Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney (review)

Since its publication more than a decade ago, David Blight’s acclaimed Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory has gone for the most part unchallenged by scholars of Civil War memory. In the years that have followed, an exhaustive list of works have expounded upon, consolidated, and sometimes subtly questioned Blight’s assertion that Americans learned to forget the war by learning to forgive. Through monument building, plantation tours, and even marriage, citizens in the North and South chose to disregard the “hard hand of war” by embracing the sentimental notions of valor, heroism, and sacrifice. While Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation examines many of these now familiar ritualistic and commemorative public sites, hers is the first comprehensive reassessment of Civil War memory. Spanning the first seventy-five years of the postwar period, she investigates the painstaking efforts Americans undertook to refuse the sentimentality of reconciliation.

Remembering the Civil War is most impressive for its ability to unpack terms that have now become so synonymous with one another that they have seemingly lost all appropriate historical connection to their time. While many scholars have often used the terms “reunion” and “reconciliation” or “race” and “slavery” interchangeably, those who undertook the work of memorializing and debating the war did not. Reunion, Janney reminds us, was accomplished rather quickly, first in 1865, and later consolidated during Reconstruction. Yet, while former soldiers returned to commemorate past battles, their returning did not mean that they reconciled the war’s most divisive political disputes. According to Blight and others, reconciliation triumphed because many Americans learned to embrace a shared commitment to white supremacy, which helped neutralize sectional animosities and political differences. Janney challenges these assumptions by carefully surveying the pervasiveness of Unionist sentiments well into the twentieth century. Indeed, Remembering the Civil War extends the plot of Gary Gallagher’s recent book The Union War and Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by examining the diverse ways that Northern citizens retained the emancipationist legacy of the Civil War despite their lingering support for Reconstruction and civil rights by the late nineteenth century. In countless ceremonies and dedications, former Union soldiers made clear that the demise of slavery was both the objective and achievement of the war, a triumph that could not be expunged despite the inescapable Northern commitment to white supremacy.

Janney’s book also provides an opportunity to remember that debates over the Civil War’s meaning were as much between blacks and whites as they were between North and South. The ways in which Northerners learned to embrace segregation without forgetting emancipation is critical to understanding not only the distinctions between race and slavery that Janney so aptly describes, but is also crucial to examining how segregation unfolded and operated in the post–Civil War North. While many scholars have stressed a continuous white supremacy in their characterizations of Northern style Jim Crow, Remembering the Civil War reminds us that de facto segregation—as both an idea and a practice—endured because of the savvy and clever ways white Northerners contained and manipulated the historical narrative in their attempts to control social relations and economic rights in the public sphere.

Finally, Remembering the Civil War provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach historical memory. Historians interested in Civil War memory might do well to leave behind the more popular ceremonial sites that have become all too predictable in discussions of reunion and reconciliation. Indeed, one might conclude that battlefields, plantation houses, and monuments are only temporary political artifacts and locations that tell us very little about how most citizens retained the Civil War’s enduring meanings. Most often, at these places citizens and tourists confront the war’s political disputes and legacy in short encounters, while more sustaining debates about the conflict play out in...