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