History 304 Readings Wiki

Three overall visions of the Civil War memory collided and combined over time: one, the reconciliationist vision, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than the history of Reconstruction has allowed us to believe; two, the white supremacist vision, which took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn of the century delivered the country a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms; and three, the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans' complex remembrance of their own freedom in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. (Guy)

The Northern postwar ideological memory of the conflict as a transformation in the history of freedom, as an American second founding, was born in the rhetoric of 1863 fashioned by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and others whose burden it was to explain who the war's first purpose (preservation of the Union) had transfigured into the second (emancipation of the slaves). (Guy)

During the first year and a half of the war, Douglass had been one of Lincoln's fiercest critics among abolitionists, scolding the president on many occasions for his resistance to a policy of emancipation. This changed after the Emancipation Proclamation and the recruiting of black troops in 1863. The all-out war on southern society and on slaveholders that Douglass had so vehemently advocated for had come to fruition. (Guy)

In the post-war years, there were many different ways that people categorized their memories of the Civil War. Reconciliationists wanted to largely ignore the overarching issues of the Civil War and bring the country back together. The white supremacist view saw the Confederacy as more righteous and used legislation and terrorism to exercise control over African Americans. To the white supremacist, the end of the Civil War was a tragic one. The emancipationists saw the nation as a rebirth of sorts, and now the nation could allow for freedom and liberty for all. (Tanner Gillikin)

In the wake of the Civil War, the “lost cause” narrative emerges as a way to counter the traditional narrative of the southern cause during the Civil War. This mythologized the Confederacy as having a righteous cause and only losing because they lacked the strength to win the war. This myth played on the white supremacist urges of America and demonized the African Americans. (Tanner Gillikin)

As in other large-scale wars, most Civil War soldiers did not readily talk or write about their conflicted emotions in the immediate postwar period. But we can see hints of these thoughts in their memories. In soldiers' responses to the end of the war and its aftermath, we can see the seeds of both the deep political and racial strife of the Reconstruction and the ultimate soldiers' reconciliation that dominated American culture by the 1880s and 1890s. (Guy)

The dehumanizing aspects of war remain in old soldiers' souls as the dark underside of memory against which other recollections have to prevail. Although he might only rarely return to such a memory, no solider could ever truly forget what he saw if he survived the charges through the cornfields at Antietam in 1862 or the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania in 1864. (Guy)

Writing about the Civil War became a lucrative industry after 1880, and the place of the veteran, both as public figure and as writer, underwent a flourishing rehabilitation. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), which had lagged in membership during the 1870s due to economic depression, the political strife over Reconstruction, and a general desire to forget the war, reemerged dramatically late in the decade as part of a wave of fraternalism in the country at large. (Guy)

As old soldiers sought recognition for their war service, they received abundant inducement not only from their own organizations, but also from major magazines, which increasingly commissioned veterans to write narratives for series about the war. The most important of such series was that launched by Century magazine. From November 1884 to November 1887, Century published hundreds of articles lavishly illustrated with engravings, drawings (many made from photographs), and maps in perhaps the most ambitious attempt ever to retell the war by its leading participants. (Guy)

The Century editors quite purposefully intended to shape a culture of reunion. They explicitly solicited articles that allowed for a non-political point of view. Why the war came and how it transformed America were not touched upon. Neither were the topics of race and slavery. (Guy)

Literature was a big part of the nineteenth century, especially after the Civil War. It allowed people to tell their stories and share their wartime experiences. For example, Grant wrote memoirs (which were top sellers in the nineteenth century) in which he expressed his thoughts and judgments, but there was no hostility. (Hannah E.)

Grant's memoirs reflected the culture of reconciliation. He wrote about Robert E. Lee and the surrender at Appomattox. He expressed his feelings about how, while he was pleased with Lee's surrender, he was also saddened by the defeat of his enemy, with which they had fought long and hard. I thought this was interesting because we don't often read about historical figures openly expressing their feelings, let alone displaying gestures of reconciliation. (Hannah E.)

Former Confederate general Bradly T. Johnson, who had a controversial military record, was a popular Confederate memorial speaker. Along with Jubal Early, D. H. Hill, and others, he had led the effort in the 1960s and 1870s to preserve Confederate traditions in Virginia. Johnson had long been a major spokesman for an especially unreconstructed brand of Lost Cause ideology. Johnson summed up the legacy of the Civil War in a declaration to which many Americans had come to at least benignly accept, that “the great crime of the century was the emancipation of the Negros.” (Guy)

Throughout the spread of the Losts Cause, at least three elements attained overriding significance: the movement's efforts to write and control the history of the war and its aftermath; its use of white supremacy as both means and ends; and the place of women in its development. (Guy)

From his prison release in 1867 to his death in 1889, Jefferson Davis set the tone for diehard Lost Cause advocates' historical interpretation. In language that became almost omnipresent in Lost Cause rhetoric, Davis insisted that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, just something that happened to be in the South at the time. He then claimed the North had tainted the otherwise gentle slaves by giving them weapons and setting them against the South. This is obviously wrong. (Guy)