Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney W. Fitzhugh Brundage (bio) Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. 464. Cloth, $35.00.) Remembering the Civil War is an important and daring book. It challenges, forthrightly but respectfully, ascendant ideas about Civil War memory during the century after the Civil War. According to Caroline E. Janney, the memory of the Civil War remained a raw scar and an ongoing source of rancor long after a culture of national reconciliation purportedly took hold. The implications of Janney’s argument are important for how we understand not just the postbellum memory of the conflict, but also the regional and national legacy of that memory to the present day. Any reader familiar with David Blight’s acclaimed Race and Reunion (2001) will discern that Remembering the Civil War offers extended dissent from its tale of national declension. Blight’s magisterial book has a juggernaut narrative that stresses the dialectical relationship between white northern and southern memory. According to Blight, national reconciliation necessitated a willful amnesia about the role of race, slavery, and black agency in the Civil War. For white northerners, it cost little, as victors, to ignore the black memory of the war or the central place of emancipation in it. For white southerners, parroting bromides about reconciliation was a fair trade for northern paeans to white southern principles and valor. Blight’s book has had tremendous resonance because of its poignancy; it complements our contemporary recognition of the shallowness of the nation’s commitment to the principles of freedom and liberty during much of its history. [End Page 326] Janney’s most important contribution may be to draw our attention to those postbellum Americans who were earnest, vociferous, and articulate disputants in the lively contest to define the war’s meaning. These white and black, northern and southern men and women were willing to entertain the possibility of reconciliation, but only on their own terms. One after another, they displayed little interest in sectional appeasement or healing. Instead, they were tenacious in their insistence that their wartime enemies were depraved, cruel, and unprincipled. Janney builds on her earlier work and that of other scholars published since the appearance of Race and Reunion that have broadened our understanding of the diverse communities and motivations at work in postbellum commemoration. Whereas Blight’s interest gravitated to the printed word, Janney’s gaze tends as much or more in the direction of public ceremony and organized commemoration. Some of the same prisoners of war, women’s organizations, and veterans take the stage in both Blight’s and Janney’s book. Yet comparatively obscure veterans, women, and African Americans are more visible participants in Janney’s account. These advocates of memory were far less inclined to acclaim sectional détente than were the editors of Century magazine, public intellectuals, or literary lions. And by tracing this mnemonic contest up to World War II, Janney emphasizes the persistence of the disputants. Indeed, the erection of a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery and the building of the Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac River from the cemetery are, for Janney, just another thrust and counterthrust in the decades-long struggle over the war’s meaning. By carrying her story past the oft-discussed fiftieth anniversary of Appomattox, Janney necessarily highlights the crucial role of women in twentieth-century commemoration. Whereas the commemorative activities of veterans have sometimes been privileged in previous histories of postbellum memory, Janney places women, northern and southern, white and black, at the center of the commemorative project. As Janney explains, they raised the money, mobilized their communities, organized the memorial dedications, explained their causes in speeches, and displayed a doggedness that few aging veterans could equal. If some veterans of the war elected to shake hands and reconcile, many more women along the fault lines of the conflict seemingly spurned even token gestures of reconciliation. Other scholars have dwelled on women as guardians of memory, but Janney offers the fullest and most compelling treatment of their essential contribution to...