Reclaiming Revolutionary Relics: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Used George Washington’s Objects to Understand the Civil War

Author

Abbi E. Smithmyer, West Virginia UniversityFollow

Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

History

Committee Chair

Jason Phillips

Committee Member

Melissa Bingmann

Committee Member

Brian Luskey

Committee Member

Jennifer Thornton

Committee Member

James Broomall

Abstract

By combining cultural, memory, and material culture studies, this dissertation examines the ways objects associated with George Washington became instruments within the proxy war over whether the United States or the Confederacy best represented the American Revolutionary era’s principal values of liberty and equality. Exploring monuments, statues, historic homes, relics, and mementoes, as well as antebellum speeches and schoolbooks, letters, diaries, military orders, newspapers, and memoirs, this work demonstrates how the relics linked to Washington and the nation’s founding shaped how the Civil War generation thought about America’s past.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States has once again brought the memory of George Washington and the American Revolution to the forefront. Although prominent filmmaker Ken Burns believes that “by going back and reinvesting some time in” America’s “origin story” we may be able to diminish the political divide in the United States today, this dissertation shows that the country’s most cherished national histories are not universally accepted.[1] By looking at the Revolutionary objects nineteenth-century Americans collected, cherished, and destroyed, we can learn a great deal about their cultural and political beliefs. These shifting responses throughout the Civil War era reveal that the memory placed on pieces of material culture has, and will always be, a point of contention.

[1] Vanessa Armstrong, “Ken Burns Says His New Documentary Forced Him to Revisit Everything He Thought He Knew About the American Revolution,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 13, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ken-burns-says-his-new-documentary-forced-him-to-revisit-everything-he-thought-he-knew-about-the-american-revolution-180987667/.

Recommended Citation

Smithmyer, Abbi E., "Reclaiming Revolutionary Relics: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Used George Washington’s Objects to Understand the Civil War" (2025). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 13068.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/13068