Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook (review)

One hundred and fifty years and more after the Civil War, Americans are still fighting it, if only its memory. On preserved battlefields and monument squares, in academic monographs and popular culture, shadows of the Blue and Gray contest the legacy of America’s most deadly conflict. In Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 (2017), Robert J. Cook, professor of American history at the University of Sussex and author of Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (2011), sets out to perform a monumental task: survey Civil War memory from the fall of Charleston in 1865 to the Charleston shooting in 2015. To do so, he uses a rich collection of secondary sources and select primary sources, providing the reader with an invaluable overview of this critical Civil War legacy.

In a well-written and extremely engaging study, Cook begins his examination with a brief summary of the military, political, and social events of the Civil War as a way of establishing what might be remembered. His bottom line, “As one would expect of such a divisive event, no single ‘memory’ of the war has ever existed” (4). He characterizes the distinct Civil War “memories” as “Unionist, emancipationist, southern, and reconciliatory.” To establish the evolution and origin of these disparate memories, the work is divided into two sections. In the first half, Cook describes how the Civil War generations “fashioned” these memories. In the second half, he explains how people “who have no direct connection with those who fought and suffered” embraced some of these memories more than others (4). The Southern or Lost Cause, linked to the reconciliatory memory, if for no other reason than the latter accepted many tenets of the former, including the valor of all white soldiers and the invisibility of black soldiers. Just as black men’s service seemed forgotten, the emancipationist memory lost the most ground, to the point where one might have diagnosed an American “amnesia” of slavery and its end. This strand of memory, which African Americans and their allies advocated most strongly, became a centerpiece in the struggle for memory in the civil rights era and beyond, suggesting the continuing power of the Civil War and its legacy. Overall, the author demonstrates the interrelationship between a number of factors that shaped Civil War memory. Cook convincingly identifies how capitalism, politics, race, the rise of nationalism, the emergence of an American Empire, popular culture, and a host of other factors shaped Civil War memories. While citing a multitude of factors reflects a comprehensive approach, a careful reading of this study suggests that the author prioritizes politics and a politically usable memory. The government focuses on a reconciliatory memory that inspires nationalism, and African Americans on an emancipationist memory that advances their struggle for civil rights.

Historians are often asked to write reviews of books similar in subject and scope to their own; one must be careful to not complain that the person did not write one’s own book. In that spirit, I would like to make a suggestion that reflects my views. Cook correctly cites the role of women in the contest between various types of Civil War memory; the success of the Lost Cause reflects the memory work of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their associates. Taking this one step further, I would suggest that gender, and gendered anxieties, are central to understanding Civil War memory, be they nineteenth-century concerns about America’s rise to industrial power or twenty-first-century angst about its fall. Overall, this is an enormously valuable book, and I would particularly recommend the civil rights section and the author’s emphasis on the politics of Civil War memory, another central element of our ongoing memory battles. Sadly, we must metaphorically sew another battle onto the...