Introduction xv
they shared with people who had not lived through this confl ict, and this became the
historical memory for successor generations.
4
Th ese same processes aff ected historical memory—the memory of those who did
not live through the war: in this case, their present, far removed from the war they
were remembering. Not surprisingly, historians played a critical role in creating his-
torical memory, acting as referees among the competing collective memories of the
confl ict. Making this task more challenging, Confederate supporters understood that
they were part of an ongoing contest over memory and created extensive archives
to chronicle their recollections, a material edge in the battle for historical memory.
Reinforcing the role of collective memory, the fi rst professional historians in the late
nineteenth century, who started the process of articulating the Civil War’s historical
memory, echoed the disparate views of the Civil War generation. Later generations
with no direct connection to the war, including historians and the broader public,
responded to life in their present, including anxieties about wars won and lost, union
and nation, and the changing landscape of race in the United States.
Imagine a World War I soldier who found inspiration in former Confederate
soldiers’ memoirs, even if his grandfather fought for the Union. His president,
Woodrow Wilson, a professional historian, born into a family of Confederate sup-
porters, advanced eff orts to honor Confederate soldiers as heroic Americans in his
popular historical studies. Th e soldier’s son questioned the value of a war for Union
if the industrial nation that emerged from this bloodletting accepted the gross ineq-
uities that culminated in the Great Depression. Decades later, the soldier’s grand-
daughter applauded the end of segregation during the civil rights movement and
remembered a war that ended slavery but not inequality. When she wrote a book
on the Civil War, it chronicled Civil War women, a subject previously ignored by a
predominantly male academic community because she came of age in an era when
women rejected their exclusion from the historical narrative. Eventually, the wom-
an’s daughter observed the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the twenty-fi rst cen-
tury and wondered: did the Civil War solve anything? As a result of the relationship
between the past and the present, Civil War memory continues to evolve long after
the men and women who remembered it have passed into memory.
As part of this survey on how Americans remember the Civil War, or Civil War
memory, I will attempt to answer a few important questions. First and perhaps fore-
most, why do Americans remember the war diff erently? It is certainly not for want of
material to study and form a consensus; there are tens of thousands of books written
about the Civil War; many of these volumes were by the men and the women who
witnessed the war. Moreover, there have been winners and losers in the battle for
Civil War memory. In contrast to the well-known saying that winners write the his-
tory, for a very long time, the losers won the memory battle. Why was the Lost Cause
so much more successful, more memorable, than the Union Cause? When and why
