The Civil War’s Contested Past

Abstract

The Civil War’s Contested Past William A. Link (bio) Barbara A. Gannon. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xiv + 282 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $42.00. Caroline E. Janney. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xii + 451 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Thirteen years ago, David Blight’s Race and Reunion argued that the Civil War fostered a struggle among three competing memories—reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist. Seeing memory as contestation, Blight argued for a triumph of reunion over race. The “forces of reconciliation,” he wrote, “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, . . . [and] the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race.”1 Race and Reunion was so compelling that, in many respects, it forestalled further work about Civil War memory. How could further work break out of the Blight paradigm? Two new books by Barbara Gannon and Caroline Janney seek to answer this question. Gannon, writing about the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and Janney, offering a new general synthesis of Civil War memory, conclude that the relationship between race and reunion was far more complicated than Blight suggests. Using both black and white war veterans and their families as subjects, they see the war’s lasting meaning through concepts of Union, comradeship, and contrasting views of nationhood. Both dispute Blight’s notion that old sectional antagonisms disappeared; if anything, Gannon and Janney maintain, these sentiments strongly endured, with full reconciliation failing to overcome wartime animosity. Like Blight, these historians portray race as central, though they disagree with his categorization and characterization. Memories of slavery and sectional division were not mutually exclusive, Gannon and Janney argue. In The Won Cause’s fourteen chapters and four parts—and less than 200 pages of text—Gannon explores race and memory in the GAR, the most important and largest Union veteran organization. Previous studies, she says, relied too [End Page 678] much on national records and thus emphasized “the controversial, and less typical, involvement of black veterans in the GAR” (pp. 9–10). Instead relying on African American newspapers, Gannon fully explores black involvement. Rather than collective memory, Gannon considers “personal memory”—the differing perspectives of individuals and how they remembered events. In the personal memory of veterans, she finds that sentiments about Union and about comradeship trumped everything else. Gannon defines comradeship as “the shared experience of suffering,” with anyone serving on behalf of the Won Cause a comrade. Union regiments and brigades were segregated, but, at the divisional and corps level, black and white soldiers served together. Even soldiers not serving in combat—most African Americans worked in support units—were considered comrades. Comradeship served as the most important ingredient of “personal” memory, but it also permitted veterans, within the arena and space of the GAR, to “overcome racial separation in an era defined by the color line” (p. 118). Gannon convincingly argues that white veterans, especially in the North, accepted black veterans into membership, with full rights. “An examination of day-to-day life in integrated posts,” she writes, “reveals that African Americans, like their white counterparts, attended meetings, participated in post activities, and accomplished the essential, but often mundane, work of their posts” (p. 107). The GAR officially welcomed all veterans without regard to race, and whites welcomed blacks based on shared service and comradeship. Posts existed across the country. Many were integrated, if white veterans permitted black veterans to join. Integrated posts provided a tenuous forum for black veterans. They “could not either literally or figuratively represent the race,” writes Gannon (p. 113). The true story of the African American experience in the GAR lies instead in the establishment of all-black posts across the country. Some two hundred all-black posts, which Gannon meticulously documented, were located in twenty-four states and the District of Columbia. These units were concentrated in small towns and cities, mostly in the North; Maryland and Pennsylvania alone claimed forty units. The black posts proved important, moreover, in how they shaped Civil War memory...