In Memory of the Best: The Classical Commemoration of American Presidents in the Nineteenth Century

This dissertation “In Memory of the Best: The Classical Commemoration of American Presidents in the Nineteenth Century” investigates the function of classical references in the public funeral rites for three citizen-soldier presidents, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Ulysses Grant. This work reveals patterns in the ways that Americans employed classical allusions and models in the three major rites of presidential commemoration—the eulogy, the funeral procession, and the monumental tomb—to reveal the significance of classicism to nineteenth-century Americans’ political thought and culture. This dissertation proposes that these three rituals established the Presidential Memorial Cult (PMC), a cohesive but adaptable ceremonial foundation on which Americans interpreted the presidency, defined their national identity, and conveyed narratives of American exceptionalism. The first chapter explores Americans’ access to and understanding of classical texts during the nineteenth century through three case studies of George Washington, George Bancroft, and Richard Greener, whose classical knowledge was intrinsic to their self-image, their political success, and their understanding of American history. The second chapter examines the many classical allusions in the eulogies commemorating George Washington in 1799-1800. It contends that Americans used their classical knowledge to justify public funerals as a republican ritual and to establish Washington as the ideal republican “citizen-soldier,” whose example all future citizens and presidents should emulate. The third chapter compares the Roman triumph and the Roman noble funeral procession to Jackson’s funeral procession in Washington, D.C., in 1845. This chapter reveals the partisan nature of presidential funerals and argues that Democratic memorialists sought to obscure Jackson’s controversial legacy by portraying him as an imperator whose military success and popularity, far from endangering the republic, ensured its defense from both internal and external foes. The fourth chapter analyzes the funeral ceremonies for Grant in 1885, and the fifth chapter examines the twelve-year period in which New York City designed and built his elaborate neoclassical tomb. These chapters contend that Grant’s commemorations gave rise to a new presidential paradigm, which this author has called the salvator, that allowed them to combine together both images of the citizen-soldier and imperator and deploy them as part of a new understanding of the president as the Union’s savior. This salvator paradigm was sufficiently adaptable so that his many memorialists, whether they supported a Unionist, Emancipationist, or Reconciliationist memory of the Civil War, could employ it to attempt to unify a very racially and politically divided nation around his memory. Signs that classicism’s significance was fading, however, began to appear at Grant’s commemorations: classical allusions in his eulogies were much rarer than in the antebellum period, and architectural professionals and members of the public now questioned whether a classical design was appropriate for a modern American president. Classical influence persisted in the visual arts and architecture into the twentieth century, but classical ideals and allusions receded from political rhetoric and ideology as the twentieth century progressed. The conclusion argues that the classical Presidential Memorial Cult of the nineteenth century left a lasting legacy still visible in the structures and themes of contemporary presidential funeral rites. The classical content of the Presidential Memorial Cult, however, has been stripped away, and in its absence, today’s presidential funeral rites have become increasingly militaristic with little opportunity for civilian participation.