ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the crucial role played by some acts of commemoration in anticipating, constructing and enshrining Winston Churchill's special relationship, an idea that the historian Jonathan Rose has identified as his 'most visionary political project'. It suggests that the twentieth-century construction of Anglo-American memorials, monuments, chapels and cemeteries did not just provide opportunities for the Churchillian myth of the 'special relationship' to be repeated and rehearsed. At root, the origins of Churchill's post-1945 Anglo-American myth lay in eighteenth-century cultural Anglo-Saxonism. Thomas Jefferson even suggested engraving the figures of legendary Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa on the newly conceived great seal of the United States. Churchill had a long-running interest in Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. In 1939, Churchill sat down at Chartwell to finish drafting his history of the American Civil War, he was able to tap an established and powerful current of British thought regarding Father Abraham.