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

Thomas J. Brown’s new book on Civil War commemoration in South Carolina challenges historians of southern memory to reconsider a fundamental assumption: that Confederate memory is primarily about race. White supremacism, he maintains, is an important but ultimately insufficient explanation for how white southerners have remembered the Civil War. Brown insists that Confederate memory should be seen as an expression of modernity, as a product of how white southerners have negotiated economic, technological, sexual, and demographic changes over the last 150 years. By shifting away from racial politics, Brown also contests the idea that Confederate memory has served as a source of consensus among white southerners. Memories of the war have generated considerable conflict at any given moment, as well as across time. Brown sets up these themes in his first chapter, a creative and moving rumination on the work of his deceased friend Ted Phillips—a college roommate and historian of Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston—and the nineteenth-century poetry of South Carolinian Henry Timrod, considered the poet laureate of the Confederacy.

In the remaining chapters, Brown moves through a diverse collection of repositories of Confederate memory in South Carolina. This “state canon of Civil War memory,” as he calls it, drew heavily on antebellum models and even began before the war with the campaign to memorialize John C. Calhoun in the 1850s in Charleston. Enthusiasm for the project eventually waned, as the protracted effort, slowed by war, dimmed the allure of the romantic southern nationalism Calhoun embodied in the wake of defeat. Charlestonians, in fact, were now unable to agree on how best to pay tribute to Calhoun and the Confederacy. Women sought, in vain, to fund a girls’ school in Calhoun’s honor and to thus realize a more expansive vision of women’s citizenship.

Gender conflict characterized commemorative efforts in Columbia, too, where both men and women hooked Confederate memory to that most modern of late nineteenth-century intellectual currents. It was social Darwinism, but to different ends. Through the establishment of the Confederate Relic Room in Columbia, for example, women emphasized their wartime productivity to justify their public labors in the continuing evolution of the white race in the postbellum state. Alarmed by the erasure of traditional gender roles that followed from the increasing industrialization of South Carolina, men erected the South Carolina Monument to Confederate Women—a paean to passive domesticity and motherhood—at the state house in 1912. Brown concludes the first half of the book with a chapter on South Carolina novels written in 1870s and 1880s, which focused not so much on narratives of the Civil War as on Reconstruction. These works implicitly criticized the social order of the Old South and indicated a willingness to forge a new arrangement, especially in terms of women’s roles.

The second half of the book examines South Carolina Civil War memory since the 1920s. Taking issue with several scholars, Brown insists that the rise of Historic Charleston in the interwar years hinged on veneration of the Lost Cause. Confederate memory underpinned the urban modernity of the new epicenter of mass tourism, marketed as an antidote to the standardization of American life. But as the development of Fort Sumter as a National Park Service site showed, this memory of the war was open to challenge.

Conflict and discontinuity dominate Brown’s discussions of the Confederate battle flag and the H. L. Hunley, a Civil War submarine torpedo boat raised from its watery grave in 2000. South Carolinians who defended the battle flag at the millennium differed from earlier champions of Confederate memory in terms of class and sex. Their celebration of the emblem also drew on new frameworks, such as the Vietnam War and modern consumerism. Critics relied just as much on memories of the civil rights movement—when segregationists revived the flag—as on memories of the...