Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America Edited by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney published by University of Georgia Press (2021).
Historical memory is often created under the influence of commercial opportunism. Publishers, patent medicine manufacturers, clothing makers, and tobacco companies, among many others, saw opportunities to make money by tying in their products to the Civil War brand in the first decades after Reconstruction. The memory of the war that was pedaled sometimes had more to do with what would sell than with any recognizable set of facts.
This new volume of essays edited by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney examines the ways that Gilded Age capitalists marketed their products using the emotional pull of the Civil War to get customers in the door. In our own age of product placement and “social media influencers” we can recognize the impulse to make a buck off of associational marketing, even if the methods seem primitive.
One manufacturer that may have used the Civil War tie-in to kill more people than the war itself was the Duke Tobacco Company. J.B. Duke turned his company selling the “noxious weed” into the industry powerhouse through slick marketing and predatory monopolistic practices. By 1889, 40% of all cigarettes sold in the United States were made by Duke. In the late 1880s, the news of famous Civil War generals’ deaths began to fill the newspapers, and a new nostalgia for the fading war era took hold in the United States. Duke stepped in to market its cigarettes wrapped in that nostalgia. Natalie Sweet writes in her essay that:
Duke capitalized on Civil War nostalgia and the spirit of national reconciliation as a marketing tool by featuring portraits and histories of Civil War generals in cigarette package inserts. These capitalized on moralistic tales of wartime heroism that also took an ecumenical approach.
Baseball card collectors know that their hobby got its start in the trading cards put into cigarette packs as an addictive premium to foster an addiction to nicotine. These were the forerunner of the baseball cards. J.B. Duke’s father, Washington Duke, had founded the company. A Confederate veteran, Washington might have been expected to only want generals in gray to appear in the trading card series, but instead the company tried to balance Union and Confederate “Heroes.” The Reconciliationist brand of Civil War memory was taking hold of the generation born after the war, replacing the animosities of those who suffered through the war themselves. Younger Americans were looking for stories of bravery on both sides, and Duke wanted to market tobacco to New York as much as to Richmond. The company had pioneered the trading cards earlier by putting in cards of attractive young women, but these were met with a backlash by religious-minded folks who thought that such images would lead young men astray! The same people did not seem worried about young men ruining their health by smoking or about the glorification of war! It was an age when sex was seen as more dangerous than cancer or military carnage.
The girly trading cards had been aimed at increasing tobacco use among adolescent boys, and when it was abandoned cards about military glory seemed like a good replacement. The Civil War Generals series differed from the cards showing comely women because they folded out to tell the life story of the general depicted. Using the latest printing technology, the cards depicted the generals and scenes from the war in color. Twenty-five Union and twenty-five Confederate military leaders were the subjects of the cards. While all of the usual suspects were included like Grant, Lee, and Sherman, a number of less widely known figures also appeared. For example, Franz Sigel had his own card. Braxton Bragg might seem an unlikely trading card subject, but at least his card noted that he seemed “to have outlived [his] fame and usefulness.”
Natalie Sweet’s essay opens a window on one way that the story of the Civil War was passed on to millions of young Americans. Men not likely to read a history book collected the cards and learned about the past from that most trustworthy of sources, a tobacco monopoly.
John Neff has an essay on something well-known to many of my readers, the entrepreneurial chopping up of Richmond’s Libby Prison in order to move it to Chicago as a tourist attraction. Neff tells the story of failed attempts to move Libby, culminating in a successful effort in 1889. Coinciding with the World Columbian Exposition Fair in 1892, hundreds of thousands of visitors plunked down what would be the equivalent of ten bucks to entertain themselves in what had been a house of suffering. After the World’s Fair closed, the site became quieter, but it remained unexpectedly popular with veterans.
Another remnant of wartime horror that was popular with veterans was opiates. Opium had been used to treat the pain of wounds and it had also been used as a cure for diarrhea. With tens of thousands of former Union and Confederate soldiers addicted to opium, a market opened up for Civil War branded cures. Opium addiction had been associated with weakness and alienage. Racial stereotypes depicted the opium addict as a Chinese immigrant, when in fact most American addicts were former soldiers. These heroes of the Republic (or Confederacy) did not want to reveal themselves as drug addicts. Over time though, they could not hide the impact of their opium use from their families and employers. Many sought help when their marriages fell apart or their jobs were lost. Reading through veterans’ magazines they could see ads targeting them to try a miraculous patent medicine cure. The fact that the medicine itself contained opium was not revealed. Jonathan Jones writes about this attempt to extract money from extremely vulnerable men by companies selling them poisonous cures.
The Milton Bradley Company’s bestselling “game” that allowed a family to set up a primitive home theater to “watch” the Civil War unfold is the subject of a great essay by Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick. There are also chapters on Confederate and Union veterans’ newspapers, the use of the images of the Monitor and the Merrimack in marketing, James Marten contributes an essay on the Civil War speaking circuit where men with entertaining stories of the war could make a living by talking about their wartime experiences.
While most of the topics covered in the book are just wisps of memory now, the last chapter deals with a topic that any real Civil War tourist today has encountered; the Cyclorama. While only the Atlanta and Gettysburg cycloramas are still on display, in the late 19th Century, more than a dozen dotted the land. Some rose to become major tourist attractions, while others were fated for financial failure. Caroline Janney provides an entertaining history of the Civil War Cyclorama craze, as well as its collapse as a money-maker. The fact that the two surviving examples can only be seen at not for profit institutions says a lot about the limited marketability of the Civil War brand.
While the book does not offer an overview of the influence of the marketed Civil War on modern understanding of the conflict, it does provide insights into the commercialized sphere of history during the Gilded Age.
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