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R
ecent study of the Civil War has dealt extensively with the questionof historical memory, that is, how the nation came to terms withthe social and political legacies of the war. As a relatively new focus within the discipline of American history, the study of memory has
upon the acceptance of certain assumptions regarding the existenceand power of collective public memory. Historians have approached theissue with various methods in order to construct a more comprehensiveand holistic understanding of the war and its aftermath. However,many important questions about the validity of memory as a mode of historical analysis remain: Is there such thing as a cohesive historical orcollective memory? Is memory created or does it arise spontaneously? Who, if anyone, has access to the control of historical memory?Historians wrestled with these issues prior to the development of
histories have aimed to engage with these questions, if indirectly.
Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865 to 1913
(1987) by Gaines Foster and
Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic 1865-1900
(1992) by Stuart McConnell are two booksthat examine how social organizations and veterans’ groups sought
wealth of publications of postwar Confederate organizations to createa coherent narrative of Lost Cause ideology, while Stuart McConnellchronicles how Union veterans struggled to control their social identity in the aftermath of the deadliest war in American history.
approaches to historical memory that historians have produced.
The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865
Willful Forgetting:Methodological Approaches to the Problemof Historical Memory
D
AVID
P
IENDAK
(2001) by Alice Fahs and
Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration,and the Post-Bellum Landscape
(2003) by Paul Shackel are new worksof history that engage the problem of memory through alternativemethodologies. Fahs interprets how the popular literature of theperiod represents cultural imaginings of the war, while Shackel, ananthropologist and historian, documents the history of controversialand contested spaces within the built environment. These works
literary, anthropological, psychological and sociological analysis.Read together, these four books represent a few of the wayshistorians have approached memory and remembrance. Read critically,they typify both the merits and problems of memory as a focus of study.Foster and McConnell complement each other particularly well andexemplify the strengths and weaknesses of histories of organizational
offer alternative viewpoints unaccounted for in the earlier works.
Ghosts of the Confederacy
. The book begins with the end of the war in 1865 andproceeds to describe the ways post-war social groups and veterans’
of the war through memorial activities, celebrations of self, and partisanpolitical activism. The focuses of Foster’s study of the developmentof the Lost Cause are the numerous veteran, historical, social, andliterary organizations and societies that formed after southernsurrender, including most prominently, the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia (AANVA), United Confederate Veterans (UCV),Southern Historical Society (SHS), Sons of Confederate Veterans(SCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Fosterdescribes at length how these groups manipulated what he calls the“ghosts of the confederacy,” that is, a form of historical memory centered around the commemoration of war dead in order to create“a ritual model of an ordered, deferential, conservative society.”
1
Heargues that these groups most often began as apolitical organizationsduring an unsuccessful southern revitalization period and attempted
1
Gaines Foster,
Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865 to 1913
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 144.
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to reshape the existing culture into a more “satisfying” form.
2
Whilethese emerging organizations were seemingly benign responses to thetraumatizing political and military defeat of the war, they would cometo exert considerable power over the dominant interpretation of the
The Confederate dead were the most powerful tools available tomany of these groups, and leaders such as Robert E. Lee and JeffersonDavis were transformed into powerful cultural symbols following theirdeaths.
3
Foster traces the development of the earliest social groupsto the death of Lee, a war hero whose personal distaste for memorialrituals rendered him more useful to the Lost Cause dead than alive.
4
Thecommemoration of war heroes after military defeat was central to the“ghost dance,” an extended metaphor that Foster uses throughout thebook to compare proponents of the Lost Cause to Native Americanfolk tradition and religious rituals of resistance. According to Foster,
tradition were in fact a form of mass resistance. The deaths of key
emphasized the valor, honor, and heroism of those who fought as partof a large-scale celebration of southern culture that would eventually abolish any link between the war and antebellum slave society.
or civic religion to describe the creation and contestation of culture.
5
In his introduction he describes his purpose: a study of “whocontrolled… postwar Confederate organizations (and thereby served askeepers of the past), how southerners responded to these groups, whatthese groups had to say about the war, and what their rituals meant.”
6
Embedded in Foster’s description of methodology is his own model of understanding historical memory. The use of “ritual”—a word with clearreligious connotations—to describe the actions of postwar southernerssuggests the weight Foster puts on public spectacle in the creation of memory. In addition, reference to Confederate organizations and their
2
Ibid., 56.
3
Ibid., 96.
4
Ibid., 52.
5
Foster,
Ghosts of the Confederacy
, 7.
6
Ibid., 5.
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