A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory by Joseph F. Stoltz (review)

While Steven Watts, Alan Taylor, Paul Gilje, Nicole Eustace, and Gene Smith have each addressed specific groups' memories of the War of 1812, Smith's student, Joseph Stoltz, is the first to devote a monograph to doing so, focusing on the best-known battle of the war across two centuries. Like several books on the memory of Civil War battles, Stoltz's explores politicized memories and public memory through memorialization at the battle site, but he adds the long history of popular culture, extending his study to the present day. The historiographical message is not surprising—that memory has been contested and has waxed and waned and changed with the times—but Stoltz's treatment of the range and variety of memory-making in New Orleans packs a lot into this book, so timely after four score years of concerted militarization in American life.

A Bloodless Victory moves chronologically, beginning with a concise but accurate discussion of the campaign and battle, which recognizes the many U.S. advantages and the central role of artillery to winning the battle (rather than the efforts of western riflemen and creole pirates often credited by mythology). The chapters range across political, cultural, social, and urban history—the latter a rarity in studies of American military memory since most notable battles on U.S. soil occurred in rural areas. In the years immediately after the war, the production of memory about the battle expressed the republican virtues of the citizen–soldier and the republican mother, with nods to religion. The Republicans used songs, plays, and images to obscure their failings during the war, to attempt to unite the country by comparison with the Hartford Convention. In the process, they increasingly equated the battle with Andrew Jackson: The memory of the battle became the celebration of Jackson, by his boosters. This sparked polarization, as Jackson's critics began (rightly) to question the battle's centrality to the outcome of the war while emphasizing his imposition of martial law as an example of his wider disrespect for the rule of law. New Englanders gradually stopped celebrating the battle's anniversary, while Democrats in other parts of the country made it a partisan Democratic holiday.

Despite Democratic attempts to use New Orleans as a symbol of national unity in the 1850s, southerners turned the battle into a celebration of sectional prowess. Confederate defeat in the Civil War, plus another imposition of martial law in New Orleans by another Democrat (Union general Benjamin Butler), confused this memory by threatening southern martial identity, and few Americans outside of New Orleans continued to memorialize the battle. (Democratic celebrations finally became celebrations of their party, with little to do with the battle.) The centennial of the battle found women's heritage groups leading the way, presenting its history as a nationally unifying alternative to sectional memories of the Civil War, but the emerging Anglo–American rapprochement compelled them to employ New Orleans as an example of the justice and necessity of defensive war, in the media mobilization that facilitated U.S. entry into the first World War.

The first century of New Orleans memory had one thing besides politicization in common: It was whitewashed. This began to change during the 1920s and 30s, when memory-makers translated the emergence of white ethnic pluralism into the top billing of Jean Lafitte as the hero of New Orleans. By the 1950s, Lafitte had become a Cold War symbol of selfless service and national integration. For a few years, New Orleans became an emblem of national unity, the subject of both rural nostalgia (in the eponymous Johnny Horton song) and of the growing number of films showing African Americans in a positive light (fighting alongside white Americans in a 1958 movie). But by the 1965 sesquicentennial, the memory of New Orleans was back in decline. One naturally thinks of civil rights, Vietnam...