The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Book Review Sample)

BOOK REVIEW: CREATING A CONFEDERATE KENTUCKY: THE LOST CAUSE AND CIVIL WAR MEMORY IN A BORDER STATE
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Decades after the civil war, Americans struggled to know the meaning and memory of the country’s most dangerous conflict. Southerners narrated their side of the story through personal memoirs and public memorializing of Confederate heroes. Research on the Lost Cause has become a field. Anne E. Marshall, in her book about the Lost Cause, gives information on how and why Americans honored and celebrated the civil war in challenging and factually erroneous ways. Kentucky honored and celebrated an invented Confederate past. As Merton Coulter once said "Kentucky waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union." Marshall’s book explains more about the civil war. She addresses slavery and state identity during the first half of the 19th century. The story was advanced to cover the memorial activity in 1935. She covers topics such as politics, violence, emancipation memorial activity and literature. Finally, Marshall claims that a romanticized, confederate recall began as dominant since it was "this sort of history that spoke to grand possibilities lost in defending a beautiful world of the past. This past was more compelling than white Kentuckians’ complicated historical choices, replete with too many disclaimers, contingencies, and ambiguities to be inspirational." The book also explains that African Americans told their story about war and freedom through monument building and emancipation day celebrations. Generally, Marshall’s book is about how members of the society interpret the past to understand the present.[Anne Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 1.] [Ibid, 182]
Marshall’s arguments are founded on the state’s competition for memory and the surprising level of partisan and racial violence that was experienced in Kentucky during the last years of the war and years after. According to Marshall, Postwar creation of a Confederate identity among the Kentuckians was because of the response to black freedom. Though they struggled to remain neutral, this was not so after the Republican policy changed from supporting slave ownership to recruiting slaves in the union army during early 1864. Marshall’s book suggests that since slaves enrolled in the Union army during the war gained freedom, neutral white Kentuckians became Confederate. After the civil war, racial relations played a role in uniting white Kentuckians behind a Confederate identity. In addition, Marshall’s book argues on whether Kentucky formed a confederate identity after the war. Though they never succeed and that the state sent more troops to the Union army than to the Confederacy, through evidence, Marshall says that the identity was formed after the war. After recognizing that Kentucky was more rebellious than the rebels themselves, Marshall shows the effect of this strange development in the commonwealth up to 1935 and the present.
The impressiveness of Marshall’s work is evident in her discussion of war memorials. Through an examination of conferences, celebrations, and monuments, she discovers that the creation of the Confederate memorabilia and the lack of national memorials was not a denial of the union. But, the formation of a Confederate Kentucky was an honor to the glorified lost cause and a denial of emancipation. Here, Marshall supports her argument with data from demographics. She says that honoring of traditional holidays such as the Fourth July involved a high number of African American participants and a low number of white participants. This change was not unique to Kentucky, but, as one may recall of Vicksburg where the events connected to the fourth July of 1963 led to an almost a century dismissal of Independence Day celebrations. It was Kentucky’s choice to celebrate their past selectively. Marshall’s arguments are also impressive in that she uses many traditional sources such as newspapers, manuscript collections, romantic literature and material culture such as monuments for evidence. For example, she reminds readers that Kentucky was the home of the major American writers of that period, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote about Kentucky in his poems and stories. Furthermore, the politics of ‘adjustment’ as she calls them instituted an era of violence aiming at African Americans and Republican Party supports. The Ku Klux Klan, vigilantes and other groups of civilian enforcers used brutal guerrilla methods of the way years. In this section, Marshall relied on periodicals to illuminate the differing views of this violence. She does not shy away from reporting controversial viewpoints on the matter. Rather, she lets her subjects speak for themselves. Various Kentuckian publications agreed to the concept of dignified violence. Contrary, periodicals from outside the state, for example, the New York Times criticized the violence due to new south democrats’ careless rule of the state. In both perspectives, Marshall insists on her theme that postwar events will be recalled by the way in which they serve current needs....