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Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory

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Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Adkins, Christina Katherine. 2014. Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13070064 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory A dissertation presented by Christina Katherine Adkins to the Committee on Higher Degrees in American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2014 © 2014 Christina Katherine Adkins All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor John Stauffer Christina Katherine Adkins Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory Abstract That slavery was largely excised from the cultural memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly by white Americans, is well documented; Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory moves beyond that story of omission to ask how slavery has been represented in U.S. culture and, necessarily, how it figures into some of the twentieth century’s most popular Civil War narratives. The study begins in the 1930s with the publication of Gone with the Wind—arguably the most popular Civil War novel of all time—and reads Margaret Mitchell’s pervasive tale of ex-slaveholder adversity against contemporaneous narratives like Black Reconstruction in America, Absalom, Absalom!, and Black Boy/American Hunger, which contradict Mitchell’s account of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. Spanning nearly seven decades, this study tells the story of how cultural productions have continued to reinterpret slavery. Focusing primarily on novels and films but also drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, private journals, and court records, each chapter explores how slavery is represented in a particular historical epoch and highlights each narrative’s contribution to the creation of cultural memory, particularly its conformity to earlier works or its revision of antecedents. In addition, Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory traces representations of slavery through recurring themes such as hunger, disease, marriage, and madness and seeks to understand how the narratives in question comment directly on the concept of memory. Among the topics discussed are the Civil War centennial; how Margaret Walker’s Jubilee relates iii slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s; the controversy over The Confessions of Nat Turner; the Roots phenomenon, and the copyright lawsuit filed against the publisher of Alice Randall’s unauthorized parody, The Wind Done Gone. The study concludes in 2005, with March, Geraldine Brooks’s reimagining of Little Women, and E.L. Doctorow’s The March, about Sherman’s campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas. A pattern emerges in the final chapters that shows recent authors conjuring, in order to revise, elements of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone With the Wind. iv Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 The 1930s: Margaret Mitchell, W.E.B. DuBois, and the Works of William Faulkner 23 2 Memories of Ex-Slaves and their Descendants, from the 1930s to World War II: The Federal Writer’s Project, 12 Million Black Voices, and the “Hunger” of Richard Wright 88 3 A Cold War Era Centennial: MacKinlay Kantor, Robert Penn Warren, and Two Sides of the “Great Alibi” 134 4 Slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s: Jubilee and the Journals of Margaret Walker 207 5 William Styron, Ten Black Writers, and the Battle Over Nat Turner 267 6 Slavery and Apostasy at Gettysburg: Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and “The Soldier’s Faith” in the Vietnam Era 321 7 Seven Generations of “An American Family” in Slavery and Freedom: The Cultural Phenomenon of Roots 368 8 “A Wound that has Not Healed”: Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose, and the Literature of Slavery 450 9 “Remembering Seemed Unwise”: Motherhood, Infanticide, and Memory as Human Parasitism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved 494 10 Slavery and the Civil War in the 1990s: From Ken Burns to Cold Mountain, a Decade of Narrative Response to The Killer Angels 518 11 “Who Controls How History is Imagined?”: Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone, and the Copyright War Over an “Unauthorized Parody” 594 12 The Known World: Race, Class, and Family Relations in Edward P. Jones’s America 664 13 “I Never Promised I Would Write the Truth”: Geraldine Brooks’s v March and the Formation of Cultural Memory in Two Family Stories 694 14 Freedom and the Crisis of National Identity in E.L. Doctorow’s The March 731 vi Acknowledgements In the course of research and writing, this dissertation has benefitted from the contributions of many people, to whom I would like to express my sincerest appreciation. From its earliest conception, my advisor, John Stauffer, saw potential in a work of scholarship that explores the cultural memory of slavery. He believed in my ability to do justice to the topic, even when the size and scope of such a project must have seemed impractical. For all of his encouragement and patient guidance in the years it took to bring this work to completion, I am profoundly grateful. The idea for this project originated in a conversation with Susan O’Donovan as she supervised my preparation for an oral exam field. She has continued to be both an excellent source of advice and an insightful interlocutor who inspires this literary-minded scholar to attempt new avenues of historical research. When a grad student he had never met showed up at his office asking for feedback on a dissertation proposal, Walter Johnson responded with a willingness and generosity that continues to astonish me. Of both the initial prospectus and the final dissertation, he provided deeply perceptive assessments and equally helpful suggestions, and he did so with good humor. Nina Silber graciously read and commented on the full dissertation as part of the final review. Her interest in my work has been heartening, and her comments have helped me envision future incarnations of this project. In her courses at Northwestern and as the advisor of my undergraduate thesis, Julia Stern significantly shaped my approach to literature. She also read dissertation chapters and, as she was writing her own book, shared with me a process that better prepared me to embark on a work of original scholarship. Her influence is evident throughout this project. vii During my early years as a grad student and until her retirement, Christine McFadden was a trusted source of advice in the History of American Civilization program. Arthur Patton-Hock adeptly assumed the administrative duties of what became the Program in American Studies and worked tirelessly to help steer this dissertation to the point of submission. Several individuals and institutions aided my research, and I extend thanks to the following: Donald R. Wright, for talking with me about his own dissertation field research and interviews with Gambian storytellers; Pat H. Smith, for sharing her personal recollections of working with Michael Shaara; Harvard University Libraries; The Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University; and the library staffs at Michigan State, Louisiana State, and Florida State Universities. On a more personal level, I have been blessed with amazing friends and family. I owe particular thanks to my grandmother, Ella Patton; Carol and Joe Patton; and Aubrey and Karen May. Karen, who read and commented on chapter drafts, moved me with her interest and enthusiasm for this project; and instead of asking “When will you finish?” she asked, “What are you working on?” Most importantly, I am grateful for the love and support of my parents, Ben and Sherry Adkins, who have always encouraged my educational pursuits and taught me the importance of aspiration, hard work, and perseverance. viii Introduction At the end of the novel Beloved, after the title character has disappeared from 1870s Cincinnati, the town’s African American residents, writes Toni Morrison, “forgot her like a bad dream.” Beloved, who embodies ex-slaves’ traumatic experience of bondage, traps Sethe in a destructive cycle of remembering. When Beloved is finally driven off by the praying women who determine that Sethe should not be possessed by her past, the townspeople cease to speak of Beloved or recall her existence. In their estimation, “It was not a story to pass on.” To them, “Remembering seemed unwise.”1 Beloved dramatizes both individual memory, in Sethe’s psychologically painful recollections, and cultural memory, in the town’s collective effort not to recall Beloved in its oral traditions or recount the events that occurred during her time there. In the decades after U.S. emancipation, slavery often—to quote Morrison—“was not a story to pass on.” For different reasons, some of which are suggested by Beloved, Americans black and white were reluctant to recall the slave past. The fact of slavery’s omission in literature and public forums and the process by which that exclusion occurred has been well documented, though usually in works that make representation of the Civil War their primary subject of inquiry. While it is virtually impossible to treat slavery and the Civil War as separate, unrelated topics, what follows is a comprehensive study of how slavery has been remembered in U.S. culture. The Civil War is an important part of that inquiry to the extent that it illuminates the memory of slavery, for instance, as part of an emancipation narrative or a competing version of the past that minimizes the role of slaves and slavery in the war.
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