The document summarizes how different groups in the US after the Civil War promoted competing narratives to explain the causes and consequences of the war. It discusses how Black Americans, abolitionists, and Radical Republicans emphasized slavery as the fundamental cause and the need to secure rights for freed slaves. Meanwhile, many Southerners pushed the "Lost Cause" narrative and idea of states' rights. Ultimately, the dominant narrative became one of "Reunion" and "Reconciliation" to help reunite the country. Popular culture works like novels, films, songs, and photographs played a large role in shaping and spreading these competing memories of the war.

1. Final Essay Two
Lynda Balloni
HIST 379: The Civil War and Popular Culture
May 18, 2015

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In the wake of the most devastating war in American history, the government, academics,
and the masses worked together and in opposition with each other to make sense of the events
that occurred leading up to and during the Civil War, from 1861-1865. Black Americans,
Radical Republicans, and all forms of abolitionists stressed the importance of slavery the
fundamental cause of the war, and sought to spread an “Emancipationist” memory that
emphasized the need to secure and expand rights for former slaves and free blacks. On the
opposite side of the spectrum, many Southerners were pushing their idea that the war had been
rooted in Northern aggression and ideas of states’ rights and property rights, the South was a
simpler and happier place before the war and Reconstruction, and the Confederacy was so poorly
equipped for war compared with the North that it never stood a chance anyway – fighting the
war had been nothing but an admirable “Lost Cause”. These ideas were popular in the years
immediately following the war and strains of their consequences are still visible today in popular
culture and the minds of the American people. However, the commemoration of the war that has
dominated Civil War memory since Reconstruction, and was arguably a necessary evil for the
sake of reuniting a divided and destroyed country, was the “Reunion” or “Reconciliation” story.
With the amount of animosity in the United States after the war (Confederates against Union
soldiers, black people against plantation owners, the South and North as a whole against each
other) and the period of mourning and devastation after losing about 750,000 Americans over
three years, the general consensus amongst the citizens of the United States was to put aside the
differences and problems that caused the war and instead focus on rebuilding a nation that had
been separated officially for four years and ideologically since its founding. Despite this
relatively commendable reason for shunting aside issues of civil rights and economic disparity in
every state and amongst every race, the consequences of constructing an inaccurate consensus-

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based national history – institutionalized racism, economic inequality, and general ignorance and
misconception of American history – far outweigh the goal of trying to unite a group of people
with deep seeded differences by creating a false memory.
There are countless ways to group Americans by an economic, political, or cultural
factor, and these segments of the population each have at least one of the three predominant Civil
War memories on their agenda. The stark differences between Radical Republicans and
Southern Democrats, slaves and plantation owners, and opposing soldiers were already touched
on, but several other subdivisions of the American public are also worth mentioning. Moderate
Republicans, which included President Lincoln, held very different ideas on how to handle
Reconstruction than their radical counterparts, and although most of Reconstruction is seen as
“Radical” (from Lincoln’s death in April 1865 until 1877), the Moderate ideology
(Reunion/Reconciliation based) is ultimately the view that one out in historical memory and the
segment of Americans who still hold most of the power today (not former slaves). The
significance of poor Southern yeomen farmers and Northern factory workers, either advocating
for or against their “Free Labor” rights, is also often overlooked. Slavery in the United States is
considered particularly horrendous since it not only involved the enslavement of a human being,
but it was solely based off of race and completely stripped the slaves of their human rights and
instead grouped them in with property. However, some historians, and the poor whites they
represent, would argue that yeomen farmers were slaves to their land and to the aspiration of one
day making enough money to own slaves of their own, and factory workers were slaves to their
owners, they just happened to get a small stipend that was mostly inconsequential. There were
also Northern sympathizers in the South and Southern sympathizers in the North, of course.
Women also played an important role in the war; popular culture has focused mostly on their

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performance at home and constructing social melodramas set during the war but away from the
battlefield, but women also helped out as nurses and spies, and some would even impersonate
men to fight in the war. Once the war ended, yet another group formed with their own unique
opinions and culture – Civil War reenactors. All of the aforementioned clusters of people played
some part in constructing a national Civil War rhetoric, but ultimately the
Reunion/Reconciliation memory and the dangerous compromises people made to keep up its
façade beat out any conflicting agendas.
The United States government and education system collaborated and opposed each other
in an attempt to construct this reunifying national memory by enacting holidays (Memorial Day),
building monuments, and setting a common history curriculum to be taught in all American
public schools. These efforts played (and still play) a pivotal role in “educating” Americans on
their history, but the cultural vehicles that had the biggest impact on teaching the masses about
the Civil War were novels, movies, television shows, short stories, photographs, songs, and other
art forms. There are a few stand-out pieces in each of these categories that reached such a large
portion of American people that even government-sponsored efforts to manipulate Americans’
mindset do not hold the same pervading power as popular culture.
Literature reached some of the widest audiences of any cultural entity before and during
the war and Reconstruction, and it was joined by the new phenomenon of film in the years
directly following these destructive periods. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and nonfiction slave
narratives were rallying points for blacks and abolitionists while simultaneously enraging most
Southerners and their sympathizers in the North. Literature did not hold as much clout in the
South since literacy rates and access to publishing industries were not as abundant, but there was
a Southern response via a series of books entitled Aunt Phillis’s Cabin which promoted

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“Southern life as it [was]”. Memoirs by Generals Grant and Lee (and other political and military
leaders) as well as accounts of the war from by ordinary Americans as well works including the
novella A Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and collections of short stories dedicated to
the Civil War by Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce reached Americans across the United States.
Works from this time period, including the examples previously stated, focused on the issue of
death above any other consequence of the war since it was so pervasive across the entire society.
Even though these pieces had their own ulterior motives leaning towards either Emancipationist
or “Lost Cause” ideals (or just bitterness and cynicism, in the case of Bierce), but their universal
emphasis on death as a unifying factor in the aftermath of the war shows an implicit
Reunion/Reconciliation message in pieces from this era.
The beginning of the 20th century also marked the beginning of a phenomenon that would
consume American and international culture for at least the next century and into the foreseeable
future – the motion picture. A Red Badge of Courage and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were eventually
made into movies, and the popular films of the 1900s and 2000s The Birth of a Nation, Gone
with the Wind, Glory, and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer all started out as books. Other
popular movies and television shows like Roots, Gods and Generals, Gettysburg, Lincoln,
Buffalo Soldiers, various westerns and silent films and Ken Burns documentaries, and countless
others were not adapted from one specific book, but they were inspired by fictional and
nonfictional literature from previous time periods. The period from the dawn of the film industry
up until the modern day grew more and more diverse in the mediums in which Civil War stories
could be told and their respective perspectives and agendas, but at least all of the pictures listed
about that I have seen personally still have at least one scene dedicated to showing the strength
of the Reunion memory – it usually involves a Union and Confederate soldier dying side by side,

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or something similar. This dominating memory may have been rooted in at least one
constructive idea, but overall it has been detrimental to American society, particularly to black
people and poor people.
Photographs, songs, (mostly Confederate) artwork, newspapers, monuments, and
academia all also fed into the three Civil War memories. “The Battle Cry of Freedom”, “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Just Before the Battle, Mother” are quintessential Northern
Civil War songs, and the South in turn has “The Bonnie Blue Flag”, “I Wish I Was in Dixie”,
and “Goober Peas” to sing along with and reminisce to. The popularity of Confederate flags
amongst people who do not even live in or have personal ties with the South is baffling but
reflects the staying power of the “Lost Cause” narrative up to this very day. The progression of
the way American history, and especially the Civil War, is taught in public schools also reflects
the changing memory of the war and the public climate of the time. Matthew B. Brady’s
photographs of the Civil War shook Americans when he published them during the war, and they
still have a haunting power to them today. Popular culture is not benign, especially in the terms
of creating a memory of the Civil War.

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Bibliography
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Anniversaries. United States: Library of Congress, 2012.
Bierce, Ambrose. Civil War Stories. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994.
Brown, Thomas J. The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with
Documents. United States of America: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Chadwick, Bruce. The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film. New York: Random
House, Inc., 2001.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. London: CRW Publishing, 1895.
Griffith, D.W. The Birth of a Nation. 2012. United States: Epoch Producing Company, film.
Fleming, Victor. Gone with the Wind. Produced by David O. Selznik. 1939. United States:
Metro–Goldwyn-Meyer, film.
Masur, Louis P. The Civil War: A Concise History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Zwyck, Edward. Glory. Produced by Freddie Fields. 1989. United States: Tristar Pictures.