Thinking about History and Memory - Not Even Past by Cody Marrs

Cody Marrs, Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

A few days ago historian Kevin Levin tweeted out a thread that got me thinking. The thread began by noting the absence of USCT units in the Grand Review on May 24, 1865 and then goes on to discuss the USCT on the ground and how various parties acknowledged the service of black soldiers in the Civil War. He further points out both contemporary evidence and modern scholarly takes challenging the notion, so argued by David Blight’s Race and Reunion, that forces of reconciliation essentially whitewashed Civil War memory. You can read it for yourself HERE.

Now…my opinions regarding the fundamental premise of Blight’s work are well known, as I have pointed out HERE and in my book, Across the Bloody Chasm. In my estimation, he missed the mark when it comes to Civil War veterans. Still, though I am critical of the book, I think it would be silly to dismiss the profound mark Blight made on Civil War memory studies, and how Race and Reunion still (nearly 20 years after the first edition hit the shelves) serves as a foundation from which teachers might launch a discussion about how Americans remember their Civil War. I have used it many times in my own classroom, and my Civil War students always find it engaging.

I guess this was a long way of introducing my topic for the day: I recently read Cody Marrs’s new book, Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War, and I am working through how I might present his ideas and evidence to my class. I have an entire unit devoted to Civil War memory and I think this book will be a great point of reference in my efforts to show how the Civil War….what it all means now that the shooting has stopped that is…is far from settled when it comes to public memory. And, as the battle over Civil War memory is particularly salient today (think…Charlottesville) Marrs’s reflections on literary, cinematic, and commemorative efforts over the years should inspire some great discussion in the classroom primarily focusing on one of his main ideas: Civil War stories tend to “place white Americans at the core of the conflict…a crucial feature of most Civil War memory…[that] decenters and devalues black freedom (13).

Marrs’s assertion is a fitting place to start the conversation about Civil War memory. One thing I have done in the past is to take my students around to various monuments (on the Gettysburg battlefield, for instance) and ask them to explain to me what they learned about slavery and emancipation. Of course, the answer is nothing much, really. But when viewed alongside context, such as monument dedication speeches, the story changes to one of moralizing self-righteousness as Union veterans often commemorated their fight to free a race from bondage alongside the preservation of Union. While Marrs notes that there was a “furious debate” that lead supporters of emancipation to deem this the “Abolition War,” he points out that this was a minority viewpoint and that “Unionism repeatedly trumped emancipation as a rationale for the war.” (134) While I agree that preservation of Union overwhelmingly motivated support for the United States war effort, I wish that Marrs had incorporated the remarks and actions made by so many Union veterans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into his work. Leaving out the sentiments of the white Union veterans who specifically did center and value black freedom as part of their commemorative ethos is significant, and as such I think that Marrs missed an opportunity to explore how and why forces aligned to ignore this message over the years. There are a number of works Marrs might have consulted beyond Race and Reunion to work through some of these issues including, Barbara Gannon’s The Won Cause, Carrie Janney’s Remembering the Civil War, John Neff’s Honoring the Civil War Dead, and my own Across the Bloody Chasm.

Conflict over Civil War memory today naturally involves the root of the war’s cause and its overall meaning. Historians have long noted that in the wake of war, former Confederates got right to work on the so-called “Lost Cause.” Distancing their efforts to achieve independence from that of the preservation of slavery (despite what they acknowledged in 1860-61), former Rebels created a narrative that in many ways resonates today. I think Marrs handles the “invention” of the Lost Cause quite well. In the wake of a devastating defeat, Marrs reminds us, specifically through literary analysis that emphasizes the virtuous defense of an ambiguous “way of life,” that white southerners “desperately needed to provide their loss with purpose - and the is what the Lost Cause promised to provide.” (98).

One final question that I will certainly bring up with students who read selections from this book: do we have something to learn from efforts to commemorate the Rebel cause - especially Confederate monuments? Despite their connections to an ideology founded on white supremacy, should these monuments be preserved in some form? In other words…are Confederate monuments historical artifacts? Marrs suggests that they are not, but rather “didactic exercises” that “embody a set of values, imparting lessons for later generations…that white rule can never be stamped out” (105). I had a great conversation with historian Adam Domby recently about these monuments and their implications concerning the persistence of white supremacy, and I have assigned the podcast interview to my students. Adding Marrs’s assertion to the mix, I anticipate great classroom discussion. To be honest, I agree with Marrs’s ideas about how monuments serve to perpetuate racist ideas…but I do not see how this necessarily excludes them from the classification as artifacts. This seems less an either/or and more of a both/and issue. But hey - I am open to the conversation.

With compliments,

Keith