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  • Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney
  • Matthew C. Hulbert
Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. By Caroline E. Janney . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2013 . 464 pp. $35.00 . ISBN 978-1-4696-0706-1 .

Caroline E. Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation is a sprawling survey of the war generation’s efforts to confer meaning on the conflict that defined them. The book is thoughtfully written (though occasionally made tedious by an abundance of case samples) and unquestionably ambitious. Janney writes in direct opposition to David W. Blight’s interpretation of the postbellum memorial landscape as found in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002). According to Blight, for sake of an expedited process of national reunification, proponents of a White Supremacist legacy and proponents of a Reconciliationist legacy of the war allied at the expense of those touting the importance of Emancipation. Thus, thanks to allegedly interconnected veins of racism and reconciliatory feelings across the Mason-Dixon Line, the Lost Cause gained significant national traction and Confederates memory narratives overcame their victorious Union counterparts.

As her title, which emphasizes the limits of reconciliation suggests, Janney is not satisfied with Blight’s explanation of the reconciliation process. Alternatively, she argues that tension between Union and Confederate understandings of the war made such a grand bargain untenable and unlikely. Remembering the Civil War ventures a corrective interpretation via three fundamental parts: first, Janney contends that we must be more careful not to conflate the meanings of reunion–the restoration of the Union–and reconciliation, which entailed a host of social, cultural, and political rituals and requirements. Reunion without reconciliation, Janney notes, was quite possible and, in many ways, logical. Second, Janney asserts that northerners did not capitulate to a whitewashed, Reconciliationist rendition of the war due to white supremacy. Rather, she offers, they had always been white supremacists and had fought a war over slavery regardless. Third, and perhaps most important, Janney concluded that northerners did not [End Page 309] gradually adopt Lost Cause-tinged legacies of the war; instead, they refused, by and large, to erase the importance of slavery and emancipation from their own wartime experiences and memories.

In many ways, Janney is convincing. Her argument that lingering animosity between North and South damaged the possibility of a whitewashed alliance for reconciliation makes sense. It is not typical, after all, for the winners of wars to concede the spoils of chronicling and commemorating their victory. Janney’s evidence, including battles waged over textbooks and regimental standards held hostage to partisan magazines, squabbles at Blue-Gray reunions, and excessive waving of the “bloody shirt,” underscores that neither side was really very interested in reconciliation of any sort unless the terms were greatly, if not entirely, lopsided. Furthermore, Janney’s explanations of instances in which genuine feelings of reconciliation surfaced are entirely reasonable. Rather than coming together through mutual hatred of African Americans, Janney opines that white Union and Confederate veterans lauded each other simply to bolster their own respective causes—that is, to heighten their own glory (in victory or defeat) by way of rhetorically constructing a more worthy opponent.

With these praises in mind, the book also prompts two red flags. The first is generated by Janney’s attempt to cover a truly monumental amount of material in a single text. In doing so, she is frequently forced to retrace long stretches of familiar evidence and some of the book’s captious potency is diluted in the stream of details. The second is a question that plagued Race and Reunion and virtually every book tackling collective memory: how collective is collective, really? Janney’s argument, like Blight’s before her, is designed to underscore how a majority of veterans (in this case northern Unionists) remembered and protected their memories of the Civil War. But to what extent or in what proportion did this majority of northern vets represent the whole? How powerful might a northern minority have been? Could it have been powerful enough to help a White Supremacist-Reconciliationist alliance vault the...

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