The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865 – 1940

A Dissertation entitled “The Sinews of Memory:” The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865 – 1940 by Steven A. Bare Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History ___________________________________________ Dr. Kim E. Nielsen, Committee Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, Committee Member ___________________________________________ Dr. Bruce Way, Committee Member ___________________________________________ Dr. Neil Reid, Committee Member ___________________________________________ Dr. Cyndee Gruden, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2019 Copyright 2019, Steven A. Bare This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author. An Abstract of “The Sinews of Memory:” The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865 – 1940 by Steven A. Bare Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History The University of Toledo December 2018 “The Sinews of Memory:’ The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865 – 1940,” explores the creation of historical memory of the American Civil War and, its byproduct, reconciliation. Stakeholders in the historical memory formation of the war and reconciliation were varied and many. “The Sinews of Memory” argues reconciliation blossomed from the 1880s well into the twentieth-century due to myriad of historical forces in the United States starting with the end of the war leading up to World War II. The crafters of the war’s memory and reconciliation – veterans, women’s groups, public history institutions, governmental agents, and civic boosters – arrived at a collective memory of the war predicated on notions of race, manliness, nationalism, and patriotism. In forging a specific memory of the Civil War, the aforementioned stakeholders in the process utilized veterans’ fraternal organizations, joint encampments of veterans, physical space, pilgrimages to sites of memory, and cultural products such as cinema to bind the former belligerent regions, both North and South, together. Out of the effort at reconciliation, a White, predominately middle-class, memory of the war emerged. iii Table of Contents Abstract iii Table of Contents iv Preface v 1. Chapter One: Organization Building: The Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans 1 2. Chapter Two: The Flowering of Reconciliation 48 3. Chapter Three: Memorial Mania: Claiming Space in the South in the Name of Memory and Reconciliation 86 4. Chapter Four: The Pilgrimage: Travels of Memory, Travels of Reconciliation 147 5. Chapter Five: “After All Tomorrow Is Another Day:” Casting Memory of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the South Through Cinema 194 6. Chapter Six: Epilogue: Whither the Confederacy? 242 References 249 iv Preface The front page of the September 23, 1895 Rock Island Argus contained the captivating headline: “End of the Great Love Fest.” The headline captured a “remarkable series of blue and grey reunions” during the late summer of 1895. The “blue and grey” mentioned in the piece referenced a “throng of multitudes” reconciling over the Civil War. Beginning in Louisville, Kentucky, and ending in Atlanta, Georgia, the veterans, both of the Union and the Confederacy, gathered “to close the great coming together of the north and south” during September 1895. The Rock Island Argus piece summed up an element of the zeitgeist of late nineteenth century U.S. society. After years of bitter acrimony between Union and Confederate veterans from the end of the Civil War in 1865, the emotional healing commenced as the century drew to its close. The reconciliation movement the U.S. experienced beginning in the 1880s and running up to the eve of World War I became a “great love fest .”1 Concomitantly, reconciliation intertwined with the formation of a shared historical memory of the war amongst Union and Confederate veterans, and other stakeholders in the process. The collective memory of the war years the veterans formed, with others following closely, a sociological concept David Gross termed unzeitgemässig, or out of sync with contemporary times. The men, and as we will see other stakeholders, engaged in crafting the war’s historical memory were stuck in neutral. The stakeholders in the historical memory process did not understand, or refused, to acknowledge, the societal changes occurring around them at the end of the nineteenth century. With Reconstruction closing in 1877, the process of reconciliation could commence. Beginning 1 “End of the Great Love Fest,” Rock Island Argus, Rock Island, Illinois, 23 September 1895, 1. v around 1880, and progressing well into the 1910s, these veterans, and their supporters, took a number of avenues to promote what they felt was perishing – memory of battlefield exploits and the ordeal they experienced from 1861 – 1865. In the process, the veterans, and attendant stakeholders, in the historical memory project attempted to craft a collective memory in a present they felt antagonistic to their needs. What emerged was a warped memory of the war that marginalized wide swaths of the U.S. population, namely African Americans, newly arriving immigrants, and those who did not experience the war years.2 The study of historical memory creation began in earnest during the Interwar Period. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is credited with beginning the memory paradigm in 1925. However, quite a few scholars attribute the growth of memory studies to work later in the twentieth century, particularly in the 1970s on forward. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1970) is considered the beginning of historical scholarship concerning Western (Euro-American) memory studies. The First World War ushered in the modern era, especially the complex interplay of trauma and memory. The logocentrism of Western modernity and its break between history and memory also figures into this process. Because of the sophistication of historical inquiry – knowledge about the past and change over time – memory is not so much about preservation of folklore and tales, as it is about utilizing how things are remembered vis-à-vis the past event. In addition, a concurrent process in historical memory formation is what British Marxist historian Eric Hobsawm termed “invented traditions.” For Hobsbawm, writing in 2 Gross, David, from Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 422. vi the 1980s, invented traditions came to mean “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic of nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” When dissecting veterans’ and stakeholders’ memorial practices following the Civil War, their actions meant to connect them with the past – the war years. Simply put, the generation that fought, and lived through the Civil War, invented symbolic rituals of remembrance to govern behaviors in the present, as well as the future. With the wealth of scholarship on historical memory formation, the field of memory studies acquired a serious scholarly framework for deconstructing historical events and actors. This would have a tremendous impact on how scholars approached the American Civil War.3 Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) helped propel U.S. scholarly production concerning historical memory. According to Kammen, “tradition can have ideological consequences and help to define a culture or subculture,” particularly when dealing with the South’s fascination with the Lost Cause of its failed bid at independence. For Kammen, “public memory, which contains a slowly shifting configuration of traditions, is ideologically important because it shapes a nation’s ethos and sense of identity.” Therefore, the power of historical memory lies in its potential to influence, mold, and configure identity 3 “Introduction,” from The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 3-15; Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1970).; Hobsbawm, Eric, from “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky- Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 271. vii regardless of the historical record. In essence, memory creation is not necessarily tied to the realities of the historical events.4 If Kammen explained historical memory’s power to mold and shape U.S. identity, John Bodnar took the concept further and elucidated how cultural manifestations impacted U.S. historical memory formation. Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth-Century (1992) argued public memory emerges from the “intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions.” Official expressions of memory originates from cultural leaders at all levels of U.S. society. In particular, leaders at all levels of society share a need to promote U.S. “social unity, the continuity of existing

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