Discussion and News: Why Is It Important To Study How We Remember The Civil War?

Why Is It Important To Study How We Remember The Civil War?, Brooks D. Simpson, Civil Warriors Weblog's URL

In the last two decades the scholarly study of how Americans remember the American Civil War has become something of a cottage industry in the profession. I admit that at times I grow a bit skeptical about it, even as I am intrigued by some of the findings. It’s not as if other historians have not written about memory before: the work of Merrill Peterson and Norman Cantor comes to mind. At times some studies simply employ in rough fashion the process of deconstruction evident in literature studies, and at times the conclusions reached in some of these studies seem to belabor the obvious. Indeed, it may well be time to take a step back in order to see how this field is progressing, and to do so with a little care and discernment, instead of rushing heedlessly ahead to find something else to dissect. That said, what I thought was obvious may strike others as new, and in any case I like that more people are approaching sources with a critical eye.

That said, there’s still a good reason to study how Americans remember the Civil War era, including the decades leading up to the war and the Reconstruction period. That’s because today we see people engaged in the misuse of the past to justify present political beliefs and some rather deplorable prejudices. Take, for example, this little affair, which Kevin Levin brought to my attention on Civil War Memory.

CWL:The instance that Levin [Civil War Memory] brought to the attention of Brooks is a controversy generated by a Sons of Confederate Veterans speaker and an communities heritage celebration

Brooks' phrase ". . . some studies simply employ in rough fashion the process of deconstruction evident in literature studies, and at times the conclusions reached in some of these studies seem to belabor the obvious" underscores CWL's understanding and feelings on much of academic literature being presented today to the educational and public marketplace.

Authors will defend their conclusions drawn from their deconstruction of evidence as being the only obvious conclusion that can be made from the evidence. Indeed, they see their conclusions as definitive because all other conclusions before their's have been generated by the climate of the times in which they have been written. Every historical interepretation is conditional on the era in which it was written. There are no exceptions.

A fine example are Jefferson Davis' and Alexander Stephens' writings before, during, and after the Civil War. Davis, the president, and Stephens, vice president, reflect climates of opinion unique to the pre-war and post-war South as lived by committed Confederates. It appears that neo-confedates have accepted the post-war but not the pre-war statements.

Image Source: Sons of Confederate Veterans

News----Obama Honors Confederate and Black Soldiers on Memorial Day

Separate but Equal Wreaths are Not a Permanent Solution to the Memorial Day Conundrum, James W. Loewen, History News Networtk, May 29, 2009.
See CWL entry May 20, 2009 for petition to not set a wreath at Arlington's Confederate Memorial. Mr. Loewen, the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, started a petition asking President Obama not to honor the Arlington Confederate Monument.

Although I had signed petitions to the President going back to the '60s, before Memorial Day 2009 I had never helped to start one. This year, the fact that neo-Confederates misconstrue the Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery to misconstrue the Civil War to misconstrue the Confederate cause got to me ... especially since every Memorial Day, the President of the United States lends his prestige to that monument by sending it a wreath.

We (Ed Sebesta and I) wound up with more than 60 co-signers, including major historians of the Civil War period like David Blight, Vernon Burton, and James McPherson; other distinguished historians like John Dittmer, Paul Finkelman, and Kenneth Jackson; and scholars in allied disciplines like Grey Gundaker, Florence Roisman, and Amilcar Shabazz. Leaders or former leaders of important organizations lent their names, including Josh Brown, Lee Formwalt, Susan Glisson, and Roger Kennedy. Professors of education signed, including Sonia Nieto, David Shiman, and Bill Ayers.

Ayers is on my contacts list because, more than a dozen years ago, he participated in inviting me to speak to pre-service teachers at the University of Illinois (Chicago) about ideas in my best-seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me. When sending out emails to people on my list, I considered omitting him, since I knew of his toxic fame. I emailed him anyway, because Sarah Palin had told us all he was a "pal" of President Obama, because it did not feel right to censor my contacts list, and also because I just wanted to see what would happen.

It turned out that the only name the media cared about was Ayers. The Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, headlined its story, "Radical Bill Ayers dogs Obama, even on Memorial Day." Within the story, Ayers's name does not appear until the 14th paragraph, which is appropriate. But no other signer's name appears at all — not mine, not Sebesta's, not even McPherson's, surely America's pre-eminent scholar on the period, whose Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize. Today, searching for "Ayers Obama "Memorial Day" wreath yields 7,570 hits, while "McPherson Obama "Memorial Day" yields just 2,570.

On Sebesta's list of contacts was art historian Kirk Savage, whose book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves treats Civil War memorials. Savage penned an op-ed to the Washington Post suggesting that President Obama continue the tradition of the Confederate wreath, but also send one to the new African American Civil War Memorial in DC. (He had proposed this to Sebesta, but for reasons this essay notes, Ed rejected the idea.) The Post never did a story about our petition but did print Savage's op-ed opposing it.

Despite the Post's silence, AP and other outlets picked up the story. A minor controversy followed. HNN's posting of our petition drew 90 comments. A blog about the matter at Daily Kos spurred more than 250. Savage's op-ed generated nine pages at WashingtonPost.com. Many were from neo-Confederates attacking any challenge to their beloved Confederate legend. Others, however, came from people respectful of the cause of good race relations while also respectful of the dead.

Americans need to understand that Confederate Memorials come in two kinds. One type remembers and honors the dead. The other glorifies the cause and typically obfuscates what it was (which was slavery). The Arlington monument is of the second type. Donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, erected during the Nadir of Race Relations, it does not purport to tell accurate history. It even gets the number of Confederate states wrong, implying that 14 seceded, when only 11 did. Moreover, in recent years neo-Confederates have deliberately misconstrued a black body servant, included in the bas-reliefs, as a Confederate soldier. Then they cite him as "evidence" that thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy. As a corollary, this claim continues, the South could not have seceded for slavery.

Why should the President privilege this monument over, say, the Confederate monument in neighboring Alexandria, a pensive statue of the former type? Why, for that matter, should the President privilege this monument over every single monument to United States troops in the Civil War?

It might be said that he no longer does. Unlike his predecessors from Wilson to W, Obama eventually followed Savage's idea and sent two wreaths, one to the Confederate monument, one to the African American monument. Doing so was certainly a significant advance over former practice. However, dual wreaths implicitly equate service for the Union and service against it. They also implicitly equate war fought to maintain and extend slavery with war eventually fought (admittedly, not at first) to end slavery. Surely both sides are not of equal moral value.

This is not the place to make the argument that the South seceded for slavery, not states' rights. Everyone knew this in 1860-61. Today anyone who believes that the Southern states left because they favored states' rights has only to search for and read "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." Also useful is my short chapter on Gettysburg in Lies Across America, which tells why and when the states' rights myth began to be told.

To be sure, neither Savage nor the president probably intended to equate North and South. Surely, both Savage and the president meant this "solution" as a way to sidestep all such moral and historical issues and merely honor the dead on both sides. Thus the president assuages two "special interests": neo-Confederates on the one side, and African Americans (and historians) on the other. Left out are United States Civil War veterans as a whole — white and black together.

Hoping to avoid post-petition depression, I humbly suggest that important historical questions remain. Why would presidents of the United States, for almost a hundred years, send wreaths just to the Southern side — the losing side and the wrong side — of our greatest war? Did presidents ever send wreaths to U.S. Civil War monuments — perhaps to the G.A.R. monument in DC — before the Nadir of Race Relations set in? Has even one of the 2,000+ Union monuments ever received a presidential wreath on Memorial Day since the Nadir? What is the connection between race relations of the time and how we remember the past?

Text and Image Source: History News Network

Image Caption: The day after, the President’s wreath lies in a heap to the side of the Confederate monument.

Other Voices---David Forsmark on Ferguson's Land of Lincoln

David Forsmark on Andrew Furguson's Land of Lincoln,FrontPageMagazine.com, 9/12/2007.

Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, Andrew Ferguson, Atlantic Press, $24.OO, 279 pp.

Want to start an argument in an online political forum? Say something nice about Abraham Lincoln.

If you buy the media line that our current political climate is the most divisive in American history, you'll get an eye-opener (though the cruel fact that the Cvil War left 600,000 dead Americans should have been enough of a clue). Although beloved by most of his countrymen and universally hailed as one of the nation's greatest presidents, Lincoln remains at the core of an underground controversy. Try to imagine 140 years from now people conducting anti-George W. Bush seminars and claiming that Karl Rove was a dastardly pioneer who crossed new frontiers in the art of dividing the country.

"As Weekly Standard editor Andrew Ferguson points out in Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America: "While he was alive, Abraham Lincoln was one of the most intensely hated figures the country has ever known. The minute he got shot, however, things began looking up for him." But not everyone thinks Abraham Lincoln is No. 1 — with or without a bullet; and the debate rages well into its second century.

Just when you think it's impossible for anyone to say anything new about Lincoln, Ferguson's Land of Lincoln is an invigorating and refreshing addition to the canon.
Equal parts travelogue, history lesson and sociology text (of the P.J. O'Rourke school), Land of Lincoln is relentlessly fascinating, frequently hilarious, and unexpectedly poignant. In short, it is one of the season's best surprises. Born in Illinois, Ferguson grew up a natural-born Abe-ophile. As an editor for The Weekly Standard, he was hardly isolated from arguments among conservatives over history, political correctness and the history of Big Government.

However, he was somewhat taken aback when demonstrations broke out in Richmond, Va., over a planned statue commemorating Lincoln's 1865 visit to the war-torn former capital of the Confederacy. Ferguson decided to investigate. While the media predictably portrayed the anti-Abe forces as racist rednecks, Ferguson decided to actually listen to them. To his dismay, while he disagreed with them, he found Lincoln's foes to be far better informed about history than Lincoln's Richmond defenders. He met with Bragdon Bowling, a spokesman for those protesting the statue, who listed the reasons for his animus against Lincoln:

With his generals he invented the concept of Total War, and waged campaigns of unprecedented savagery against noncombatants and private property in the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman's March through Georgia, and elsewhere. He was the father of Big Government, vastly expanding the reach of imperial Washington in ways unthinkable to the country's founders. The Northern victory was, therefore, the triumph of a cosmopolitan, commercial culture run by Big Business, over a Southern culture of small towns and farms that only asked to be let alone."

Whatever one might think of Bowling's grievances, they are at the least informed by history and worth arguing over. Ferguson was less impressed by the pro-Lincoln forces, a befuddled group of chamber-of-commerce types who were shocked to find anyone still harbored a grudge against St. Abraham. They did nothing to pacify their opponents by inviting only leftist historians to man the panel discussion over Lincoln's greatness. In Ferguson's mind, they made the great war leader sound "like Bill Moyers." Robert Kline, the man who established the dubious United States Historical Society to promote the Richmond statue (and sell knickknacks), gushed to Ferguson that any extra money generated by the project it would go to the Richmond Peace Center -- "a wonderful group" -- where signs are posted that say "Jail Bush, Not Saddam."

"They stand for a lot of the things that Lincoln stood for," Kline enthused to a bemused Ferguson, "Peace. Understanding. Their specialty is conflict resolution."
Somehow, the fact that Lincoln stubbornly presided over the nation's most brutal war in the face of public discontent had become a footnote to a "historical society" in the heart of the Confederacy. Ferguson attends a "Lincoln Reconsidered" seminar featuring Dr. Thomas Dilorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, which capitalized on the controversy to boost attendance. Ferguson once again is dismayed to learn the people in attendance are closer to him politically than the Lincoln fans.

Skipping the lunch at the seminar, Ferguson wanders around downtown Richmond and happens upon a teachers -- excuse me, "educators" -- conference on "Early Education," where the seminars boast such titles as "Banning Superhero Play." When he tells the educators why he;s in town, their eyes glaze over, and they mouth platitudes like, "History can be a good learning experience." Ferguson looks around the room full of warm fuzzy political correctness and realizes of the anti-Lincoln crowd, "Those guys say they don't like Lincoln, and they don't; but this is what they really hate, this right here. The country turned into something they don't like, and they think Lincoln's responsible, and they will never forgive him for it."

As Ferguson notes, from the moment of his death, Lincoln has been dragooned into causes ranging from national temperance to the Communist Party USA, which named its volunteers unit fighting in the Spanish Civil War the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Churches got in the act, too, despite the fact that while Lincoln liked to quote the Bible, he never joined a church and had a very ambiguous spiritual life. From the barely religious Unitarians to Evangelicals using Lincoln's life and death as a parallel to the story of Jesus to Mary Baker Eddy's claiming the martyred president for Christian Science, Lincoln lived on in American pulpits.

The Richmond experience leaves Ferguson determined to find the real Lincoln. "What threw me…was the vehemence of the people who hated him, and — just as surprising -- the mildness of those of those who would defend him. (The scholars) came up with one of two Lincolns: a racist, warmongering totalitarian, or a sentimental old poop — Mussolini on one hand, or Mr. Rogers on the other." So, Ferguson sets off on a journey to visit sites, seminars and individuals devoted to Lincoln, sometimes (and hilariously) with a reluctant family in tow. He visits collectors of Lincoln memorabilia, who have varied backgrounds and political outlooks but share one thing: a hem-of-his garment depth of reverence for things touched by the great man.

Handwritten copies of the Gettysburg Address top the list, of course, but there also is a huge market for items related with Ford's Theatre and Lincoln's funeral. One man Ferguson meets claims to have a fragment of Lincoln's brain matter scattered by Booth's bullet. The shrines range from an impressive Disney-designed memorial extravaganza in Springfield, Ill., (where one of the designers takes pride in the fact the museum section contains no guns) to a statue build by a Thai immigrant restaurant owner in an Arab neighborhood who thinks Lincoln typifies all he loves about America —and is convinced the president's first name means he was Jewish.

Ferguson finds Lincoln is also an inspirational icon for many folks who would probably buy WWLD bracelets if someone were to market them. He attends a convention of Lincoln impersonators who consider their craft a calling, not a hobby. This culminates with a laugh-out-loud sequence where a few hapless tourists stumble upon the gathering of Abes who are overly eager to perform. Honest Abe also has been the inspiration for many self-help books, including the grandaddy of them all, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Most people forget Carnegie's first book was a blarney-filled biography of Lincoln, Lincoln the Unknown, and how prominently Abe figures in Carnegie's anecdotes in his most famous work.

Lincoln also figures prominently as a modern business guru, a role that, at first glance, might be an awkward fit at best, Ferguson writes. As he notes, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People "do not include 'Forget to cash your paychecks,' and 'Keep your most important stuff in your hat.'" When Ferguson attends a business seminar that looks for the secret of management success in Lincoln, he finds the business gurus — and the bestselling business management book Lincoln on Leadership — are at least far closer to the reality of Lincoln as a person than those who once celebrated Lincoln/Lenin Day.

While the "War of Northern Aggression" has certainly won the day in academia, no doubt fueling the siege mentality of many at the Lincoln Reconsidered conferences, some balance seems to be returning to popular historical writing. Such historians as Jay Winik and Thomas Fleming, along with father-and-son "novelists" Michael and Jeff Shaara, prove it is possible to love Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Some 14,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, but Ferguson's Land of Lincoln is remarkable enough to stand out in the crowd. It's hard to imagine another book will ever explore the love/hate affair of Lincoln and the nation in such an entertaining and insightful way.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source's Link: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx

CWL's Thoughts: A personal favorite of mine is Tony Horowitz's Confederates In The Attic in which Horowitz tours and describes Dixie in a manner that reveals the humanity of those who dwell upon differnt aspects of the Confederacy and its culture. Both reverantly and irreverantly, Horowitz draws sharp pictures of, not the past, but of the present and how memory can be manufactured. Every generation uses the past to interpret its present. Hopefully, Ferguson has done for Lincoln what Horowitz did for Dixie.