Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Barbara A. Gannon Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 244. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6534-4.) The Civil War ended in 1865; the battle for its memory continues. The struggle persists both in popular memory and in scholarly monographs engaged in pitched historiographical debates over the legacy of America’s deadliest conflict. Jill Ogline Titus, the associate director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, examines the Civil War’s centennial at the site of its most famous battle. Scholars including David W. Blight and Robert J. Cook have assessed this commemoration at the macro level. In contrast, Titus’s microstudy assesses the Civil War’s contested memory in “America’s most famous small town.” As her title suggests, there were several agendas at play in 1963 that had little to do with the events of 1863. Many white Americans wanted to use the centennial to encourage national unity. Titus notes that “Gettysburg’s 100th anniversary enlisted both the battle and Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address in the service of the anticommunist crusade” (p. 1). But despite this eager embrace of unity by white Americans, African Americans did not stand idly by. Instead, they struggled to recruit Civil War memory as “[v]ibrant campaigns for equal rights, north and south, shone an unstinting spotlight on the hollowness of ‘freedom’ and the unfinished work of the Civil War” (p. 1). While earlier studies at the national level support Titus’s findings, her contribution to this vital subfield demonstrates the value of microhistory. Previous examinations of this milestone assessed how state and national organizations, including the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, shaped this anniversary. In contrast, Titus examines how grassroots organizations shaped a local commemoration. While National Park Service personnel and their interpretation of the battlefield reflected national discourse, local citizens, Black and white, also shaped this commemoration mostly through civic organizations. Notably, these groups ranged from the NAACP, one of the oldest and best-known civil rights groups, to one of the newest and least-known organizations, the Congress of Racial Equality. Like all studies of Civil War memory, this study tells readers more about the era it examines than it does about the Civil War itself, documenting how these civil rights organizations operated at the grassroots level in northern states. Most studies examine these organizations’ actions in the de jure Jim Crow South, and not in the de facto Jim Crow North. In this book’s greatest irony, in the place where Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a “new birth of freedom,” African Americans struggled to realize emancipation’s promise. While Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town is a tremendously important local study, it might be valuable to examine other small towns and larger cities and their commemorations. The most obvious factors in the Gettysburg commemorations, tourism and commercialization, shaped residents’ memory. What about the centennial at Sharpsburg/Antietam? Did the people remember the Emancipation Proclamation issued in its aftermath? The Civil War’s [End Page 387] bloodiest day occurred far from the type of road system that made the Gettysburg battlefield accessible to tourists. Did that matter? What happened in cities like Philadelphia, which was central to both the Black and the white Civil War experience? How did other northern cities with populations of native-born Black Americans and foreign-born immigrants commemorate? In Civil War memory, forgetting matters. Did western communities, such as those in Colorado or California, even observe the centennial? This call for more research in no way diminishes the value of this outstanding study. No one town, regardless of its iconic landscape, represents the final word on memory studies, particularly since Americans seem willing to continue to fight and even kill at places like Charlottesville, Virginia, sixty-four years after Gettysburg remembered the centennial of its three bloody days. Barbara A...