From Jackets to Joysticks: Everyday Objects as Sites of Civil War Memory

The tripartite model of Civil War memory first articulated by David Blight has defined the field for the last twenty-five years. Three collective memories of the war that emerged during Reconstruction continue to shape our understanding of the war today. The Southern Lost Cause, which denies slavery’s role as the Confederacy’s casus belli and romanticizes the Old South’s White supremacist social order, has informed White Southerners’ views of the conflict and has since infiltrated media such as film and television. Northern political leaders, eager to reunite the North and South, folded the Southern perspective into their reconciliationist vision of the war by emphasizing the courage and sacrifice of the “Blue and Gray” while downplaying the significance of abolition. The fusion of these two collective memories obscured the emancipationist memory held by African Americans, who understood the conflict as a struggle for freedom and Black citizenship.In their respective works, Shae Smith Cox and editors Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn echo prior scholarly denunciation of the Lost Cause by examining how everyday objects shape collective memory and identity. Cultural products ranging from Civil War–era uniforms to video games act as what historian Pierre Nora has described as “sites of memory.”1 Though Nora used this term to describe how the state imposes its preferred version of the past through commemorative architecture, the meaning of these spaces and the memories they invoke can be contested by unsanctioned counter-collective memories. In this way, sartorial objects and video games are wearable and playable sites of memory; each can emit a version of the past proffered by their makers, but their meanings can be altered by the recipients of their symbolic connotations. Moving beyond scholarship concerned with built landscapes, the works reviewed here investigate how communities forged meaning and identity from such objects, thus calling on historians to resurface African American and Indigenous perspectives of the war’s legacy.Cox situates The Fabric of Civil War Society at the nexus of material culture studies and memory scholarship to explore how uniforms, badges, and flags shaped ideological battles over the war’s meaning between 1859 and 1939. Cox’s argument is threefold: first, the high cost of military garb placed financial burdens on soldiers and families; second, clothing “physically and metaphorically” transformed wearers and those with whom they interacted, thus constructing new identities that subverted state power; and third, military garments evolved from “practical tools of warfare to symbols of sentimentality” after the conflict, becoming potent emblems of sectional identity despite Gettysburg anniversary ceremonies nominally softening sectional divides (2). Military attire and accoutrements were not mere necessities nor commodities but were instead tools used by ex-Confederates, Union veterans, African Americans, Native Americans, and their descendants to vie for cultural prestige, political representation, and personhood in a society fractured by warfare.The first two chapters analyze newspapers and army regulations to detail uniform production costs. For most of the rank-and-file, uniforms were prohibitively expensive. Southern communities crowdsourced funds for homespun uniforms, while Northern industrial infrastructure enabled sourcing from large manufacturers. United States Colored Troops (USCT), unlike White soldiers with clothing allowances, paid for uniforms out-of-pocket, often incurring debt that diminished wages. Indigenous soldiers faced similar neglect from both the Union and the Confederacy. With Indigenous groups having already been dispossessed by antebellum federal policies, the few uniforms provided to Native allies were attempts by Union and Confederate authorities to coerce Indigenous warfighters into allyship and to extend state power over the trans-Mississippi region. For Northern and Southern governments, uniform-clad armies symbolized military capability and continental reach.The following two chapters reveal how individuals challenged state control by attaching sentimental value to uniforms and accessories. Cox notes that “uniforms were . . . the foundation for individual and group identities and tangible building blocks for cultural and political representation” (62). Cox convincingly argues that women, African Americans, and Indigenous men in uniform undermined state authority to achieve a “new level of equality and sovereignty” by serving in the military, or “performing the same duties as White men” (67). Uniformed bodies thus became conduits of symbolic and rhetorical warfare; Black servicemen and Native allies donned uniforms and joined the fight to prove their fitness for citizenship, declare their personhood, and express their masculinity. Marginalized combatants attached sentimentalities to jackets, caps, and decorative badges to create transgressive sartorial vernaculars that subverted the intended messaging of Union and Confederate governments.In the last four chapters, Cox examines how Northern and Southern “memory machines” wielded Civil War–era military garb and other war ephemera as potent symbolic weapons during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (113). In the South, memorial societies such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sold Confederate collectibles to a national consumer base and displayed uniforms in museums and at commemorative events. The accompanying rhetorical strategies buttressing these displays associated Confederate memorabilia with martial sacrifice, pride, and honor instead of slavery and White supremacy. Rebel uniforms thus became historical artifacts imbued with the lost antebellum identity of White Southerners.In Northern locales, veteran groups such as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) partnered with the Women’s Relief Corps to orchestrate military parades emphasizing veterans as saviors of the Union rather than as emancipators of enslaved people. Though USCT veterans formed their own GAR chapters or integrated White chapters, the dominant reconciliationist belief among White members sequestered emancipationist perspectives among small pockets of Black servicemen and radical White racial egalitarians. By the twentieth century, federal authorities attempted to ameliorate sectional differences among these memory machines by organizing the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913 and 1938. But Cox concludes her narrative by exposing as superficial the conciliatory rhetoric wielded by reunion organizers, which some historians have seen as a successful palliation of sectional hostility. Decades of memory manufacturing by warring pro-Union and ex-Confederate factions had produced “symbols encrusted with ideals” that allowed for “the wound of divisiveness to remain open and festering” (204). The absence of Black and Indigenous veterans from the Gettysburg anniversaries further derailed the process of reconciliation, as a “truly harmonious reunion,” according to Cox, would have required the presence of combatants of color, too (205).Focusing on more recent interpretations of the Civil War, Playing at War examines how American Civil War–era (ACW) video games inform historical memory in modern America. Two themes unite the book’s fifteen chapters. First, video games reflect the cultural currents and ideologies of their time, with many pre-2010s ACW games embedding Lost Cause narratives that were prevalent in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Second, a tension exists between players’ desire for historically authentic visuals to enhance immersion and educators’ emphasis on accurate coverage of the war’s causes, the role of slavery, and the participation of Black and Indigenous populations. Playing at War pioneers a new historiography of Civil War memory and demonstrates that interactive digital media are crucial sites of memory that define the Civil War for younger generations.Part I traces the evolution of video game technology and recounts how early ACW games relied on misguided perceptions rather than informed historiography. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson chronicles the rise of Civil War video games in the 1980s and 1990s and discusses developers’ research methods. Katherine Brackett examines the rhetoric of game manuals, suggesting that three key 1990s ACW games inserted ahistorical ideological narratives into their instructional pamphlets. James Frusetta provides a comparative analysis of Civil War and World War II video games, while Stephen J. Edwards and Blakeney K. Hill explore player-produced game modifications, revealing how game alterations reflect players’ imaginings of the Civil War era.Part II focuses on foundational ACW video games and their interpretations of the war’s causes. John R. Legg critiques outdated depictions of the American West and its Indigenous inhabitants found in The Oregon Trail (1971). Nicholas W. Sacco examines the political debates and educational value of Freedom!, Freedom! (1991), which was the first game to depict the experiences of freedom-seekers. James Welborn investigates the ties between historical scholarship and game design through analyzing North & South, a European-produced game that gained popularity with the rise of console gaming in the 1990s.Part III charts the development of ACW strategy games and first-person shooters following Ted Turner’s film Gettysburg (1993). Patrick A. Lewis argues that “granular military historical detail” in Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! (1997) “tacitly” advanced a pro-Confederate understanding of Civil War history (12). Christian McWhirter’s investigation into the tactical simulator Civil War Generals 2: Grant, Lee, Sherman (1997) finds that Civil War “buffs” crave realistic war experiences without having to sacrifice entertainment value. Jacopo della Quercia and Erzsébet Fazekas also probe Civil War Generals 2, noting that the fictional battle for Washington, DC, which concludes the Confederate campaign, serves as an ultimate “end boss” battle that players must win, reflecting narrative patterns found in myriad non-ACW games. Charles R. Welsko critiques History Channel: The Civil War—A Nation Divided (2006) for using the authority of The History Channel to whitewash the war by excluding African American soldiers and neglecting slavery.Part IV follows the progression of ACW games into the 2010s and 2020s. David Silkenat and Holly Pinheiro critique Ultimate General: Civil War (2017) for omitting the African American military experience to instead provide hyper-realistic battle simulations. Daniel Farrel argues that the emancipationist online communities that play War of Rights (2015) reject Lost Cause narratives, thus providing space for an emerging cynical memory of the war that critiques both the Union and the Confederacy from libertarian perspectives. Aaron M. Phillips explores Call of Juarez: Bound by Blood (2009), showing that the “imaginative appeal” of Civil War memory influences international perceptions of the war (15). Jonathan S. Jones’s closing essay on Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) highlights the game’s intentional use of emancipationist memory to promote anti-racist understandings of the Civil War–era that reject the Lost Cause.Innovative use of source material unites these two monographs. The Fabric of Civil War Society’s analysis of military attire invites scholars to incorporate clothing into the lexicon of sources scholars rely upon to unveil the meanings behind memories of the Civil War. In doing so, Cox makes a compelling case that material culture methodologies are key to recovering Black and Indigenous collective memories. Analyses focused on material objects can partially offset the paucity of textual sources written about or by Indigenous people and African Americans who possess memories of the Civil War that contradict commonly accepted narratives. On the other hand, Playing at War incorporates nontraditional sources such as online blogs, chat forums, and Reddit posts to uncover the sentiments of new generations of consumers who spend much of their time online. By revealing how online communities interact with video games over the last fifteen years, Lewis’s and Welborn’s volume shows that emancipationist perspectives are becoming increasingly prevalent compared to the Lost Cause. Importantly, the sites of memory analyzed by these texts suggest that Blight’s three-pronged theory of Civil War memory needs expansion. As historians continue to retrieve Indigenous and African American memories of the war, and online communities develop unconventional critiques of the war’s impact on the size, scope, and role of the federal government, a new comprehensive framework for understanding Civil War memory becomes necessary.Like any texts forging new historiographic paths, both works contain shortcomings. Cox’s emphasis on material culture is not sufficiently contextualized within the broader cultural developments of the postwar era. Northerners and Southerners comprised a fin de siècle national consumer culture and literary tradition that shaped Americans’ opinions of the war and to some extent lessened regional animosity. Though reconciliation remained incomplete, Cox slightly overstates the degree to which these animosities lingered. Similarly, Lewis and Welborn overstate the cultural significance of ACW games. Civil War–era video games have yet to garner widespread appeal among casual gamers. Though these games are popular with their communities, ACW games, except for Red Dead Redemption 2, command the attention of a small number of passionate users who constitute a small portion of the much larger gaming ecosystem that comprises millions of games and dozens of platforms. These criticisms notwithstanding, The Fabric of Civil War Society and Playing at War stand out as insightful and inventive histories that deserve scholarly attention.