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?