IN DECEMBER 2003 moviegoers were treated to a vivid re-creation of the battle of the Crater in the movie Cold Mountain, directed by Anthony Minghella. Though the battle, which was fought just outside Petersburg, Virginia, on July 30, 1864, was not included in the original work of fiction by Charles Frazier, it was used in the film as a dramatic opening to set the stage for Inman (played by Jude Law) and his decision to leave the Confederate army and head back to his lover (played by Nicole Kidman), still living in western North Carolina and working desperately to make ends meet. The opening sequence presents the important stages of the battle, including the initial massive detonation of explosives under a Confederate salient, the advance of Federal soldiers into the crater, and the hand-to-hand combat that left thousands dead and wounded, resulting ultimately in a decisive victory for General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
The movie accurately portrayed the bloody fighting in and around the crater and probably satisfied the demands of most Civil War enthusiasts. The movie also briefly acknowledged the presence of United States Colored Troops (USCTs). At one point in the battle sequence, a black Union soldier and a Native American in Confederate uniform exchange glances. Minghella’s negotiation of the race issue, however, avoids any references to the well-documented executions of many black soldiers after their surrender.
Minghella’s historic representation of the battle of the Crater takes its place in the long and complex history of race and Civil War memory stretching back to the accounts that the soldiers themselves wrote after the battle. If we step back, however, it is impossible not to acknowledge the wide gulf, with regard to race, between the accounts the soldiers wrote and the way subsequent generations remembered and commemorated the event, from the nineteenth century up to the eve of the Civil War sesquicentennial.
It is the absence of race, exemplified here in Cold Mountain, that is the subject of this book: this process of preserving a certain kind of memory that moves to minimize or ignore the participation of USCTs in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Understanding how memory of this racial component was shaped at various points during the 150 years since the end of the war allows us the opportunity to peer into the changes and challenges experienced by the nation at large. More important, the study of memory allows us to understand the extent to which previous interpretations of the past were subject to political, social, and economic pressures, and how difficult it was for individuals and communities outside of dominant power structures to preserve and commemorate their preferred understanding of the past.
This book has benefited from the vast amount of research that has been done over the past few decades on the Civil War and historical memory. It is not surprising that historians have embraced the study of Civil War memory. The Civil War is ideally suited to an examination of the cultural, social, and political shifts that have shaped our understanding of this nation’s defining moment. One does not need to look far for evidence of the competing claims on history made by different social groups active in the decades following the war. From research on the influences of the Lost Cause to the role of national reconciliation to the examination of individual battles, monument dedications, textbooks, children’s literature, and commemorative rituals, the focus on memory has aided in uncovering the fluid cultural, political, and racial factors that, in large part, determined whose understanding of the past became legitimized and integral to the formation and maintenance of an evolving national identity.1
In many ways this book builds on the scholarship of David Blight, whose book Race and Reunion introduced a readership to the subject of historical memory, a subject extending beyond the narrow confines of the academy. In Blight’s view, the veterans on both sides of the Potomac chose to assign the deepest meaning of the war to the heroism and valor of the soldiers on the battlefield. The shared experiences of soldierhood was a theme that could bring former enemies together peacefully on old battlefields. Forging bonds of valor between onetime enemies, however, required that questions surrounding emancipation and race be ignored. According to Blight, the success of national reconciliation and reunion over the “emancipationist legacy” guaranteed that the role of African Americans in the Civil War would be minimized to the point of nonrecognition.2
Readers will find elements of Blight’s thesis throughout this book, but my analysis of memory at the Crater will reveal places where his examination of the multiple traditions that came out of the Civil War does not go far enough in explaining the interplay of race and politics in national reconciliation as well as the deep divisions between former Confederates and white Virginians. Confederates who fought in the Virginia brigade at the Crater were united in their defense of Petersburg from black Union soldiers. This was the first time that Lee’s men were forced to fight former slaves, and the rage they felt—which led to the well-documented slaughter of captured black soldiers after the battle—reflected, like nothing else could, just what was at stake in the event of Confederate defeat. Confederates’ experience at the Crater, including their participation in one of the final decisive victories in Virginia, served as a foundation for reunions among the veterans of the brigade in the 1870s on the old battlefield. However, these continued bonds of affection were not immune from the political disputes connected to Virginia’s fragile postwar racial hierarchy.3
The most contentious point centered on former major general William Mahone, who led the Confederate counterattack and was widely credited for saving the Army of Northern Virginia and Petersburg. Mahone used the fame that went along with a successful military career to further his own postwar projects, first as a railroad magnate and later as a politician. By 1883, Mahone had become one of the most controversial and divisive politicians in the country. As the organizer and leader of the Readjuster Party (named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt), Mahone led a highly successful independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats. Readjusters governed the state from 1879 to 1883, electing a governor and two U.S. senators, and they served in six of Virginia’s ten congressional districts. Their legislative agenda and Mahone’s prominent role within the party and in the U.S. Senate generated heated attacks in newspapers as well as in more personal forms of communication.
As had former Confederate general James Longstreet, Mahone incurred the wrath of a growing “Lost Cause” movement that, in addition to rationalizing Confederate defeat, sought to maintain Democratic Party solidarity by fostering white supremacy and states’ rights. Lost Cause advocates such as Jubal Early assumed an aggressive posture against ex-Confederates like Mahone who threatened their own conservative social and political agenda. As Mahone was not an outsider but a successful Confederate general, he had to be dealt with severely, and they dealt with him by attacking his war record, including his leadership at the battle of the Crater. A closer look at Mahone’s postwar difficulties sheds light on the heated debates surrounding the limits to which the Confederate past could be used to serve current political ends, and in doing so it undermines the notion that “Virginia history” and “Confederate history” became nearly synonymous in the first few decades after the war.
The Crater also hosted numerous reunions between former enemies. Veterans praised one another for their bravery and reflected on their shared values as Americans. They accomplished this by suppressing their bitter memories of the black soldiers or by sharing their remembered outrage in public forums in a way that conformed to the current political and racial atmosphere. Reunions even led to the possibility of early preservation of the Crater battlefield through its purchase by Northern investors. This was not to be, however. A closer look at the Crater, though, reveals the limits of sectional reunion. Virginians exercised a great deal of control over how the battlefield was remembered and they did so in the form of two major reenactments, one in 1903 and one in 1937, that highlighted the local and regional veterans who had served in Mahone’s Virginia brigade.4
The strong pull of reconciliation is also inadequate to explain the relatively late inclusion of some sections of the Petersburg battlefield in the National Military Park system compared to the first five battlefield parks, which were organized in the 1880s and 1890s. Unlike other major battlefields, the earthworks around Petersburg could not be contained within an easily defined park boundary. Because there was no boundary between the earthworks and the rest of the city, the battlefield was often seen as an obstacle to continued economic expansion, especially during times of economic depression. As a result, few area residents placed the need to preserve sacred ground above commercial development. This was most clearly the case in the development of an eighteen-hole golf course on the Crater battlefield during the 1920s.5
During the first two decades after the war, Petersburg’s African American community publicly commemorated its military heritage, most notably through its local Virginia militia. Public speakers acknowledged the bravery of black Union soldiers and the need to maintain their collective memory as part of a broader story of emancipation and freedom. Outside Petersburg, a small number of black writers and former USCT officers penned accounts that not only preserved an important aspect of Civil War history but acknowledged the bravery of the men in the ranks at a time when the fruits of the freedom they had helped to secure were gradually deteriorating because of the resurgence of “Redeemer” governments in the South and a national memory of the war largely structured around reconciliation. This black narrative of the war, featuring USCTs and the battlefields on which they fought, would eventually blossom into a full-blown counter-memory that worked to highlight the continued racial injustices of the 1950s and 1960s as white Americans commemorated the Civil War centennial.6
It was not until the Civil War centennial celebrations of the 1960s and the concurrent civil rights movement that African Americans were able to challenge both white political control of local and national government and a predominantly white memory of the war, infused with elements of the Lost Cause and reconciliation. The political inroads made by African Americans in the 1970s and beyond have inevitably led to substantial changes in the way public spaces such as battlefields are used to commemorate the past.
The current debate surrounding battlefield interpretation is part of a much larger transformation that is taking place predominantly in the South. As the region continues to be transformed by the active political participation of African Americans and other minorities, there has been a push for its public spaces, including Civil War battlefields, to reflect more closely a broader and more diverse past. This can be clearly seen in Petersburg itself, as the city and National Park Service explore opportunities to break down some of the barriers that have prevented the black community from identifying with the history of these landscapes. The challenges the nation faces as it enters the Civil War sesquicentennial revolve around the question of how to remember the most divisive event from its past. However, before we look forward, it would be wise to look back.