A Late Encounter with the Civil War

CHAPTER ONE: Remembering the Civil War in the Era of Race Suicide

1 CHAPTER ONE Remembering the Civil War in the Era of Race Suicide We use personal and collective memory of the past to help us negotiate the present, to determine who we are by reminding ourselves of who we have been. And those who study both types of memory tell us that we are used by these negotiations as much as we use them. My focus here is what can be referred to as collective, civic, or ritualized memory—rather than personal , although analogies connect the two. I think of it as a kind of complicated puppet theater; we are the pullers of the strings (insofar as we set dates for ceremonies of public memory and fill the ceremonies with choreographed activities) and the figures pulled. Perhaps not so clearly in the moment, but with enough distance, we can see how the puppeteering works in making our public history address anxieties that consume us in the present. Americans have had, now in the twenty-first century, three large, organized public encounters with our collective memory of the Civil War. The first two are sufficiently distant from us in time that we can see how the string-pulling works, how conscious intentions and unconscious anxieties share the memory space. I propose, by way of these essays, to analyze our two previous commemorations for embedded conscious and unconscious themes and then to project the results on the present, the age of the sesquicentennial. We should 2 Chapter One then be able to frame the essential questions growing from rituals of collective memory: Are we the same people in all the same ways as our predecessors? Does our distance in time from the event place limits on the effectiveness of public memory? During the fiftieth anniversary of the war, the semicentennial (1911–15), William Howard Taft (a Republican from Ohio) and Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat from Virginia—the first southerner to sit in the White House since Andrew Johnson) were presidents. The “separate but equal” racial doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was the law of the land, and the naacp was in its first decade of pubic advocacy for the “colored people” whose rights as citizens had been promised after the war but not yet delivered in full. One of the naacp’s first causes was the banning of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The Clansman), adapted from Thomas F. Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905). Race was much on the nation’s mind during the semicentennial. The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the war occurred during a time when the lynching of African American men was common, particularly in the South. Federal antilynching laws were repeatedly introduced and passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but blocked by southern Democrats in the Senate. The agitation for and against antilynching laws was not exclusively legal but still managed to unlock subconscious anxieties that underlay the discourse of race. Jack Johnson, a black man who had married three white women and defeated the “great white hope” Jim Jeffries in 1910, was convicted of violating the Mann Act in 1913. Rather than serve a prison sentence on the trumped-up charge (Johnson was married to the woman he was accused of transporting across state lines), Johnson left the country. In the wake of the national uproar, a Georgia congressman introduced an amendment to the Constitution forbidding intermarriage between “negros or persons of color and Caucasians.” The proposed amendment failed, but white anxiety over the Civil War in the Era of Race Suicide 3 mixing of race, blood, and intimate partners prevailed, giving a spin to themes of gendered identity and romantic plots that we might, today, see as obsessive or even hysterical. Widespread anxiety about blood—in its scientific discourse and in its looser cultural one—pervaded the turn of the century and influenced the way the Civil War would be commemorated. Much of this conversation was shaped by Englishman Francis Galton (1822–1911), remembered mostly for his pioneering work in the forensic science of fingerprinting and for his speculations on blood and hereditary racial characteristics for individuals and societies, known as eugenics. In the essay “BloodRelationship ,” published in Nature (U.K.) in 1872, Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin), asserted a position that became a basis for racial anxiety. “Therefore,” Galton calmly asserted, “each individual may properly be...