Civil War Memory

Memphis National Cemetery (Source: Daily Memphian) On Memorial Day 1889, Major T. B. Edgington stood among the graves of Union soldiers at the national cemetery in Memphis and delivered one of the most revealing addresses of the postwar era. We tend to remember the turn of the twentieth century as a moment when white Southerners used Confederate monument dedications and Lost Cause ceremonies to reinforce the racial status quo.

In my last post I shared my initial thoughts on Saving America’s Story, the 162-page report on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History that the White House Domestic Policy Council released over the July 4 weekend. I have not been able to stop thinking about it since, in large part because of the wave of news coverage that has followed.

Many Voices, One Nation Exhibit at NMAH Late on Independence Day, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report titled “Saving America’s Story,” accusing the National Museum of American History of “institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology.” The timing was by no means accidental. The administration chose the nation’s birthday, on the eve of the Semiquincentennial, to declare that the country’s flagship history museum cannot be trusted to tell the American story.

(Source: Destination Gettysburg) I hope all of you had an enjoyable Fourth of July. Many of you have been traveling or spending time with family and may have missed a series of posts that I wrote to mark the 163rd anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. These five posts highlight stories from the campaign and from each day of the battle that I am exploring as part of my current book project on the role of enslaved laborers in the Confederate army during the Gettysburg Campaign.

(Source: Cheney Orr/Reuters) I am spending the afternoon of this July 4 in the comfort of my home, reading Eddie Glaude’s new book, America, U.S.A. It is not an easy book to read on the nation’s 250th anniversary. Glaude refuses to look away from the most uncomfortable truths of this country’s history, and yet I find his willingness to bear his soul on the page to be, in its own way, reassuring and even hopeful.

This illustration by Allen Christian Redwood depicts the Confederate army retreating from Gettysburg during a rainstorm. (Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections) As the sun rose over Gettysburg on July 4, 1863, few body servants and enslaved laborers in the Army of Northern Virginia harbored any confusion about what had happened. Robert E. Lee’s army had suffered a decisive defeat. They knew it, even if no one yet knew whether the fighting would resume that day.

“Toward the Angle” by Don Troiani Our understanding of Robert E. Lee’s final charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863 has been set in stone for a long time. For generations, popular memory of the assault belonged almost exclusively to the Virginians of George Pickett’s division, who stepped off from Seminary Ridge that afternoon and into legend. Only recently have we found a place for the North Carolinians who advanced alongside them.

“Little Round Top and the Valley of Death” by Dale Gallon On the morning of July 2, 1863, the 4th Texas Infantry lay near Herr Ridge west of Gettysburg, part of Jerome Robertson’s Texas Brigade in John Bell Hood’s division of Longstreet’s First Corps. The men were exhausted from an overnight march. Among them moved a small population of enslaved men who cooked, foraged, and cared for Confederate officers. Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin F.

Railroad Cut by Dale Gallon One hundred sixty-three years ago today, as the light faded over the first day’s field at Gettysburg, an enslaved man from Lexington, Virginia walked out to the unfinished Railroad Cut west of town. The ground around him held the wreckage of some of the most concentrated killing of the entire battle.

Yesterday’s 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara upheld what should never have been in doubt: the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship. The amendment exists for exactly this reason. It was written to bury Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 decision in which the Supreme Court declared that Black people could never be citizens of the United States.