Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris (review)

Memories of the Civil War among the men who fought it were exceedingly complex, ranging from the reconciliationism of blue-gray reunions, through paeans to the foe’s valor (often in pointed contrast to shirking civilians), to continued denunciation of treason on the one hand and federal tyranny on the other. It was not unusual for individual veterans to combine many strands of memory, arguing that former enemies were manly warriors and fellow Americans but also that “we were right, immortally right and . . . the conqueror was wrong, eternally wrong,” as Confederate veteran Bradley T. Johnson put it in 1895 (74).

Recent scholarship, led by David Blight’s magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), has emphasized the dominance of reconciliationism and the way that it helped whites to forget both the antislavery cause and the ongoing violence in the postwar South. M. Keith Harris emphasizes a contrary strain of memory, arguing that Civil War combatants refused to abandon their respective causes for many years after the war. Union veterans continued to insist that the Confederates had been traitors and, contra the recent scholarly emphasis on reconciliation, that the war had been fought (in the words of Union veteran Le Grand B. Cannon) “to free a race from chattel slavery” (109). Combing through regimental histories, monument dedications, memoirs, and published “war papers,” Harris finds repeated denunciations of slavery and slaveholding, not just tributes to union or invocations of manhood. Ex-Confederates were welcome to rejoin the national fold—provided that they did it on Unionist terms. For their part, Confederate veterans fired back that they had fought to defend the original Constitution from northern aggression. Even when southern political leaders such as Fitzhugh Lee and John Warwick Daniel spoke in favor of reconciliation, they “insisted that they and their comrades craft reconciliatory efforts on very specific terms—those that reflected the ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation and adopted by the Confederate States of America” (71). That is: Victory for me, “reconciliation” for you, which is to say no true reconciliation at all. It was not that the veterans were unconcerned with intersectional peace. But “ultimately, the memories of their lived past stood between veterans’ desires and reality. While they did not set out to intentionally hinder reconciliation, their words often did exactly that” (4).

The book is organized as a sort of debate between positions, beginning with the “atrocity narratives” both groups of veterans told about each other, particularly with regard to Civil War prisons and the devastation of Sherman’s March. We then learn about the Union veterans’ commemorative attacks on Confederate treason, ex-Confederate responses to those attacks, Union praise for emancipation and defense of the war as a moral cause, and ex-Confederate rebuttals to those claims. A brief but stimulating epilogue considers neo-Confederates and the changing memory of the war in the present-day South.

Harris’s picture of old soldiers still crossing ideological swords thirty years after Appomattox (“fighting them over”) is in some ways a familiar one, because by 1900 it was the way many Americans understood and portrayed Civil War veterans. Young people born after 1865, migrants from one region to another, and the great wave of immigrants after 1890 were all ready to move on from the wartime polarities, a process of dilution that Harris, in his epilogue, suggests is still ongoing. But moving on from the war meant somehow coming to terms with what the war had wrought, which in the postwar South was a dark world of disfranchisement, night riding, and horrific racial violence. Reconstruction and its aftermath are essentially absent from Across the Bloody Chasm, and yet those were the public events shaping the cultural and political realm in which the old soldiers made their arguments. That the Union veterans continued to denounce slavery and treason is admirable, and Harris has...