xviii Introduction
It took a long time for historians, and anyone else, to understand the diff erence
between history and memory and even longer for people to understand how the Civil
War in public spaces shapes memory. Many of the issues surrounding the aftermath
of the Charleston shooting involve public memory, such as the fl ag at South Caro-
lina’s Statehouse. In many ways, public memory is a bridge between collective and
historical memory. Th e Civil War generation created material artifacts, such as the
monuments and preserved battlefi elds as part of their collective memory eff orts. John
Bodnar in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the
Twentieth Century (1992) made a critical distinction that explains the Civil War in
public memory. He identifi ed two types of public memory, vernacular (local grass-
roots) and offi cial (state/nationally sanctioned) memory. Civil War public memory
originated in the local grassroots actions of Confederate and Union supporters. Ini-
tially, people built monuments for the dead who never returned home, partly to
assuage the grief of those who survived memorializing a particular cause, be it the
Confederacy’s Lost Cause, or the Union’s Won Cause. Th e failure to build mon-
uments to black soldiers seemed to reinforce amnesia about their wartime eff orts.
Once the Civil War generation passed away, the next generation continued to build
monuments; the United Daughters of the Confederacy led Lost Cause eff orts. Th ese
women’s actions refl ected their present. Women wanted to play a more active role in
politics, and turn-of-the-century social convention limited women’s roles; defending
the Lost Cause represented an acceptable way to engage public issues. In contrast,
battlefi eld preservation eff orts occurred decades after the war ended, partly because
the idea of commemorating the dead seemed more urgent than preserving where they
died. Eventually, the federal government managed many of these sites and used them
in an attempt to create an offi cial Civil War memory; however, this has not always
been successful due to the strength of sectionalism in vernacular memory. Recent
eff orts to introduce the idea that slavery caused the war met resistance at national
battlefi eld parks by those who remember a Lost Cause that had nothing to do with
owning human beings.
5
People who remembered the Lost Cause have little to complain about in popular
memory. Here too, the Lost Cause seemed more successful than the Union Cause
for much of the twentieth century. Since many more people saw movies or televi-
sion programs about the Civil War than visited battlefi elds, this may constitute their
most vivid memory of the confl ict. Partly, the success of the Lost Cause refl ected its
broader success in American memory; however, the Confederate cause often reso-
nated in popular culture. Gone with the Wind ’s (1939) success as a best-selling novel
and one of the most popular movies of all times may have been as much about its
popularity as a romantic melodrama than its portrayal of the Lost Cause version of
Civil War memory. It place in memory may be about what happened after millions
of American saw this movie. To these men and women that became their Civil War
