Remembering and Forgetting: Slavery, Secession, and the Civil War

Nowadays it’s not enough to study the Civil War years of 1861 to 1865 in a vacuum. Over the past twenty years, historians have become increasingly interested in the legacy of the war, often framed in the language of memory and commemoration. In many ways, the field was defined by David Blight’s masterly Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which explored the first fifty years after the war. Blight argued that, as white Americans retreated from the promises of Reconstruction, they shaped a narrative of the Civil War that emphasized Union—and over time, reunification—at the expense of emancipation and racial equality. Blight reminded readers that the place of the Civil War in U.S. memory and culture was constructed and reconstructed: the work of veterans, white women, both Northern and Southern publishers and editors, and African Americans. Blight’s story was literary in nature and stressed broad, national trends. In contrast, Carol Reardon’s Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (1997) took a familiar story (that of the third day at Gettysburg) and showed how that story was a distortion of what actually happened.. Reardon’s emphasis on one incident and her close reading of the sources represent a parallel strand in Civil War memory studies.

Books about Civil War memory fall into several categories. Some explore the shapers and transmitters, including Ladies Memorial Associations, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and various veterans’ organizations. Echoing Reardon, other authors have honed in on various battlefields and sites, including Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, and Sherman’s March. The dead—or rather their resting places—have been closely read as sites of commemoration; African Americans, the Confederate flag, music, film, and literature have all been mined in the service of understanding memory. In general, the former Confederacy has been more fertile ground for these memory studies, but Northern veterans have not suffered from a lack of attention.

Into this crowded, multifaceted field come four recent works. Read together, they provide a broad overview of the place of the Civil War and slavery in America. They engage with veterans’ lives and memories; tourism, both past and present; questions of commemoration; and memorialization. They ask readers to consider not just the creators and shapers of stories but also the consumers.

M. Keith Harris’ Across the Bloody Chasm is the most traditional memory study of the four under review. He builds on the work of scholars such as Barbara Gannon and Caroline Janney, who have sought to challenge David Blight’s reunion narrative, emphasizing instead the degree to which Civil War veterans—both Union and Confederate—maintained anger and even resentment towards their erstwhile enemies.¹ Harris draws a distinction between “reunion” and “reconciliation,” defining the former as “simply . . . the coming together of individual states,” while the latter was “an experiential action undertaken by the participants of that war” (p. 2). In essence, Harris seems to be saying that reunion was a political act, and a binary one at that, completed when Reconstruction ended. But reconciliation, in Harris’ formulation, was an emotional or sentimental decision made by each individual, separate from (although potentially influenced by) political reunion.

Harris uses the lens of Civil War commemoration to explore veterans’ memories, and that proves to be both a strength and a weakness of his study. He casts...