The post-war marketplace for Civil War Memories 

Marten, James Alan; Janney, Caroline E., eds.. Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. UnCivil Wars Series. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. 274 pp. $114.95 (cloth),   $19.94 (paper)

    James Marten and Caroline E. Janney’s selection of essays superbly navigates the cross-section between two central themes of Gilded Age America: sectional reconciliation and rampant commercialism. The essays demonstrate the complex ways that these two factors influenced each other. 

    While calmer sectional tensions often played into the hands of businessmen who sought to expand their clientele, the profit-seeking motive also caused tension between those who took Civil War memory seriously and those who wanted to make a quick buck. The authors of this volume also investigate the extent to which companies and individuals utilized (or rejected) the Lost Cause memorialization of the Civil War.

    The late John Neff demonstrates the tension between commercialism and Civil War memorialization in his essay on the removal of Libby Prison from its original site in Richmond. At the behest of northern investors who wanted to use the Civil War prison as the structure for a museum in Chicago, laborers disassembled and reconstructed Libby Prison, brick by brick, in the Windy City. For many northern and southern veterans, the move aroused negative feelings. Southerners did not want a war artifact stolen from Virginia’s soil, and northern veterans, especially those who spent time in Libby Prison, objected to the commodification of their suffering. Despite the protests, the investors continued the project, and the museum opened on September 21, 1889. The attraction initially garnered success, but attendance gradually declined until the museum’s closing almost a decade later. Eager to construct new buildings on the prison’s valuable real estate, the investors demolished it in 1900 with few qualms about its history. The building’s owners sold the remains of the prison for scrap, demonstrating the importance of profit over preserving wartime structures.

    Consumerism could also envelop the more sensitive aspects of the Civil War. Jonathan S. Jones’s essay focuses on the popularity of opiate addiction “cures” in the postwar era. Many soldiers acquired morphine addictions to cope with pain during the war and struggled to kick the habit once they returned home. In a world where people treated addiction as a severe lack of self-control, veterans’ physical reliance on opium often caused them psychological distress and a crisis of manhood. 

    As a result, desperate and suffering veterans often sought addiction cures of questionable validity. Advertisements in veteran-targeted newspapers often featured testimonials from former soldiers stating that these remedies helped them break their addiction and renew their manly vigor. Despite the touted benefits, Jones points out that the “cures” contained few, if any, legitimate properties to help addicted veterans. The remedies that helped often contained morphine themselves, causing former soldiers to continue the cycle of addiction.

    While the commodification of Civil War memory produced conflict between veterans and company interests, the profit motive contributed to positive outcomes by promoting sectional reconciliation. However, rectifying the relationship between the two sections required individuals and companies to distort the historical record. Natalie Sweet demonstrates how companies navigated these issues in her essay on a marketing campaign for Duke’s cigarettes that featured prominent figures from the Civil War era. In the 1880s, Duke’s began to include a cardboard insert (similar to a trading card) of a notable Civil War “hero” in each pack of cigarettes. 

    The “Heroes of the Civil War” campaign featured short biographies of each figure that often employed Lost Cause ideas. The blurbs portrayed Federals and Confederates positively, arguing that both had fought valiantly for noble goals. Duke’s romantic distortion of the Civil War paid off—“Heroes of the Civil War” contributed to Duke’s becoming a bestselling American cigarette. In this sense, the Lost Cause represented a positive marketing effort—by portraying both sides as noble Americans, Duke’s could increase their market share in both sections of the country. However, their stories about Civil War generals left the American public with a romantic and distorted picture of the conflict.

    Though Gilded Age Americans often embraced the Lost Cause, two essays in this work show that some northerners rejected the idea of a valiant Confederacy. In her essay, Margaret Milanick analyzes the hand-cranked Myriopticons that progressed the user through a series of scenes of the Civil War. The Massachusetts-based Milton Bradley & Company that created the Myriopticon spurned Lost Cause celebrations of the South. The visuals and accompanying text portrayed Confederates as treasonous aggressors who opposed a virtuous Union fighting for liberty and equality. The Myriopticon even featured a positive portrayal of the USCT Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts entering Charleston in 1865. 

    Caroline E. Janney’s essay also questions the ubiquity of the Lost Cause during the Gilded Age. Her work examines panoramic paintings of Civil War battles (“cycloramas”) displayed in various cities across the United States. While northern audiences enjoyed scenes of the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, where the North claimed victory, they grew squeamish at battle scenes where Confederates won the day. Though reconciliation rhetoric often dominated the Gilded Age, Milanick and Janney’s study of northern art demonstrates that they could respect the Confederacy while leaving “no doubt about who had been right” (p. 219).

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory represents an important contribution to the literature by showing how Americans filtered Civil War memory through consumer culture. The essays in this volume prompt readers to think more about the mediums through which Americans received stories about the conflict. Does the message resonate differently, for example, if the listener received it in a cigarette advertisement rather than a classroom? Overall, the book’s entertaining and thought-provoking stories make it an excellent choice for undergraduate or graduate classrooms.

Review Source: H Net Book Reviews, December 11, 2024

Link:   https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59566

 

Sexual Violence and American Slavery:

The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South

 Shannon Eaves, University  of North Carolina Press,

242 pp., illustrations. index, bibliography, $27.95  April 2024,  paperback, 2024.

Eaves mimes a wealth of primary sources including autobiographies, diaries, court records and more to show that rape and other forms of sexual; exploitation entangled slaves and and slave owners in battles over power to protect oneself and one's community, power to avenge hurt and humiliation, and power t punish and eliminate future threats.

By placing sexual violence at the center of the systems of power and culture, the author shows how the South's rape culture was revealed in enslaved people's and their enslavers' interactions with one another and with members of their respective communities.

More Important Than Good Generals: Majors, Captains, Lieutenant Colonels, and Colonels in the Army of the Tennessee

More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee, Jonathan Engle, Kent State University Press, $35.95, Spring 2025

 Union’s forgotten mid-level officers and their commitment to the cause

More Important Than Good Generals is an in-depth study of the Army of the Tennessee’s junior officers—the company and field grade lieutenants, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. While many studies have examined generals and common soldiers, Civil War armies’ “middle management” has been largely ignored. 

Officers had a substantially different array of duties than the soldiers they commanded and the generals above them, resulting in a drastically different wartime experience. Moreover, it is not only Civil War officers who have been overlooked but also the army Grant and Sherman commanded—the Army of the Tennessee—despite the fact that it was one of the most victorious armies of the war. 

Pushing back against the commonly accepted narrative of disillusionment among officers, Jonathan Engel concludes that the Army of the Tennessee’s company and field grade officers endured the war’s trials with their moral and political ideology intact. 

Further, rather than becoming indifferent to the Union cause, Engel argues that the reverse was often true: officers who started off racist or disinterested in the issue of enslavement became advocates of emancipation. 

Engagingly written and meticulously researched, More Important Than Good Generals is a lasting work of scholarship that will appeal to Civil War historians and general readers alike.

No Cover Image Available

Feel The Bonds That Are Drawn By American Civil War Photography

 

Feel The Bonds That Draw: Images of the Civil War at the Western Reserve Historical Society

Christine Dee, editor; Western Reserve Historical Society, Kent State University Press, 128 pages, 2011

For a century and a half, images of the Civil War have allowed millions of Americans to experience, commemorate, and reinterpret the conflict. Photographs, engravings, lithographs, and original artwork have revealed heroic volunteers, mobilized regiments, battle preparations, and the war’s grim aftermath.

“Feel the Bonds That Draw” presents nearly 200 images from the extensive Civil War photographic collections of Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society, complementing author Christine Dee’s reflections on topics such as historical memory, the war as economic engine, and the impact of mobilization and combat on civilians and the environment.

Included in the volume are stirring images by Mathew Brady, preeminent Civil War photographer, and by Henry Moore, who documented military fortifications and soldiers, particularly at Fort Pulaski on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Moore photographed troops in traditional poses and groupings, and he captured the likenesses of formerly enslaved African Americans. These latter pictures played an important role in shaping public opinion in the North in support of emancipation.

“Feel the Bonds That Draw” is a fine addition to the library of anyone interested in the history of America’s cruelest conflict.

 William C. Davis, Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech:

“It is always a pleasure to turn the eye back to those magnificent images left behind by the photographers of the Civil War. Theirs was the first epic human event captured by the camera, and their daring, ingenuity, and scope of interest never fail to impress. The Western Reserve Historical Society has one of the finest collections of wartime images in existence, and Feel the Bonds That Draw gleans some of the very best, including some not before published. As we enter the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, everyone would profit by taking a look at the faces of the men and women who actually lived it.” 

Joan Waugh, author of U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth:

Feel the Bonds that Draw show cases the stunning collection of Civil War photographs held by the Western Reserve Historical Society. That is reason enough to buy this book, but fortunately there is much more to be gained. Christine Dee's chapters provide a lively and informative context and commentary to understanding how photographers and the art and business of photography shaped the interpretation of the conflict for the generation who lived through the war, and for the generations that followed. A fascinating and enjoyable read!” 

Earl J. Hess, Lincoln Memorial University, author of Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg:

“This book is a welcome visual journey, an enjoyable ride through many regions, and among the civilians as well as with the soldiers, of the Civil War. I especially like the photographs that are here published for the first time, and the extensive commentary provided by the capable author of this new and important book.” 

“Peter S. Carmichael, Fluhrer Professor and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College

Feel the Bonds that Draw brilliantly explores how Americans discovered the brutal realism of organized warfare through Civil War photography. Although we often claim that seeing is believing, Christine Dee reveals that the act of seeing could be horribly deceptive. The Northern public thought they had had found the ‘real war’ in images of physical destruction, mangled bodies, and wrecked landscapes, but in actuality they were viewing the artistic expressions of photographers who created the illusion of war as a coherent, orderly, and knowable experience.” -