Americans Remember Their Civil War

In June 2015, the waning days of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the governor of South Carolina, an Indian American woman, asked the legislature to approve measures that would remove the Confederate flag from State House grounds. The Civil War began in South Carolina more than 150 years before, and it would be gratifying to think the battle for Civil War memory ended there when the flag came down a few weeks later. This victory seemed hollow; nine African American men and women lay dead-pastors, grandmothers, and others-gunned down as they prayed in a historic Charleston church; that single act prompted this request. The accused shooter's social media accounts demonstrated his devotion to white supremacy and the Lost Cause-Confederate Civil War memory. In response to his actions, other states rejected Confederate symbols. The Lost Cause came under attack in places as varied as Stone Mountain, Georgia, home to the largest statuary of the Lost Cause, and Bowdoin College in Maine with its Jefferson Davis Prize. A new phase in the contest over Civil War memory between the Lost Cause and the Union Cause-how federal supporters remembered the Civil War-had begun.
When Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner proclaimed that "the past is never dead. It's not even past," he might have been speaking about how Americans remember the Civil War. Nothing else can explain why Americans contest the Civil War and its memory one hundred and fifty years after the war ended. To understand how Americans remembered a war they cannot remember, you must understand memory. Memory is about what individuals remember of their lived experiences, it is about how men and women come together to make sense of what they remember, and finally it is about how people with no lived experience of an event remember. Since the Civil War ended one hundred and fifty years ago, what today is called Civil War memory represents the views of those who have no individual memory of the conflict.
Everyone has experience with individual memory; however, this study is about how groups remember. Both those whose members experienced what they are remembering-collective memory-and groups whose members have no individual memory because they were not witnesses to the events they are remembering-historical memory. Though sometimes used interchangeably, for the purpose of this study these terms represent distinct types of memories. Similarly, scholars defined other important aspects of Civil War memory, public and popular memory, in many different ways. In this book, public memory refers to memory in public spaces, including monuments and battlefields. Similarly, popular memory denotes memory in popular culture, including movies and television.
All memory, individual, collective, historical, public, or popular, represents the past in the present, if for no other reason than a memory involves past events recalled in the present. What happened to an individual has its roots a single, definite event with a point in time: its interpretation affected by the conditions of the individual's life and society when he or she recalls the specific episode. An American who lived through the Civil War remembers events from that period, but their current circumstances shaped and influenced their memory. An amputee's physical infirmity defined his or her battlefield memories; a widow framed the wartime home front in light of her economic struggles in the postwar world. Moreover, all memory is shaped by the social and cultural contexts of those who remember, both before the war and how society changed in its aftermath. The same soldier recalled his wartime experiences limited by his ability to describe the agony he suffered because of his idea of what a man should endure without complaining defined by society before the war; the widow in light of what society believed a woman can and should be. These men and women's memories reflected their antebellum social and cultural context, but the war and its aftermath challenged some of these ideas. After the war, women engaged in public acts related to memory; before the war society defined their place as at home in the domestic sphere. A society that demanded men to be whole changed its idea of what a man should be in a postwar world with thousands of amputees. When this amputee joined a veterans' organization and the widow a women's organization, they helped create a collective memory of the Civil War. As part of their legacy, the men and women who supported the Blue (Union Cause) and the Gray (Lost Cause) created a collective memory of the Civil War, one that they shared with people who had not lived through this conflict, and this became the historical memory for successor generations.
These same processes affected historical memory-the memory of those who did not live through the war: in this case, their present, far removed from the war they were remembering. Not surprisingly, historians played a critical role in creating historical memory, acting as referees among the competing collective memories of the conflict. Making this task more challenging, Confederate supporters understood that they were part of an ongoing contest over memory and created extensive archives to chronicle their recollections, a material edge in the battle for historical memory. Reinforcing the role of collective memory, the first professional historians in the late nineteenth century, who started the process of articulating the Civil War's historical memory, echoed the disparate views of the Civil War generation. Later generations with no direct connection to the war, including historians and the broader public, responded to life in their present, including anxieties about wars won and lost, union and nation, and the changing landscape of race in the United States.
Imagine a World War I soldier who found inspiration in former Confederate soldiers' memoirs, even if his grandfather fought for the Union. His president, Woodrow Wilson, a professional historian, born into a family of Confederate supporters, advanced efforts to honor Confederate soldiers as heroic Americans in his popular historical studies. The soldier's son questioned the value of a war for Union if the industrial nation that emerged from this bloodletting accepted the gross inequities that culminated in the Great Depression. Decades later, the soldier's granddaughter applauded the end of segregation during the civil rights movement and remembered a war that ended slavery but not inequality. When she wrote a book on the Civil War, it chronicled Civil War women, a subject previously ignored by a predominantly male academic community because she came of age in an era when women rejected their exclusion from the historical narrative. Eventually, the woman's daughter observed the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the twenty-first century and wondered: did the Civil War solve anything? As a result of the relationship between the past and the present, Civil War memory continues to evolve long after the men and women who remembered it have passed into memory.
As part of this survey on how Americans remember the Civil War, or Civil War memory, I will attempt to answer a few important questions. First and perhaps foremost, why do Americans remember the war differently? It is certainly not for want of material to study and form a consensus; there are tens of thousands of books written about the Civil War; many of these volumes were by the men and the women who witnessed the war. Moreover, there have been winners and losers in the battle for Civil War memory. In contrast to the well-known saying that winners write the history, for a very long time, the losers won the memory battle. Why was the Lost Cause so much more successful, more memorable, than the Union Cause? When and why did the Union Cause finally make an impression on Americans' Civil War memory? Finally, does the evolution of Civil War memory in the past tell us about its future? It may seem odd talking about the future of memory, but it certainly is astonishing that at this late date, at the end of the sesquicentennial, Americans still do not agree on how they remember the Civil War.
There is no one way Americans remember their Civil War. The Civil War generation experienced the war differently and had distinct individual memories of these events. As a result, these men and women created opposing collective memories-a Confederate and Union Cause. Moreover, even when they lived through the same events, they perceived them differently. A Confederate supporter remembered the U.S. government's wrong-headed effort to stop peaceful secession. If slavery mattered, it was about radical abolitionists' attempts to interfere with this beneficial institution. Confederates recalled a defensive struggle to establish an independent nation in the face of a savage Union assault. When this failed, they rejected any notion that they were wrong; the memory of an honorable defeat against overwhelming odds sanctified their memories and justified their wartime losses. Similarly, federal supporters looked back on a war that suppressed a rebellion, preserved the Union, and freed the slaves. Union victory validated their cause and their wartime sacrifices. When the men and women of the Civil War generation passed, succeeding generations selected aspects of these collective memories that resonated in their present. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Lost Cause met the needs of contemporary times; in the second half, the civil rights movement and challenges to the racial status quo meant that more Americans rediscovered the Union Cause. Ultimately, what Americans remember about their Civil War past is more about the challenges of the present suggesting that Civil War memory will continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.
For the men and women for whom the war was a lived experience, it was the postwar era that cemented these different memories. Confederate and Union supporters organized separate groups that created the war's collective memories; some formed veterans' organizations, others women's groups. Not surprisingly these men and women did not articulate a memory that included any idea that their respective causes were wrong or that their generation's sacrifices were meaningless; there should be no expectation that they would do so. Though defeated during the war, and their slave society destroyed, Confederate supporters still believed that they were right on many of the war's issues. In their mind, brave men and women persevered in a noble cause against overwhelming odds for independence and states' rights, a cause that had nothing to do with slavery. Memory was not only about the past but the present, particularly for Confederates, who used their collective memory-the Lost Cause-to rebuild their shattered society. Similarly, loyal Unionists felt that victory validated their efforts and their cause. In their mind, brave men and women persevered in a noble cause for Union and freedom, a cause that had everything to do with slavery. African Americans of the Civil War generation participated in the efforts and created their own collective memory that would be "remembered" later when racial attitudes changed.
Ironically, while white and black Unionists emerged victorious in the real war, federal supporters lost the war in memory. Successive generations who did not live through the war remembered the war by fashioning a historical memory based on selectively emphasizing specific collective memories of the Civil War generation and forgetting others. In this instance, the Lost Cause won the contest over Civil War memory during the first half of the twentieth century. Initially, it appealed to Americans facing the social and cultural strains of a transition to an industrial society at the end of the nineteenth century. Later, the needs of a nation that had risen to world power status, and the subsequent wars of the twentieth century, prompted Americans to embrace Lost Cause notions emphasizing Americans of both sections' courage and military prowess. Ironically, the people who rejected American militarism, particularly after World War I, accepted aspects of the Lost Cause arguing that the Civil War was not worth the sacrifice in blood and treasure. Similarly, Americans in the first half of the twentieth century who disparaged the industrial nation that emerged after the Civil War praised the agrarian society destroyed by Union victory. Race mattered in both cases. First, white Americans saw no moral issue with slavery because they agreed that racially inferior African Americans benefited from this institution. Second, some Americans renounced a war that cost white American lives that destroyed an idealized agrarian society. In contrast, African Americans who rejected the notion of slavery's benevolence and the Lost Cause kept the Union Cause alive, even when many white Americans had forgotten it.
After World War II, it was African American actions that shaped Civil War memory; in this case, it was about contemporary times and the civil rights movement. Ironically, the critical turning point occurred during the Cold War when the state of the Union led some Americans to promote a more unitary Civil War memory to unite Americans against the threat of communism, which supported the Lost Cause. At the same time, the civil rights movement challenged the racial status quo and prompted some Americans to examine the racial assumptions that facilitated the acceptance of the Lost Cause, including the morality of slavery. When the present changed, the memory of the past did also. Once Americans began to accept the notion that slavery was wrong, the Union Cause and the effort to destroy this institution resonated in some Americans' memory. As time passed, historians realized that the Lost Cause was more memory than history, consciously created by Confederate supporters. Despite this awareness, a generation passed before historians began to broaden Civil War history and memory to include African Americans, women, immigrants, and others as part of a broader challenge to traditional Civil War memory.
It took a long time for historians, and anyone else, to understand the difference between history and memory and even longer for people to understand how the Civil War in public spaces shapes memory. Many of the issues surrounding the aftermath of the Charleston shooting involve public memory, such as the flag at South Carolina's Statehouse. In many ways, public memory is a bridge between collective and historical memory. The Civil War generation created material artifacts, such as the monuments and preserved battlefields as part of their collective memory efforts. John Bodnar in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992) made a critical distinction that explains the Civil War in public memory. He identified two types of public memory, vernacular (local grassroots) and official (state/nationally sanctioned) memory. Civil War public memory originated in the local grassroots actions of Confederate and Union supporters. Initially, people built monuments for the dead who never returned home, partly to assuage the grief of those who survived memorializing a particular cause, be it the Confederacy's Lost Cause, or the Union's Won Cause. The failure to build monuments to black soldiers seemed to reinforce amnesia about their wartime efforts. Once the Civil War generation passed away, the next generation continued to build monuments; the United Daughters of the Confederacy led Lost Cause efforts. These women's actions reflected their present. Women wanted to play a more active role in politics, and turn-of-the-century social convention limited women's roles; defending the Lost Cause represented an acceptable way to engage public issues. In contrast, battlefield preservation efforts occurred decades after the war ended, partly because the idea of commemorating the dead seemed more urgent than preserving where they died. Eventually, the federal government managed many of these sites and used them in an attempt to create an official Civil War memory; however, this has not always been successful due to the strength of sectionalism in vernacular memory. Recent efforts to introduce the idea that slavery caused the war met resistance at national battlefield parks by those who remember a Lost Cause that had nothing to do with owning human beings.
People who remembered the Lost Cause have little to complain about in popular memory. Here too, the Lost Cause seemed more successful than the Union Cause for much of the twentieth century. Since many more people saw movies or television programs about the Civil War than visited battlefields, this may constitute their most vivid memory of the conflict. Partly, the success of the Lost Cause reflected its broader success in American memory; however, the Confederate cause often resonated in popular culture. Gone with the Wind's (1939) success as a best-selling novel and one of the most popular movies of all times may have been as much about its popularity as a romantic melodrama than its portrayal of the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory. It place in memory may be about what happened after millions of American saw this movie. To these men and women that became their Civil War memory. In contrast, the first movie that portrayed the African American Civil War experience, Glory (1989), debuted almost one hundred and twenty-five years after the war ended suggesting that the Lost Cause dominated popular memory long after the civil rights movement challenged the memory of the Lost Cause.
The television documentary The Civil War made the war more popular in the last decade of the twentieth century; its emphasis on race and slavery, reunion and union, captured the state of Civil War memory at the end of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, at the Civil War's sesquicentennial, the emergence of the Internet and social media allowed more Americans to weigh in on the subject making a unitary memory of the Civil War impossible. Among the present issues affecting how Americans remember the Civil War are discontent against wars on terror, distrust of the federal government, and dismay over the election of the first black president. More recently, the Charleston shooting began a new phase in Civil War memory wars when more Americans reject the Lost Cause and its symbols in public spaces. In response, supporters of the Lost Cause rallied to their colors as officials removed their flag and other Confederate icons. Since the Civil War is a mirror in which people see themselves and their times, this is not the last word on Civil War memory.
Identifying how Americans remember the Civil War is a complex process particularly since this study covers almost one hundred and fifty years of American memory. Initially, I studied memory theory to identify the types of memory relevant to the discussion of the Civil War; making this theory more accessible represents one goal of this study. Later, I examined scholarly studies on Civil War memory, a recent development in the study of this era. Chapters 1 and 2 reflected my assessment of scholarly studies on the Civil War generations' collective memory. While there has always been an effort to reduce memory to Northern and Southern, this study assesses it based on the memory of Confederate and Union supporters. The presence of federal supporters in the South and Confederate sympathizers in the North explains why this book describes how the partisans of the Confederate and federal government remember. When historians assess memory, they feel compelled to say that all Northerners or all Southerners did not agree on the memory of the war, why would they? They did not agree during the war. Therefore, it would be surprising if they did in its aftermath. Especially problematic, the unity of white Confederate supporters has been translated as a unity among Southerners and conflated with Southern identity; this is true only if African Americans born in southern states are not considered Southerners.
Starting in Chapter 3, and continuing in Chapters 4 and 7, I explored historical memory-a narrative shaped by the present based on one of the streams of the Civil War's collective memory. In some cases, I relied on what historians found about Civil War memory; in others I assessed scholarly studies as memory acts; scholars made choices about the subjects they studied and the sources they used, for example, a generation that desired national unity focused on reconciliationist narratives from the Civil War generation. In Chapter 4, scholars lead the way in questioning the racial assumptions that allowed such an uncritical acceptance of the Lost Cause in American Civil War memory. This sensitivity manifested itself in a number of ways including a renewed interest in African American military units. Chapters 5 and 6 relied on a recent explosion of studies that assessed what and how Americans remember the Civil War in public and popular memory.
Public memory brings us back to a Charleston church on a summer night. It was likely no coincidence that the church assaulted by the Charleston gunman played a major role in fighting black slavery and advocating black freedom in the decades before the war and since. Perhaps the way Americans should remember the Civil War, one beyond causes either won or lost, is that these nine Americans were only the latest victims of the failure to remember the Civil War, the nation's greatest cataclysm.