Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914

Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914. By William A. Blair. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xii, 250 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-8078-2896-3.

William Blair contributes to a growing literature on public commemorations with this convincing analysis of how Confederate and Union Memorial Days and African Americans' Emancipation Days were used by various racial, sectional, and political constituencies during "the struggles over politics and power in the postemancipation South" (p. ix). Blair is less concerned with the ways in which those constituencies went about constructing the memory of the war than with the ways in which memory was used in postwar contestations for political power. Informed by research in manuscript and archival sources and period newspapers, he argues that public commemorations were not merely festive occasions or "windows into people's attitudes"; rather, "the new invented traditions of the Civil War were politics and power" (p. x).

After an opening chapter on antebellum commemorative culture, Blair traces the evolution of Memorial Days and Emancipation Days (along with a variety of other African American commemorative holidays) from 1865 to 1915. Although he does use a few sources from other parts of the South, his focus is squarely on Virginia, where activities related to the war and its memorialization were both concentrated and well documented. Blair's analysis of African American Virginians' celebrations of Surrender Day (commemorating the April 9, 1865, surrender of Lee's army at Appomattox) and, in Richmond, Evacuation Day (commemorating the April 3, 1865, Union occupation of the city) is particularly effective in illustrating the importance of examining commemorations deeply, at the local level, in order to appreciate their full meaning and significance. Through his thorough discussion of local African Americans' choice of dates, and of northern and southern whites' reactions to those choices, Blair conveys a sense of black Virginians' distinctive historical understandings and political agendas, and of the central role played by festive culture in shaping the shifting alliances that revolved around new realities of politics, race, and labor in the early postwar South.

Blair also emphasizes how public memorialization helped foster a redefinition of the use of public space with regard to gender roles. Through their control of mourning rituals on Confederate Memorial Days, white southern women effectively subverted federal attempts to silence expressions of Confederate nationalism. The "cities of the dead" where Union and Confederate soldiers were honored also became sites of contestation over the political manipulation of symbolic resources like flags and uniforms. Here Blair departs from previous scholars like Paul Buck and Gaines Foster, who have seen Memorial Days as contributing to healing and reconciliation.

Changes in the racial dimensions of public space by the late nineteenth century are nicely evoked by juxtaposing the 1890 unveiling of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond with African Americans' responses and with black Richmonders' unsuccessful drive to establish a national Emancipation Day holiday. Although some northerners and blacks were outraged by the Lee monument, overall it served as an effective symbol of the racially exclusive sectional reconciliation that was rapidly advancing. Emancipation Days allowed African Americans to continue to express their views in public, but now within more marginalized spaces and with greater intraracial debate over political affiliations, selfhelp and uplift strategies, and accommodation to white reconciliation. A concluding chapter on Arlington National Cemetery neatly illustrates the book's argument about the intersection of sectional and national politics within commemorative culture.

The study is limited by its geographical focus on Virginia and the narrow range of commemorations discussed. For example, more attention might have been given to July Fourth or to other monument projects. Blair's approach, however, allows him to explore his material deeply and to surpass more broadly defined studies in developing our understanding of the complex roles that commemorations played at the local and regional levels in struggles for political power. A bit more problematic is the author's concentration primarily on commemorations' political dimensions. Although the examination of political motivations and objectives is essential to understanding these events, Blair may downplay unduly the role played by racial ideology in shaping white reconciliationist agendas. That said, Cities of the Dead represents a major contribution to the literature not only on public commemoration and Civil War memory, but also on postwar political culture generally. It should be read by all scholars interested in the social and political changes that took shape in the South during the half century after the war.

Mitch Kachun

Western Michigan University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jul 2005
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