Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (review)

This informative monograph concentrates on one of the most important ways in which Americans remembered the Civil War, their disposition of the dead bodies that the war left in its wake. Neff's approach to the topic provides a useful perspective on the sectional dynamics of Civil War commemoration and identifies valuable opportunities for examining other transformations wrought by the war.

Neff focuses on the Civil War dead as a political and administrative problem. His fine introductory survey of death and interment during the war observes that the war "challenged fundamentally the social rituals and mores associated with death" (11), but his elaboration of that argument centers on the extent to which individual deaths became a foundation for national identity. His chapter on the spectacular, often-studied example of the Lincoln obsequies is indicative of his emphasis. Ably analyzing a wide range of sources—including popular prints, the prose and poetry of Walt Whitman, and especially commemorative sermons—Neff highlights the collective effort to unite the North and seal its claim to define the United States. Though alert to the religious strategies of this initiative, he is not particularly interested in the meanings of the new nationhood, or other implications of Civil War death, for American religious life. Neither in this chapter nor in his later assertions that the deaths of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were pivotal to the rise of the Lost Cause does he seek to engage social-science scholarship on the structures of nineteenth-century nationalism. The same is true of his more original examinations of the federal military-cemetery system and its Confederate counterparts that occupy most of the rest of the book. Neff does not dwell on the military cemetery as a milestone in postwar state formation or the place of that institution in the trajectory of late nineteenth-century cemetery development. His concern is primarily with treatment of the dead as a venue of sectional relations.

Neff understandably frames his main conclusion around David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), one of the most acclaimed recent works on American history. Contrary to Blight's account of Union commemoration as a long, contested retreat from the egalitarian promise of the war, Neff acknowledges that federal military cemeteries were relatively progressive in their racial integration but declares that, on the whole, northern policies for the war dead "had no very advanced position from which to retreat" in the treatment of African Americans (214). He also reports that federal burial policies showed less willingness to honor the Confederacy than Blight found elsewhere in the postwar North, which white southerners answered with more resistance to reconciliation than historians have noted. Whatever the corrective value of these claims, they tend to limit the book to a narrower importance than it deserves. Blight powerfully suggests that America might recover the momentum for racial justice embedded in the immediate memory of the war, but Neff responds that the conflation of the Union and the nation inhibited the achievement of "nonsectional nationalism" (241). That theme will stir little excitement in the United States today.

When Neff escapes from the historiographical shadow of Blight and reflects on the pervasive, profound challenge of death in the Civil War—a challenge that extended across the sections as much as it divided them—he points toward a vital line for future exploration. Scholars who follow that line through literature, religion, political science, and other fields will benefit from his thoughtful and assiduous research.