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Article Excerpt
In July 1913, veterans of the United States and Confederate armies gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the fifty-year anniversary of the Civil War's bloodiest and most famous battle. The four-day "Blue-Gray Reunion" featured parades, reenactments, and speeches from a host of dignitaries, including President Woodrow Wilson. Striking among the event's activities was the lack of a comprehensive remembrance of the war's causes and consequences. Veterans and other public figures highlighted only the virtuous aspects of soldiery such as courage, valor, and selfless devotion. Thousands of spectators enthusiastically approved of President Wilson's remarks to former Yankee and Rebel alike: "Valor? Yes! Greater no man shall see in war; and self-sacrifice, and loss to the uttermost; the high recklessness of exalted devotion which does not count the cost." Any mention of slavery or emancipation was conspicuously absent.
For many scholars, this event typifies the robust commemorative impulse undertaken by both Union and Confederate veterans celebrating newfound nationalism in the wake of civil strife--an impulse that necessarily minimized antebellum sectionalism and war causation. Scholars focusing on collective memory and emphasizing sectional reunification contend that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regimental and state monument dedications, patriotic speeches, personal narratives, "Blue-Gray" reunions, and even combined support for the American war effort against Spain in 1898 yielded a triumphal, national, and, most important, a reconciled version of Civil War memory. Veterans selectively drew from the past to validate the present. In so doing, they left sectionalism behind. (2)
A conventional interpretation illustrating the shortcomings of national reconciliation has emerged from the growing body of memory scholarship. Many have concluded that the dominant themes of war commemoration marginalized issues concerning slavery and emancipation; white Northern and Southern proponents of war commemoration welcomed reconciliation at the expense of racial change. Edward Tabor Linenthal's analysis of American battlefields, for example, examines Civil War commemorations through the lens of "tacit forgetfulness" and characterizes the "elaborate rituals of reconciliation" as a "moral myopia that ignored the real legacy of the [Civil War]." Similarly, Gaines M. Foster, in his study of Confederate memory, laments that the "sense of triumph derived from [the 1913 reunion at Gettysburg] involved little that had been at issue in the war," and Stuart McConnell's work on Union veterans reminds readers that "the question of blacks and slavery received scant mention in celebrations of the war's outcome." (3)
The most eloquently expressed account of the implications surrounding the supposed enthusiastic and widespread support for national reconciliation appears in David W. Blight's capstone work, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Blight examines how participants at events geared toward reconciliation, such as the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion, did in fact ignore the principal issues leading to war and the Union war aim of emancipation. White supremacists and reconciliationists, Blight argues, "locked arms" and by the "turn of the century delivered a segregated memory of the Civil War on Southern terms." He concludes, "Forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture [and] the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race." (4)
While painting a distinctly darker portrait of reconciliation than many of their predecessors, these recent analyses resemble works such as Paul H. Buck's 1937 publication, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900. Although a celebratory study venerating the "positive influences" paving the way for the "promise of ultimate peace" and applauding the breakdown of sectional animosity during the postwar years, Buck's work otherwise anticipates future scholarship. He admits that reconciliation ushered in a "period where [black people] would no longer figure as the ward of the nation to be singled out for special guardianship or peculiar treatment." Buck pays tribute to reconciliation but questions "the tremendous reversal of opinion" regarding freedmen. These historians have crafted an influential reconciliation historiography remarkably narrow in scope, maintaining that slavery and emancipation were effectively written out of Civil War memory. (5)
A reconciliation premise fundamentally informs these scholars' interpretive framework. Recognizing the profound racial inequalities coinciding with widespread support for both reconciliation and nationalism, scholars use the reconciliation era as a vantage point from which to delineate and lament a moment forgotten in historical memory--a lost chance for the nation to capitalize on the promises of Union victory. In so doing, they place historical actors in categories hindered by analytical limitations. Developing a di chotomy between the reconciled and unreconciled, historians illustrate how the few vehemently opposed to reconciliation were cast aside and considered embarrassing anachronisms by their contemporaries. Their studies thus stress that the overwhelming majority of those who had survived disunion agreed (for better or worse) to remember selectively whatever supported newfound national unity. This analysis obscures the tense, often vituperative negotiation processes of a nation's formerly warring sections suddenly thrust back together, each staking claim to a nationalist spirit. Many Northern veterans favored national unity, but did so on their own terms. (6) Careful study of the confrontation between former enemies actively working to shape their own version of nationalism reveals episodes of national cohesion under pressure when those considered reconciled worked against the very unity they proclaimed. (7)
Scholars working within the conventional interpretive framework have thus played down or overlooked evidence that suggests divergence from the nationalist/triumphal reconciliatory drive that marginalized controversy. Granted, testimony such as President Wilson's 1913 Gettysburg remarks ignoring slavery and emancipation in favor of valor and "exalted devotion" of all Civil War soldiers shows that individuals could and sometimes did suppress prickly issues. Further, shared enthusiasm at certain gatherings illustrates how moments of nationalist celebration could promote good feelings between former enemies. Further still, the conspicuous absence of black participants at many of these events reveals the extent to which white Americans' racist customs directed and manipulated "rituals" of reconciliation. Yet, the strain of commemoration devoid of contention represents only a fraction of the broader drive to integrate the experiences of disunion with a strong sense of nationalism. Emphasizing exceptional events and implying extensive rejection of the causes and consequences of the war conceals important features of Northern Civil War memory. Veterans of the Union cause, despite their racist assumptions, undertook a sustained fight to include sectional terms in a national commemorative ethos. Long after reconciliationists had allegedly expunged the cause of freedom from Civil War commemorations, politicians, editorialists, individual former soldiers, and groups of white Northern veterans singled out the sectional row over slavery as the fundamental origin of the war and praised emancipation as its righteous consequence.
Some scholars are beginning to assess sectional Civil War memories and challenge the assertion that the fight for freedom was relegated to the shadows. Barbara A. Gannon's work on black and integrated Grand Army of the Republic posts shows that Northern celebrations of the war's outcome often included both black and white participants. Memorial Day and other celebratory events attended by black and white veterans frequently revered emancipation as a worthy result of the war. William Blair's Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 discusses the political implications of Emancipation Day celebrations and suggests that blacks' demands for citizenship rights kept the fight against slavery in public view well into the twentieth century. Joan Waugh's assessment of Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs illustrates how Grant welcomed reconciliation but on terms that acknowledged the Union fight for freedom. Finally, John R. Neff has recently argued in his compelling study, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation, that the necessarily sectional remembrance of those killed defending the Union's "cause victorious" functioned as a key challenge to reconciliatory efforts. In the context of the commemoration of the dead, Neff finds the clearest evidence of a lack of reconciliation. (8)
These historians have made valuable contributions to the field of historical memory by analyzing contemporary interpretations of the war opposed to the influential "Southern terms" argument. However, evidence suggests that the acknowledgment of slavery as the cause of the war and the commemoration of emancipation as a crucial part of the Union cause was far more extensive. North of the Potomac, a vibrant and powerful voice emanated from a diverse (and sometimes surprising) collection of veterans, politicians, and other Unionists. Some were disinterested in racial change, while others demanded it. But whether or not they embraced an expressly emancipationist legacy of war memory, veterans of the Union cause articulated and fought to preserve memories of a war that pitted a Northern vision of Union against the institution of slavery--efforts that ultimately undermined the movement toward reconciliation.
The compelling evidence supporting the assertion that former Confederates dominated the national memory of the war should not be ignored. For example, editorials and reports of reconciliatory events at Gettysburg and elsewhere offer clues that some veterans might have been willing to forget the tensions over slavery that sparked warfare. Since the 1870s, white Northerners and Southerners had gathered to highlight the virtues of soldiers and "reunite the bonds of fraternity those sections of our country so unhappily estranged by the war." (9) Early twentieth-century correspondence between the preeminent Union veterans' organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and their Confederate counterparts, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), was astonishingly amicable when discussing the possibility of a future Blue-Gray gathering. High-ranking GAR officials proclaimed that a reunion would solidify a "permanent establishment of harmonious and fraternal relations between the North and South," whereby the UCV leadership responded with the intention to "earnestly and heartily unite in the hope that [the] event [would] mark the final and complete reconciliation of those opposing armies of fifty years ago." Newspaper coverage of the 1913 Gettysburg reunion confirmed an "extraordinary festival of reconciliation" free from contention where former enemies met and "immediately became friends." (10)
Beyond simply dismissing the Union cause of freedom, some Northern veterans seemed in agreement with former Confederates over the slavery issue and explicitly denounced the emancipationist strain of war memory. During the war, a great number of white Union volunteers opposed all association with blacks, even those who had served in the Union army, rejecting any semblance of racial equality. (11) In the postwar decades, some publicly condemned what they considered distasteful attempts by radical Republicans to eclipse the fight for national integrity. Across the North, those who had opposed or had been indifferent to emancipation launched an attack that dovetailed well with certain aspects of Lost Cause interpretations of the war. Some echoed the...
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