Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South.

Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South. By William A. Blair. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004.) Pp. xiv, 250. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2896-3.)

This book "examin[ing] the political implications of commemorating the Civil War, specifically Emancipation Day and Memorial Day in the former Confederate states from 1865 to 1915" (p. 1) invites comparison with David W. Blight's award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Although it makes its points with reference to Blight's study, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South is more than the first major refinement of Race and Reunion. William A. Blair, an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and editor of Civil War History, is less concerned with tracing the origins and development of diverse memorial traditions than he is with probing interrelationships between postwar memorial rituals and southern political life.

Refuting earlier schools of thought, Blair sees sectional tension just beneath the apparently placid surface of postwar reconciliation. White southerners' determination to care for Confederate cemeteries--the "cities of the dead"--was an expression of resentment of their perceived status as "second-class citizens within the new nation" (p. 53). He maintains that "[s]cholars ... have overlooked the extent of intervention by federal officials in Confederate traditions and the impact that the neglect of southern dead had on the defeated" (p. 50). Criticized immediately after the war for "inflammatory" demonstrations, white southerners abandoned them for less threatening rituals that were nevertheless rife with sectional resentment (p. 63).

Gestures of sectional unity similarly masked jockeying for political advantage. "Ex-Confederates reached across the bloody chasm to protect their hold on regional power," Blair contends, "adopting accommodation so authorities would not have reason to intervene in southern affairs and would let the best white men govern" (p. 107). They exploited "the crippled veteran" in an effort to effect white voter solidarity much as northern politicians "waved the bloody shirt" (pp. 108, 127).

Southern African Americans' campaign to define and perpetuate Emancipation Day rituals also harbored significant political content. Freedpeople assured whites that celebrating their freedom was not a celebration of Confederate defeat, but it was a political act of staking a claim to citizenship. Occasionally, African American action was a conscious reaction to white celebrations of the Confederacy. The unveiling of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in May 1890 prompted a gathering four months later among African Americans to promote a national Emancipation Day and a new self-help movement.

Race and region are Blair's primary analytical variables, but he also explores gender issues, especially the substantial role of southern white women. "Filtering Decoration Days through a woman's domain made it easier for people to forget the bitterness behind these early occasions and to recall them as benign rituals of mourning to help a nation heal," Blair argues (p. 105).

With its analysis of the relationship between memorial rituals and political action, the thematic reach of Cities of the Dead is greater than its relative brevity suggests. But the geographic scope is less than the title implies. This is primarily a study of Virginia with supplemental research in Louisiana and South Carolina newspapers to test the veracity of the conclusions.

JOHN M. COSKI

Museum of the Confederacy