Coda

This chapter examines the paintings of John Frederick Peto, whose “letter rack” depictions constitute melancholic acts of remembering transacted through the arrangement of abandoned objects. Insofar as Peto theorizes memory through the genre of trompe l’oeil, he provokes questions concerning the extent to which recollection entails fabrication, and focused upon the insistence that such fabrication invariably turns upon sensations of loss. As Peto’s letter racks move toward subject matter relating to the Civil War, his questions come increasingly to involve embroilments of memory and memorialization, and in ways that offer an entrée into Emerson’s “Fortune of the Republic,” an essay that anticipates future acts of remembering undertaken by other generations of Americans confronted with the challenge of recalling the War with integrity.