Barbara A. Gannon

Americans Remember Their Civil War (eBook, PDF)

• Format: PDF

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: 9780313049002
• Artikelnr.: 68183823

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.