After the American Civil War, there was what historian Robert J. Cook calls a “robust and purposeful narrative” of the Union’s defeat of slavery and the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. This may be epitomized by veteran Reuben Smith’s 1897’s declaration that the most selfless thing he had ever done in his life was to risk that life so “that future generations might live under a government without a serf, a servant, or a slave.”
But Smith, an English immigrant to Kansas, was bucking the trend. While many other Union veterans kept the faith as he did, the nation as a whole, pushed by younger generations, moved away from their stance—as did the Republican Party, erstwhile carrier of the banner of Emancipation.
Cook writes that by the last years of the nineteenth century, three decades after the war’s liberation of four million people from shackles, the once “potent blend of free-soil republicanism, purposeful evangelical Protestantism, and searing wartime experience” had waned. The remembrance of Union victory had “lost its cultural and political sway.” The war was transformed in remembrance to “a romanticized White brothers’ war fought between two groups of equally courageous and principled patriots.”
At first, though, there was little doubt in the North that there was no moral equivalency of cause with the South. There was no forgetting the notorious Confederate prison camps like Andersonville and Salisbury, the Confederate pogrom at Fort Pillow, and the fact that the South had seceded in the first place to perpetuate and expand an elite-serving economy based on human chattel. General and then President Ulysses S. Grant’s posthumously published memoirs (1885–1886) called the Slave Power’s cause “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse.” Memorial Day started as the specifically Unionist Decoration Day.
“The Civil War constitutes an unusual case of the victors ultimately failing to write their story into the history books,” Cook writes. “As the years passed, their confident account of a just war waged against wicked proslavery southern ‘rebels’ seeking to destroy the American republic yielded to a sentimental reconciliatory memory that served the consensual needs of the fin-de-siecle United States, now a rising great power.” Moreover, “African Americans, increasingly segregated and disenfranchised, were further marginalized by this decisive shift in American memory.” Black Americans “now found their active role in national salvation virtually erased from the country’s selective memory of the late unpleasantness.”
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Cook notes that it was “pragmatic Republican politicians rather than Union veterans en masse who abandoned African Americans in the South to their fate” with the defeat of Reconstruction. The Republican Party’s “vanguard” role in racial justice came to an ignoble sputter in 1891, when Senate Republicans from the west and even the north joined Democrats to defeat Republican Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s federal elections bill. (This would have federalized elections for the US House of Representatives and thus helped to secure fair elections in the face of violent attacks on multiracial democracy in the southern states.)
Again, some kept the faith: white Union veteran Albion Tourgée was a tireless opponent of white supremacy and supporter of civil rights for Black Americans. But his National Citizens’ Rights Association never quite got off the ground—and as a lawyer, he couldn’t persuade seven members of the Supreme Court that his client, Homer Plessy, was a human being just like them.
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The new “culture of reconciliation” that arose at the end of the century “both facilitated, and was facilitated by, the national triumph of Jim Crow mores.” American historiography of the Civil War would be dominated by the Confederate-friendly into the middle of the twentieth century, providing intellectual backbone for the American version of apartheid. Dominant culture echoed with racist fantasies like of Birth of a Nation (1915; based on a novel and play of 1905) and Gone With The Wind (novel 1936, movie 1939).
Ultimately, writes Cook, “a majority of Union veterans proved willing to substitute an uncritical form of late nineteenth-century nationalism” for the once-powerful story—a usable past—of the victory against the abomination of property in human beings.
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