The U.S. Civil War and Cultural Memory

Abstract

Few historical events shed more light on the topic of cultural memory than the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865). The war was fueled in large part by collective memories of the seventeenth-century conflict between the early New England Puritans and the royalist Cavaliers, who settled mainly in the South. In turn, the Civil War over time was collectively re-encoded in the contexts and moods of successive periods. During the eight decades after the war, when Northerners and Southerners tried to bury the hatchet, a pro-Confederate memory of the Civil War was popularized in schoolbooks, Confederate monuments, fiction, and films. A wholly different view of the Civil War, emphasizing the righteousness of the North’s cause in its battle against slavery, arose during early Reconstruction, was kept alive in the first half of the twentieth century largely by African Americans, and was revived during the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement promoted the idea that the war was crucial in putting the nation on the path to justice for all. Since then, some Americans on the right have continued to take pride in symbols of the Southern cause, but a strong backlash has resulted in the tearing down of Confederate statues, the renaming of places and institutions, and an interpretation of US history to highlight the experiences of African Americans. Collective memories of the Civil War have now become more sharply divided than at any time since the war itself. How do the various collective memories of the Civil War stand up to historical analysis? As this chapter shows, cultural memory consistently departs from factual history.