Remembering the Civil War: reunion and the limits of reconciliation

Abstract

Remembering the war while restoring the Union At 3:00 PM on July 3, 2013 several hundred Union re-enactors and thousands of spectators stood along the stone wall at Gettysburg and watched an even larger number of Confederate re-enactors and modern civilians recreate General George Pickett's great charge on its 150th anniversary.As the cameras clicked and rebel yells filled the air, the world watched as the National Park Service commemorated one of the most spectacular military failures in American history.Yet, the day clearly belonged to the losers, whose energetic final sprints to the wall contrasted with the sullen passivity with which they were received by those representing the victors.Lest one be tempted to see this as further evidence of the Lost Cause's triumph in our collective memory of the war, it should be noted that this display met with a fair amount of distain by many of the Unionists.The photo-op handshakes at the angle were not replicated at either end of the line, where some Union units pulled out before the last of the pseudo-Confederates had finished their hike to the wall.This brief, dramatic southern moment in the spotlight did not obscure the fact that the Army of the Potomac's victory at Gettysburg helped determine the nation's ultimate triumph over slavery and disunion.As Caroline Janney persuasively argues in Remembering the Civil War, the process of national reunion and sectional reconciliation in the decades following the war was uneven, inconsistent, and incomplete.Furthermore, the degrees to which past sins were forgiven differed widely among many diverse constituencies in both the North and the South.Janney's timely work steps firmly into the debate between one set of historians (represented by David Blight, Nina Silber, et al) who argue that reconciliation between white Union and Confederate veterans was fairly