'Black flowers to the soldier's hallowed grave': Public and private commemoration of early American servicemen

In recent decades, scholars have increasingly investigated the ways in which Americans commemorate the past, both publicly and on a more personal level. These investigations have focused on two distinct lines of inquiry; namely, how and why Americans publicly memorialize wars and other tragic events, and what scholars can learn about a past community or its individual residents by examining a cemetery landscape. This study attempts to draw these two lines of inquiry together by surveying how military servicemen (specifically those who served in the American Revolution, War of 1812, and Civil War) are commemorated in municipal cemeteries.;Using the cemeteries of Portsmouth, New Hampshire as a case study, I examine representations of military service (both textual and iconographic) on historic grave markers to determine whether there are parallels between how local communities honored fallen soldiers and the way in which particular conflicts were commemorated on a national scale. The results of this survey demonstrate that, although allusions to military service and armed conflicts vary in form on historic grave markers, personal commemoration at grave sites in Portsmouth roughly conforms to national trends of war commemoration. Considering the temporal and geographic limits of this study, it is my hope that this work be seen as a starting point for additional survey to verify my findings and/or identify potential regional variations in the relationship between public and private commemoration of American servicemen and their wars.