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.