$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5572-3

Published: Fall 2004

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Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction
Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh

The Civil War has never receded into the remote past in American life. The most momentous conflict in American history, it had a revolutionary social and political impact that continues to be felt today. The political firestorms of the 1980s and 1990s over the appropriateness of the Confederate battle flag flying over statehouses in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, for instance, demonstrate how deeply meaningful Civil War symbols remain in American politics, especially racial politics. The unveiling of Richmond's first and only statue to Abraham Lincoln in April 2003 brought forth a bevy of protesters. Although supporters of the life-size bronze sculpture of Lincoln and his son Tad emphasized the statue's symbolism for reconciliation, neo-Confederates waved signs bearing the slogan "Lincoln: Wanted for War Crimes." Indeed, in any given year since 1865 individuals and social groups have sought to legitimize claims, and even to redefine what is American, by evoking selective memories of the war. Such evocations have been—and continue to be—a powerful means of claiming membership in the nation as well as of denying others' claims to such membership.

This volume examines a variety of battles over the memory of the war during the last 135 years, finding in them important insights concerning our identities as individuals and as a nation. It recovers the racial and gender politics underlying numerous attempts to memorialize the war, provides new insights into how Lost Cause ideology achieved dominance in the late nineteenth century, and shows how contests over memories of the war were a vital part of politics during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the innovations of the volume is that it moves among a variety of cultural and political arenas—from public monuments to parades to soldiers' memoirs to political campaigns to textbook publishing to children's literature—in order to reveal important changes in how the memory of the Civil War has been employed in American life. By setting the politics of Civil War memory within this wide social and cultural landscape, it is able to recover not just the meanings of the war in various eras but also the specific processes by which those meanings have been created. Taken together, those cultural locations and processes form what Stuart McConnell has evocatively termed the "geography of Civil War memory."

That geography employs both literal and figurative dimensions involving physical and symbolic spaces. Processions, parades, and public ceremonies, for instance, have created theatrical public settings in which different social groups have asserted the legitimacy of their interpretations of the Civil War's meanings. Occurring in concrete physical settings, such ceremonies have also had important symbolic dimensions, as different groups have sought to affirm a specific language of memory attached to place. Similarly, the construction of Civil War monuments has involved not only a physical transformation of public space but also the creation and manipulation of a visual language of memory for specific ideological ends. Political campaigns, too, have employed the war's dramatic iconography as a legitimizing tool in public rallies and speeches. Finally, books have been both physical and symbolic spaces mapping out the contested historical and emotional terrain of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant's famous memoirs, late-nineteenth-century Southern textbooks, and children's Civil War fiction can all be seen as contributing to an ongoing argument over the war's meanings within American culture. At once material objects and symbolic spaces, such books have worked to connect individuals to larger regional or even national concerns.

Historians have not always linked the military and cultural history of the war, but this volume does so deliberately in order to produce new insights into the impact of the war within American life. The opening section of the book, for instance, focuses on the way the war's history was refought and reconfigured through the study of two military icons: General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee. Joan Waugh's essay on Grant's Personal Memoirs portrays the struggle of Grant and Northern veterans to keep the memory of the Union cause brightly lit even as the forces of reconciliation were dimming that light. In contrast, Gary W. Gallagher's essay demonstrates the success of Southern generals, and, later, Southern historians, to make the Confederate cause admirable through the deification of Lee. Both authors not only make clear the high stakes in the battle over the memory of the war but also reveal how book publishing became an arena in which that battle was fought.

The essays of James M. McPherson and Alice Fahs focus on books as an important location of Civil War memory. McPherson examines the largely successful effort by Southern textbook crusaders in the decades after the war to ease the bitter sting of defeat by replacing Northern versions of the war in schoolbooks. This crusade had significant repercussions for the way in which the history of the war was learned by later generations of Southerners. Surprisingly, the Northern press and public offered little opposition to the increasingly widespread positive view of the Confederate Lost Cause. In a study of popular children's war novels written both during and after the war, Fahs argues that a Northern embrace of Southern views of the war was in large part due to a prevailing racial ideology of masculinity, which emphasized the honor and courage of white soldiers on both sides.

Civil War monuments and public celebrations are the focus of two essays exploring how public commemorations have shaped collective memory and forged both a national and a sectional identity. In his essay on the politics of reunion, David W. Blight reveals that the establishment of Memorial Day centered around battles over the racialized meanings of Reconstruction in both the North and the South. Thomas J. Brown shows how a statue of John C. Calhoun, the brilliant advocate for Southern nationalism and a senator for South Carolina, became an embodiment of Lost Cause ideology by the time it was unveiled in the 1870s.

The next two essays turn explicitly to politics, offering new perspectives on how the Civil War affected the political landscape of the late nineteenth century. J. Matthew Gallman rescues an important figure from historical obscurity. Anna Dickinson, a young feminist firebrand for the Union and the first woman to speak to a joint session of Congress in 1864, played a significant role in the 1872 presidential election. Gallman shows how Dickinson's support of the liberal ticket headed by the newspaper editor Horace Greeley drew upon deeply contested memories of the war for the Northern public. Patrick J. Kelly's essay on veterans continues this examination of the war in the nation's political culture by focusing on the complex interplay between Northern veterans' patriotism, welfare demands, and the policies of the Republican Party. Both essays emphasize the power of evoking memories of the war to effect political agendas.

Contemporary concerns of race, class, and gender are showcased in the last essays of the book. LeeAnn Whites's piece chronicles how a 1930s monument honoring the courage of Missouri's Confederate soldiers became, by the 1960s, a symbol of racism and the center of debate over the appropriateness of such monuments in the late twentieth century. Jon Wiener's essay juxtaposes the planning and execution of the centennial of the Civil War from 1961 to 1965 against the profoundly unsettling period of American history driven by Cold War tensions and the second American civil rights revolution. Finally, in the epilogue Stuart McConnell provides an overview of the geography of memory in American culture, not only examining the variety of places where that memory has been constructed but also discussing the power politics underlying Americans' access to those important physical sites.

From 1865 to the present each new generation has actively reinterpreted the Civil War to support its own ideological agendas. As many of these essays reveal, only too often in the decades after the Civil War memories of that conflict were invoked to support racist agendas attempting to exclude African Americans from full participation in American life. In our own time, in contrast, it has become impossible to separate the history of slavery from the history of the Civil War era. Indeed, due to the concerted efforts of numerous groups who view the Confederate flag as a symbol of a slave regime rather than a part of a supposedly benign Southern "heritage," the flag has at long last been removed from the South Carolina statehouse. As that action reveals, and as this volume shows, the past is continually enlivened and renewed by the creativity of the present.