The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (review)

In The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, editors Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh bring together ten essays, four of them previously published, that reflect the reigning historiographical orthodoxy on the development of the memory of the war. Fifty years after Appomattox, according to this view, Northerners had come to acknowledge Confederate heroism and to embrace the white South's contention that the conflict had nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Northerners thereby abandoned the war's emancipationist legacy, still championed by African Americans, for an interpretation that promoted sectional reconciliation and an aggressive, white male nationalism. David W. Blight's essay in the volume, taken from his influential Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), makes the argument explicit. Most of the other contributors write within a similar perspective, but they also expand historians' understanding of the memory of the Civil War.

Three aspects of their contributions stand out. First, the collection goes beyond the chronological limits of most studies of Civil War memory; the editors have included two selections on the years after 1930. Jon Wiener provides an interesting if somewhat episodic examination of the Civil War centennial celebration, concluding that the popularity of the Confederate battle "flag as a symbol of white defiance of black rights remains" its most "significant legacy" (253). LeeAnn Whites, in a strong essay, analyzes the decision in the 1930s to place a Confederate memorial boulder on the University of Missouri campus and the successful campaign in the 1970s by African American and white female students to have it removed

Second, the editors have selected essays that explore various cultural forms: not only monuments but also memoirs, formal histories, school textbooks, children's literature, Memorial Day rituals, and political oratory. In an epilogue, Stuart McConnell explains the importance of studying memory in a diversity of contexts and argues that, together, the essays provide a "geography of memory," a not fully satisfying metaphor (288). The essays make a very strong case for the importance of understanding memory as constantly changing as people employ the past for their ofin purposes.

Third, the collection provides many insights into the transformation of Northern memory, as the editors write, "the Northern press and public offered little opposition to the increasingly widespread positive view of the Confederate Lost Cause" (3). The collection begins with Waugh's astute analysis of Ulysses S. Grant's interpretation of the war. Grant criticized Robert E. Lee and Southern society and made emancipation, not just the preservation of the Union, central to the war. Perhaps to set up the conflict with the Lost Cause, Waugh's essay is followed by Gary W. Gallagher's study of how Jubal A. Early and Douglas Southall Freeman enshrined Lee and a Southern view of the war in the national memory. The two other essays that focus on the South, James M. McPherson's account of the crusade for Southern school textbooks and Thomas J. Brofin's intriguing discussion of the John C. Calhoun monument in Charleston, South Carolina, do not attempt to demonstrate how the South shaped Northern memories. Three of the essays, though, reveal that Northerners revised Grant's view for their ofin reasons. J. Matthew Gallman's on Anna Dickinson demonstrates that the popular orator changed her abolitionist views of the war in hopes of getting Horace Greeley elected president in 1872, and Fahs's on novelist Oliver Optic convincingly shows why he wrote far Differently about the war in the 1880s than he had during it. Along with Southerner Thomas Nelson Page, Optic sought to foster reconciliation at the cost of African American rights and their rightful place in the historical narrative of the war, to promote a new nationalism based on "a white, masculinist experience in American life" (91).

Patrick J. Kelly concludes in a perceptive essay on the 1896 presidential election that Republicans reconstructed the memory...