Shades of gray blues

In Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial, a group of scholars looks at the receding legacy of a great national drama

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

To say that the Civil War ain't what it used to be is to indulge a postmodern cliché: by this point, we all understand that what we "know" is socially constructed -- and contested. The takeaway from this anthology edited by Tom Brown at the University of South Carolina seems more prosaic but is actually a good deal more pointed: the Civil War is not what it used to be because it matters less than it once did. Which is not to say it's unimportant; the war continues to be engaged, in some cases with real intensity. But these essays collectively assert that it is now less a defining touchstone of national identity than a point of departure or iconographic warehouse for cultural productions that invert, bend, or reconfigure the conflict in ways that previous generations would hardly recognize, much less endorse.

Significantly, this cultural shift is not simply that of the avant garde. One of the more compelling pieces in the collection is Brown's own contribution, which looks at the lingering contemporary obsession with the Confederate flag. He notes that in the century following Appomattox, the flag was a rallying point for a sense of shared Southern identity, one whose resonance intensified in the mid-twentieth century as a response to the Civil Rights movement. Now, however, he argues that the Stars & Bars, along with related iconography, have become emblems of a self-conscious white minority that defends its civil right of self-expression with consumerist logic that would appall earlier guardians of Confederate identity, who regarded selling flags or t-shirts as a form of sacrilege. Insofar as the Southern experience of defeat has any compelling moral or psychological legitimacy, it's via a Vietnam analogy that is itself fading into history.

One also sees the recession of the Civil War in Robert Brinkmeyer's piece on contemporary Southern literature. Brinkmeyer notes that for African-Americans in particular the military conflict seems far less important than the antebellum decades leading up to it, and the battles are less important than various aspects of the home front. (The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 parody of Gone with the Wind is discussed by a number of essayists.) And for many white writers such as Bobbie Ann Mason or Ron Rash, the Civil War is a tangent, even a dessicated husk.

In many of these essays, local, even private, concerns trump national ones. In his piece on the growth of Juneteeth celebrations marking the anniversary of emancipation's arrival in Texas, Mitch Katchun observes that February 1, the day Abraham Lincoln signed the joint resolution that led to the Thirteenth Amendment, would be an apt candidate for a national holiday, especially since it comes at the start of Black History Month.  But it has been only one of many, and not a particularly beloved one.

Even the stock of the blue-chip Lincoln has sunk a bit. Amid his analysis of how the Left in general and Barack Obama in particular have tapped into the mythology of the Great Emancipator, C. Wyatt Evans notes that the contemporary Right has largely given up on him, uncomfortable with his Big Government reputation and awkward in invoking his Civil Rights legacy. The Tea Party invokes the Revolution, not the Civil War, as the source of its power and legitimacy.
 
The primary focus of Remixing the Civil War, however, are the visual arts, where collective memory of the conflict functions as a postmodern closet that gets raided for varied acts of bricolage. Essays by Elizabeth Young, Gerard Brown, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage all look at the way images, particularly photography, have been used to destabilize inherited notions of what the war was about. Sometimes contemporary artists complicate racial hierarchies or essentialized notions of blackness; other times their work involves the expansion or projection of alternative notions of sexuality or gender into nineteenth century settings. Ironically, some art carefully uses patiently recreated artifacts or settings to call attention to the artifice involved in remembrance.

Such work can be impressive in its passion, creativity, and intelligence. But it's a little depressing, too. In part that's because written history, scholarly and otherwise, seems to lack some of the same spark these artists show, as even the most avowedly transgressive or revisionist scholarly writing remains helmeted in academic convention. Conversely, the deeply fragmented quality of contemporary Civil War remembrance suggests a larger crisis of confidence in which grand unifying themes or aspirations can only be looked on with a sense of irony or suspicion. It's remarkable to consider that the versions of the Civil War that do evince such confidence, like Ken Burns's celebrated documentary or the 1989 film Glory are now (already!) a generation old. In becoming what can plausibly considered the first real 21st century rendition of its subject, this book provocatively suggests that the Civil War may really be running out of time.

Capital gains

In The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days that Shook the Union, John and Charles Lockwood capture the rebirth of a nation

The following review was posted earlier this week on the Books page of the History News Network site.
 
Historians like to remind us that collective memory is a process of remembrance and forgetting. In the case of contemporary Civil War historiography, there is a growing recognition that historians themselves have lost sight of something important in recent decades: the depth and power of Northern unionism. Much of the work of the last half-century has focused on American racism (cause in its own right in the case of the Confederacy, fact of life in the case of the Union), or impersonal structural forces like capitalism, whether industrial or slave-based, in the coming of the conflict. And the major social changes of the sixties -- that's the 1960s, not the 1860s -- have placed great emphasis on the role of individual struggles and collective oppression of important demographic segments of the population. Amid these legitimate and useful avenues of scholarship, it is sometimes hard for students of the war to imagine, much less remember, that millions of Americans had a deep and abiding commitment to the idea of a constitutional republic, one for which hundreds of thousands proved willing to risk their lives. Books like Joan Waugh's recent biography of Ulysses S. Grant, Gary Gallagher's newly published The Union War and Adam Goodheart's recent 1861: The Civil War Awakening have reconnected with these currents. In an indirect but powerful way, so do brothers John and Charles Lockwood in The Siege of Washington.

This volume is the first book-length treatment of a standard episode of the master narrative: the tense two-week period in April 1861-- exactly 150 years ago -- following the fall of Fort Sumter, when Washington DC was essentially a federal island in a Confederate lake, situated between a Maryland itching for the chance to secede from the Union and a Virginia that would formally succeed in doing so. In these desperate days, with railroad and telegraph lines cut, the national capital was extraordinarily vulnerable. Nearby Baltimore was ruled by mobs determined to prevent Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York regiments from reaching the District of Columbia, and the mayor of that city as well as the governor of Maryland were at a minimum enablers that obstructionism. The soon to be retired General Winfield Scott showed tremendous energy (notwithstanding some sagging spirits) in trying to maintain order in the capital and managing the destruction of Union munitions at Harper's Ferry, to prevent its resources from falling into the hands of the rebels. In these tense days, we see a stream of other characters -- Benjamin Butler, Robert Gould Shaw, and Dorothea Dix, among others -- crossing the Lockwoods' narrative of this episode, on their way to exploits for which they would be better remembered.

What the brothers are best at, though, is capturing the awakening of Northern patriotism in the face of the crisis. This was apparent in the enthusiasm with which the the Union states responded to President Lincoln's call for volunteers, but also a newly assertive unionism that surfaced in what had always been a de facto Southern city. Lincoln himself, a recent arrival to the District, became a potent symbol of that unionism. The Lockwoods describe a moving moment when Pennsylvania soldiers arrived at the capitol and were met at the House of Representatives by the president. "Here, towering tall over the room was the great central figure of the war," they quote a private recalling. "I remember how I was impressed by the kindliness of his face and awkward hanging of his arms and legs, his apparent bashfulness in the presence of these first soldiers of the Republic."

The Confederate side of the equation is a bit more murky. The Lockwoods periodically check in with the Davis administration, still in Montgomery, as well as Virginia politicians and Robert E. Lee, who declined Scott's offer to command the U.S. army. We learn at one point that Washington never fell in large part because Lee commanded that Virginia troops would not take the city, but we get no clear sense of why, or why the Confederacy as a whole did not capitalize on what appeared to be a golden opportunity. (The early Civil War is typically told as a story of Northern failure to act decisively in moving on Richmond, but here it's the Confederates who appear afflicted by what Lincoln would call "the slows" in moving on Washington.) In part, the problem here seems like a function of the Lockwoods' perspective; both lifelong Washingtonians, the locus of their interest is clearly the city. In part, too, it's a function of the way the book is organized, as a dense narrative of day-by-day developments. But this granular rendering of the trees does sometimes leave one wishing for a bit more forest.

Still, The Siege of Washington manages to seem like a synecdoche for the the war as a whole. When the Seventh New York regiment finally manages to make it into the nation's capital, it feels like a whole war has been won already. The Union would go on to experience a seemingly unending string of setbacks that would extend from Manassas to Chancellorsville and beyond. But the will of the Union's people, and their belief in power of the federal government as a force for good, would prove mighty when finally unleashed against those who had spent decades denying its legitimacy and sapping its strength. May those politicians who would do the same 150 years later be mindful of this useful precedent. Long live the Union!

Moving Movements

Ira Berlin offers a masterful distillation of black history with The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

The following review was published yesterday on the Books page of the History News Network site.

Ira Berlin is a national treasure. Scholars of American history are indebted  to him for his pivotal editorial role in the vast collective project Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, a multi-volume treasure-trove of primary source materials that capture the African American experience from slavery through freedom, which appeared through the 1980s and 1990s. In the last decade, Berlin has moved from the hard and important work of excavating and arranging these sources to contextualizing and explaining them in a series of books that greatly enhance our understanding of the black experience in the United States from the colonial era to the present. To say that this is a story he could tell in his sleep is to make a statement not about his prose -- which is notable for its clarity -- but rather the depth of his saturation in American history and his ability to convey information with seeming effortlessness.

Berlin's latest book, The Making of African America, manages to distill this vast story from an intriguing angle. He makes the arresting assertion that black history can be seen as a set of four migrations. The first, and best-known, is the so-called "Middle Passage," the brutal experience of enslavement and transportation across the Atlantic Ocean. The numbers involved grew over the course of the seventeenth century and ebbed by the end of the eighteenth. The second great migration was the movement of slaves from the Atlantic seaboard to the nation's interior in the first half of the nineteenth century, where they were used to build the great cotton kingdoms of the plantation South. The third -- long actually called "The Great Migration" -- was the movement of emancipated slaves from the Southern countryside to Northern (and Southern) cities in the first half of the twentieth century. The final migration, now currently underway, is that of the peoples of African descent (including Latin America) into the United States, finally weaving black people into the fabric of traditional immigration history. This is the most novel chapter of the book, and brings this epic tale up to date.

Throughout the book, Berlin demonstrates a supple ability to make large generalizations while texturing them with counter-currents. He is attuned, for example, to the dialectical way an emphasis on movement alternates with a sense of place, a tension captured in Black Atlantic scholar Paul Gilroy's phrase "routes and roots." He notes the way black people had their identities imposed on them -- they only became "African," a designation without much meaning for tribal peoples until they arrived on American shores -- as well as the ways they resisted and reinvented themselves every step of the way. He also notes that even words like "black" and "African American" have become newly fraught, reflecting tensions between native and immigrant -- tensions comparable to those that also occurred in earlier migrations. Berlin is able to illustrate many of his examples with recourse to the great African-American musical tradition that courses from shouts to hip-hop, reflecting simultaneous continuity and change. He ends the book with a discussion of Barack Obama, who embodies many of the themes of traditional African American history as well as the more recent black immigrant experience.

An easy read that's notable for its brevity (240 pages), The Making of African America is a powerful teaching tool. That's because it's so neatly segmented, as well as so broad in its narrative trajectory. There's something wonderfully skillful about this book; it represents the finest aspects of the contemporary historical enterprise, and is likely to be a durable resource for some time to come.

Civic War

In Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Stephanie McCurry offers a compelling account of how women and slaves defeated a society dedicated to the proposition of inequality

The following review was published last week  on the Books page of the History News Network site.

No: It was not a matter of overwhelming numbers. Nor was it the outcome of particular battles. Or the vision of statesmen (sorry, Mr. Lincoln). Professor Stephanie McCurry of the University of Pennsylvania doesn't deny these things made a difference. But in the end, the Confederate States of America was doomed from the start because the people who weren't consulted about its creation -- principally white women and black people -- exerted their overlooked power and destroyed it from within. This is what happens, she says, when your vision of politics, and your notion of who counts, gets too narrow.

Confederate Reckoning lies at the confluence of three streams of recent scholarship: studies of secession explored by William Freehling, the pioneering work of Drew Gilpin Faust on Southern women, and Ira Berlin and company's massive body of work documenting the saga of emancipation. There is also a tributary on the discourse of comparative slavery (think George Fredrickson), which surfaces periodically to demonstrate that the closely linked political and military dynamics of the Confederacy were not unique to the western hemisphere or the western world in the 19th century, from Cuba to Russia. But the integration of these bodies of discourse into one forceful and elegantly written volume makes this book a landmark piece of Civil War historiography. 

Part of what makes it so is McCurry's ability to make truly surprising points along the way. For example, she shows in the opening chapters of the book that even white male voters were effectively disenfranchised in many Southern states during the pivotal months of 1860-61 when the Confederacy first took form. The actions of the plantation elite in states like South Carolina and Mississippi give the lie to an oft-invoked ideal of herrenvolk democracy, as resolutions were rushed into approval on dubious grounds, the results of voting were suppressed, and widespread intimidation was practiced. Even in Alabama, the very heart of Dixie, opposition to secession never dropped below 39%. These widespread efforts to railroad through secession in face of more obvious resistance would bear bitter fruit in places like Virginia, whose western residents would ultimately secede from the seceders. But passive as well as active resistance would be widespread from North Carolina to Texas. The so-called "Slave Power" invoked by Northern politicians in the 1850s was no myth, and its power was nowhere more evident than in the South of the 1860s.

But that power, while real, was destroyed because those who wielded it failed to consider people they considered beneath notice in their deliberations. Confederate women, assumed by government policymakers to be merely ancillary, quickly became a force in their own right. Ironically, the first way womens' power became apparent was through their presumed dependency. Since the defense of home and hearth was endlessly invoked at the basis of Confederate independence, anything that at least appeared to undercut that defense -- like the death or prolonged absence of men unable to protect families increasingly subject to invading armies and hostile slaves -- became matters of insistent appeals, and, eventually, demands. As McCurry shows, women, especially non-elite women, were increasingly direct in addressing government leaders. By 1863, they began taking matters into their own hands; McCurry emphasizes that the well-known Richmond food riot that summer was only one of a number of highly organized, female-led political actions. In their wake, Confederate leaders were forced to make systematic efforts to address the well-being of wives and widows by allocating precious resources in response to their demands. Which brings us to another surprising finding: McCurry's suggestion that the modern welfare state actually has its origins in the increasingly desperate statist behavior of C.S.A. state and federal governments. While she would never put it that baldly, principally because the women in question did not really use a language of citizenship and explicit political assertion we tend to think of as central to the modern liberal tradition, she makes a compelling case not only for rethinking Confederate history, but American history as well.

To a great extent, the last generation of Civil War scholarship has focused great attention on the African American experience, with a special emphasis on the agency of slaves in achieving their emancipation. This book is broadly consonant with that disposition, but situates it less in terms of liberation that swept down from the North than to the degree to which slave resistance emerged from the very heart of Confederate society. Once again, this hugely damaging power was a direct result of slaveholder inability to grapple with the implications of simply assuming that black people were property, an asset to be deployed to serve their own political ends. For this particular form of property had a mind and a will of its own, and its total exclusion from any rights or privileges meant that slaves had little if any reason, incentive, or loyalty to help advance to those ends (and indeed powerful motives to subvert them). McCurry says that slaveholders could not confront this reality, because their commitment to property rights trumped their patriotism. When a besieged Confederacy sought to utilize that property, the planters balked: the relationship between slave and master mattered more than the relationship between citizen and state. Challenging historians who argue the Confederates were willing to sacrifice slavery for independence, she shows that even in its death throes, slaveholders could not bring themselves to allow the conscription or arming of slaves until it was far too late, and even then in a hopelessly illogical and useless way. They were just too addicted to their peculiar institution.

Confederate Reckoning is not a perfect book. The last third seems a bit labored, even overdetermined. McCurry's moral fervor animates her analysis, but her zeal sometimes gets the best of her, as when she asserts, in the closing pages of the book, that "The Confederate political project had been tried before the eyes of the world and it had failed. The poverty of Confederates' proslavery political vision had been proved once and for all time." For once, certainly. But not all time: the past may belong to the historian, but the future is beyond her reach. We cannot escape history, but we can hope, however dimly, it can light our way.