The New York Times reviews a new Savas Beattie book on the impact of the trauma of the last months of the Civil War in North Carolina on soldiers and civilians. Times military reviewer Thomas E. Ricks writes:
How we remember wars has been a hot topic in academia in recent decades, and that’s a good thing. Examining this subject helps us better understand both what happened in a war and how we have come to think about it. For Americans, for example, the issue of how to properly remember and memorialize our Civil War remains a live and even explosive question.
Our memory can be uneven. It is often forgotten , that even after Robert E. Lee’s surrender in Appomattox on April 9, 1865, the fighting continued for more than another week in North Carolina. In HEARTS TORN ASUNDER: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina (Savas Beatie, 264 pp., $32.95), Ernest A. Dollar Jr. does a moving job of capturing the horror of that Hobbesian time, when the conflict degenerated into a war of all against all. Confederate commanders deployed their troops against marauders from other Rebel units. Federal soldiers seeking revenge for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 15 marched on Raleigh, N.C., only to be deterred by Federal cannons loaded with flesh-shredding double-canister shells. White civilians were terrified of all soldiers, and with good reason. Confederate troops murdered enslaved Black men seeking freedom for the sheer hell of it.
Dollar, the director of the City of Raleigh museum, feels a bit oversympathetic to the secessionist perspective, as when he seems to describe slave uprisings as “nefarious behavior,” as if it were sinful to seek to be free. At the same time, he notes that when a Unity Monument was erected in Durham in the 1920s to commemorate the eventual Confederate surrender in North Carolina, on April 26, 1865, it was widely opposed by people who objected to remembering the South’s surrender.
As that squabble indicates, disputes over the meaning of conflicts continue long after the shooting stops. The Civil War ended some 157 years ago, but Americans still argue about how to remember it. Was Lee, for example, a noble Virginian or a heartless whipper of captive humans — and should his statue stand in our cities?
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