The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning

3. Relics of Reunion: Souvenirs and Memory at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, 1889–1895

47 3 Relics of Reunion Souvenirs and Memory at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, 1889–1895 Daryl Black At noon on September 19, 1895, General J. S. Fullerton, chairman of the Chickamauga Park Commission, stepped to the rostrum on a temporary stage set up at the foot of Snodgrass Hill.1 The former Union officer and veteran of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns welcomed the audience —more than 12,000 people—to the dedication ceremony for the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Charged with providing a “simple” introduction for Vice President Adlai Stevenson, Fullerton found himself inspired by “the scenes of this battlefield around us, and the many old comrades into whose faces we now look for the first time since the war cloud went down.” Fullerton’s “swelling of memory” led to a lengthy discourse recounting the battle and conjuring images of those “youthful soldiers ” who had contested the field at Chickamauga. But after recalling the events of 1863, and as he reached the end of his remarks, Fullerton declared, “this celebration, the inauguration of this park and commemoration of the grand and noble idea—marks the beginning of a regenerated national life.” Barely “thirty years have passed,” he noted, “since the most desperate of battles was fought, and now survivors of both sides harmoniously and lovingly come together to fix the battle lines and mark the places now and forever to remain famous as monuments to the valor of the American soldier.”2 Speaker after speaker reiterated General Fullerton’s theme. Chattanooga 48 Daryl Black mayor George Ochs called the park a “symbol of the Nation’s second birth.”3 Former Confederate general John B. Gordon declared that the battlefield park was a demonstration of the “brotherhood, and unity between the soldiers who fought and between their children who are the heirs of their immortal honors.” And, he said, “the warriors’ blood spilled on the battlefields” contributed “to the upbuilding of a loftier American manhood for the future defense of American freedom.”4 Addressing the former Confederates in the audience, John Palmer, commander of a Union division at Chickamauga and a corps at Missionary Ridge, claimed, “I never allowed myself to forget that you were Americans, freely offering your lives in the defense of what you believed to be your rights and in vindication of your manhood.”5 These speeches and dozens more like them delivered at the dedication ceremony marked a major transition in the dominant cultural memory of the Civil War. Conflict was forgotten, cause and result downplayed, and unity among white Americans celebrated. In the days before audio and film recordings, the words spoken at these ceremonies of remembrance were transitory, while the written versions of these comments remained deep in the shadows of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century literature. Yet the meanings expressed by the speakers, writers, and monument builders penetrated to the core of white American culture and became a dominant template for thinking about the Civil War.6 This essay examines how the souvenirs created to commemorate the park’s dedication advanced a version of the Civil War that focused on the valor of white men in combat and simultaneously marginalized the wartime roles of African Americans and overlooked the experiences of the freed people who had to fight for inclusion in the new nation after the war. These objects also domesticated women’s experience and confirmed a bourgeois model of female dependency. Finally, these souvenirs erased any lingering examples of sectional animus and created a visual culture that homogenized the national narrative of the Civil War and transformed it into a story that celebrated nationalism, muscular manhood, and white supremacy. As Sherry Turkel argues, “objects help us make our minds, reaching out to us to form active partnerships.”7 Thus, the programs, songbooks, and ribbons given to visitors at Civil War reunions in the 1880s and 1890s were portable carriers of the memory that defined and reproduced with mechanical consistency a new narrative created on the Chickamauga battlefield. These were new kinds of products—products of the new industrial age that spoke Relics of Reunion 49 in a repeatable, consistent visual and symbolic language. Thousands of these mass-produced and mass-distributed objects made their way into the personal collections of families across the North and South and operated to help Americans “make their minds” about how to recall and interpret the Civil War. At the same...