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Article Excerpt
Near dawn on 21 August 1863, Missouri "bushwhackers" set ablaze Lawrence, Kansas, a stronghold of regional antislavery sentiments. By ten o'clock 143 citizens-men, children, and freedmen--were dead. News of the attack immediately spread nationwide, and Lawrence became known as an archetype of the worst side of the U.S. Civil War: guerrilla combat. Local and national literature on the town's history reflects a birth through destruction and the deaths of innocents. Despite the national significance placed on the community's violent past, the memories reified in the town's landscape are ambivalent.
Lawrence's memorialization is significant in two respects. First, it offers an example of how American landscape and memory reflect violence against citizens. Second, it exemplifies how selective memory, expressed through the landscape, conflicts with written history. Owen Dwyer argues that "the narrative content of monuments reflects the types of archival materials that survive, the intentions of their producers, and contemporary memory politics" (2004, 422). Lawrence's historians have produced a narrative that contradicts the landscape.
My concern here is the memorialized landscape and its representation of a pair of guerrilla events that shook the early town in 1856 and 1863. Scholars have consistently asserted that the memorialized landscape is a significant reification of collective memory, sense of place, and community identity and values (Lowenthal 1975, 1985; Foote 1997). They have also shown, however, that memorials are fraught with the issues of power and questionable authenticity that direct their meaning and that of the overall landscape (Harvey 1979; Peet 1996; Foote, Toth, and Arvay 2000; Mitchell 2000; Stangl 2003). The memorialized landscape represents only a version of the past yet reflects a public identity with it. It is the product of economic and political structures placed in the hands of a few people.
LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY
Materializing our intangible memories of events and people is one of the principal uses of the landscape and a fundamental social, or cultural, action. As Yi-Fu Tuan wrote, "It is an essential characteristic of being human that we feel the urge to reify experience" (1980, 462). David Lowenthal submitted that communities remember the past in this way to "make the past intelligible in the light of present circumstances" (1975, 27). Those who build and fund memorialized landscapes intend them to symbolize an unquestioned identity and collective memory for their respective audiences. They "appear ... above political bias and worthy of civic admiration" (Dwyer 2004, 423). Going back to Lowenthal: "What previous groups identify and sanctify as their pasts become historical evidence about themselves. ... We perceive the past through artifacts, physical traces, and objects in the landscape that we believe endured from earlier times, or 'are old'" (1979, 103-108). This, of course, makes a necessity of our cultural ruins. Though seemingly "ordinary," they possess critical cultural meaning about our past communities and our modern relationship with those histories (Lewis 1979; Jackson 1980).
The landscape is a product of our activities and simultaneously becomes an explanation of community history and values, regardless of a more popular and/or contemporary social memory (Harvey 1979; Cosgrove 1988; Peet 1996; Mitchell 2000). As representations of the past, monuments often come imbued with a set of values that belong to only a few people. Authenticity is such a difficult proposition to achieve that many scholars argue that all traditions are selective, or "invented," to some degree (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Bowden 1992; Johnson 1994; DeLyser 1999; Conforti 2001; Schnell 2003). The social critic Raymond Williams claimed that many a tradition is "an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification" (1977, 115). This, according to Natalie Davis and Randolph Starn, is really substituting one memory for another (1989, 2). Kenneth Foote discussed this proposition by discussing the "land shape" of memory and tradition (1997). In his analysis, instances and places scarred by tragedy, such as the Alamo, Gettysburg, Oklahoma City, or the World Trade Center, often go through a metamorphosis of meaning to be seen as places of heroism and sacrifice despite their more complex histories.
Beyond compromising historical authenticity, a second consequence of selective memory is actively forgetting the past through this selection and memorialization. Although this process seems paradoxical, it is done quite easily. Pierre Nora divided memory into two camps: the tangible lieux de memoire and the intangible milieux de memoire (1989, 7). He claimed that memorializing and making the past tangible releases us from continuing the cognitive practice of memory and instruction of the past. The responsibility to prompt memory is passed on to the very structures we build.
Lawrence is doubly forgetting in its memorialization. First, active memorialization has released the community from remembering its past holistically. Second, the memory of frontier life has overshadowed the sacrifice and honorable nature of the city's abolitionists who died for that cause. Race and slavery are not discussed on the landscape; nor is the landscape shaped in a way that makes it loud and clear who any heroes may have been. The result is a landscape that loses its power as a special piece of collective memory and identity.
LAWRENCE'S BEGINNINGS AND ITS HISTORICAL RECORD
During the mid-nineteenth century, no economic, political, or cultural question in America loomed larger than slavery. The frontier territories were central to this debate, for their emergence into statehood continually shifted the representation of proslavery and antislavery interests in Washington, D.C. Federal efforts to mediate this process, such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, failed to create an accord on this aspect of the country's westward expansion. All the while the issue of slavery further polarized regional politics. The Kansas-Nebraska Act offered frontier settlers "popular sovereignty," or the right to vote, for the establishment of slavery in their respective territories (McPherson 1988). Kansas became critical to the struggle to end slavery because, unlike Nebraska, it had at least some agricultural land suitable for plantation agriculture along the Missouri and Kansas Rivers and the territory's eastern border. The existence of slavery throughout the nation could come to a head if voters established Kansas as a free state for African Americans.
Migrants from the North and the South started pouring into Kansas in 1854 to help establish it as a state that would represent their view of slavery in the U.S. Congress. One group from Massachusetts, the New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC), founded Lawrence as a focus for its abolitionist cause in 1854, and the town quickly became a flashpoint for the whole region over the slavery question. Funding for both the settlement and its name came from the Massachusetts capitalist Amos A. Lawrence--although he never lived there--who made his money through inheritance and as a textile commission agent. Also in the group were several individuals whose lives would be significant in Kansas's early years, including its first governor, Charles Robinson.
A majority of the antislavery migrants to the new frontier actually came from the Old Northwest (the area that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota, also called the "Northwest Territory"). Much of their fight, however, was over personal liberties and economic opportunities, not necessarily the abolition of slavery as a moral cause (Etcheson 2004). These northern migrants in Kansas thought that permitting slavery on the frontier would infringe...
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