The Civil War in History and Memory
DAVID W. BLIGHT

The concepts of history and memory represent two attitudes toward the past, two streams of historical consciousness that must at some point flow together. History -- what trained historians do -- is a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action, and therefore more secular than what people commonly refer to as memory. History can be read by or belong to everyone; it assesses change and progress over time, and is therefore more relative, more contingent upon place, chronology, and scale. Memory, however, is often treated as a sacred set of potentially absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community. Memory is often owned; history, interpreted.

In the confluence of history and memory, we will find much of what is exciting and troubling about how nations and communities use the past. We must respect the poets and priests, honoring them by studying and learning from them. We should study and understand the power of the myths that define societies and cultures. But then, standing at the confluence of the two streams, we should write the history of memory, observing and explaining the turbulence we find.

Neither poets nor historians can stand alone in using and explaining the past. Since all memory is in some way prelude, we have to chant together.

No Desperate Hero: Manhood and Freedom in a Union Soldier's Experience

Born and raised in Northampton, Mass., Charles Harvey Brewster was a relatively unsuccessful, 27-year-old store clerk and a member of the local militia when he enlisted in Company C of the Tenth Massachusetts Volunteers in April 1861. His father, Harvey Brewster, had died in 1839, when Charles was only 5 years old, leaving Martha Russell Brewster a widow with three small children, including two daughters. Charles Brewster's wartime letters, virtually all written to his mother and sisters, clearly reflect a background of family financial distress. For Brewster, as has been true for men throughout the ages, war became an ordinary man's opportunity to escape from the ordinary.

He entered the service disappointingly as a noncommissioned first sergeant and spent the first summer and autumn of the war pining for the status of a commission, which he received in December 1862. He sent a detailed description of the sword, sash, belt, and cap purchased for him as gifts, at considerable cost, by members of his company. His letter reads like a description of an impending graduation or a wedding night. The army in winter quarters had become a society of men living together, developing their own rituals and conventions of domestic relations.

Brewster, like most men of his generation, was deeply imbued with the Victorian American values of "manhood" and "courage." He perceived war as the test, and he constantly sought reassurance that he could meet the challenge. Especially in the early stages of the war, there is no question that fear of personal dishonor provided the motivation and much of the discipline of Civil War armies.

In May 1862, just before the Battle of Fair Oaks, Brewster wrote daily, dramatic accounts of the impending battle, but even more so, he chronicled his desperate struggle with dysentery and "terrible exposure" while sleeping nightly in the mud. Courage in this instance, Brewster learned, merely meant endurance and a little luck. At the Battle of Fair Oaks, Brewster's regiment lost one of every four men engaged (killed, wounded, or missing), and, with good reason, the young officer wondered why he was still alive. He tried to describe the sounds and the stench of the battlefield, and the excitement and pulse of the fighting. He also began to demonize the enemy at every turn.

After Gettysburg, in 1863, he described the endless corpses of dead men and horses as if they were macabre monuments. At Spotsylvania, in 1864, he wrote that "there was one Rebel sat up praying at the top of his voice and others were gibbering in insanity others were whining at the greatest rate." Brewster took an awkward solace in the fact that he had not, he claimed, heard any wounded Union soldiers "make any fuss."

One of the most intriguing themes revealed in Brewster's letters is his attitudes and actions regarding race and slavery. He had voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and embraced the Republican Party's free-labor and antislavery ideology. He had lived all his life in reform-minded Northampton and believed from the first giddy days of the war that he was fighting to save the Union and free the slaves. But Brewster was no radical abolitionist (their ranks were very small in the Union army). His racial views were those of a sardonic, white workingman who believed that black people were a backward if not inferior race. But, at the same time, he believed that slavery was evil, that a war against secession was inherently a war against racial bondage, and that out of the bloodshed would come a different society.

Very early in the war, at Fortress Monroe, Va., Gen. Benjamin F. Butler declared the fugitive slaves who escaped to his lines "contraband of war," treating them as confiscated enemy property. The idea caught on as a moral and military imperative. Yet the slaves themselves were forcing a clearer settlement of this issue by their own courage and resolve. The Civil War was a conflict of such scale that its greatest lessons, collectively and individually, were being learned on the ground, where abstractions must be converted into daily decisions.

From Camp Brightwood, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., Brewster learned firsthand that many slaves were freeing themselves and converting the war's purpose. Slaves took "leg bail," Brewster wrote approvingly in November 1861. And in language that might have been fitting of a small-town, wartime abolitionist rally, he declared that "this war is playing the Dickens with slavery and if it lasts much longer will clear our Country's name of the vile stain and enable us to live in peace hereafter." In such passages, Brewster represented an attitude among white Northerners that, driven by the exigencies of war against the South, prompted Congress and Lincoln eventually to commit the nation to the reality of emancipation.

Shortly after receiving his commission and setting up his new domestic quarters, Brewster had taken a 17-year-old runaway slave named David as his personal servant. Proud and possessive, he treated his "contraband" with a gushing paternalism. The young lieutenant took pride in relieving the Confederacy of this lone asset. "He was the only slave his master had," said Brewster, "and his master never will have him again if I can help it." But the contraband issue bitterly divided the Tenth Massachusetts, causing, by March 1862, what Brewster called nearly "a state of mutiny" in the regiment. Brewster and his antislavery cohort (six contrabands were harbored in Company C alone) would lose this dispute to the pro-slavery officers in the regiment. Some fugitives were tearfully returned to their waiting owners, while still others were spirited away toward Pennsylvania to an ambiguous fate.

Brewster left the war for good in November 1864. By the mid-1870s, he had turned his prewar sense of failure into a steady sash, door, and paint business. By 1880, he had bought one of the finest residences in Northampton, built three greenhouses, and opened a successful, year-round florist business. The disdainful, insecure, ambitious soldier of the war letters became the old veteran and family man who grew flowers, speculated in land and other property, made a comfortable living, and actively participated in the the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans' organization.

By the 1880s, like most veterans, Brewster was ready for reconciliation with Confederate veterans. In October 1886, he attended Blue-Gray reunions at Gettysburg and Fredericksburg, writing to his children that "papa has had the grandest time he ever had in his life." Of the Confederate veterans, he could only marvel at how they "seem as glad to see us as though we were brothers or cousins at least."

Partly as tourists, partly as icons of a refurbished martial ideal, partly just as old men searching for their more active and noble youth, and partly as symbols of changelessness in a rapidly industrializing age, veterans like Brewster discovered a heroic nostalgia in these reunions. The former soldier who had so fervently sought a sense of community in the army could now truly belong in a society building monuments -- and rapidly forgetting the reality of combat and the deep racial and ideological roots of the war.

Healing and History: Battlefields and the Problem of Civil War Memory

Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas -- healing and justice. On some level, both had to occur, but given the potency of white supremacy in 19th-century America, those two aims never developed in historical balance. One might conclude that the imbalance was simply America's inevitable historical condition, and thus celebrate the remarkable swiftness of the reunion. But sometimes reconciliations come with terrible costs, both intentional and unseen. The sectional reunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late 19th century, but it could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people the war had freed from centuries of bondage. That is the tragedy lingering on the margins and infesting the heart of American history from Appomattox to World War I.

In the wake of the war, thousands of Northern readers learned of the condition of the defeated South, its material and political condition, as well as its famous battlefields, from Northern travel writers. In The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, the novelist and poet John T. Trowbridge wrote the longest and most lyrical of such accounts. Trowbridge began his journeys in late August 1865, at Gettysburg, on Cemetery Hill.

He watched a veritable production line making stones lettered Unknown, and felt compelled to contemplate the meaning of it all. He could have been speaking for thousands of tourists in our own time who visit this most famous of American battlefields. "Grown accustomed to the waste of life through years of war," he wrote, "we learn to think too lightly of such sacrifices." Trowbridge demanded meaning from what he observed, not merely a feeling of the grandeur of the massive fight. But the meaning remained to him "vague and uncertain. It lies before us like one of those unidentified heroes," he said, "hidden from sight, deep-buried, mysterious, its headstones lettered 'Unknown.'"

So often at Civil War battlefields, Americans are still walking in Trowbridge's footsteps, observing and moved, but not knowing why so many men died on those beautiful landscapes. We cannot see the coffins protruding from the ground anymore, nor hear the stonecutter's hammer; we need help in bridging the gap between the graves and their meanings. The most important forms of healing are probably those that come from a combination of emotion and knowledge that instructs and even surprises us, rather than from that which confirms what we already want to believe.

During the first decade or so after the war, Civil War veterans on both sides tried to forge new lives. Veterans' organizations and reunions lagged until the late 1870s; women, South and North, tended to lead memorial activity. But, especially in the 1880s, battlefields increasingly became sites of regimental reunions, an industry of monument building, the object of detailed mapping, and eventually an array of Blue-Gray reunions. Bitterness between Yankee and Confederate veterans could still emerge, especially over such issues as the possible return of battle flags and the longstanding reluctance of most former Confederates to return to Gettysburg at all.

But aging soldiers shared much in the Gilded Age; a kind of "culture of character" emerged as a core ideology that knit them together. Old soldiers tended to measure each other as preservers of an older, more wholesome society, uncorrupted by materialism and rooted in individual honor. They came to see their war experience as a special, shared possession, and the battlefields where they reassembled 20 or 30 years after the fact as their own sites of healing. In the mutuality of sacrifice, in the shared claim to a special realm of experience and manliness, in their obsession for detail in preserving and mapping battlefields, veterans themselves became America's first Civil War "buffs." They began to transform those battlefields into places of sectional healing, though rarely if ever places of racial healing.

At Gettysburg, the early history of Blue-Gray fraternalism was mixed. A first attempt, in 1874, was abandoned when it became clear that it was simply too early for soldiers to mingle at the scene of such sensitive memories. Reconstruction politics also delayed such fraternalism; as long as the "bloody shirt" was so useful on both sides in the struggles over the meaning of the war, Blue-Gray reunions were not easy to organize. Confederates were also deeply divided among themselves, between Virginians and North Carolinians, over responsibility for defeat at Gettysburg.

But, by 1887, on the 24th anniversary of the battle, some 500 members of the Philadelphia Brigade veterans' organization met with some 200 survivors of Pickett's Division. They met in an elaborate ceremony in the town square to shake hands, and then, after speeches acknowledging mutual valor, they gathered out at the "high-water mark" where they had met in 1863 in some of the most celebrated combat of the war. They pitched tents and spent the night, exchanging stories, hats, and mementos, including, for a few, locks of hair.

All was not sweetness in Blue-Gray relations, however. An 1888 attempt at a larger reunion on the 25th anniversary was a disappointment. "No God-knows-who-was-right bosh must be tolerated at Gettysburg," wrote the editor of a Union-veterans' journal. With time, though, an "everyone-was-right bosh" did overtake the practice of Blue-Gray fraternalism.

As it stood in the general American culture early in the 20th century, Civil War memory never saw a more fully orchestrated expression than that at Gettysburg on the battle's 50th anniversary, in July 1913. With their railway tickets paid for by the government, more than 53,000 veterans, Blue and Gray, came to Gettysburg, from every state except two. The states and the federal government appropriated well over $2-million to put on this remarkable festival of harmony and reconciliation. The reunion came off as a kind of public avowal of a glorious fight that led to greater national unity.

No time or space was allowed at the four-day spectacle for discussion of causes and consequences. There was no rhetoric about emancipation or the unresolved history of Reconstruction. Nor was there any consideration of the war's second great outcome by 1913 -- the nation's disastrous abandonment of racial reconciliation. The "Peace Jubilee," as the reunion was called, was a Jim Crow reunion.

There is no evidence that any black veterans attended or were welcome, in spite of what is shown in episode 11 of Ken Burns's television series on the Civil War. The only black people in attendance were laborers who helped build the tent city, constructed and cleaned the latrines, and dispensed blankets to the white veterans.

At a time when lynching had developed into a social ritual of its own horrifying kind (the NAACP counted 70 in 1913), and when American apartheid had become fully entrenched, many black leaders and editors found the sectional love feast at Gettysburg more than they could bear. "A Reunion of whom?" asked the Washington Bee.

African-American responses to the 1913 Gettysburg reunion were especially telling in the context of the Wilson administration's efforts that very summer to aggressively resegregate federal agencies in Washington. Woodrow Wilson, elected president in 1912 and inaugurated that spring of 1913, came to the Pennsylvania town on July 4, the last day of the reunion, to give his Gettysburg address. Wilson did not really want to come; he wanted no part of this festival of sectional peace, and as the first Southerner elected president since the Civil War, he wished not to have to test the politics of such an event. Up until about four days before the reunion, he had planned not to attend.

President Wilson rode into Gettysburg by train and was quickly put into an open car and whisked out to the battlefield, where a huge tent awaited him, filled with some 12,000 of the veterans. He walked into the tent accompanied on either side by a Union veteran and a Confederate veteran, each holding his respective flag. In his brief speech, Wilson declared it "an impertinence to discourse upon how the battle went, how it ended," or even "what it signified." Wilson's charge, he claimed, was to comprehend what the 50 years since the battle had meant. His answer struck the mystic chord that most Americans were prepared to hear: "They have meant peace and union and vigor, and the maturity and might of a great nation." Wilson's gift for ambiguity was in perfect form. A nation can have too much memory, but a nation can also forget too much.

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory

The question of the stakes involved in struggles over rival versions of history not only leads us to the political and social meanings of what historians do but also provides an angle of understanding about the confluences of history and memory for intellectuals and for larger societies.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a pioneer in illuminating the phenomenon of "official" and "alternative" histories in America, especially with reference to history and race. He spent much of his career as a scholar and an artist trying to dislodge American history from its racist moorings. In Du Bois's historical writing, he was not merely crying foul at racist historians for leaving black people out of the story of American history. He was surely partisan to the extent that he sought to restore, even exalt, his own people's history. At the same time, he believed that such a restoration could only enrich American history. He was very much interested in how multiple parts could make a new whole, how pluralism might be a new conceptual framework for American history.

In his commencement address at Harvard in 1890, "Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization," the 22-year-old Du Bois offered up Davis, the recently deceased former president of the Confederacy, as an American "Teutonic hero." Boldly, he used Davis as a symbol of the "type of civilization" (national, and not merely Southern) that had advanced itself by "murdering Indians," that had created a culture "whose principle is the rise of one race on the ruins of another," and that was driven by an "overweening sense of the I and a consequent forgetting of the Thou." The veiled implication of Du Bois's speech was that America's quest for sectional reconciliation had led it not only to honor former Confederate leaders but also to fashion a society where might made right, where unbridled individualism reigned, and where racism flourished.

From his most scientific studies of black urban and rural life, like The Philadelphia Negro (1899), to his essays, fiction, and poetry, a sense of history informs nearly everything Du Bois wrote. He was a student of race, and therefore of conflict, and his very subject matter placed him in an oppositional -- and sometimes advantageous -- position to comment on the struggle over memory in American society. Du Bois came to see himself as a historical outsider in America, but one who could use his American duality, the famous double consciousness (the competing identities of being black and American) about which he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as a lens through which to observe and interrogate the nation's history.

As he would in various ways in several other works, Du Bois asserted in Souls that the black experience stood at the center of national history, at least for those who cared to look at conflict rather than only continuity, at irony rather than pleasing myth. His image of the "swarthy spectre" sitting in its "accustomed seat at the nation's feast" frames his claim that "the nation has not yet found peace from its sins." Specters haunt, and American memory was haunted, Du Bois seemed to be saying; the country's collective memory awaited new voices, new scholars, and storytellers who might peer into its contradictions and make irony the lifeblood of the story rather than merely the unseen background. At the very least, such an approach might change the seating arrangement at the feast.

In these essays and one short story, Du Bois used a poetic sensibility to make an offering to the souls of Americans. His vexed, sometimes mystical attachments to "race" as a source of ideals and gifts is full-blown in portions of Souls. But the book was like a gift of narratives -- across the color line -- that might help mediate America's treacherous journey between memory and expectation about race.

In Black Reconstruction in America, a project that was more than 20 years old when it came out in 1935, Du Bois assumed the posture of an empiricist. But, in the preface, he acknowledged the dual function of the historian: "to tell and interpret." It is especially interesting that, in a one-page preface, Du Bois found it necessary to "say frankly in advance" that his most basic assumption was that black people were "ordinary human beings," that he sought to refute any theory of Negro inferiority, and that he understood that doing so might curtail his audience. The weight of traditional interpretations of slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction inspired and haunted this long book.

The first chapter of Black Reconstruction, "The Black Worker," is a meditation on the meaning of slavery in American history. That essay and the final chapter, "The Propaganda of History," can serve as a primer for the field of African-American history as it has developed since the 1930s. Although Du Bois's tone was unquestionably polemic, he did strive for some balanced perspective. He acknowledged that slaveholders were not unremittingly evil people, and even that the institution of slavery was "not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system." He allowed that slaves may have been reasonably housed and fed. But, looking back upon the historiography of slavery, as well as on popular attitudes toward the Old South as they stood in the 1930s, Du Bois declared inconceivable "the idyllic picture of a patriarchal state with cultured and humane masters under whom slaves were as children, guided and trained in work and play, given each such mental training as was for their good."

Instead, he offered a picture of a labor system bent on the "ultimate degradation of man" and the "psychological" disorientation of individuals. To Du Bois, the broadest significance of slavery lay in its definition of the limits of American democracy. As long as labor, freedom, and constitutional rights were defined in racial terms, he suggested, America's historical self-definition would always be stunted.

"No one can read that first thin autobiography of Frederick Douglass," Du Bois declared near the end of Black Reconstruction, "and have left many illusions about slavery. And if truth is our object, no amount of flowery romance and personal reminiscences of its protected beneficiaries can keep the world from knowing that slavery was a cruel, dirty, costly, and inexcusable anachronism, which nearly ruined the world's greatest experiment in democracy." Writing at the very time the Works Progress Administration's slave narratives were being collected, and well before any serious rediscovery of Douglass or the other antebellum black writers, Du Bois made an important claim about black sources and history, even if he did romanticize it: Some of the most important witnesses had never been asked; the very notion of a source needed redefinition; and an entire history was yet to be told.

In the conclusion of Black Reconstruction, looking especially to the Civil War era, Du Bois warned against using history merely "for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego." There had to be a place for slavery, massive civil war, and postwar racial violence in the doctrine of American progress.

Du Bois was not writing, in 1935, as a typical professor inside the academy; he could not simply take his work to the American Historical Association's annual meetings, which, ironically, were raging at that time with debates over relativism and objectivity. Du Bois had to contend for American historical memory -- for a new vision of the meaning of race and Reconstruction -- with the weapons of language. He felt "so futile," he said, in confronting that task.

Du Bois ended the book with the image of a college teacher in an academic hall somewhere at the turn of the century. The teacher "looks into the upturned face of youth and in him youth sees the gowned shape of wisdom and hears the voice of God." Then Du Bois placed the words of the historian John Burgess in the mouth of the teacher. The nation, announced the lecturer, "has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South on this subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican Party ... will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man."

In this metaphoric classroom, with the actual words of a leading Reconstruction historian, Du Bois demonstrated that the real tragedy of Reconstruction was not in the history but in the histories.

The hope embedded in Du Bois's tragic ending of Black Reconstruction is that, when the marketplace for the construction of social memories becomes as free and open as possible, while still firmly guided by the rules of scholarship, then the politics of remembering and forgetting might be, here and there, overcome. Whether that was a vain hope or a realized ideal remains the principal challenge of all those seriously interested in American historical consciousness.

David W. Blight is a professor of history at Amherst College. This article is adapted from his Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War, being published this month by the University of Massachusetts Press. Copyright © 2002 by David W. Blight. His previous book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001) won the 2002 Bancroft Prize and many other awards.

Source:  The Chronicle of Higher Education
            The Chronicle Review (July 12, 2002)