| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Franny Nudelman. John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. x, 226. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
It has long been a staple of Civil War historiography that the blood sacrifice of the soldiers—over 600,000, North and South—provided an organic element that the United States had heretofore lacked: a cement to the unity of the nation. In this book, Franny Nudelman sets out to historicize the notion that "violence regenerates": that bloodshed is "the necessary unrivaled means of re-energizing our commitment to national life" (p. 2). Such legends, she argues, obscure both the horrors of war and the role of state-sponsored violence in "disciplining a national public" (p. 11). The power to regenerate lies not in death but in cultural constructions of death.	1
Nudelman finds a variety of meanings in Civil War constructions of death. John Brown's death was a seminal event in the creation of a wartime nationalism that relied on individual self-sacrifice. The song "John Brown's Body," which celebrates both the decay of Brown's physical being and the immortality of his soul, encouraged citizens and soldiers to believe that the losses they suffered would revitalize the national community. Brown's African American co-conspirators met a different fate: buried at the site of the gallows, John Copeland's body was disinterred by medical students and dissected. In one of her most compelling chapters, Nudelman contends that postmortem dissection, the fate of many African American bodies in the nineteenth century, deprived blacks, even in death, of self-ownership, undercut the rituals that gave death its redemptive power, and was used by a pseudo-scientific community of ethnographers to reinforce notions of racial inferiority.	. . .

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