The Civil War Centennial as Review and Preview

The sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War is almost upon us. The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, established by Congress in 2000, struck up its elaborate prelude on February 12, 2008 with the opening exercises in a two-year celebration of the two hundredth birthday of the Civil War president. Jockeying is well underway for formation of a similar commission to organize federal participation in remembrance of the most expansively remembered event in American history. In February 2007 members of the Congressional delegations of Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Virginia introduced a bill that would set up a commission and authorize federal grants to university programs focused on the Civil War, specifically the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, and the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. Meanwhile, several states have already created commissions that have launched a variety of initiatives. The Virginia commission, for instance, has awarded a $350,000 contract to the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies (which is headed by a member of the state commission) for production of a three-hour documentary film about the Civil War to be distributed without charge to every school, library, and museum in the commonwealth.¹ As this political maneuvering attests, official observances of the sesquicentennial offer those interested in interpretations of the Civil War substantial opportunities to attract resources and audiences.

Historians looking ahead to the Civil War sesquicentennial will find much to reflect on in Robert J. Cook’s able assessment of the Civil War centennial. The decentralized organizational framework for the hundredth anniversary followed a federal template that the upcoming commemoration is unlikely to modify dramatically. In September 1957 Congress established the Civil War Centennial Commission (CWCC), comprised of representatives of related government agencies like the National Park Service and the Library of Congress, several members of Congress chosen by the speaker of the house and the vice-president, and private citizens appointed by the president. The CWCC received an appropriation sufficient to employ a small administrative staff in Washington, D.C. Its success depended heavily on the relationships it formed with public and private organizations interested in the centennial, many of which the CWCC brought together in annual national assemblies held in cities associated with the Civil War. The most influential of these partners were the state centennial commissions, which helped to sponsor, coordinate, and publicize the exhausting array of commemorative activities. Virginia alone hosted 1,147 centennial events.² Cook’s monograph is for the most part a political history focused tightly on the CWCC and the state commissions, to which he has appended a chapter on representations of the Civil War in film, fiction, and historical scholarship during 1961–1965.

This approach effectively spotlights the main story of the centennial, the resonance of the sectional conflict over slavery amid the quickening of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. The casualties in the commemoration were the participants who failed to recognize the importance of connecting interpretation of the past to vital issues of the present. The first chairman of the CWCC, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant III, may have been well suited for his position by his lineage, military rank, and experience as chairman of the National Park and Planning Commission, but he and the first executive director of the CWCC, public relations and investment entrepreneur Karl Betts, washed out because they tried to administer the centennial as the consensus expression of an America that was in fact sharply divided over race relations. The pivotal event in their downfall was the contretemps over the CWCC national assembly of 1961, held in Charleston, South Carolina, on the centennial of the firing on Fort Sumter. When the segregated Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston refused to accommodate an African-American member of the New Jersey commission, several northern delegations pledged to boycott the gathering. Grant and Betts failed to respond to the embarrassing...