Book Review: Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris

This book explores commemorative traditions developed by Union and Confederate veterans after the Civil War. The author, Keith Harris has a deep knowledge of a breath of post-war writings and activities by veterans and their organizations. His research shows that Civil War veterans were not quick to reconcile with their old enemies, that they sought to control how their respective struggles were interpreted by coming generations, and that they maintained strong commitments to elements of the causes that they had fought for.The book is very well-written, making it a pleasure to read for anyone who appreciates good historical analysis.

Harris challenges notions that as the Civil War receded into memory the veterans on both sides led a reconciliationist movement to bring the once-warring sections together. He uses a speech by Col. R.J. Harding, president of the Hood’s Texas Brigade Association warning that “Chronic reconcilers who are overhasty to forgive their enemies, are quick to forget them. But to forget, then, indeed are our minds gone,” to make the point that those who lived through the war were among the least likely to endorse sectional reconciliation. Harding then enumerated the crimes that Yankee and immigrant soldiers had inflicted on the white women of the South.

Harris writes:

While the atrocities narrative rarely appeared in the broader national commemorative ethos, it retained a strong sectional presence.

Harding went on at length regarding Yankee soldiers’ “crimes” against the southern people. Specifically, he singled out the shelling of Fredericksburg and the devastation of Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley. Ultimately, however, Abraham Lincoln figured as the key criminal. “Lincoln ordered Burnside to ‘shell the town [of Fredericksburg]. Burnside telegraphed the town was full of women and children and non-combatants. His order was to shell the town, and the old city was knocked into brick dust and laid in ashes.” Turning to the Valley campaign of 1864, he continued, “When Sheridan was ordered to devastate the valley of Virginia so that a crow could not fly over it without carrying his rations, Lincoln thanked him for doing so well.”

Union veterans were every bit as committed to insuring that the memory of the war comported with their certain knowledge of the facts. They campaigned against the growing use of books they saw as treasonous by students in Southern schools. They argued that works like Alexander H. Stephens’s War between the States were not only filled with distortions, but that they promoted disloyalty to the United States.

The Union veterans groups like the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and Confederate veterans in the United Confederate Veterans fought over the memory of the war in books and magazine articles, and reproduced their memories in meetings of their posts and camps. Harris uses the records of the veterans organizations to explore how the veterans discussed the great issues of the war among themselves. For example, the entry for one GAR post’s minutes book for September 14, 1923 records this about a German immigrant veteran’s story of the war:

“Comrade Unkrick entertained the Post with reminiscences of his arrival in the U.S.—the desire of the family to avoid that portion affected by slavery & his final enlistment with the ‘Lincoln Soldiers’ to help destroy that evil and save the Union.”

The Union veterans resented the post-war fallacy that the root of the conflict was states’ rights. They were unshaken in thinking of the war as rebellion and treason in defense of slavery and its expansion into the west. Harris writes:

Veterans dismissed the “right” of a state to secede from the Union as “flimsy dogma.” Assertions of this right only worked as a pretense by which leaders in the slave states sought to build an empire of the “cornerstone” of slavery. Veterans would point out that this was precisely the language used by the Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens.

While Union monuments tended to stay away from the causes of the war in the few commemorative words on them, Harris says that the dedicatory speeches offered by the veterans were direct on the subject of why the war was fought. For example, Seth Low spoke for his comrades at the dedication of the 84th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment (14th Brooklyn) Monument in October 1887 when he said: “Whatever other issues of constitutional interpretation were involved, they all hinged upon slavery. The preservation of the Union was the rallying cry. Without the abolition of slavery the preservation of Union was a dream.”

Conclusion:

Confederate veterans’ had a problematic approach to their memory of the war. They wanted their war effort to be remembered as an instance of American heroism, at the same time that they defended their right to forcibly leave the United States. They denounced former Confederates who supported Black civil rights as “traitors” while denying that their own taking up of arms against the country that they were born in was itself treason.

If you are interested in the roles organized veterans played in how the Civil War was remembered in their day, this is a book that you should pick up.

Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:

•