Americans Remember Their Civil War by Barbara A. Gannon (review)

Recent controversies over displays of the Confederate battle flag and the removal of Confederate statues and street names have demonstrated that the Civil War continues to resonate in contemporary culture wars and racial politics. This concise account of how and why Americans have constructed powerful memories of a brutal conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of combatants helps explain its capacity to stir raw emotions long after it ended.

Barbara Gannon begins her assessment by distinguishing between the collective memories of those who experienced the war in some form and the compound historical memories of later generations that had no personal memory of the slaughter. Drawing here on the pioneering French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, she also stresses the critical importance of understanding memory as a work of the present. Although Gannon’s approach is broadly historiographical, this clear theoretical base enables her to chart the evolution of Civil War memory over time and to explain the development of highly selective historical memories, all of them generated by contemporary concerns and power relations.

The author delineates two principal collective memories of the war: the South’s Lost Cause and the victorious Union Cause. She argues convincingly that elite white men and women played a vanguard role in constructing the losers’ remarkably durable memory of the conflict as an authentically American fight for states’ rights and self-government. This collective memory, she suggests, was not simply a statement of its purveyors’ commitment to white supremacy but also an outgrowth of the grief and trauma generated by mass death in the war. Perhaps the most original chapter in the book is devoted to the Union Cause, a topic strangely neglected by historians until the early years of this century. Gannon, an expert in this field, shows how Union veterans dominated the process of remembering the war outside the defeated Confederacy. Concurring with scholars such as Caroline Janney and M. Keith Harris, she contends that these men recalled nation-saving and emancipation as linked achievements but concedes that their essential racism prevented them from supporting black rights in the late nineteenth century.

Regarding a shared white racism as a given, Gannon rightly urges readers to understand that racial politics have never been the sole driver of Civil War remembrance. Well-to-do Southern white women were active in memory work, in part because their efforts to build monuments and censor textbooks gave them what they wanted: a public role in society. Northerners, including professional historians as well as viewers of The Birth of a Nation, embraced elements of the Lost Cause because it assuaged many of their own anxieties about mass immigration and the growth of an industrial society.

Ultimately, historical memory changed in the United States only when society did. The civil rights movement of the 1960s instigated demands for a more inclusive public memory of the war—one that acknowledged the role of blacks in the wartime experience. This development, Gannon argues, explains why the Union Cause has now trumped the Lost Cause—at least in terms of how the academy remembers it. In a useful final chapter, Gannon evaluates recent shifts in Civil War scholarship, interpreting current interest in guerrilla memory and the conflict’s environmental effects and global significance as a response to contemporary concerns. It is apparent, she concludes, “that Civil War memory has little to do with the war; instead it is about now . . . reinterpreted by each generation to address their needs” (130).

One can quibble with aspects of Gannon’s analysis. Her coverage of the relevant scholarship is extensive and admirably generous, but, understandably, it is not exhaustive. Attention to Bruce Baker’s work on the memory of Reconstruction, for example, would have underscored the importance of this turbulent postwar era not only to Lost Cause advocates but also to Northern supporters of sectional reconciliation. Indeed, one could argue plausibly that, for diverse reasons, most white Northerners bought into a potent reconciliatory memory of the war in...