Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs (review)

Every book about the American Civil War appears post-something. There are post-Reconstruction, post–World War I, post–Brown v. Board of Education, post-centennial, post-Vietnam, post–Ken Burns, and post-sesquicentennial examples. Cody Marrs frames Not Even Past as a post-Charlottesville book. August 2017 in Charlottesville enters in his introduction, reappears in a chapter on Lost Cause narratives, joins June 2015 in Charleston to dominate the afterword, and has the last word in the final paragraph of “Suggested Further Reading.”

Marrs’s Charlottesville references frame a good general guide to “looking at the Civil War through literature” (97) and occasionally through visual art. His pioneer precursors are Robert Penn Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War (1961) and Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962). From the first, Marrs inherits an impulse to distinguish between or among competing modes of remembering. A clear genealogy descends from Warren’s dyad (the “Great Alibi” in the South versus the “Treasury of Virtue” in the North) to David Blight’s triad in his 2001 Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (reconciliationist, white supremacist, emancipationist), to Gary W. Gallagher’s tetrad in his 2008 Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Union Cause, Reconciliation Cause, Lost Cause, Emancipation Cause), and finally to Marrs’s own fourfold scheme, mapped onto his four chapters, “A Family Squabble,” “A Dark and Cruel War,” “The Lost Cause,” and “The Great Emancipation.”

From Edmund Wilson, Marrs inherits the field of Civil War literary study, though field antecedents go back at least as far as the 1865–66 Salem, Massachusetts, lyceum season, when Oliver Wendell Holmes gave a lecture titled “Poetry of the War.” In his earlier study Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (2015), Marrs devotes full chapters to Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Not Even Past is a different kind of book, a user-friendly portal into the field. The longest discussion of any work or writer runs five or six pages; many treatments take only two or three. Along with Whitman, Douglass, Melville, and Dickinson, Not Even Past briefly maps onto Marrs’s fourfold scheme figures both familiar and less so, among them Ambrose Bierce, Terry Bisson, William Wells Brown, Mary Chesnut, Lucille Clifton, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. DuBois, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, Michael and Jeffrey Shaara, Abraham Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman, Natasha Trethewey, Mark Twain, Margaret Walker, and Stephen Wright.

Every book, whether about the Civil War or not, comes into the world dated. Calling a book dated can mean it seems quaint or stale, its intellectual expiration date past. But in the case of Marrs’s Not Even Past, the explicit post-Charlottesville time stamp is a bold gamble, one that asserts the timeliness of the book and its late-breaking authority over earlier books. At one point, Marrs identifies the “now” of his writing as September 5, 2019 (108), which at the time of this writing (April 2020) does not seem very long ago.

During pandemic disruption, however, it feels long ago indeed. The story of what white supremacy has brought forth on this continent over more than five hundred years has moved on from shootings in a church and a rally-turned-riot near an equestrian statue, both in states of the former Confederacy, to something much larger. Confined to no section or region, it exposes as sophistries all attempts to separate racial fractures in the United States from other fractures, not least among them the deliberately designed ones between the sovereignty of the states and the powers of a federal government. Amid large disruptions, choosing slavery over states’ rights as the cause of the Civil War...