First and foremost: congratulations, Dr. McDaniel! We’re so excited about your son!

Somehow the day got away from me and it is now past midnight, so I hope you’ll all forgive the less-than-eloquent format of this recap of our meeting this morning.

Without further ado:

We all agreed that Brundage gives a comprehensive analysis of struggles for memory construction in the south. Based on this reading, we wondered if Blight wasn’t simplifying this tenuous reality for the sake of the reconciliationist narrative. We also wondered if Neff placed too much emphasis on commemoration, at the expense of other narratives, like the development (and relative autonomy of) segregated black schools, as Brundage illuminates.

We liked Brundage’s use of anecdotes, and found the way he wove the snapshots of the chapters together convincing.

The section on Hayti in particular, and the creation of bulldozer ghettos in general, perplexed us. Jocelyn began to wonder about eminent domain. Ryan and Kat were sad to see the destruction of historical black architecture, as rendered through the photographs Brundage included. I asked the group if they thought developers actually believed they were improving these neighborhoods they were bulldozing, with the intent of returning blacks to their newly rejuvenated community, or if there were malicious intents at the outset. We were divided on the issue, but all agreed what eventually happened to these once-vibrant black neighborhoods was heartbreaking and a shame.

We were all particularly interested in Negro History Week (as a precursor to Black History Month, as Kat pointed out) and especially its eventual inclusion into most integrated schools. This surprised us, even if we could imagine a lot of it being token acknowledgment rather than authentic celebration.

Brundage brings up the ever-salient question of connotations of Confederate symbols. Are all Confederate symbols necessarily racist? We struggled over how to answer this question, and ended up leaving it somewhat up in the air. Kat pointed to the difference between “The South will Rise Again” and remembering an ancestor who fought on the Confederate side. Ryan said because things like the Confederate flag are still such flashpoint issues, maybe we can’t answer the question yet.

Please feel free to add more from today’s discussion in the comments section.

Bonus: We’ve decided that if the Battle of Sabine Pass gets to be the Confederacy’s Thermopylae, then our independent study gets to be Rice’s Thermopylae, and thus, we accept Thermopylae as our collective name. Talk about constructing public memory…

The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
W. Fitzhugh Brundage

As Ryan said, Brundage sets his framework, “struggles over the control of public space,” clearly and early (7). Following the introduction, the reader is introduced to nearly parallel stories of whites’ struggle to dominate public memory followed by black reaction to that construction. Brundage, more than Blight or Neff, allows space—even in the pages of a book, the struggle for a precious commodity—for both white and black attempts to create their own “useable past” (222).

From the subtitle, we know Brundage has chosen to focus on the race criterion more heavily than Blight or Neff. Despite this, I thought the North (as a nebulous entity) played an interesting role as consumers of the “quaintness (tourism) industry” (184).

Maybe I am overly aware of this, but again we see the commodification of public history become a, if not the, driving force of memory creation. For Blight, that manifests itself in literature: How much can be made from Sherman’s memoirs? Who would constitute an audience for black memory? At what point does black memory become salable? For Brundage, the emergence of historical tourism as a lucrative industry (307), the creation of state archives (with federal money), the development of black heritage “tours” through southern cities, all point to the particular salience memory adopts once a dollar sign is attached to it.

An interesting point that I think is new to our discussion is the telescoping of black memory. Brundage states on p. 306:

“Almost certainly too much has been asked of the new African American history museums in the South. They are expected to revise misconceptions about the past, teach inspiration lessons, attract tourists, revive troubled neighborhoods, and spur political activism. These expectations, however unrealistic, are entirely predictable. Throughout the centur after the Civil War, southern whites had looked to their monuments and museums to advance similar ends. With so few venues in which to present their collective memory, blacks understandably have anticipated that their new museums would do the work that the myriad memory theaters of whites have long performed” (emphasis added).

After so long being denied access to the public space, to the mass culture market, black attempts to produce a collective memory must necessarily be both reactive and all-encompassing. I wonder how this influenced the stories blacks crafted, and the audiences for whom they created them.

Another point Brundage makes near the end of his book is the appeal to contemporary (white) tastes of “the separation of the past and the present” (308). Perhaps this is the crux of the present-day contest between blacks and whites in the south: most whites want to construct a scenario in which the past is just that: passed. Brundage quotes a tour guide in Greenville, Mississippi who says, “It happened; this is our history. We’re different now” (312). I’d love to discuss this in the meeting today, but that sounds dangerously like erasure through banalization. Whereas for blacks, the link to the past, the tie to what came before, is an essential part of their present-day narrative, and indeed, continues to shape collective memory creation.

I think this separation may be important to us for the Dowling statue because the new narrative that was constructed with the (heavily-Irish) 1997 rededication ceremony seems to be a pretty clear separation from the “Thermopylae of the Confederacy” days of Jefferson Davis.

(Kat, I did notice the reference to Emancipation Park, and scribbled in the margins, “What do they acquire when flanked by streets celebrating a hero of the CSA?” in response to Brundage’s claim that “…such spaces acquired enduring associations with the rituals of black memory” (70).)

The Southern Past: A Class of Race and Memory by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

While reading The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, I like Jocelyn found myself constantly finding references back to Trouillot whom we read at the beginning of the semester.  In attempting to construct detailed history of how Southern “historical memory” was created and changed from the antebellum period to the modern day, Brundage seems to be constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure to point out those points in time that historical fact and memory were commemorated or forgotten and how that related to the political and cultural motivations of the time period.

Throughout the book, Brundage tracks the changing meaning of what it means to be “Southern” and how race played into the construction of historical memory.  Historical memory, defined by Brundage as the “amorphous and varied activities that southerners and others have employed to recall the past.” (Brundage, 4)  Brundage goes on to explain that historical memory as different than simple individual memory:

“Collective or historical memory is not simply the articulation of some shared subconscious, but rather the product of intentional creation. (…) Collective remembering forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms.” (Brundage, 4)

This is perhaps the most succinct definition of historical memory we have received thus far, and the most clear.  This clear definition is important as Brundage’s concept of historical memory forms the common thread throughout Brundage’s narrative which starts with the familiar history of the commemoration and the development of history of the Lost Cause by Southern white club women immediately following the war, then moves to the less permanent but very public demonstrations and establishment of African American memory through parades and pageants in the post-war period.  Following this segment of history, Brundage discusses the movement by “professional” historians to archive the Civil War era around the turn of the century (which turn out to be largely archives of Southern whites due to available resources and sources of funding), then he moves forward to the African American movement to establish a black history movement lead by teachers in schools that changed greatly the established history of the Civil War during the 1920s and 30s.  Brundage ends his narrative with the development of tourism and the selective remembrance in the 1920-30s era that was needed to market the south and finally the razing of historically African American communities to make way for urban revitalization in the 1950s to the 1970s.

To answer to Jocelyn’s question for whether a collective narrative among all Southerners that acknowledges all complexities and arrives at a truth can be found.  I would argue that while Brundage may not have seen his own work as filling this gap, he gets closest to providing a complete narrative of the Southern past than any of our other authors.  While Brundage may not have perfectly intertwined these layers of historical memory he not only describes the different narratives which groups have sought to remember at different times, he also explains why these narratives were important at the moments they were and shows his reader how, while each narrative is distinct, they all form together to create the collective narrative that has yet to be agreed upon.  Even though this collective memory is not complete, I believe that through this book Brundage gets much closer to combining many of its aspects without losing how they were created, how, and why, important factors for both him and Trouillot.

It is in this expansive nature of Brundage’s work that I with Ryan that “With all three books under our belts, it seems to me that Brundage has crafted the most persuasive and fulfilling argument yet.”  While I, like Ryan, think that my opinion may be slightly shaded by the fact that Brundage is the only historian to have carried out his research to the end of the 20th Century, I stand by my belief that Brundage’s narrative on the formation and remembrance of Southern historical memory is the most expansive and best weighted.  By detailing each of the movements we have previously studied and introducing new ones, Brundage built an understanding of how history is formed, used, and influenced by the power dynamic of the time period, from the white supremacy and Lost Cause organizations of the antebellum period, to the power of white elected officials in the case of urban revitalization.

In response to Ryan’s critique regarding the role of Northerners in the Brundage book, I too would agree that he neglects this segment of society.  However, as Brundage was concerned with the formation of historical memory of the South, not the history of reconciliation, I feel he cannot be faulted for excluding them from this already expansive piece.  Brundage instead chose to focus his energy on telling the story of the South, not the story of reunion, and in this task of telling the story of the South, I believe he succeeds.

This book however raises some important questions as it presents for us several faults of historical memory of the past, including the “hero-worship” issue of black historians (Brundage, 180).  My question is, how can we avoid a similar narrative of hero-worship in our study of Dowling so as to provide a more accurate portrayal of his role and the overall story of Sabine Pass, so that we are not subject to the same criticism?

ALSO—Special note: Did anyone else realize that Brundage talked about Emancipation Park?  It was quick but a fun reference to something we’ve talked about in this class.  See page 70 if you lost it.

In The Southern Past, W. Fitzhugh Brundage examines the intertwining relationship between memory, space and culture as it relates to the public remembrance of the Civil War in the American South. For Brundage, the theme of space is very much in the foreground for the entire duration of the book as he explores how various groups competed, despite often lopsided results, for the control of public space as an arena to present their version and memory of the Civil War.

Brundage’s acknowledgment of the plethora of social groups is one of the most fundamental yet significant features that sets him apart from the previous authors that we have read. Blight and Neff undoubtedly dedicated time to the various groups contending for cultural power, yet one cannot help to see that Brundage has provided a more extensive social dissection and prevailed over the previous historians in this respect. Early on, Brundage claims that more than semantics are at stake when we align the southern identity with white identity (2). The next 300 pages or so, accentuate the roles of white men, white women, black men, black women, the poor, the rich, the politically powerful and the politically suppressed in the colonization of public space.

Each group employed different tactics in their attempt to preserve their memory of the War, as white women (who were themselves often divided over the issue of suffrage) formed voluntary associations to occupy the realm of sentiment, a space largely left void by governments and white males. Via their turn to history, white women asserted their public selves and became, for one of the first times, a powerful social group with cultural authority. It was their success, however, that ultimately helped impede reconciliation, both sectional and racial.

Meanwhile, the role of white males is explored through the founding of biased state archives, the emergence of the self-indulging white historian, and the destruction of black “memoryscapes” in places like Hayti in the 20th-century.

Definitely to an extent greater than Blight and perhaps even Neff, Brundage gives African-Americans an emphatic voice, explaining in great depth how southern blacks employed inclusive public celebrations such as Juneteenth to overcome illiteracy in their stride to claim civic space. While Brundage admits that such demonstrations only rarely spilt over into white-occupied space, his focus represents his attempt to avoid silencing any group regardless of effectiveness.

In his analysis of the Civil War dead, Neff also exhibited a concern for the policing of space, however, Brundage seems to proffer a more extensive analysis on the theme of space in public memory. While a comparison between the two must acknowledge the facts that Neff is focusing primarily on the North-South dichotomy in commemoration of the dead, and Brundage is concentrating chiefly on the black-white dialectic in the American South, one segment from The Southern Past caught my attention:

“Beginning during the late nineteenth-century with cemetery monuments to Confederate dead, and continuing as courthouse squares were claimed for white memorials and as state-funded archives and museums were situated beside state capitols, whites dominated the historic landscape” (225).

Dr. McDaniel posed the question last week about the prospect that Neff was giving too much emphasis to the commemoration of the dead, while ignoring too many other elements in such a focused approach. When we consider Neff’s claim that Blight, on the contrary, subsumes the commemoration of the dead under larger political, economic and social motivations, perhaps Brundage has struck a balance between the two? Brundage certainly sits opposite Blight’s theory of sectional reconciliation yet does not completely agree with Neff as he is crediting much more than commemoration of the dead for causing cracks in the reunion. With all three books under our belts, it seems to me that Brundage has crafted the most persuasive and fulfilling argument yet. (I feel as if I should myself admit that Brundage is the only historian whose work goes up until the end of the twentienth-century, yet I stand by my claim).

Allowing for a healthy amount of skepticism, I must admit that Brundage does seem to silence the role of Northerners in the competition for public space. I am aware of the irony of such a statement in a book that is entitled The Southern Past, and is predominately focused on the South, yet the end of the Civil War undoubtedly brought an influx of Northerners into the region, along with their memories. Brundage insists that by the 1880’s, black voluntary organizations had supplanted the Republican Party as organizers of many commemorative events in the South (77), yet we hear little about the Republican Party leading up to this. Overall, the emancipationist legacy was certainly preserved in the South by Northern parties, so perhaps a more extensive insight into them would reveal further conclusions.

In The Southern Pace: A Clash of Race and Memory, W. Fitzhugh Brundage chronicles the ways in which the Civil War was remembered in the South, and how this has affected interpretations of Southern history by women, blacks, white southerners and, to some extent, northerners. Brundage’s argument is fairly simple, and is best evidenced by the style in which the book is written: to date, memory of the Civil War, slavery and race-relations in the South have been the projects of fragmented groups within the South, but never the entire community as a whole.

Brundage highlights the various groups that have, over the course of the past 150 years, played a role in memorializing the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, women took a lead in this type of commemoration, particularly through the construction of monuments and southern heritage groups, something we have already discussed in the other works we’ve read. Brundage also touched on two points brought up in previous readings: Blight’s discussion of how  black people in the post-Civil War era sought to commemorate slavery as a necessary evil (92) and Neff’s brief mention of how the Spanish-American war helped to reunite Americans, a point which Brundage too, sadly left unexplored. (101)

A persistent theme throughout what we have read, beginning with Trouillot, is that those with the power are those who get to write the story of how history is remembered. While Brundage shows that whites were able to dominate much of the post-Civil War narrative through monuments, education, the burgeoning field of professional history, museums and historical sites, Brundage is the first to show that this may not always be the case. While white people were busy writing their narrative that was, admittedly, seen by a greater portion of the public, blacks enjoyed relatively large amounts of freedom to create their own narratives that they shared among their community. As Brundage says:

“In one of the most profound ironies of the Jim Crow era, blacks used state and private resources to turn schools into essential sites of collective memory that performed a role comparable to that of museums, archives and other memory theaters in the white community.” (140)

Although schools were segregated and had minimal resources, black teachers were uniquely celebrated in their communities, and also gave younger black children successful role models to which they could aspire—something Brundage says is actually lost in the Civil Rights movement. Furthermore, black teachers were able to pursue unique educational initiatives such as Negro History Week, a week that became very popular among some segregated schools, and also something that was adopted across the board in many schools following the success of the Civil Rights movement.

While blacks were taking on these initiatives in their own private spheres, whites were creating their own narrative, whose purpose is perhaps best summed up by Brundage’s quote:

“The larger message of the public history movement in the South was unmistakable: while the black past had no relevance for public life, white history was fundamental to it.” (137)

White southerners began commemorating the war first with monuments and Confederate heritage groups and, after the car popularized tourism to the South, with reenactments of the antebellum era. My personal favorite is Brundage’s anecdote about the Society for the Preservation of Spirituels, where white members would dress “in hoop skirts and in tuxedos with antebellum-era bow ties” and sing “spirituels in the low-country black dialect of Gullah.” (217) On a more serious note, of course, Southern whites were attempting to present a version of the antebellum and post-war era that best suited and served their needs, but the ways in which they did so were frequently quite amusing.

Without a doubt, the most important thing Brundage’s book does is complicate our understanding of events both before and after the Civil War which we frequently try to simply understand in terms of being basically good or essentially evil. As Brundage says

“Slavery was an inhumane institution and yet both slave masters and slaves found ways to retain their humanity….[and] the oppressiveness of the Jim Crow South was unquestionably soul-numbing , and yet blacks were never reduced … to ‘the sum of their brutalization.’” (343)

The only way to rectify this situation, according to Brundage, is to do something that even this book did not do: create a collective narrative among all Southerners that acknowledges all of these complexities to arrive at a truth. While I agree that this is probably the only way to have a completely accurate and genuine understanding of the post-Civil War South, I also find myself asking, is that even possible?

Though the last to jump on the Neff versus Blight bandwagon, I’m on board with everyone’s analysis that Neff sees commemoration of the dead in direct conflict with Blight’s reconciliationist narrative. As Neff says, “Anything that provoked memory was … antithetical to any attempt toward reunion based on forgetting the injuries of the past” (210). Blight, on the other hand, pointed to this “politics of forgetting” as a central tenet of his pro-reconciliationist argument.

However, I think Neff may underestimate Blight and his conception of his proposed reconciliationist model. Neff argues that emphasis on reunion overshadows the South’s lingering sectionalist sentiments. In Race and Reunion, Blight is careful to assess certain concessions the North made to the South during the fragile postbellum (and, especially, post-Reconstruction) era, as ultimately leading to a national reunion on Southern terms.

Neff seems to think Blight has missed this point, and the greater point of Southerners understanding and manipulating their agency within the system (214). This is something we touched upon last week, but may prove important as we begin curating the Omeka exhibit: despite overarching reconciliationist sentiments, divergent notions still existed, and played important roles in the production of public memory. For example, when in 1900 the first Confederate dead were allowed reburial in the Arlington National Cemetery, “Southerners continued to preserve the sentiments of sectionalism” (229).

I think it is this understanding of divergent sentiments that allows select groups in Houston to build a monument to a fallen Confederate hero while still participating in the larger narrative of reunion.

Speaking of divergent notions, Neff makes strong arguments for the importance of language and its interpretation by the sections. Upon Lincoln’s death, both the North and the South ultimately see the late President’s assassination as designed by God, and therefore both unavoidable, and beneficial. That “God Almighty ordered this event or it could have never taken place” means one thing to a northerner and a completely different thing to someone from the South (97).

Similarly, in Chapter 3 and discussions about national cemeteries, Neff bluntly states, “…not for many years to come was the term national meant to include those who had not died loyal to the nation” (132). This control over language enables northerners to honor and commemorate their (Union) dead without overtly stripping southerners of theirs. Indeed, in 1898 when President McKinley suggests “‘…we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers…’” (222) he is resorting to the “possessive language” (223) so often utilized by the North.

Further, this language simultaneously denies access to blacks. Neff states that reunion necessitated the reincorporation of two alien groups (84). This construction of “our dead” places value judgments on northerners over southerners and blacks. For Blight, the tension lies between race and reunion. For Neff, the overarching importance of commemorating the dead (and the death culture of the period), precludes the possibility of reconciliation with either.

In Honoring the Civil War Dead, John Neff makes it a brief six pages before he first mentions the work of David Blight. Such a confluence was undoubtedly inevitable as Neff is challenging the idea of reconciliationism, a paradigm popular not only among Civil War historians but also in public memory. It certainly seems to be the consensus among us, myself included, that Neff and Blight present conflicting arguments regarding sectional reunion in the wake of the Civil War. While Blight holds that the North largely sacrificed racial reunion in the name of an economically and politically-charged sectional reunion, Neff proposes that the idea of a reconciled North and South was nothing but the result of:

“a late-season and formulaic assertion of the Cause Victorious” (206).

Reunion as presented by Neff is one full of cracks and factions refusing to surrender their memory of the War even in the name of reconciliation. This is a striking dichotomy to Blight’s reunion, which appears robust and much more widespread in Race and Reunion. It is quite evident, therefore, that these two reunions cannot coexist without one side at least partially ceding to the other. Thus the question is raised of which historian should acquiesce?

After reading both books, it seems to me that Blight is the one who must tip his hat to Neff. The reason for such sentiment is that Neff directly calls Blight out for silencing the role of commemoration of the dead in the development of pubic memory. Indeed Blight’s thesis uses a great deal of socio-economic and political arguments to support it. Neff, however, perceives the subsumption of commemoration of the dead under larger political and economic realms as Blight’s primary mistake. In the process of underestimating and overlooking the role of commemoration, Blight fails to see that

“remembering the dead proved to be an impediment to national healing” (6).

The “face off on reconciliation,” as Jocelyn puts it, continues throughout the duration of the book as Blight remains in Neff’s crosshairs. Neff continues to bring attention to evidence that directly undermines Blight’s thesis of reunion. While the two agree that by the 1890’s the North had a choice to either defend emancipation or pursue sectional reunion, Neff claims that the desire for the latter wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as Blight insists. Blight seems to have silenced the words of those like William H. Lambert, who spoke on Memorial Day in 1879 and reminded everyone that death could not be molded and converted into an instrument for reunion. Overall, Neff helps us see that people like Lambert, the creation of “national” cemeteries that sought to protect the Union dead from the hostile Southern cause, and even the turbulent reality of the blue-grey reunions that Blight so fervently champions, are all visible cracks in the once perceived idea of a clean cut sectional reunion.

It is interesting to note at the end that Neff and Blight often reference the same primary sources, such as the Confederate Veteran. Despite this, they reach opposing conclusions. This only continues to confirm that historians make different choices even when using the same sources, as Trouillot taught us in week 1.

A final thought does not allow me to accept Neff’s argument completely without question. One particular statement with the potential to stimulate skepticism was:

“on the whole, the color line of segregation that pertained in the nation’s cemeteries was between blue and gray, not black and white” (134).

Neff does admit that racially integrated cemeteries were rare at the time, but does this claim perhaps undervalue the ongoing struggle African-Americans faced in preserving their memory? Both Neff and Blight seem to agree that the emancipationist legacy gets the short end of the stick in the end, but it seems possible that Neff is deemphasizing the constant adversity blacks faced in protecting their meaning of the war to make room for his thesis about the continuous memory battle between the North and South.

To answer Kat’s question regarding whether Neff and Blight’s conception of post-Civil War reconciliation and remembrance can coexist: “No, absolutely not.” Blight’s entire argument hinges on the power of forgetting and creating a fiction from which people can move forward by seeing the past through rose-colored glasses. Neff begins his book with gruesome depictions of Civil War death and its impact on soldiers and Americans alike, essentially saying that, while it may be possible to forget or downplay some of the causes of the war, the vast number of horrific deaths would serve as a constant reminder of how bloody and gruesome a conflict it actually was.

For Neff, it was not just that a large number of soldiers died, it was that they died in a way that was completely foreign to Americans prior to the Civil War. Thus, not only did Americans have a completely different concept of the death toll a war could cost a population, they also had a completely different understanding of how death took place, as they had seen countless friends and loved ones die alone and away from any friends or family. This new form of death was so shocking to Americans, Neff says, that it is impossible to forget or move past. Particularly indicative of the unreasonable impact these deaths had on the American post-war psyche was the obsession with essentially digging up graves and reburying them in a more dignified manner. It was almost as though since Americans did not feel like their Civil War dead had found a proper resting place the first time around, they saw it as an almost noble cause to disturb the remains of the dead in hopes of laying them to rest somewhere more dignified. Neff puts it most succinctly, saying “the dead were the measures of the living.” (207) The living hoped to find peace by ensuring that the dead were properly and appropriately commemorated in keeping with their understanding of the war and its causes.

To further drive home his point, Neff questions many of Blight’s statements regarding reconciliation. Instead of focusing on events that demonstrate reconciliation, as Blight did, he highlights the fights over where bodies should be laid to rest, the segregation of Confederate and Union graves, and the discrepancies in the ways in which great war figures such as Lincoln and Davis’s deaths were commemorated in the North and South. He directly attacks Blight’s example of the epitome of reconciliation—the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg—saying that while it was well attended by Civil War veterans, the vast majority were Northern soldiers (215). This was not just a one-time occurrence, Neff said, but rather a repeating pattern where even where there were events that may appear to be examples of reconciliation, they still were far better attended by one half of the nation than by another. Neff also points to discrepancies between the numbers of monuments built  at Gettysburg, saying that the North again invested far more money and resources into commemorating this battleground than their southern counterparts. (213)

One of Neff’s arguments that I found most interesting was the one centering around the treatment of black soldiers, and how that played into the North concept of the Cause Victorious. Neff mentions that, during the war, there was a great deal of contradiction in the rhetoric of soldiers and generals regarding black soldiers. Despite the fact that the war was being front to improve the condition of blacks in America by emancipating huge numbers of them from slavery, blacks were treated very unequally during the war. They were pushed out into battle first, received worse medical treatment, and, after the war, they frequently received far less commemoration than white graves. These contradictions were, according to Neff, very difficult for Northerners to handle, because these realizations contrasted so sharply with the sentiments of the Cause Victorious, that they were fighting for a noble cause and achieved this goal. This led to people such as Meigs attempting to justify things such as the segregation of black and white graves by saying that it would be unfair to black soldiers to honor them in the same place as white soldiers because they had clearly sacrificed so much more (199). Debates such as these are one of the reasons Civil War cemeteries were some of the first nationally-sponsored integrated cemeteries in American history.

Of all the points Neff makes, though, the one which I found most interesting was one he left completely unexplored. He notes that one of the most ignored reasons for reconciliation was the Spanish-American War, where American soldiers were once again fighting, dying and being buried side-by-side. (221) This argument seems to make logical sense, but it is an idea I would like to see further qualified, explored, and justified.

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration the Problem of Reconciliation by John R. Neff

In Honoring the Civil War Dead, John R. Neff takes a considerable step away from the previous interpretations of commemoration and reconciliation that we have encountered.  Stepping away from the ideas of memory as reconciliation between Northerners and Southerners that were forwarded by David W. Blight, Neff presents an entirely different interpretation of memory in which memory and reconciliation cannot coexist on the table of reunion.  Presenting the issues of the Lost Cause mythos revered by Southerners and the Cause Victorious ideology that was central to Northern interpretations of the Civil War, Neff argues that memory and commemoration could not coexist with true reconciliation as the memory of the causes of the dead cannot be silenced, nor should this impossibility of reconciliation be overlooked by historians in the portrayal of reunion. As Neff states,

“By stressing reunion and the ease by which we assume it took place, we miss the persistence of antagonism, of bitterness, of animosity.  We wrench out of its proper context the deep division that remained for many years after the war ended.  (…)Similarly, we underestimate the power of a reconciliations position as a manipulative tool in the hands of Southerners who had no reunion sentiment.” (Neff, 214)

This attack on reunion historians such as Blight is biting, as Neff strikes at all their examples of white reunion as the ultimate in the reunion movement of veterans meeting on former battle grounds to remember and forget.  Saying, “Reunion, and its attendant rituals, were widespread, but still only a façade.  Also, reunion was only possible for the living; the dead remained permanently unreconciled, and any serious attempt to remember and commemorate them inevitably involved a confrontation with the tenets of the Cause Victorious,” Neff illustrates the culmination of his work on commemoration and its meaning in the post Civil War period. (Neff, 214) To Neff, commemoration in its act of remembering the fallen and their causes could not exist in a time of reunion as the dead could not be separated from the causes of the original schism. These causes, the Cause Victorious and the Lost Cause form a language to commemoration that Neff explores throughout the book.

The Cause Victorious to Neff was the idea of the dual emancipation of the slaves and reunion of the nation under the Union (Neff, 182), whereas the Lost Cause was the idea that the South only lost because of a lack of numbers and resources and Union did not win, but merely outlasted the handicapped South allowing the South honor in its fight and motivations to fight (Neff, 144).  These sectional ideas of the Civil War were to Neff best displayed and remembered through the acts of commemoration that followed the war as a means of coping with the massive death.  This overwhelming death, Neff was careful to explain, poses a considerable challenge to the nation, as none of the honored dead met the “good death” ideal of slowing passing with honor while surrounded by family. This good death, or lack of it, forms a driving motivation for the commemoration of the fallen in an attempt to make reparations for their ungraceful death.  To illustrate this ideal of a “good death” and the public’s need to inaccurately ascribe it to the fallen Neff describes the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis as well as the attempts to describe them as matching the “good death” schema.  Neff also then explains how this good death idea was incorporated into the burial of the soldier dead on both sides with honor, notably in the Northern reinternments immediately following the war and the Southern women’s actions to commemorate the fallen despite political consequences that is idealized in the poem and painting, The Burial of Latané.   All of which attempt to explain of how the ideals of a good and honorable death or at least burial were attempted to be achieved in the massive commemoration movements following the Civil War.

Throughout Honoring the Civil War Death, Neff is careful to illustrate the underlying tensions that prevented the full reconciliation or reunion of the North and South, and how in almost all situations, the commemoration of the dead became the central battleground of these tensions as the motivations of these men and the honor bestowed upon them clashed with the attempt at forming a national identity. He ends with the conclusion that, “Until we have reached an understanding of that war’s place within our national identity, we, like Americans a century ago, will remain hopelessly, willingly and reverently among the congregation of the dead.” This is far from the conclusions of Blight upon the reunion of the nation and reconciliation being built upon the “combined remembrance with healing, and therefore, with forgetting,” (Blight, 389) and his understanding of race relations at the cost of reunion of whites.  Can these two understandings of reunion coexist? In what other ways does Neff depart from Blight’s understanding?

Also, for consideration in our further discussion of the Dick Dowling memorial, Neff had much to say about commemoration—its motivation and meaning in the context of competing sectional ideals. How were these motivations and causes at play in the commemoration of Dick Dowling which we are currently studying?  Can we learn anything by considering “The Cause Victorious” as versus the “Lost Cause” in our understanding of the surrounding context of the Dowling statue?