Barbara A. Gannon

Americans Remember Their Civil War (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

This book provides readers with an overview of how Americans have commemorated and remembered the Civil War.

Most Americans are aware of statues or other outdoor art dedicated to the memory of the Civil War. Indeed, the erection of Civil War monuments permanently changed the landscape of U.S. public parks and cemeteries by the turn of the century. But monuments are only one way that the Civil War is memorialized.

This book describes the different ways in which Americans have publicly remembered their Civil War, from the immediate postwar era to the early 21st century. Each chapter covers a specific historical period. Within each chapter, the author highlights important individuals, groups, and social factors, helping readers to understand the process of memory. The author further notes the conflicting tensions between disparate groups as they sought to commemorate "their" war. A final chapter examines the present-day memory of the war and current debates and controversies.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Altersempfehlung: ab 7 Jahre
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. Juli 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798216047643
• Artikelnr.: 68165177

Autorenporträt

Barbara A. Gannon is associate professor of history, University of Central Florida (UCF). She is the author of The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic.

Inhaltsangabe

In June 2015, the waning days of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the
governor of South Carolina, an Indian American woman, asked the legislature
to approve measures that would remove the Confederate flag from State House
grounds. The Civil War began in South Carolina more than 150 years before,
and it would be gratifying to think the battle for Civil War memory ended
there when the flag came down a few weeks later. This victory seemed
hollow; nine African American men and women lay dead-pastors, grandmothers,
and others-gunned down as they prayed in a historic Charleston church; that
single act prompted this request. The accused shooter's social media
accounts demonstrated his devotion to white supremacy and the Lost
Cause-Confederate Civil War memory. In response to his actions, other
states rejected Confederate symbols. The Lost Cause came under attack in
places as varied as Stone Mountain, Georgia, home to the largest statuary
of the Lost Cause, and Bowdoin College in Maine with its Jefferson Davis
Prize. A new phase in the contest over Civil War memory between the Lost
Cause and the Union Cause-how federal supporters remembered the Civil
War-had begun. When Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner proclaimed
that "the past is never dead. It's not even past," he might have been
speaking about how Americans remember the Civil War. Nothing else can
explain why Americans contest the Civil War and its memory one hundred and
fifty years after the war ended. To understand how Americans remembered a
war they cannot remember, you must understand memory. Memory is about what
individuals remember of their lived experiences, it is about how men and
women come together to make sense of what they remember, and finally it is
about how people with no lived experience of an event remember. Since the
Civil War ended one hundred and fifty years ago, what today is called Civil
War memory represents the views of those who have no individual memory of
the conflict. Everyone has experience with individual memory; however, this
study is about how groups remember. Both those whose members experienced
what they are remembering-collective memory-and groups whose members have
no individual memory because they were not witnesses to the events they are
remembering-historical memory. Though sometimes used interchangeably, for
the purpose of this study these terms represent distinct types of memories.
Similarly, scholars defined other important aspects of Civil War memory,
public and popular memory, in many different ways. In this book, public
memory refers to memory in public spaces, including monuments and
battlefields. Similarly, popular memory denotes memory in popular culture,
including movies and television. All memory, individual, collective,
historical, public, or popular, represents the past in the present, if for
no other reason than a memory involves past events recalled in the present.
What happened to an individual has its roots a single, definite event with
a point in time: its interpretation affected by the conditions of the
individual's life and society when he or she recalls the specific episode.
An American who lived through the Civil War remembers events from that
period, but their current circumstances shaped and influenced their memory.
An amputee's physical infirmity defined his or her battlefield memories; a
widow framed the wartime home front in light of her economic struggles in
the postwar world. Moreover, all memory is shaped by the social and
cultural contexts of those who remember, both before the war and how
society changed in its aftermath. The same soldier recalled his wartime
experiences limited by his ability to describe the agony he suffered
because of his idea of what a man should endure without complaining defined
by society before the war; the widow in light of what society believed a
woman can and should be. These men and women's memories reflected their
antebellum social and cultural context, but the war and its aftermath
challenged some of these ideas. After the war, women engaged in public acts
related to memory; before the war society defined their place as at home in
the domestic sphere. A society that demanded men to be whole changed its
idea of what a man should be in a postwar world with thousands of amputees.
When this amputee joined a veterans' organization and the widow a women's
organization, they helped create a collective memory of the Civil War. As
part of their legacy, the men and women who supported the Blue (Union
Cause) and the Gray (Lost Cause) created a collective memory of the Civil
War, one that they shared with people who had not lived through this
conflict, and this became the historical memory for successor generations.
These same processes affected historical memory-the memory of those who did
not live through the war: in this case, their present, far removed from the
war they were remembering. Not surprisingly, historians played a critical
role in creating historical memory, acting as referees among the competing
collective memories of the conflict. Making this task more challenging,
Confederate supporters understood that they were part of an ongoing contest
over memory and created extensive archives to chronicle their
recollections, a material edge in the battle for historical memory.
Reinforcing the role of collective memory, the first professional
historians in the late nineteenth century, who started the process of
articulating the Civil War's historical memory, echoed the disparate views
of the Civil War generation. Later generations with no direct connection to
the war, including historians and the broader public, responded to life in
their present, including anxieties about wars won and lost, union and
nation, and the changing landscape of race in the United States. Imagine a
World War I soldier who found inspiration in former Confederate soldiers'
memoirs, even if his grandfather fought for the Union. His president,
Woodrow Wilson, a professional historian, born into a family of Confederate
supporters, advanced efforts to honor Confederate soldiers as heroic
Americans in his popular historical studies. The soldier's son questioned
the value of a war for Union if the industrial nation that emerged from
this bloodletting accepted the gross inequities that culminated in the
Great Depression. Decades later, the soldier's granddaughter applauded the
end of segregation during the civil rights movement and remembered a war
that ended slavery but not inequality. When she wrote a book on the Civil
War, it chronicled Civil War women, a subject previously ignored by a
predominantly male academic community because she came of age in an era
when women rejected their exclusion from the historical narrative.
Eventually, the woman's daughter observed the ongoing struggle for racial
justice in the twenty-first century and wondered: did the Civil War solve
anything? As a result of the relationship between the past and the present,
Civil War memory continues to evolve long after the men and women who
remembered it have passed into memory. As part of this survey on how
Americans remember the Civil War, or Civil War memory, I will attempt to
answer a few important questions. First and perhaps foremost, why do
Americans remember the war differently? It is certainly not for want of
material to study and form a consensus; there are tens of thousands of
books written about the Civil War; many of these volumes were by the men
and the women who witnessed the war. Moreover, there have been winners and
losers in the battle for Civil War memory. In contrast to the well-known
saying that winners write the history, for a very long time, the losers won
the memory battle. Why was the Lost Cause so much more successful, more
memorable, than the Union Cause? When and why did the Union Cause finally
make an impression on Americans' Civil War memory? Finally, does the
evolution of Civil War memory in the past tell us about its future? It may
seem odd talking about the future of memory, but it certainly is
astonishing that at this late date, at the end of the sesquicentennial,
Americans still do not agree on how they remember the Civil War. There is
no one way Americans remember their Civil War. The Civil War generation
experienced the war differently and had distinct individual memories of
these events. As a result, these men and women created opposing collective
memories-a Confederate and Union Cause. Moreover, even when they lived
through the same events, they perceived them differently. A Confederate
supporter remembered the U.S. government's wrong-headed effort to stop
peaceful secession. If slavery mattered, it was about radical
abolitionists' attempts to interfere with this beneficial institution.
Confederates recalled a defensive struggle to establish an independent
nation in the face of a savage Union assault. When this failed, they
rejected any notion that they were wrong; the memory of an honorable defeat
against overwhelming odds sanctified their memories and justified their
wartime losses. Similarly, federal supporters looked back on a war that
suppressed a rebellion, preserved the Union, and freed the slaves. Union
victory validated their cause and their wartime sacrifices. When the men
and women of the Civil War generation passed, succeeding generations
selected aspects of these collective memories that resonated in their
present. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Lost Cause met the
needs of contemporary times; in the second half, the civil rights movement
and challenges to the racial status quo meant that more Americans
rediscovered the Union Cause. Ultimately, what Americans remember about
their Civil War past is more about the challenges of the present suggesting
that Civil War memory will continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.
For the men and women for whom the war was a lived experience, it was the
postwar era that cemented these different memories. Confederate and Union
supporters organized separate groups that created the war's collective
memories; some formed veterans' organizations, others women's groups. Not
surprisingly these men and women did not articulate a memory that included
any idea that their respective causes were wrong or that their generation's
sacrifices were meaningless; there should be no expectation that they would
do so. Though defeated during the war, and their slave society destroyed,
Confederate supporters still believed that they were right on many of the
war's issues. In their mind, brave men and women persevered in a noble
cause against overwhelming odds for independence and states' rights, a
cause that had nothing to do with slavery. Memory was not only about the
past but the present, particularly for Confederates, who used their
collective memory-the Lost Cause-to rebuild their shattered society.
Similarly, loyal Unionists felt that victory validated their efforts and
their cause. In their mind, brave men and women persevered in a noble cause
for Union and freedom, a cause that had everything to do with slavery.
African Americans of the Civil War generation participated in the efforts
and created their own collective memory that would be "remembered" later
when racial attitudes changed. Ironically, while white and black Unionists
emerged victorious in the real war, federal supporters lost the war in
memory. Successive generations who did not live through the war remembered
the war by fashioning a historical memory based on selectively emphasizing
specific collective memories of the Civil War generation and forgetting
others. In this instance, the Lost Cause won the contest over Civil War
memory during the first half of the twentieth century. Initially, it
appealed to Americans facing the social and cultural strains of a
transition to an industrial society at the end of the nineteenth century.
Later, the needs of a nation that had risen to world power status, and the
subsequent wars of the twentieth century, prompted Americans to embrace
Lost Cause notions emphasizing Americans of both sections' courage and
military prowess. Ironically, the people who rejected American militarism,
particularly after World War I, accepted aspects of the Lost Cause arguing
that the Civil War was not worth the sacrifice in blood and treasure.
Similarly, Americans in the first half of the twentieth century who
disparaged the industrial nation that emerged after the Civil War praised
the agrarian society destroyed by Union victory. Race mattered in both
cases. First, white Americans saw no moral issue with slavery because they
agreed that racially inferior African Americans benefited from this
institution. Second, some Americans renounced a war that cost white
American lives that destroyed an idealized agrarian society. In contrast,
African Americans who rejected the notion of slavery's benevolence and the
Lost Cause kept the Union Cause alive, even when many white Americans had
forgotten it. After World War II, it was African American actions that
shaped Civil War memory; in this case, it was about contemporary times and
the civil rights movement. Ironically, the critical turning point occurred
during the Cold War when the state of the Union led some Americans to
promote a more unitary Civil War memory to unite Americans against the
threat of communism, which supported the Lost Cause. At the same time, the
civil rights movement challenged the racial status quo and prompted some
Americans to examine the racial assumptions that facilitated the acceptance
of the Lost Cause, including the morality of slavery. When the present
changed, the memory of the past did also. Once Americans began to accept
the notion that slavery was wrong, the Union Cause and the effort to
destroy this institution resonated in some Americans' memory. As time
passed, historians realized that the Lost Cause was more memory than
history, consciously created by Confederate supporters. Despite this
awareness, a generation passed before historians began to broaden Civil War
history and memory to include African Americans, women, immigrants, and
others as part of a broader challenge to traditional Civil War memory. It
took a long time for historians, and anyone else, to understand the
difference between history and memory and even longer for people to
understand how the Civil War in public spaces shapes memory. Many of the
issues surrounding the aftermath of the Charleston shooting involve public
memory, such as the flag at South Carolina's Statehouse. In many ways,
public memory is a bridge between collective and historical memory. The
Civil War generation created material artifacts, such as the monuments and
preserved battlefields as part of their collective memory efforts. John
Bodnar in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in
the Twentieth Century (1992) made a critical distinction that explains the
Civil War in public memory. He identified two types of public memory,
vernacular (local grassroots) and official (state/nationally sanctioned)
memory. Civil War public memory originated in the local grassroots actions
of Confederate and Union supporters. Initially, people built monuments for
the dead who never returned home, partly to assuage the grief of those who
survived memorializing a particular cause, be it the Confederacy's Lost
Cause, or the Union's Won Cause. The failure to build monuments to black
soldiers seemed to reinforce amnesia about their wartime efforts. Once the
Civil War generation passed away, the next generation continued to build
monuments; the United Daughters of the Confederacy led Lost Cause efforts.
These women's actions reflected their present. Women wanted to play a more
active role in politics, and turn-of-the-century social convention limited
women's roles; defending the Lost Cause represented an acceptable way to
engage public issues. In contrast, battlefield preservation efforts
occurred decades after the war ended, partly because the idea of
commemorating the dead seemed more urgent than preserving where they died.
Eventually, the federal government managed many of these sites and used
them in an attempt to create an official Civil War memory; however, this
has not always been successful due to the strength of sectionalism in
vernacular memory. Recent efforts to introduce the idea that slavery caused
the war met resistance at national battlefield parks by those who remember
a Lost Cause that had nothing to do with owning human beings. People who
remembered the Lost Cause have little to complain about in popular memory.
Here too, the Lost Cause seemed more successful than the Union Cause for
much of the twentieth century. Since many more people saw movies or
television programs about the Civil War than visited battlefields, this may
constitute their most vivid memory of the conflict. Partly, the success of
the Lost Cause reflected its broader success in American memory; however,
the Confederate cause often resonated in popular culture. Gone with the
Wind's (1939) success as a best-selling novel and one of the most popular
movies of all times may have been as much about its popularity as a
romantic melodrama than its portrayal of the Lost Cause version of Civil
War memory. It place in memory may be about what happened after millions of
American saw this movie. To these men and women that became their Civil War
memory. In contrast, the first movie that portrayed the African American
Civil War experience, Glory (1989), debuted almost one hundred and
twenty-five years after the war ended suggesting that the Lost Cause
dominated popular memory long after the civil rights movement challenged
the memory of the Lost Cause. The television documentary The Civil War
made the war more popular in the last decade of the twentieth century; its
emphasis on race and slavery, reunion and union, captured the state of
Civil War memory at the end of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first
century, at the Civil War's sesquicentennial, the emergence of the Internet
and social media allowed more Americans to weigh in on the subject making a
unitary memory of the Civil War impossible. Among the present issues
affecting how Americans remember the Civil War are discontent against wars
on terror, distrust of the federal government, and dismay over the election
of the first black president. More recently, the Charleston shooting began
a new phase in Civil War memory wars when more Americans reject the Lost
Cause and its symbols in public spaces. In response, supporters of the Lost
Cause rallied to their colors as officials removed their flag and other
Confederate icons. Since the Civil War is a mirror in which people see
themselves and their times, this is not the last word on Civil War memory.
Identifying how Americans remember the Civil War is a complex process
particularly since this study covers almost one hundred and fifty years of
American memory. Initially, I studied memory theory to identify the types
of memory relevant to the discussion of the Civil War; making this theory
more accessible represents one goal of this study. Later, I examined
scholarly studies on Civil War memory, a recent development in the study of
this era. Chapters 1 and 2 reflected my assessment of scholarly studies on
the Civil War generations' collective memory. While there has always been
an effort to reduce memory to Northern and Southern, this study assesses it
based on the memory of Confederate and Union supporters. The presence of
federal supporters in the South and Confederate sympathizers in the North
explains why this book describes how the partisans of the Confederate and
federal government remember. When historians assess memory, they feel
compelled to say that all Northerners or all Southerners did not agree on
the memory of the war, why would they? They did not agree during the war.
Therefore, it would be surprising if they did in its aftermath. Especially
problematic, the unity of white Confederate supporters has been translated
as a unity among Southerners and conflated with Southern identity; this is
true only if African Americans born in southern states are not considered
Southerners. Starting in Chapter 3, and continuing in Chapters 4 and 7, I
explored historical memory-a narrative shaped by the present based on one
of the streams of the Civil War's collective memory. In some cases, I
relied on what historians found about Civil War memory; in others I
assessed scholarly studies as memory acts; scholars made choices about the
subjects they studied and the sources they used, for example, a generation
that desired national unity focused on reconciliationist narratives from
the Civil War generation. In Chapter 4, scholars lead the way in
questioning the racial assumptions that allowed such an uncritical
acceptance of the Lost Cause in American Civil War memory. This sensitivity
manifested itself in a number of ways including a renewed interest in
African American military units. Chapters 5 and 6 relied on a recent
explosion of studies that assessed what and how Americans remember the
Civil War in public and popular memory. Public memory brings us back to a
Charleston church on a summer night. It was likely no coincidence that the
church assaulted by the Charleston gunman played a major role in fighting
black slavery and advocating black freedom in the decades before the war
and since. Perhaps the way Americans should remember the Civil War, one
beyond causes either won or lost, is that these nine Americans were only
the latest victims of the failure to remember the Civil War, the nation's
greatest cataclysm.