Thesis (M.S.)--Eastern Illinois University. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-49).

John Brown Gordon was committed to the mission of national reconciliation. He knew that the South would have to embrace the North to repair the devastation of the Civil War. Driven by dedication to public service after the war, he worked through his positions in governmental offices to help the South. As his public life slowed he began work on a lecture aimed at making him a peacemaker, a missionary for reconciliation. His purpose was to provide a broad, nationalistic perspective which created a common vantage point that would allow both Northerners and Southerners to derive pride and honor from their participation in the Civil War. The lecture, "The Last Days of the Confederacy," became very popular in a short period of time, and made Gordon one of the most requested speakers of the Southern Lyceum Program and Slayton Lyceum Program. The purpose of this critical interpretation of Gordon's lecture is to account for the effectiveness of the rhetorical elements and strategies in the work. The analysis will be based on Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm. Narratives dominate the content and structure of speech; narratives provide a way of ordering and presenting a view of the world through descriptions of a situation - -the act of storytellingthe format Gordon chose in creating the lecture. After drawing conclusions from application of the narrative paradigm I will focus on identifying and evaluating Gordon's rhetorical vision, which is based in Ernest Bormann's fantasy-theme theory. Finally, due to the synecdochal nature of the narratives I will use Kenneth Burke's four master tropes literature to fully interpret the various aspects of the narrative, which complements the initial mission of narrative criticism. In "The Last Days of the Confederacy," Gordon masterfully uses anecdotes from his experiences in the Civil War to create narrative sequences, which construct a strategy of transformative discourse. A typical sequence would start with an ingratiary tactic in which Gordon, in his eloquent manner, would describe a Northern character, scene, or theme and juxtapose it to another story from the South. The purpose of this sequence is to generate irony, creating a dialectic between the two stories, which, at the surface, seem to be opposed. His third step, then, was to use that dialectic to point to the commonalities between the North and the South. This he would do by illustrating an American trait, skill, or value. The result would be a major theme demonstrating a national value or belief to add strength to his existing compendium of themes, such as unity, fraternity, and brotherhood - -all tools to salve the process of reconciliation of conflict with face-saving for both. / Graduation date: 1994

This study examines the evolution of the popular images of John Brown and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. It begins by analyzing the historiography of each man. The second and third chapters are biographies of each man. The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters examine the popular images of the two men in print media, visual media, and monuments. This thesis concludes with appendices which contain reproductions of songs, photographs, and paintings referred to in the chapters. This study finds that the myth of the Lost Cause has kept Thomas Jackson's popular image consistently positive and heroic since his death in 1863. At the same time, this myth has contributed to an ever-changing image of Brown, though other issues, such as race and terrorism, have played significant roles as well. Brown has at various times been considered a madman, a saint, and merely a product of his times. Because the Lost Cause continues to pervade popular memory of the Civil War, Jackson's image is unlikely to change quickly. Because race and the fear of terrorism continue to pervade American society, Brown's image is likely to remain controversial.

This paper looks at three significant instances of the representation of abolitionist martyrdom in nineteenth-century America to first sketch the abolitionist discourse and its varied conceptualizations of martyrdom and second question the rationale and success of this strategy for manumitting slaves. Accordingly, I start with Brown, who (with help from sympathetic northerners and the megaphone of the Associated Press) appealed to the martyrological tradition in order to transform his paramilitary failure at Harper’s Ferry into a powerful symbol of his own abolitionist righteousness over and against the state’s iniquity. Though the superficial differences between Brown and arch-sentimentalist Harriet Beecher Stowe have discouraged their comparison, a look at the logic of martyrdom reveals a similar strategy at work in both Brown’s martyrization and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which makes death an argument for the manumission of slaves. I argue that this hugely successful novel reveals the potency of martyrological thinking in 19th-century America as it also reveals martyrdom and its logic to be the foundation of sentimentalism like Stowe’s. Finally, I look at the speeches and nonfiction of Frederick Douglass to argue that his own martyrization of John Brown is different than what we see in Brown and Stowe because it provokes change rather than validating abolitionism that already exists. To various degrees, these writers seem aware that there may be a problem in the rhetorical use of martyrdom against the putatively secular state; they consequently employ different strategies for negotiating the meaninglessness of suffering and death with the soteriological and eschatological assumptions of their day. These negotiations reveal the extent to which martyrdom could be taken seriously as a hammer of abolitionism by different authors and thus also indicate the degree to which martyrdom can be taken seriously as a political solution whatsoever. Ultimately, I want to argue that martyrdom and its logic are at best dubious when applied to secular politics precisely because it relies upon the analogy to Jesus Christ as savior, which cannot hold outside Christianity. Simply put, the death of a mortal cannot register eschatologically and, more importantly, death does not make a cogent argument for anything. Instead, martyrdom is preaching to the choir par excellance; whether the choir is Christian, abolitionist, or something else, martyrological appeals do not grow its membership, as martyrologists since early modernity have assumed.