation of slavery. At the age of eighteen, she was beaten severely over the course of several weeks by a neighbor determined to break her spirit. When she was twenty-one, she bore a son, George, the product of a forced sexual relationship with Alexander M. Kirkland, a prominent white man.

But even as she experienced terrible brutality, Keckley learned the art of dressmaking, and became an accomplished seamstress. In 1847, her enslavers relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, and she sewed dresses for the family and for members of the community, for a fee. By 1855, she had earned enough money through her dressmaking to buy freedom for herself and for her son. In 1860, she moved back east, first to Baltimore, and soon after to Washington, DC. Soon, she was making dresses for the wives of some of the most powerful men in Washington, including Mary Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee, and Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis.

Purple velvet dress belonging to Mary Todd Lincoln, attributed to Elizabeth Keckley, c. 1861 (Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

In December 1860, the secession crisis preceding the Civil War began, and on March 4, 1861, the day of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inauguration, Elizabeth Keckley met Mary Todd Lincoln. The next day, Mrs. Lincoln appointed Keckley as her personal modiste, and over the next six years, Keckley stayed with Mrs. Lincoln as both a dressmaker and a confidante. While Mrs. Lincoln’s style tended toward the ostentatious, Keckley’s dresses for her were more streamlined, with clean lines and sophisticated details. It is difficult to attribute particular garments definitively to Keckley, as handmade garments in the nineteenth century did not include labels, but several existing gowns in major collections have been attributed to her. A quilt made by Keckley from scraps of Mrs. Lincoln’s dresses is in the Kent State University Museum.

On August 10, 1861, Keckley’s son George, who had enlisted in a white regiment in the Union Army, was killed in action. On February 20, 1862, the Lincolns’ 12-year old son, Willie, died in the White House, most likely from typhoid. Their shared sense of loss brought the two women closer together, and when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, Keckley was a source of strength and comfort for Mary through her very public grief.

Thomas Waterman Wood, A Bit of War History: The Contraband, oil on canvas, 1865 (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

While employed by the Lincoln White House, Keckley worked to improve the lives of “contrabands,” the name given by the Union Army to enslaved people who escaped to Union lines and offered support and allegiance to the army. In 1862, she founded the Contraband Relief Association to provide food and shelter to those in need. In 1864, the organization was re-christened the Ladies’ Freedmen and Soldiers’ Relief Association, in order to reflect its work with soldiers of the United States Colored Troops. Thanks to her prominence in Washington’s free black community and in political circles, Keckley was an effective advocate for soldiers and freedmen.

In 1868, Keckley wrote a book detailing her experiences in the Lincoln White House, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (available for free download on Google Books!). Many in the white community felt that the book revealed too much about Keckley’s relationship with the Lincolns, and after its publication, she and Mary Lincoln became permanently estranged. Her business declined, and she spent the last years of her life at the National Home for Destitute and Colored Women and Children, where she died in 1907.

Slavery had an enormous effect on the development of American art and material culture, denying access to the privileges of the art world to many generations of creative people. It is haunting to consider all that was lost over those years, and one wonders how these individuals, denied the access and encouragement they deserved, found an outlet for their artistic ideas. Elizabeth Keckley’s story provides one possible answer. She channeled her considerable skill into a trade through which she bought freedom for herself and her son, entered the most intimate circles of power in Civil War-era Washington, and advocated on behalf of the enslaved and the recently freed. Her story should be known wherever American history, art, and material culture are discussed.