HISTORY AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

All my classes and other presentations combine attention to both history and historical memory. I push students to master what actually happened, while also showing that successive generations often recall and interpret historical events and personalities in starkly different ways. Memory often trumps reality, I emphasize, because people act on what they perceive to be the truth, however flawed that perception. For my Civil War–related courses, I have splendid materials at hand to illustrate the power of memory. Students view films (always outside of class time) to gauge how Hollywood has interpreted the past, writing papers that compare celluloid treatments to assigned readings and my lectures. I also conduct optional tours of various battlefields and other historic sites, where we use monuments to discuss how and why Americans have created conflicting versions of what transpired.

I address the disjuncture between history and memory in a number of other essays, including several relating to how Lost Cause writers and later enthusiasts sought to remove slavery as the bedrock of the Confederacy and one about the remarkable erosion of U. S. Grant’s reputation in the middle decades of the twentieth century. That anyone could separate the Confederacy from slavery or interpret Grant as anything but a gifted soldier and widely hailed Union hero speaks to the power of memory to obscure reality.7

Gettysburg affords striking instances of the same phenomenon. Most obviously, the battle has become entrenched in the popular imagination as the war’s great turning point. This makes sense on one level, because we know it was the conflict’s bloodiest battle, the last time a major Rebel army invaded the United States, and the occasion for Abraham Lincoln’s tribute to Union dead in November 1863. Yet Gettysburg, though by any yardstick an important event, was not considered decisive in breaking the rebellion. Indeed, Vicksburg’s surrender loomed larger in the summer of 1863, and many in the U.S., including Lincoln, saw the Pennsylvania campaign as a lost opportunity to deliver a crippling blow to the most important Confederate army. As for the Gettysburg Address, virtually no one paid more than cursory attention during the war (the scene in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln showing Union soldiers quoting the speech to the president is laughably anachronistic). Had anyone polled people in the United States and the Confederacy in the summer of 1864, virtually none would have pronounced Union victory assured because of Gettysburg.

Even so, evidence of Gettysburg’s supremacy in our historical imagination abounds. For example, a special sesquicentennial issue of USA Today termed Gettysburg “a hallowed event . . . a hinge of fate” that represented “both the high point of Confederate hopes and the turning point that led to eventual Union victory.”8 Thus did USA Today help sustain a hoary distortion propped up by Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, and Ron Maxwell’s film Gettysburg. In an amusing twist, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, released in theaters in 2012, offers Gettysburg as not only the war’s most important battle but also its last.

Perceptions regarding Joshua L. Chamberlain’s role at Gettysburg also illuminate the vagaries of historical memory. As a young person during the centennial, I considered Gouverneur K. Warren the hero of Little Round Top. The dust jacket of my treasured copy of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War featured a photo of Warren’s statue at Gettysburg, and Bruce Catton’s text credited the New Yorker with placing troops that “saved Little Round Top.” Similarly, my copy of Frederick Tilberg’s Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania, the NPS handbook first published in 1954 and revised in 1962, included a section titled “Warren Saves Little Round Top.”9 Neither publication mentioned Chamberlain. Nor did W. C. Storrick’s Gettysburg: The Place, the Battles, the Outcome (1932), aimed at tourists and written by a retired superintendent of guides at the battlefield. For these authors, Warren stood first at Little Round Top, with cameos by brigade commanders Stephen H. Weed and Strong Vincent, Colonel Patrick H. O’Rorke of the 140th New York Infantry, and artillerist Charles E. Hazlett.

Thanks in large measure to Shaara, Burns, and Maxwell, Chamberlain now enjoys a position in popular culture near the front rank of all Union military heroes—not just those at Gettysburg. Events and characters prominent in Burns’s series and Maxwell’s adaptations of The Killer Angels and Jeff Shaara’s novel Gods and Generals have received considerable attention from artists, underscoring the power of TV and films to shape the popular marketplace. A subject of no importance in post–Civil War artworks, Chamberlain became the most-painted Union military officer between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century; indeed, he and other Federal commanders at Gettysburg account for a significant proportion of all artworks on Union topics. In a few instances, figures in paintings resemble the actors in Maxwell’s Gettysburg as much as the historical figures they represent. Chamberlain’s ascendancy in the world of art, I think it safe to say, would strike William T. Sherman or Philip H. Sheridan as odd.10

None of this is meant to deprecate Chamberlain’s service or abilities. He performed admirably at Gettysburg, but his efforts did not stand out among other competent regimental leaders. Chamberlain and his Twentieth Maine did nothing on Little Round Top to exceed what Colonel David Ireland and his 137th New York accomplished on Culp’s Hill on July 2. Each successfully held one end of the Union line and suffered almost identical casualties. Yet almost no one beyond a circle of Gettysburg specialists knows anything about Ireland and his regiment.

The next students who enroll in my Civil War course will reflect on how various memory traditions have shaped their thinking about the war. As always, I will hope that a semester’s work equips them to engage the vast complexity of the conflict with a sense of how history and memory often lead down different paths.

Monument to the 137th New York Infantry on Culp’s Hill. Dedicated in 1888, it includes this inscription: “For Its Services in This and Many Other Great Battles of the War It Holds a Proud Position in the History of the ‘Great Rebellion.’” The brigade commander’s official report for Gettysburg affirmed: “The officers and men behaved admirably during the whole of the contest. Colonel Ireland was attacked on his flank and rear. He changed his position and maintained his ground with skill and gallantry, his regiment suffering very severely.” (New York Monuments Commission for the Battlefields of Gettysburg and Chattanooga, Final Report of the Battlefield of Gettysburg, 3 vols. [Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1900], vol. 3, plate opposite 935, quotation on 942.)