Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina by Thomas J. Brown (review)

In Civil War Canon, Thomas J. Brown provides a sophisticated analysis of the Lost Cause in South Carolina over the last 175 years. Its central theme is an important contribution to the literature on Civil War memory. Most of the legion of studies of the Lost Cause concentrate on how white southerners interpreted the meaning of the war; Brown instead explores how southerners used the memory of the war. When they do explore how memory functioned, many studies of the Lost Cause—although by no means all—stress its role in perpetuating a conservative, traditional society. Brown convincingly shows how the Lost Cause helped white southerners “embrace . . . new ideas” and “social structures” as well as “negotiate disruptive modernity by revising presentations of the past” (7, 1).

Brown develops his insight, in part, through a discussion of various books that South Carolinians wrote about the war, Reconstruction, and “redemption.” Most chapters, though, look closely at a public monument or historic building, then range widely to include other aspects of Confederate memory associated with the site or simply occurring around the same time. Brown offers observations based on all manner of references to the Civil War (more than can be covered here) and provides abundant examples and evidence. He has an amazing breadth of knowledge and has done an admirable job of research. His approach to this wide-ranging evidence reflects the influence of cultural history, both in its careful and creative “reading” of individual “sites” of memory and in its close attention to race, class, and gender.

The book begins by looking at the grave of Henry Timrod, the famed Confederate poet with a mixed-race ancestry who perceived the crisis of modernity. Brown turns then to the monument to John C. Calhoun in Charleston. Efforts to erect the monument began in the 1850s when the recently deceased Calhoun served as a symbol of unity and “republican virtue” based in a “plantation economy” (51). The campaign to honor Calhoun resumed after the war, but it then became part of an urban culture in which women served as leaders. “Rather than a timeless republican masculinity,” Brown argues, the statue itself “now represented an obliterated society dependent on loyal women for an afterlife in memory” (68). Even then, African American sarcasm about the statue forced changes to it, so it never had the impact its sponsors had sought.

Monuments to the veterans and to the women of the Confederacy placed on the statehouse grounds in Columbia in 1879 and 1912, respectively, had a different function. In their cases, the Lost Cause served as “a public culture through which white southerners debated shifting interpretations of manhood and womanhood” (92). The veterans’ monument typified how the Lost Cause had become more celebratory than in the immediate postwar period, with a greater emphasis placed on the veterans’ masculine prowess instead of on their sacrifice. The monument to women, commissioned by men, celebrated motherhood, even as women championed their own productivity and work in their contemporary efforts on behalf of a Confederate relic room. Overall, Brown argues, during the first decades after the war, “the Lost Cause remained vigorously Christian,” with a “cosmology [that] explained race, gender, religion, and class in a pattern that was politically useful because so many white South Carolinians found it satisfying” (124, 126).

As good as the early chapters of Civil War Canon are, the later ones on more recent developments prove even better. One begins with an analysis of the Charleston’s literary renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, in which its writers “imagined the Confederate army as a white southern folk movement committed to protection of the local community and stewardship of African Americans” (166). Brown then discusses how the city’s interest in tourism led to “cooperation with national professional networks and the federal government” (167). When the National Park Service assumed control of Fort Sumter...