Commonwealth of Compromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri

Abstract

Over 155 years after the end of the Civil War, Americans are still struggling with the legacy of the conflict and how it should be commemorated. Different factions continue to see the war through sectional and racial lenses that distort the reality of the country's shared collective memory. But this phenomenon is neither new nor soon to be settled. In Amy Laurel Fluker's Commonwealth of Compromise, she explores the development of competing memories through the experiences of Missouri. She skillfully demonstrates the importance of this border state from the several different perspectives that its geography played. Missouri not only divided North from South, but as a gateway to the Pacific Ocean, it divided East from West. She also explores other internal divisions throughout her work, including those between Blacks and whites, urban and rural, and males and females, creating an in-depth, well-researched view that focuses strictly on primary sources. Missouri's sectional division during the war, which manifests itself in the post-bellum period, becomes the ideal microcosm from which to study the country.Fluker taps into the growing historiography of Civil War memory by demonstrating that Missouri was deeply steeped in all four narrative traditions that historians recognize today: Unionist, emancipationist, Confederate, and reconciliationist. After a summarization chapter of Missouri during the war, she devotes a chapter to each of these narratives and chronologically explores each of them independent from one another. She finally ends with an investigation of the state's need to be at the forefront of reconciliation as Missourians felt it was their obligation to be an example for the country. She examines the unified veteran's monument at Vicksburg Military Park and the eventual state's control over both the Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Homes. In doing so, she demonstrates how the state's white population desired to move forward from the war purely for the political and economic gain of the state and how this made Black Union veterans’ push for racial uplift yet another long-term causality of the war. She argues, “Missourians never arrived at a complete consensus over the legacy of the Civil War in their state and . . . the ways [they] remembered the war largely reflected the ways they experienced it” (p. 10). Missouri experienced the war as a pro-Union, slave state divided over its role within the Union; therefore, that experience translated directly into how Missourians chose to remember their legacy. Those experiences and that legacy were both debated, reconciled, and even legislated by whites, leaving Blacks to once again fight for their rights alone and against an unsympathetic majority. The legacy established in the immediate post–Civil War years still lingers today. Fluker shows that, despite the challenges set before Missouri's Black population, they never stopped fighting and continually made progress when and where they could, thereby unquestionably displaying their character as true American citizens.With her focus predominately on sources from within the state, one might argue that the addition of Missourians effect on non-Missourians’ memory could have been looked at closer, but she identifies early on that this was not her intent and it remains as work to still be investigated. That issue aside, the depth of her research and clarity of her writing makes this monograph accessible to a wide audience. Additionally, the combination of relevancy, historiographical integration, and highly detailed research makes it an important read to historians and lay readers with a broad spectrum of historical interests. Illinois historians should easily recognize the importance of her research as some southern counties also suffered from similar divisions during the era. Her examination of Missouri, where majority consensus on legacy was troubled from the start, gives it a higher place in Civil War memory than cases discussed in other states that were decidedly North or South during the war.