Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (review)

Since the 1990s, Gary Gallagher has established himself as a one-man Civil War cottage industry. He's produced a substantial body of work focusing on the military history of the Confederacy, edited a line of distinguished Civil War books for the University of North Carolina Press, served as a lecturer for the "Great Courses" audio series, and shows up regularly on the symposium circuit. He's well positioned to succeed James McPherson as the dean of active Civil War historians.

In Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten, Gallagher takes on a theme that has become increasingly central to his work—Civil War memory—and extends it into the realm of recent popular culture. Focusing principally on Hollywood movies, he delineates four main interpretive threads: 1) the familiar "Lost Cause" tradition that casts the Confederate war effort as heroic but doomed to be crushed by sheer numbers; 2) a "Union Cause" tradition that sees the war as an affirmation of republican values; 3) an "Emancipation Cause" tradition that asserts the destruction of slavery as the only truly redemptive dimension of the conflict; and 4) and a "Reconciliation Cause" tradition that places less emphasis on divisive wartime (or postwar) conflicts than the shared values of North and South. Gallagher traces all four of these interpretative lines, which sometimes blend or coexist, back to the immediate postwar period and follows them into the twentieth century. But he devotes most of his attention to Civil War popular culture in the two decades that followed Glory in 1989, a film he rightly notes marks a watershed in both new interest in the war after a long post-Vietnam interregnum and a new emphasis in the Emancipation Cause in popular culture in particular. The last chapter departs (a bit arbitrarily, in a book whose seams as a collection of talks sometimes shows) from the cinematic realm to explore the often overlooked world of contemporary Civil War visual art typified by the prints of Mort Künstler, Don Troiani, and others.

Gallagher surveys this landscape with proficiency. While his analysis of particular films is not particularly surprising, it is infused with a deep sense of authority that has its satisfactions. For example, he punctures in passing the iconographic cult surrounding Nathan Bedford Forrest by noting that Forrest "never performed on a stage large enough to affect the strategic sweep of the war in any decisive way," an opinion that, he relates, resulted in an Internet flaming after he offered it on a television show in 2006 (183–84). Indeed, one of the two important interpretive contributions Gallagher makes in the book is the decisive—and truly surprising, given its retreat elsewhere in popular culture—triumph of Lost Cause ideology in visual art.

Gallagher's other, and perhaps more valuable, observation concerns the near disappearance of the Union Cause tradition from popular culture. Whether or not contemporary Americans share Abraham Lincoln's belief that the United States represented the last best hope for a nation premised on freedom and equality of opportunity, the absence of this interpretive strain speaks to a collective amnesia that makes it hard to understand why hundreds of thousands of northerners were willing to fight, die, and kill to preserve it, whether they were abolitionists or not. Gallagher is rightly troubled by a consistent pattern of depicting white northern soldiers as brutish, bloodthirsty foils for courtly Confederates and noble African American freedom fighters, which surely distorts reality.

In addition to participating in what is now a large discourse surrounding Civil War memory, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten reflects a larger pluralistic tendency in Civil War historiography—represented, for example, in David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and Chandra Manning's What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2007)—that moves...