Civil War Memories

Robert J. Cook's Civil War Memories offers a new synthesis of a field that has invited both scholarly and public controversy. The book provides few paradigmatic challenges to the maturing field of Civil War memory, but by taking the long view from the Civil War to the present day, Cook deftly situates the development of competing memorial narratives within the context of both memorial activities and American history. Cook is especially attentive to the particular political, cultural, and even personal uses to which Civil War memorial narratives were deployed at different moments. Early Civil War memories had much to do with officers seeking vindication for their roles in the war. Beginning in the late 1860s, the Grand Army of the Republic enforced a Unionist triumphalist narrative in the North—with emancipation occasionally a key part—to secure Republican party victories in the 1870s and 1880s. By the 1890s, however, white southerners turned to Lost Cause narratives to support white supremacist Democrats in their campaigns to extinguish the flames of populism and annihilate the last vestiges of the Reconstruction-era Republican party. By the turn of the twentieth century, northern Republicans and New South Democrats jointly celebrated an enduring Union capable of rallying for war with Spain and later with Germany, and making the United States a world power. By that point, as Cook stresses, it was the children of the Civil War generation who had pushed the reconciliationist narrative

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