Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney (review)

Published in a multivolume sesquicentennial history of the Civil War, this book is a fit pendant to Paul Buck’s seventy-fifth anniversary synthesis, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (1937). Buck purported to trace the process by which “a union of sentiment based on integrated interests had become a fact” (viii). Scholars later came to treat postwar rapprochement as a field of discourse rather than a verifiable reality. Nina Silber’s The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (1993) examined the union of sentiment as a cultural construction related to changing views of nationhood and debates over gender, immigration, and industrial capitalism. David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) centered on tensions between blue-gray harmony and realization of the egalitarian legacy of emancipation. Like Silber, Blight concluded that reconciliationist narratives prevailed in popular culture by the early twentieth century, although he highlighted the persistence of emancipationist perspectives. Janney returns to the notion that historians might measure “the degree to which former Confederates and advocates of the Union had agreed to forgive and forget—to embrace true, heartfelt reconciliation” (7). Setting aside the questionable premise that “forgive and forget” could constitute “true” reconciliation after the Civil War, the problematic claim to divine the “heartfelt” views so many Americans limits the conclusions Janney is able to draw from her considerable research.

Janney aims to reverse the story of a strengthening reconciliation that Buck told and that Silber and Blight paralleled as they repudiated Buck’s moral endorsement of the process. Although she concedes that “the imprecise nature of reconciliation makes it more difficult to determine if and to what extent it ever occurred,” she maintains that “reconciliation never was, nor has it ever been, the predominant memory of the war” (311). Recognizing that the war years were an important time for remembrance, she opens with a chapter on the mutual vilification of the Union and the Confederacy. She then devotes a full chapter to sectional attitudes in April and May 1865, followed by one on the execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, mourning for fallen soldiers, and celebrations of emancipation from 1865 to 1869. Paired chapters on northern and southern commemoration from the onset of Reconstruction through the 1880s stress continued acrimony. North and South come together in a chapter on blue-gray reunions, battlefield park dedications, and other intersectional exercises, where Janney finds that “true, heart-felt reconciliation was rare indeed” because “neither Union nor Confederate veterans were willing to forget—much less forgive—all that had happened” (162). After chapters focused on race and women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she extends her coverage beyond the endpoint of most comparable books by offering a chapter mostly about the interwar period. Finally, a brief epilogue comments on the centennial and sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Civil War.

This impressionistic survey of Americans’ attitudes from 1861 to 1939 invites debate about the reading and selection of evidence. Janney points to southern “Hell no, I ain’t forgettin’!” bumper stickers as proof that the war “still incites heated debates today” (5). Gaines Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (1987) identifies the same bumper stickers as illustration that recent southern invocations of the war often lack “specifically Confederate content” (4). Interpretive challenges multiply with more complicated cultural texts, like the 1895 dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, where Janney emphasizes that “Union veterans refused to forget that there had been a right cause and wrong cause” (192), in contrast to Blight’s argument that veterans’ speeches “neatly fit the narrative of blameless, fated reconciliation among former foes” (205).

Compounding these direct interpretive disagreements are conflicting decisions about the selection of sources. Janney conspicuously excludes several veterans whom previous authors showcased, including...