To open Remembering the Civil War, Caroline Janney evokes early twentieth-century film clips of bearded Union and Confederate veterans shaking hands and swapping stories at carefully orchestrated Blue-Gray reunions. Such iconic images, she warns, can conceal as much as they reveal. In a well-conceived and beautifully written reinterpretation, Janney suggests that sectional forgiveness after the Civil War was “never as thorough or as complete” as historians have long assumed (3). Northern and southern civilians and veterans nurtured distinct and contradictory visions of the war well into the twentieth century. Confederate sympathizers rallied around the Lost Cause, whitewashing slavery, emphasizing battlefield valor, and blaming defeat on the Union's superior numbers. Northern commentators may have lauded the bravery of Confederate soldiers, but few were willing to admit that the southern cause was just or righteous. The preservation of the Union (and to a lesser extent, emancipation) remained the central story of the Civil War for most northern commentators. Though scenes of Blue-Gray fraternity were a visible part of the nation's commemorative landscape, Janney argues, the impulse toward sectional reconciliation always coexisted—often uneasily—with regional chauvinism and memorial one-upmanship.

At the heart of Janney's analysis is an all-important distinction between “reunion” and “reconciliation.” In Janney's hands, reunion is a purely political term referring to the reunification of the nation in the aftermath of war. Since all but the most intransigent Confederates accepted that the war had destroyed the doctrine of secession, reunion was achieved relatively quickly. Reconciliation would be another matter. For Janney, reconciliation refers to the more slippery terrain of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Even as North and South forged a political reunion in the 1860s and 1870s, sentimental reconciliation remained elusive. Far from forgetting and forgiving, Janney argues, “deep bitterness and a refusal to cast aside judgments about the worthiness of the two causes remained throughout the lives of the generation that had survived the war” (6). The postwar era, therefore, saw reunion without reconciliation. Unionists and Confederates could agree to live as one nation, but neither side wavered in the conviction of its own righteousness.

Though Janney does not directly engage other historians in her text, David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory is the elephant in the room.Footnote ¹ Janney's text challenges and complicates Blight's groundbreaking work on several important points. On a fundamental level, Janney's focus on long-term contestation refutes Blight's insistence that reconciliationist sentiment had largely overawed sectionalism by the late nineteenth century. The authors also differ in their treatment of the memory of slavery. In Blight's hands, a popular memory of the war that emphasized emancipation was an unavoidable casualty of sectional rapprochement. Janney, on the other hand, persuasively argues that northern whites continued to celebrate and commemorate emancipation as a necessary and positive result of the war well into the twentieth century. If this did not necessarily lead to support for black civil and political rights—and it frequently did not—the mere fact that northern whites continued to celebrate the emancipatory legacy of the Civil War is surprising and noteworthy.

It must be admitted that readers may occasionally find themselves longing for the tidier narrative arc of Blight's treatment. When compared with Blight's neat change-over-time structure, Janney's depiction of Civil War memory is contested, convoluted, and sometimes downright confusing. This, however, is precisely the point. Reconciliation was one of the ways in which Americans made sense of their Civil War, but it was never the only way. Janney's treatment of the disastrous 1895 dedication of the Chickamauga battlefield—in which a ceremony explicitly designed to promote Blue-Gray reconciliation quickly devolved into a rancorous debate over the causes and conduct of the war—provides a perfect example. For northerners and southerners alike, “gestures of reconciliation did not lessen the devotion to their respective causes” (191).

One of the book's strongest points is Janney's treatment of the role that women played in the construction and perpetuation of popular memory. In the South, she notes, the experience of Reconstruction meant that Confederate women quickly became important agents of memorialization. Because it would have been politically unwise for white southern men to actively venerate the Confederacy, women became the appointed caretakers of the Lost Cause. In the North, however, where Union veterans were free to remember the war as they saw fit, women's memorial activity remained comparatively peripheral. Even more interesting is Janney's contention that reconciliation was a strictly male preserve. While Union and Confederate veterans frequently came together at reunions and on battlefields, northern and southern women seldom crossed paths. When they did, they seemed to have little interest in forgiveness. On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, white women cultivated distinctive and oppositional memories of the war. If reconciliation remained a minority viewpoint, this fact had much to do with white women's staunch refusal to forget.

If there is a weak point in Janney's fine book, it is her treatment of African American memory. Though Janney devotes quite a bit of attention to black memorial activities, her arguments differ little from those previously offered by Blight, Mitch Kachun, and Kathleen Clark.Footnote ² Though their interests often aligned with white Unionists, African Americans clung to a unique vision of the war that emphasized emancipation and black military service. In published writings, public commemorations, and organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic, African Americans demanded the right to voice their understandings of the war. Such an account of black memory is by no means incorrect, but it does feel flat in a book that challenges prevailing wisdom on most other issues.

Remembering the Civil War offers a powerful, readable account of the shifting grounds of memorialization in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. To her credit, Janney accepts—even revels in—the inherent messiness of popular memory. Her book seldom settles for the easy generalization and always embraces historical complexity and idiosyncrasy. It richly deserves the acclaim it will undoubtedly garner.