Telling History vs. Making Art: The ways we remember the war
“We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born,” wrote Robert Penn Warren during the Civil War’s centennial; “or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.” Writer/activist Albion W. Tourgee, however, considered that moment in a different light just two decades after it happened. “The South surrendered at Appomattox,” he lamented, but “the North has been surrendering every since.”
Such has been the complicated memory of the Civil War. The North won the war but the South won the peace, ensuring a lasting immortality for the Confederacy that has long since been debunked by historians but has nonetheless been firmly ensconced in public memory. Ulysses S. Grant lamented that it should ever come to pass. “While I would do nothing to revive unhappy memories in the South, I do not like to see our soldiers apologize for the war,” he said.
Read on, Macduff, at Emerging Civil War.