Xanthus Smith: Marine Painting and Nationhood

This dissertation is the first study dedicated to the Civil War marine paintings of Xanthus Smith (1839-1929), a nineteenth-century American artist who served in the Union Navy and depicted the naval war for over fifty years. In 1862, Smith was stationed in Port Royal, South Carolina, where he witnessed the Port Royal Experiment: a groundbreaking federal initiative to transition the slaves of the surrounding Sea Islands to citizenship and a free labor cotton economy. Smith\u27s earliest wartime paintings document the dawn of freedom in the Sea Islands, but he eventually ceased to picture the war\u27s sociopolitical impact in favor of heroic martial imagery that masked the Civil War’s racial unrest, political transformations, and violence. Building on the scholarship of David Blight and Kirk Savage, I examine Smith’s work through the interpretive lens of Civil War memory, arguing that he participated in a culture of remembrance that jettisoned the fraught legacy of emancipation to facilitate the reunion of white Americans. This project draws on Smith’s unpublished paintings, drawings, and archival materials to prompt a fresh consideration of race and Civil War memory in nineteenth-century American art, thereby enriching the understanding of artistic responses to the Civil War and its aftermath