Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

Abstract

It has become commonplace for historians to pronounce the Civil War memory genre as played out. Nothing could be further from the truth, as John R. Neff's Honoring the Civil War Dead demonstrates so well. Neff's cultural study of the profound social consequences of the deaths of 625,000 young men challenges the current scholarly consensus portraying northern compliance with a postwar ideology that emphasized the courage of both sides. In that consensus scenario, loyalty to the Union cause sank while adherence to the Lost Cause rose. As the war's bitterness receded, the Union's righteous ideals, including emancipation, were increasingly elided or downplayed at such venues as Memorial Day ceremonies and battlefield reunions. Neff acknowledges the indisputable fact that reconciliation did take place. Moreover, the victors allowed, and sometimes encouraged, partisans of an utterly defeated slave republic to commemorate and romanticize the Confederacy. “The myth of the Lost Cause,” the author states, “is conspicuous in our national consciousness because it sought to reassert a world that could not be remade if it existed at all” (p. 9). In contrast, the elements of the northern myth, which Neff labels the “cause victorious,” had a solid if unstable basis in reality in the immediate aftermath of war. The cause victorious was anchored by the belief that a stronger, more-united, freer nation emerged from the terrible bloodletting. This new nationalism was sanctified by death and embraced by a majority of northerners and southern freed people.