Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation.

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. By John R. Neff. Modern War Studies. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 328. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-13668.)

John R. Neff notes that although the "commemoration of the dead... provides a particularly rich source that documents how Americans derived meaning from that nearly incomprehensible tragedy of war," it is a source relatively neglected by historians. Neff ascribes this to the greater interest in the "larger political, economic, and social motivations encouraging reunion" and argues that commemoration and a concomitant obfuscation of the changing meaning of death in the Civil War should be examined as "a significant social movement in [its] own right" (p. 6). Critical of earlier interpretations, Neff argues that so far from facilitating reunion, "remembering the dead proved to be an impediment to national healing" (p. 6). He stresses "[t]hat the soldier dead never lost their symbolic value" (p. 37).

The book begins with a detailed description of the lineaments of death on the battlefield. The author then explores the role that Abraham Lincoln' s death played in Civil War commemoration, the dominance of the North in Civil War memorializing, and the rather different southern response to the war dead. He concludes with an examination of the links between the dead and American nationalism, both at the time and later (p. 37).

Death shaped both "the landscape through which soldiers moved" during the war and the commemorative landscape after it, the latter dominated by northern interpretations of the war's meaning, expressed through what Neff terms the Cause Victorious--the northern equivalent of the Lost Cause (p. 25). The Cause Victorious, Neff asserts, produced "a nationality reunited in imagination long before reconciliation had been actually accomplished" (p. 9). In "the public response to Lincoln's assassination ... the Northern myth of American nationalism [found] its first voice" (p. 11). It is not, perhaps, entirely fair to suggest that the link "between Lincoln's death and nationalism" has been accepted "all too often without critical analysis," since several scholars have explored this subject (p. 69). Equally, northerners showed a marked tendency to assume all the attributes of American nationalism in the antebellum era, so their doing so after 1865 is hardly surprising. The Cause Victorious certainly struggled to incorporate "two alien peoples within the perceived membership of the nation," but by 1898 this struggle had expanded beyond its Civil War context.

Neff rightly highlights the opportunity the Spanish-American War offered for sectional reconciliation. But ethnic and religious divisions also came into play: New Mexico was as adamant as any southern state to prove loyalty to the nation in that war, as were American Catholics. "Overlooked in the military experience of the Spanish-American War," Neff suggests, "was that, in addition to fighting together, Northern and Southern sons died together and were then buried together" (p. 221). Scholars do, however, recognize the significance of the media attention accorded Worth Bagley, from North Carolina, one of five sailors who died when their boat was sunk and whose death was offered as evidence that the South was fully reincorporated into a nation that, as Neff's fine and detailed study reveals, was more divided by death in the half century after the Civil War than historians have hitherto realized.

Susan-Mary Grant

University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne