The following are reviews of four books pertaining to the American Civil War, all written for a course on that topic. They are presented in the order that they were written, and they relate to my ongoing philosophical project concerning historical knowledge. I will never post my first foray into that field (June 2009), except under severe prodding and not without an ample disclaimer, as the paper is indecent, not suitable for wholesome company. This is the fault of two of the books used as examples that comprise about two thirds of the discussion. I did not choose them. Be aware that all my comments are provisional, and I take every opportunity to experiment with different ideas. I would rewrite some of what is below even, if I were to review these books now (e.g., I wrote my account of critical imagination before I read about Collingwood's a priori imagination, and any future account of historical imagination that I should give shall not go without discussion of its merits and weaknesses). I will, however, simply publish them as they are, for the sake of fruitful discussion, even if that is only with myself.
Review: Confederates in the Attic
Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic is an exploration of the American Civil War, but it is not a study in the mold of traditional history; much more, it is a work of journalism that is laden in history and touches on certain important historiographical considerations. Let these be analyzed in grammatical terms. Tense concerns the temporal location of an event, which may be past, present, or future. Aspect concerns the continuity of an event, which may be perfective (i.e. completed) or imperfective (i.e. progressive). Thus, in the past, there are completed actions (Greek aorist, Spanish preterit, French passé simple) and continuous actions (imperfect). Events, however, are not always to be understood just as complete in themselves; events have effects, which may continue beyond the completion of the event. Thus, a completed action in the past (i.e., Jackson opened the door) can be made to emphasize the continuous result of that event (i.e., Jackson has opened the door). The latter indicates that the door is presently open. The former makes no comment on the current state of the door. The effect may also have ceased (i.e., Jackson had opened the door), which carries with it the implication that the door is no longer open. These are the perfect and pluperfect, respectively. In this review, I will be using these terms to look at three ways in which past and present relate (the aorist interpretation, the imperfect interpretation, and the perfect interpretation), as illustrated in Horwitz’s book, and I shall thereby consider the historiographical content of Horwitz’s reflections, which I suspect are greater than he would guess.
To begin, one might see the War as something complete in itself in the past; that is, such a person looks at the War as something that can be understood purely on its own terms, never mind its ongoing effects. Call this the aorist interpretation of the War. Such a view lends itself not only to a naïve historiography, but also to a disconnected view to the War’s symbols (and other such residue), like the rebel flag. With reference to the latter, consider the murder of Michael Westerman in Todd County, Kentucky. Westerman had been driving his truck, adorned with the rebel flag, when some black youths decided to give him trouble, one of whom decided to open fire on Westerman, shooting him fatally. In the aftermath of this event, the prosecution wanted to downplay any potentially hateful interpretation of the flag, redefining Westerman’s alleged understanding (or lack of understanding) of it. One account, via Westerman’s father-in-law, says, “‘It was a school symbol, that’s all…I don’t think he knowed the history of it,’” where his mother-in-law casts the flag just as Westerman’s symbol of himself, and his aunt says, “‘Michael was raised with that flag, just like my own son…It’s just a part of our life’” (108). In all three cases, the flag is rent from its history (or at least what is popularly believed to have been its history) and redefined in contemporary terms. History is in the past, complete; its symbols may remain, but they mean something different now and therefore cannot be attached to the historical event. Michael’s aunt could hardly have put it better: the flag is just a part of our life. The just tells us that the flag is nothing more than a part of our life, and so its meanings outside of our life are beside the point. The War is to be understood on its own terms, left in the past. Our use of the flag is to be understood in our terms, in the present. By extension, the historical meaning of the flag is left to the annals of history.
Later, Horwitz interviews a character from a pro-flag demonstration called Walt, who says of a photo of a German at an anti-Communist rally in former East Germany, “‘he knew what the flag stood for. Being a rebel, raising hell’” (81). The flag has again been stolen away from its historical context, being given instead a new universal meaning for rebels everywhere. In a sense this is the other side of the coin for the aorist interpretation. Where Westerman’s supporters tried to particularize the meaning of the flag to separate it from its historical meaning, Walt reduces its Civil War use to just one rebellion for which it stands (albeit, the rebellion whence it came). Both leave the Civil War as complete in its historical place and reinvent one of its symbols with meaning that has no necessary connection to that conflict. As we have seen in these examples, the aorist interpretation strongly severs past and present, and I would argue that it does so too strongly. So too, I think, would Horwitz, as we shall see below. For exactly this reason it seems that a naïve historiography follows from the aorist interpretation of any event, since it leaves little room to consider the frameworks through which historical reconstruction is invariably undertaken. In this way the absolute severance of past and present is naïve, insofar as it does justice neither to historical reconstruction nor to present understanding of historically loaded symbols (as well as events, narratives, states, and the like). So Horwitz has perhaps unwittingly found himself exposing some good historiographical insights, of which more will follow.
Interestingly, Horwitz stumbles upon a number of people for whom, at least rhetorically, the War never ceased. Call this the imperfect interpretation of the Civil War. Numerous statements echo this attitude. For example, Doug Tarlton, who Howitz met first at the Lee-Jackson birthday celebration in Salisbury and again outside Firearms, etc., said of the average Confederate soldiers (particularly non-slave-owners), “‘they were fighting for their honor as men. They came from stock that was oppressed and they felt oppressed again by the government telling them how to live,’” which evoked the responses, “‘Same as today…Government’s letting the niggers run wild,’” and then “‘Amen’” (35). This 1990s political opposition to government is one in the same conflict that once led the Confederate States of America to secede from the Union. The War was a particularly important episode in the continuous struggle for states’ rights, both tinged in this case with racial politics, as well. Far from being an attitude of a fringe of Southerners, the imperfect interpretation was strikingly stated in a comment by a South Carolina legislator, who said, “‘Our ancestors were a little off with their timing, but their rebellion against federal government is finally seeing fruition’” (77). Again, the Civil War is just a phase in a continuous conflict that has been playing out since long before the War began.
Quite the opposite of the aorist interpretation, the imperfect interpretation tends to over-emphasize the present to the point of ahistoricism. The imperfect interpretation casts the present action as the same continuous action as the War and therefore reads the War through the lens of whatever that continuous action is supposed to be. Typically, this means the war explained in the terms of 1990s politics, which have thus far been associated with segments of the 1990s American right. Near the end of the book, however, we see another imperfect interpretation in the classroom of Rose Sanders at her alternative school for black students who had either dropped out or had been held back in Selma, Alabama. There, Sanders is quoted as saying to the students, “‘The Civil War is still going on…The only difference is that the Union army has betrayed us, too. So we’re fighting a confederacy up North and down South’” (368). Indeed, this is probably the most direct statement of the imperfect interpretation that Horwitz draws from anyone. In this case, Civil War and Civil Rights collide both with one another and with the present in one race-centered view of history, which reads as the narrative of a single conflict: a single ongoing action. The imperfect interpretation has no particular ideological allegiance, but invariably it is shaped more by contemporary agendas than historical evidences, as Horwitz’s research has shown. It does injustice to the past by way of frequently inappropriate frameworks, where the aorist interpretation neglects awareness of frameworks. It does injustice to the present in that it creates false (or at least, much too strong) continuities with historical events. The Civil War is not the same as the Civil Rights movement of a century later, but they are related. A third mode of interpretation is well suited to tell us how, forming a balance between the extremes of the aorist and imperfect interpretations.
The War—or any historical event, for that matter—can be seen as complete with ongoing effects. Call this the perfect interpretation of the War. The perfect interpretation is, I think, the proper way to look at historiography, and it seems that Horwitz, by the very nature of his project of questioning why the War still matters, would agree. The War is over, but its ripples will never cease so long as the flow of time goes on. There is continuity between past and present, in that the past explains the present, and its symbols (&c.) are yet meaningful in the present, even if that meaning has morphed in the meanwhile—history is not blind to that. The naïve view of a complete past, and the present, never mind the in-between, is untenable. Horwitz has shown as much time and again. There is an in-between, but it is not the same as the completed past event any more than the completed past event is the same as the present. The effects, distinct from the event (action) itself are what reside between a past completed event and the present. An imperfect interpretation may be suitable if an event is in fact ongoing, but this is not the case with regard to the Civil War. An aorist interpretation is always historiographically naïve—one cannot ignore the in-between. Horwitz’s book may well be taken as an argument for a perfect interpretation of the Civil War, and a realist one, as well.
The close relationship between the perfect interpretation of the War and historical practice shows itself when Horwitz travels to Shiloh, where he speaks to a certain Stacy Allen, whose study of the battlefield from the perspective of physical anthropology represents not only a turn to a more critical stance regarding sources like the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, but also a turn in the interpretation of the War. Allen says, “‘Each generation sees the War differently, and that’s why interest in it will never die’” (180). The veterans themselves emphasized battlefield heroics where the nest generation emphasized tactics. Allen’s generation, in the wake of witnessing the Vietnam War, emphasizes the horror of battlefield history. In light of this, Horwitz quotes Shelby Foote as saying, “‘I could redo my entire three volumes on the Civil War without using one bit of source material I used the first time…and probably come to very different conclusions,’” and, “‘I don’t think I could have written what I wrote in less than a hundred years after the War…It took that long for North and South to see each other honestly through the dust and flame’” (183). For a moment, it sounds as if Allen and Foote both point to some sort of historical pluralism or even antirealism, but in fact both Allen and Foote point firmly toward a critical view of historical realism that acknowledges the impact that the time following a historical event, up to and including the present, inevitably brings to historical reconstruction. By historical antirealism, I broadly refer to a historiographical approach that tends to deemphasize the fact of the matter concerning some historical event, and likely the possibility of knowing such a thing. By historical realism, I broadly refer to a historiographical approach that does strive for reconstructing the fact of the matter concerning some historical event. The dust and flame are that which, in the present, obscure accurate, or “honest,” history—bad frameworks (astrology, for example), certain political agendas (that may drive an inapt imperfect interpretations, for example), and so on. It is not that each generation is reinventing the war in utterly incompatible ways—there will be incompatibilities, but it may be that one generation shows where an earlier goes wrong, or perhaps both are wrong, or perhaps (pessimistically) one generation goes in a poor direction—it is that each generation latches onto a different facet of the enormity of the War (or any historical event). Courage and valor alongside tactics alongside brutality and injustice: that is the complexity of the war that a good historian begins to see. Understanding does not have to improve with time, but with good historiography, historians can hope to make sense of the War and, dare I say, make progress. Surprisingly, Horwitz’s journalistic adventures treat us to a glimpse of historiographical insight that may even come out as an argument for a realist, perfect interpretation of the War. This is what it means to say the War is unfinished.
Bibliography
Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. Vintage, New York: 1998.
Review: Apostles of Disunion
Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion is an important contribution to answering the controversial question, “The Civil War was fought over what important issue?” It is in terms of this question that Dew provides an analysis of certain heretofore largely neglected documents, namely, those relating to the commissioners sent out across the South to court secession. Dew poses this question as a choice between two primary responses: either the Civil War was fought over slavery, or it was fought over states’ rights. Apostles of Disunion is an attempt to dismantle this duality by demonstrating the indispensability of the issue of slavery as a motive for secession. Apostles is therefore in large measure a response to those who hold, like Dew himself once did (1), that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights to the exclusion of the issue of slavery. Instead, Dew argues, these documents of the Southern secession commissioners show that not only were issues of slavery and states’ rights inseparable on the eve of secession and the War, but slavery was also, in Dew’s words, “absolutely critical” (81), as were states’ rights. Dew does not claim that these exhaust the causes of the War, saying, “Like any student of secession, I know that I have not presented the whole story here” (3), but he provides important insights into the two issues that form the heart of the question.
Dew adeptly pursues certain pre-War statements that cohere well with post-war, states’ rights focused accounts of the War’s origin. Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address is the paradigm example, making no reference to slavery at all (13). The idea that Davis did not think of secession as separate from the issue of slavery is quickly dispensed, as Dew points out one of Davis’s other speeches, that to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, in which the twin issues of slavery and states’ rights are intimately linked, and principles of racial order are invoked (14-15). Dew also dispels any plausibility for Alexander H. Stephens’s post-War claim that his comments concerning slavery and race in Savannah in 1861 were misquoted and misunderstood, citing a similar speech in Atlanta that would have to have been similarly misappropriated (16). This minimally illustrates the shift in post-War explanations of secession, but it is far from enough to indicate what exactly the importance of the pre-war, slavery oriented explanations might have in explaining the War.
Before looking at the secession commissioners themselves, we must make a distinction between what the commissioners said and what is in fact the case. Dew’s argument requires that we understand the relationship between what the commissioners had to say and what, in fact, explains secession and the outbreak of the War. Dew describes the role of the commissioners by saying that “the challenge of providing…an explanation—of informing the Southern people of the dark forces threatening their region and driving their states to seek sanctuary outside the Union—was taken up by the secession commissioners” (24-25). So the commissioners were out to perform a persuasive function on behalf of the secessionists. As such, we can expect that they should have mustered the most charged and divisive issues to the front, expressing them in the appropriate oratorical fashion. Dew is out to emphasize the primacy of slavery and race here.
One element of Dew’s thesis affirms the consistency of the commissioners’ rhetoric concerning slavery and race, which he traces back to an early speech by Commissioner William Harris: “The racial themes that [Judge Harris] struck in his speech would echo through the statements of the other commissioners as they spread out across the South in late 1860 and early 1861” (30). These themes include the threat of equality between whites and blacks, into which is built the threat of intermarriage and the consequent sullying of Southern women and the white race as a whole. In other words, Harris hits on two of the three main components of the nightmare vision that Dew analyzes in his closing chapter: “the looming specter of racial equality” (77) “and “racial amalgamation” (79), the other being “the prospect of race war” (78). Another important early text comes from James Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson, about which Dew not only traces a line from Harris, but he also notes that “Thompson’s prophecy of emancipation, humiliation, subjugation, and ruin runs through the commissioners’ messages like a scarlet thread” (32). Emancipation again is the end of the South. Race-centered nightmare visions abound before the coming of the “Black Republicans,” which Dew notes is a very consistent label (50).
As secession became a reality, beginning with South Carolina, it became the commissioners’ urgent duty to win the other slave states to the secessionist cause so as to have any hope of standing up to the Union. The continued work of the commissioners must be seen in this context. In addition, near the close of his analysis, Dew addresses an important matter concerning the in fact causes of the War: did the commissioners actually believe what they were saying concerning slavery and, more broadly, race? In this way some of the other commissioners become particularly worthy of attention.
Dew’s first argument that the commissioners did believe what they were saying says, “They made these statements, and used the appropriate code words, too many times in too many places and with too much fervor and raw emotion to leave much room for doubt” (80). To start, “raw emotion” is somewhat difficult to analyze. It seems that the second part of Stephen Hale’s letter to Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin is the premier example of this. As Dew says, “Debates over fine points of constitutional interpretation or the meaning of historical events were not generally conducted at fever pitch by any of the commissioners. But as he moved to the climax of his argument, Hale took the rhetorical gloves off” (54). So we see such statements as Lincoln’s election cast as a declaration of war, and white men and white women being left at the mercy of “the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Dew’s method of establishing that a commissioner is expressing “raw emotion,” it seems, is to invoke a rhetorical contrast. This is what he does in sectionalizing Hale’s letter, and this is also what he does with Henry Lewis Benning’s speech in Virginia. Regarding Benning, Dew first emphasizes the sparse and logical style typical of the orator, and then he states, “After he finished laying out his point-by-point argument for the inevitability of Republican-led emancipation, Benning abruptly shifted to a much more passionate and emotionally charged appeal,” predicting a black majority, blacks in holding office, and so on, in addition to the fear of a North-incited race war (66). Not only do we see the nightmare vision again, it is the rhetorical swoop that exposes the contrast through which Dew wants to attach “raw emotion” to Benning’s speech. It seems difficult, however, to separate “raw emotion” from skillful rhetoric, and these cases both serve much better to emphasize the continuity of that rhetoric. Benning has brought forth the nightmare vision, and of Hale, Dew says, “Any doubts about how representative Hale’s comments might be quickly disappear when we look at the messages being delivered almost simultaneously in places as distant as Maryland and Missouri” (56). Whether or not any important measure of “raw emotion” was expressed hardly matters in the face of the commissioners’ consistent messages, which can be explained either by dependence or conspiracy. In either case, it seems wildly implausible to think that the commissioners would agree so well on a fiction. Dew’s point is taken here, but he might have stated it better.
Dew goes on to point out the illogicality of the Southerners’ fears, but he argues for their genuineness on the basis that “the capacity for compartmentalization among this generation of white Southerners appears to have been practically boundless” (81). This inconsistency of the Southerners is supported by William Harris’s comments in support of free labor, implicitly excluding slaves from the equation. Harris’s personal inconsistency is supposed to be established here, as his racial views have already been seen: he was among the first to voice the nightmare vision. Harris’s contradiction, it seems, must rest between the two propositions that slave labor is essential to the Southern way of life, and that free labor is to the benefit of the South. In order for Dew’s argument to hold water, it is first necessary that these propositions represent an actual inconsistency, which is supposed to reside in Harris’s failure to conceive of the idea that the slave population might well serve as free labor. The latter proposition is captured quite clearly in a statement of John Preston, the leading commissioner to Virginia, who said, following another commissioner, Leonidas Spratt, that the essential difference between North and South consists in that “the South cannot exist without African slavery…None but an equal race can labor at the North; none but a subject race will labor at the South” (72). It is such an attitude as this that stands against the encouragement of free labor.
Second, this kind of inconsistency must be extrapolated beyond Harris. Half of the latter task is easily completed for anyone who accepts Dew’s arguments for the consistency concerning the commissioners’ rhetoric. By way of example, “Over and over again the Alabamians described the same nightmare world that Commissioner Harris had painted for the Georgia legislature: a South humbled, abolitionized, degraded, and threatened with destruction by a brutal Republican majority” (58). As to the other half, at least some commissioners can be found fairly certainly to hold a fondness for free labor. Benning, at least, seems to present such an attitude when he sketches “a glowing picture of Virginia’s commercial and manufacturing prosperity in a new Southern Confederacy” (67), as Dew puts it. This is particularly ironic in light of Preston’s above statement about Southern labor, even further amplified by the fact that Preston’s speech followed Benning’s by a single day in the same location in Virginia. Dew’s evidence may do well in establishing inconsistencies in the commissioners’ rhetoric, but a swooping psychological claim about compartmentalization is much more a hand-wave response to a late-appearing issue than a legitimate answer. Still, Dew has what is needed for a satisfying conclusion on a broader scale.
Apostles of Disunion is an important contribution to the question of the literature on the causes of the Civil War, strongly establishing the importance of slavery as an indispensable corollary to states’ rights. As Dew says early on, “There is simply no way to avoid these two factors, in part because the secession conventions and Southern political leaders referred to them constantly in their efforts to explain why their states were leaving the Union” (10). Still, there seems to be a question lingering at the end: did the issue of slavery run deeper than rhetoric? Dew has strongly demonstrated that the racial issues struck a chord among Southerners in driving secession, in that they motivate qua fear. This is the importance of the nightmare vision that we have seen over and over. This minimally shows that fear regarding the potential dissolution of the slave system was a critical cause of the Civil War, which is a narrower claim than “slavery was a cause of the Civil War.” Far from a denial of Dew’s thesis, this specifies the sense in which it is supported by both the texts and the arguments that Dew himself provides. Importantly, this settles the lingering question, in that this claim does not depend on slavery being a cause that is deeper than rhetoric. Thus it can be said, slavery and states’ rights are both absolutely critical causes of the War.
Bibliography
Dew, Charles. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville: 2001.
Review: Victims
Phillip Paludan’s Victims is a focused investigation of a specific event of the Civil War, namely the Shelton Laurel massacre. In January 1863, Confederate soldiers captured thirteen prisoners in Shelton Laurel on suspicion of being Unionist guerrillas, only to execute them all shortly thereafter on the orders of James Keith. In both his 1980 and 2004 prefaces, Paludan offers a brief account of the methodology he sought to employ in Victims. He puts particular emphasis on the interpretive work that goes beyond and between what the sources might strictly indicate. Here the responsible historian may begin to worry. Not only is Paludan focusing on a small-scale event in detail, with its individual and personal characters (for example), but he also seems to be willing to develop them by way of imagination. Our fears are assuaged, however, as Paludan not only states in his preface, but also demonstrates through his text, that this imagination is employed critically, and the risk of collapsing historical reconstruction into historical novel is largely avoided, as a more extreme historical anti-realist might deign to do. Paludan is no anti-realist, saying, “Victims isn’t made-up, in people or events; but, in the gray area between history and fiction, a truer story might be seen than in history alone” (ix), and later, “This book tells a story based on, and grounded pretty deeply in, historical documents” (xv). I propose that Victims is an exploration of the critical imagination as integral to the historical enterprise.
Let us examine the sort of critical imagination, as I have called it, that Paludan is out to employ to develop his historical narrative. For one, Paludan writes, “I have sought to expand understanding of this incident and tried to capture the incident’s complexity, by writing about it in a style that calls forth the reader’s emotional resources as an aid to understanding” (xxv). This is shortly followed by the sentence, “I respect detached objective observation” (xxv), with the caveat that it alone is not enough (never mind the vexed question of its possibility). The latter statement affirms the importance of scientific historiography, albeit that sentence by itself sounds extraordinarily naïve. Fortunately, it is tempered by the former claim among others. The former claim is an affirmation of the importance of empathetic history.[1] Paludan’s philosophical claim is basically that a full understanding of a historical event requires both a scientific understanding and an empathetic understanding, and these two are hardly separable. This approach is borne out time and again in Victims.
One such time is Paludan’s presentation of the character of Henry Heth, replete with psychological comments, derived apparently from an empathetic reading of Heth’s memoirs, the source that forms the backbone of the reconstruction of Heth’s career. This, in conjunction with other relevant literature, constitutes the documents in which the narrative of Heth is grounded. On the one hand is scientific, historical reconstruction. On the other hand Paludan develops a psychological picture of Heth that relies more on an empathetic approach than on the strictly analytical approach that, say, puts the events in order. Thus we find Paludan claiming, for example, that Heth’s military service on the frontier allowed him to “take his father’s place, rule his ‘plantation,’ revel in his skills. Army life was providing much more than just a career” (41). There are important historical facts underlying this claim. Heth’s late father had spent time on the frontier and was known to be an excellent horseman and marksman, for instance. Heth’s service on the frontier placed him in a similar situation. These facts are derived from Heth’s own memoirs, so Heth was conscious of a continuity between his adventures and those of his father, or at least at the time of the writing he came to see his service in this way. A strict analysis of the documents admits of these facts, but in order to reach Paludan’s conclusion, one must make an empathetic inference (if it is properly called an inference), try to enact Heth’s thoughts, as R.G. Collingwood might say.[2] This is more than the mere claim that both Heth and his father had notable careers on the frontier; this pushes beyond that claim in such a way as to develop Heth’s character, so that the reader might similarly empathize. Empathy is imagination, but this example has shown that it is not mere imagination. It can be tempered with evidence to become critical imagination. Here we also begin to see the beginnings of a more robust analysis of the critical imagination, which we shall begin to develop forthwith.
The critical imagination also emphasizes the incorporation of scholarship from other fields. The 1980 preface says, “I have tried to use a writing style that will enlarge understanding, to use such detached observation as a historian is capable of to analyze that experience, and to call upon available insights from other disciplines to enlarge understanding” (xxv-xxvi). Part of Paludan’s account of guerrilla warfare is a particularly forceful example not only of this, but also again of empathetic understanding. In a style that approaches a stream-of-consciousness, having described the torture of women for information concerning the whereabouts of their men, Paludin writes in the persona of the Confederate soldiers, “Then you ride or walk away and hate them all the more for what they were making you do, for what they were making you be, for making you find that sometimes you liked it—Jesus, God—sometimes you liked it” (95-96). This passage, from which this is but a sample, is followed by an extensive footnote citing an assortment of soldiers’ recollections (especially from Vietnam), psychological studies, and works of fiction. To read soldiers’ recollections and, even more so, fictional accounts of soldiers’ experiences and then try and reconstruct them in a different historical context is an ambitious move. In order to do this, one must first empathize with the soldier via the report of the experience, be it veridical or fictional. This constitutes an attempted enactment of their psychological states. This enactment allows for a new expression of those states, which is the writing of a passage like the one cited above. This process is an act of the imagination, what philosopher Alvin Goldman might call “enactment imagination” or “E-imagination,” which is captured by the sentence, “When I imagine feeling elated, I do not merely suppose that I am elated; rather, I enact…elation iself.”[3]
It seems therefore that five necessary conditions must be satisfied for a narrative of this kind to be read historically, properly speaking. First, the source texts must be accurately expressive of the states actually experienced. Second, those psychological states must be relevant to the historical narrative. Third, the historian must accurately enact the psychological states in the texts. Fourth, the historian must express the enacted psychological states accurately, such that his or her text is expressive of the intended states. Fifth, the reader of the historical text must properly enact those psychological states. The fifth should be a corollary of the fourth so long as the reader is competent. Let us consider how well Paludan’s presentation of the Confederate soldiers meets these conditions. For the first condition to be satisfied, Paludan must have chosen sources that express the psychological states actually experienced, or else the enacted states cannot match the actual states, since the conduit between—the text—them is insufficient for the task.[4] Short of analyzing the litany of sources provided, I simply point out the importance of this condition, that Paludan must make use of appropriate authorities. I will add to this, however, that Paludan’s use of fictional accounts of the soldier’s life is a bit problematic here, as the aptness of these sources demands the truth of another proposition: these accounts must be expressions of some set of those psychological states associated with the actual soldiering experience, broadly speaking. The writer of fiction is under much the same set of conditions as is the historian, if the historian is to use fiction as Paludan has.
The second condition could give Paludan some trouble, since it requires that he accept a proposition like “The relevant psychological experiences are applicable between events,” since he is not relying on Civil War texts. There is some merit to a proposition like this, which we see in the varying names for “post-traumatic stress” or “shell shock” or being “terbackered out.” The psychological experience is common across wars and events. The question, therefore, is whether the conditions are relevantly similar between events so as to inculcate a similar psychological state. This is how Paludan uses the idea of psychiatrist Robert Lifton’s “atrocity-producing situation” which is “a situation in which soldiers murder and torture civilians” (ix). Thus the “atrocity-producing situation,” as I understand it, defines the conditions wherein agents are apt to enter into those psychological states that are likely to bring an atrocity to action. These conditions seem to include such as “in guerrilla warfare, men can feel as if the environment itself is hostile to them, that each tree or hillside is dangerous…In regular combat death terrorizes, but not to the same extent. There are things in regular combat that a man can do to restrain his fears, to fight back” (94-95). On the one hand, we see psychological conditions, the feelings of hostility and helplessness, but what produces those conditions? Hidden enemies against whom one cannot easily strike, combat situations for which none have been trained, and there being no easy way to distinguish between combatant and civilian, or civilian and conspirator, and so forth seem to be some. If Paludan is right that these describe the situation in Shelton Laurel, and they seem derived from Vietnam accounts, then the use of those accounts can satisfy our second condition.
As for the third condition, the only way a reader can judge its fulfillment is to look competently to the success of the fourth condition (which also fulfills the fifth condition). So if Paludan has competently enacted the psychological states expressed in his source material, then his text can be an expression of those states, fulfilling condition four. The fulfillment of condition four is impossible without the fulfillment of condition three. To judge the success of condition four, one must establish that the psychological states of the Confederate soldiers expressed in Paludan’s narrative is consistent with those that should be enacted on reading relevant sources. Again, to thoroughly judge Paludan’s success one must extensively review his sources. The reader’s fulfillment of condition five is a corollary of condition four: if the psychological states are well-expressed, then the competent reader will be able to properly empathize. The reader’s competence has nothing to do with the writer’s work, however, and the inclusion of the fifth condition is to account for the whole communication from source to reader, and not to stop at the writer’s act of expression.
The fulfillment of these five conditions provides a means of distinguishing between critical imagination and mere imagination. Where mere imagination is satisfied to draw from any or no sources, critical imagination is defined by these parameters, which define not only the use of historical sources (much of which is very easily satisfied or irrelevant), but also the use of scholarship from other disciplines. Let another example illustrate this point. Concerning the life of mountaineers, Paludan says, “If a boy of thirteen were killed, then death had come to someone just learning to be a man, not yet forgetting what it was like to be a child…someone who had been cared for by older brothers and cousins and uncles, as well as parents. They would all remember him as a little boy trying to be a man” (15). Here Paludan is discussing what it means for a mountaineer boy to grow up, alluding of course to the fact that one of the victims of the Shelton Laurel massacre was a thirteen-year-old boy. Emphasizing the closeness of even extended parts of mountaineer families as part of the community, as well as explaining how a boy could be a soldier with the older men as well as a child in many respects, Paludan’s account once again plays upon his readers’ emotions. The fact that a boy has a gun and is shooting at Confederate soldiers is akin to his going hunting with the older men in more peaceful times (14), and this does not make him any less a child, only that he happens to be growing.
To paint a portrait like this and then to discuss the implications of a death that actually occurred is an appeal to empathy and by empathy. It is a use of critical imagination. It is a historical reconstruction pushed beyond what can be strictly derived through the analysis of source material, as we saw in Paludan’s account of Heth. Unlike the stream-of-consciousness presentation of the Confederate soldiers, this account does not rely on interdisciplinary study, but now armed with our conditions for an imagined narrative to be read historically, we can consider how this account fares as history. The first and second conditions are no trouble, since Paludan is imagining from his reconstruction of mountain life, not from other material. The aptness of this basis of imagination is instead contingent upon the quality of Paludan’s strict analysis prior to imagination and to the justification of any prior act of critical imagination on which a further analysis or act of imagination is based. Now, the accuracy of Paludan’s reconstruction is required for his accurate enactment of the psychological states relevant to this situation—the death of a thirteen-year-old boy. It is not just a matter stating that there is a sense of loss, it is a sense of expressing what that loss is like. As we have seen, the historical reconstruction tells us of the closeness of the community within itself and with the land, and it tells us of the status of a thirteen-year-old boy in society as being in some respects child, and in other respects man. From considerations such as these, a narrative can be reconstructed, and imagination can be employed from that narrative, being mitigated by the scientifically derived foundation of the narrative. Then critical imagination enacts something like the sorrow that the mountaineers must have felt with such a loss. As per condition three, this must first be enacted in the historian, so that he or she may express the state in writing per condition four, so that it may be enacted in a reader, per condition five. Any historical narrative for which critical imagination is appropriate should suggest certain psychological states, some more so than others, and if the historian is to employ critical imagination everything that follows depends on his or her ability to enact those states. The reader of history can simply look to Paludan’s depiction of loss, quoted above, and enact the states that Paludan has expressed, which are the states he meant to express if condition four is fulfilled. The historian has the challenging task of constructing the narrative whence the psychological states are imagined, as well as enacting and expressing those states, if his or her history is to involve critical imagination.
Now we have an idea of what it means to employ imagination in a way that is consonant with scientific historiography, and Paludan’s Victims has shown us the way. This should lend some warrant to the claim that Victims is in part an implicit exploration of the critical imagination. We have explored not only critical imagination from reconstructed narrative, but also critical imagination from outside and interdisciplinary literature, and we have conceived of five necessary conditions for a successful reading of a critically imagined passage. This is certainly not a complete account of the potential of critical imagination any more than it is a bulletproof analysis, but I believe that Paludan has pointed us in the direction of something very fruitful, and I believe that the account developed here is a good start.
Bibliography
Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford, Oxford: 1946.
Currie, Gregory. “Empathy for Objects.” Forthcoming.
Goldman, Alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford, Oxford: 2006.
Paludan, Phillip. Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville: 1980.
[1] By empathetic history, I basically mean any historical methodology that tries to read the minds of historical persons by “putting oneself in their shoes” or some such. For a good overview of empathy theory in the twentieth century, see Currie, Gregory. “Empathy for Objects.” Forthcoming.
[2] Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Revised Edition. Oxford, Oxford: 1946.
[3] Goldman, Alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford, Oxford: 2006. (pg. 47)
[4] This is not to make the impossible demand that the expression be perfect and complete, only that it allows for a significant resemblance between the states experienced and those enacted by a competent reader. I cannot very well analyze what counts as resemblance is here, but the idea is that the states are alike in kind if not degree, a significant majority of them have been expressed, etc. No one reads a soldier’s memoir and thinks he understands just what it is like to be a soldier, but that does not mean that one cannot do so to an extent.
Review: Race and Reunion
In his Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory David Blight makes extensive use of the concept of collective (or communal) memory. Unfortunately, nowhere does he do his reader the service of providing an analytic definition of this concept. It therefore behooves the critical reader to search out the philosophical components of Blight’s collective memory and to subject it to scrutiny. The concept of collective memory is introduced when Blight says in the prologue, “there were many warring definitions of healing in the South and the nation’s collective memory had never been so shattered” (3). This suggests that there are different levels of collective memory at work among different historical actors. On the one hand, there is the shattered national collective memory, but on the other hand, there are those collective memories that constitute the larger, shattered memory, including various stripes of Southern collective memory, a few varieties of black collective memory, several sorts of Northern collective memory, and so on. Where these levels of memory conflict, prominently on the national stage, we observe a positively schizophrenic national consciousness. One of many examples of the national collective memory’s divide, the analysis of which is certainly among Race and Reunion’s primary objectives, is the “many warring definitions of healing at play in the late 1860s” (55), including the radical vision of severe retribution against the rebels, the ordinary Republican vision of universal male suffrage, the reactionist vision of reconciliation, and so on. In these terms Blight points to the conflict between justice and healing, “retribution and reconciliation,” which characterize some of the most divisive differences between strains of collective memory discussed throughout the book. Blight’s overarching project is to explain how the conflicted national consciousness changed between Emancipation and its semicentennial.
Minds are the basic subjects of memory. As far as the historian is ordinarily concerned, the minds in question are those of human beings. Thus, memory is an object of human beings. Collective memory, therefore, is a kind of memory that is the object of a plurality of subjects, a kind of memory that is common to many human beings. We may say that memory is common, minimally, in the sense that we may define a set of entities whose conditions for membership are (1) being a mind and (2) assenting to a certain memory. Memory, however, is a subjective phenomenon. How can it be collective? After all, any two human beings experiencing the same event (broadly conceived) will differ in perspective, not only in terms of sensible perception but also in terms of historical perception (having reached the event in question through a different personal history, etc.). All subjects possess different objects; the contents of all memories are different, and therefore no two memories are the same. It seems, then, that collective memory is impossible, and the entire project of writing its history collapses into a chaotic pluralism. This is not how Blight proposes to understand the “memory” involved in collective memory.
Collective memory (as subject) is not related to its object (the thing remembered) as ordinary memory is related to its object. An ordinary memory, intuitively, is a representation of its object, which is thought to have been a temporally prior experience. The sense of memory at work in collective memory is better captured in Blight’s discussion of reminiscence. He even points to a form of communal reminiscence, saying that such is “stimulated by an audience of like-minded rememberers.” Quoting the philosopher Edward Casey, Blight discusses reminiscence as re-understanding in light of the present, answering “the dual need for personal understanding as well as personal recognition” (173). Collective memory as Blight understands it is therefore an exercise not in mere re-imagination of the past, as one would watch a film, but one of reflection on the past, that is, reminiscence. If we attempt to understand collective memory in terms of ordinary memory, it becomes very difficult to make much sense of what Blight has to say. One example comes from the chapter on literature. Having mentioned the arch-sentimentalist Thomas Nelson Page, Blight says, “no writer offered a more artful challenge to the hegemony of Lost Cause ideology, or to the reunion wrapped in the retrospective make-believe world of faithful slaves and the mysticism of Blue-Gray fraternalism, than W.E.B. Du Bois” (251), who took up the emancipationist mantle. What Page and Du Bois did when they wrote was not remembering—indeed, Page’s world is “make-believe”—but reminiscing on received material. What they did was to select, interpret, and even imagine the past under the influences of preexisting collective memory and present needs, and in turn they influenced the course of different strains of collective memory after them.
So, understood properly, collective memory does not refer to a certain mental content shared by a number of minds, but shared thinking about a plurality of mental contents, thought to be related in a way defined by that shared thinking. Collective memory is therefore a way of thinking about thoughts, which might be called a consciousness (as I used it above), or it might be called a philosophy; however, these pre-reflective thoughts are thoughts about the past, so we may narrow the category of collective memory to a variety of philosophical history, or, as R.G. Collingwood would say, just history (as all history is philosophical). Unfortunately, the philosophy in question is rarely representative of genuine critical reflection, and so collective memory more often than not degenerates into what has often been called mythologizing (though I rather dislike that moniker, but that is an issue for another discussion).
As is suggested by the layered structure of collective memory, its subjects do not divide out neatly into mutually exclusive sets. Blight observes this when he comes to speak of the various strains of black Civil War memory, listing a number of them, and saying, “These strains of memory are not definitive; all could overlap and flow into one another. Together they form the conflicted determination of a people to forge new and free identities in a society committed to sectional reconciliation” (300-301). Within the national collective memory is that of the black population, which is itself composed of various collective memories that sometimes were in conflict and at other times consonant with not only one another but also with the collective memories, and these sets often share common elements, and these elements are often common to different sets of sets. Consider Blight’s observation, “In the Christian cosmology and the apocalyptic sense of history through which many Americans, white and black, interpreted the scale of death in the war, Memorial Day provided a means to achieve both spiritual recovery and historical understanding” (72). Those subscribing to the “apocalyptic sense of history” fall all over the board in terms of collective memory. To point to two conflicting understandings that yet fall within this apocalyptic view, we have but to look to the concern of the likes of Jubal Early “that Northern apologists were riveting a Unionist-emancipationist narrative of the war deep into American memory,” leading to the response that said that “the spirit of the Southern people would be redeemed…through the story of the irrepressible and heroic Confederate soldier” (79). Both rooted in the “apocalyptic sense of history,” says Blight, both are mutually exclusive, the former being emancipationist and the latter being the seed of Southern reconciliationism, which birthed the myth of the faithful slave and espoused such arguments for the goodness of slavery as that of paternal masters caring for the child-like savage, civilizing and Christianizing him. This would not cohere with emancipationism, but like emancipationism, it coheres with an “apocalyptic sense of history.” This point can be driven further when we note that some blacks espoused something like the latter paternalistic argument, claiming the Providential arrangement of slavery so that Christianity and civilization might be taken back to Africa. This view, conflicting with both the previous two and still embracing the apocalyptic (in addition to the aforesaid argument), is associated especially with Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (321). Further still, this attitude is one among the conflicted black collective memory mentioned above. Clearly then, defining sets for collective memory is a complex task, and it is one which requires the historian to do careful work as he or she navigates the various components of the set as it is put to use in historical narrative.
At this point, I shall propose the following definition of a collective memory, drawn from Blight’s text and the latter reflection thereupon:
(1) A collective memory, as object, is distributed across a plurality of subjects, namely minds.
(2) A collective memory is not a mere memory, but rather a reflection upon a memory (or past event, etc.) in the present, often in terms of present concerns. This is why collective memory tends to change with time.
(3) This reflection (i.e. collective memory) can be distributed across other memories (or past events, etc.), and it selects which of these are important and influences the interpretation of those selected.
(4) This reflection (i.e. collective memory) can be (and is) applied to the past by those who do not share the mere memory.
(5) Collective memory, with time, influences the selection and interpretation of the mere memories whence it is derived.
(6) Collective memory is multi-layered, and therefore may contain within it strains of conflicting collective memory or, at the lowest level, conflicting individual reminisces.
Let a final example suffice to illustrate this definition. Blight devotes considerable ink to soldiers’ memoirs and other such recollections of wartime experience. One example is Charles Brewster, who left a graphic description of the carnage at Spotsylvania, but “his vision of hell faded with time into more useful and comfortable sentiments” (145). These comfortable sentiments are those associated with the Veterans’ conventions and the like, especially of the 1870s and 1880s, when sentimentalism was a guiding principle for a major strain of collective remembrance. Brewster’s falling in with the collective memory thinking with the Blue-Gray reunions certainly illustrates (1), and the nature of that memory, namely sentimentalism, reunionism, and the like, is clearly not mere memory, but reflection on memory, the fruit of reminiscence (2), it colors the whole set of Brewster’s war memories (3) and (5), it is a reflection shared by many (4)—such as those who attend Blue-Gray reunions, and the mere fact of non-sentimentalist and non-reunionist strains of collective memory in the national collective memory demonstrate (6). These six components are taken to be a proposal of necessary and, taken together, sufficient conditions for the use of collective memory in historical writing.
By way of conclusion, it is worth noting that collective memory, or something near enough, is indispensible for academic historiography as it is ordinarily practiced, and this is because of its close relationship to the concept of a historical actor (or agent, or entity, etc.). Collective memory, as a historiographical tool, is a means whereby the historian may attribute mental states to historical actors that are themselves minds. Thus societies, economic classes, régimes, and other such collective actors in history may be sensibly understood to have philosophies, memories, emotions, and the like. The reality of the matter is of course vastly more complex, as the details will expose myriad conflicts of which the good historian will be aware and give due heed (as Blight does quite well), but the fact remains that collectives can act analogously to individuals, and if we are to explain such action, recourse to a quasi-mental state like collective memory is of considerable value. If mind is prior to action, and mindless collectives are historical actors, then what is the source of collective action? I answer, it is something akin to collective memory.
Bibliography
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: 2001.
