This chapter uses Elmira, New York, as a case study in the fraught and overlapping geographies that both inform and come to embody post-war monumentalizing. It takes Elmira as one example of a conversation surrounding Black histories and Black memory taking place across the United States after the Civil War. These conversations reached backward to illuminate Black histories and forward to anticipate Black futures. Spaces like Elmira demonstrate how Black citizens thought of the monument not only as an instrument of white supremacy or a genre of critique, but also as a medium for imagining Black futures. In tracing the genealogies of monumentalizing made visible in Elmira through the African American activist John W. Jones and the white writer Mark Twain, this chapter shows how certain dynamic monumental landscapes manifest post-war intersections of race and memory that continue to be arbitrated today.

The Confederate nation was always an exercise in imagination. Southern nationalists, including Confederates and antebellum authors, viewed literature as integral to the project of nation-building. Just as the Confederacy would build its own world around the socio-economic system that defined the region—slavery—early southern nationalist and later Confederate novels speculated about a separate reality that fed into proslavery southerners’ understandings of themselves and their culture. This chapter explores the role of southern nationalist fiction in creating and sustaining an idea of the Confederacy from the antebellum period through the Civil War, using the example of novels and short fiction by authors such as Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, Augusta Jane Evans, and Richard Malcolm Johnston.

One of the primary functions of war-time print culture was to bring the home to the front and the front to the home, thereby connecting soldiers with the loved ones they had left behind and bolstering the war effort in both places. On the pages of newspapers that circulated in army camps and in northern cities and towns, the campfire and the fireside were paired emblems of the Union cause. As a hallmark of antebellum conceptions of family and home, the fireside served as inspiration for mobilization and military endeavor. In turn, the campfire—a utilitarian necessity of army life—provided a substitute fireside for the soldiers gathered around it, connecting them to distant homes and uniting them in a shared cause. As flexible symbols, the campfire and the fireside blurred racial and gendered boundaries, equating the work of women at home with the efforts of soldiers at the front and providing a place of communion for Black and white soldiers.

The category of Civil War literature is not bounded by historical designation or lived experience; instead, this genre encompasses a broad range of reflections and reconstructions concerning the legacy imparted by the war. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, contemporary evaluations of the civil rights movement mobilize competing logics of Civil War memory. These versions of Civil War memory take shape in both personal and political registers, the subjective nature of which simultaneously confounds and perpetually renews understandings of the past. Three developments occurred in the 1950s and 1960s that brought such contradictory remembrance to light: the desegregation of public schools via Brown v. Board of Education, the commemoration of the Civil War’s centennial anniversary, and the deaths of the last remaining Civil War veterans. This final event characterizes the relevant work produced in both the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment, as writers continuously work to preserve, alter, or resist their ancestors’ history in ways informed by the interests and conflicts of the present.

This chapter examines the literary afterlives of white Confederates' household possessions, especially those damaged during military invasion, or degraded by the impoverishment experienced by elite white southerners in the Civil War’s aftermath. It argues that, alongside emancipation's arrival, the military incursion into southern plantations and wealthy households altered the premises of white possession beyond recall. The damaged objects left behind became more than just traces of enemy invasion to the privileged slaveholding women left to pick up the pieces. As these women revealed in their private journals, their own belongings represented a threat to the forms of selfhood and racial pedigree that had defined their antebellum lives. In exploring how ex-Confederate women, writing during Reconstruction, used fiction to reorganize and display their sullied possessions, this chapter outlines a material history integral to the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth more recognizably reified by monuments to the Lost Cause.

If there was no Civil War drama written during the conflict, there was an active theater culture thriving before, during, and after the war, one represented most clearly in American melodrama. Tracing the particular genealogy of racial melodrama from before the Civil War to the beginnings of Black Lives Matter, this chapter discovers the way in which playwrights have deployed and manipulated melodrama’s black-or-white aesthetic mode both to retrench and to reimagine Black and white racial relations. From sensational melodramas before the war, through conservative ones after it, to radical ones today, racial melodrama has a long genealogy. Recovering this genealogy allows us to witness how the American theater played a crucial role in not only staging this country’s fraught racial relations for audiences, but also inviting these audiences—from the nineteenth century to today—to think and feel differently about the unfinished racial drama of the American Civil War.

While not as financially or critically successful as his previous novels, Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream is an important, though understudied, contribution to a vein of black anti-capitalist thought emergent in the post-Reconstruction era. The story of a former Confederate soldier’s failed endeavor to buy a dilapidated cotton mill and introduce economically and racially progressive labor practices, the novel explores how the post-slavery afterlife of the cotton commodity continued to contribute to Black subjugation in the south. In the end, The Colonel’s Dream asks us to consider whether the fallout of racial capitalism can be remedied by introducing more “humane” capitalist practices, or whether capitalism will always proceed on the same, ruinous route it has historically followed.

Though Civil War battle reenactment is widely viewed as a set of regressive practices defined by a preoccupation with the past, African American-centered performances highlight its transformative potential in terms of offering counternarratives to dominant memories of the era and connecting the war and its legacies to the present. Traditional reenactment, as performed primarily by white men, focuses more on authenticity, masculine gunplay, and battle minutiae, which has the impact of divorcing the practice from its causes and consequences. Black reenactments focus more on the pedagogical goals of recentering visitors’ focus on slavery as the primary cause and emancipation as its most important consequence. This recovery of African American memory alters the meanings assigned to the sacred space of the battlefield and offers a critical interrogation of many of the core assumptions about contemporary Blackness, both of which further enhance the practice’s resistant potential.

This chapter explores Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s neglected epic poem “Moses: A Story of the Nile” (1869). It argues that Harper harnessed the biblical story to create spaces for Black history, agency, and action, and thus placed Black voices at the center of debates over faith, the past, and the nation’s future. It recognizes that “Moses” was also a striking artistic experiment for Harper and a text deeply intertwined with her Reconstruction-era oratory. To support a close reading of the poem’s content and form, after establishing basic facts about “Moses” as a printed artifact, the chapter considers Harper’s 1867 and early 1868 lectures as corollaries to the poem’s composition, later 1868 and early 1869 lectures as critical to the poem’s final form, and both groups of lectures as paratexts. The chapter concludes by hinting at how this approach could shape consideration of a broader range of Reconstruction texts.

Recent scholarship in the history of emotions encourages us to think about the ways war-time Americans managed their feelings. Separation of families fostered loneliness, for example, the tedium of camp life brought on boredom, the delays of news from home or from camp occasioned anxiety, and the uncertainty of the war’s outcome eroded confidence. Reading, this chapter argues, became a deliberate strategy to mitigate these corrosive effects of warfare. By looking at Civil War–era reading practices we can see how readers engaged imaginative literature and other genres popular in the mid-nineteenth century to maintain the ties that bind. Epistolary conversations about books allowed those separated by war to approximate shared reading, a common practice in antebellum America. And they allowed readers to express emotions by proxy, using fictional characters and imagined scenarios to voice their thoughts and invite reassurance. Fundamentally, reading reminded readers they were not alone.

From the heightened civil strife of the late antebellum years through the Reconstruction era, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass underwent significant expansions and redactions across numerous editions. Historically informed literary criticism has become highly attuned to the political connections and implications of even minor formal adjustments to Whitman’s masterwork. Yet through all Whitman’s alterations, Leaves of Grass maintained a prophetic vision of an American nation reconstructed around a more egalitarian core than the current political system supported. This chapter shows how each of the revised 1860, 1867, and 1872 editions of Leaves consistently presented itself as a central component of the more democratic version of the United States that Whitman sought to articulate and enact. As the postbellum challenges of federal Reconstruction became central to national politics, Whitman attempted to leverage the venerable reconstructive impulse behind Leaves of Grass, which gained a more concrete relevance as he adopted his postbellum persona of the Good Gray Poet.

Restoring health to casualties of the Civil War functioned as a work of unprecedented national literary repair. Soldiers, caregivers, and civilians experienced wounding, illness, and convalescence as conditions that not only imperiled the physical body, but also symbolically disrupted the national body and psyche. Such disruptions were as visible in Whitman's poetic sites of caregiving communion as they were in the turbulence of Chesnutt's or Tourgée's Reconstruction stories, where Black heritage functioned alternately as contagion or reclamation. In fiction, poetry, and memoir, period writers explored the intimacies of caregiving, raising bedside and battlefield encounters to a trope whose racial and gendered valences limned the tragedies and absurdities of war-time loss. Describing a range of traumas from physical pain to the compromises of disability, they oversaw the emergence of the hospital narrative as a budding literary genre that, in coming to terms with the medical crisis of the war and its aftermath, established the genre that we prize today.

Drawing on her border-state experiences, Rebecca Harding Davis explored the meaning of the Civil War and its complicated legacy throughout her career. Her insistence on realism in her writing about the conflict as it unfolded prefigured her later skepticism about the emerging memory of the war as a Lost Cause. Her early Atlantic Monthly stories, such as “John Lamar” and “David Gaunt,” frame political justifications for a war of competing rights and anticipate her use of the trial metaphor to suggest justice deferred at the end of Waiting for the Verdict. Her postbellum work, such as “The Rose of Carolina” and “How the Widow Crossed the Lines,” acknowledges the force of cultural memory, itself an adversarial contest of competing claims in late nineteenth-century America. Davis invites her readers to revisit the lessons of the war, its cultural legacy, and its impact on a verdict too long deferred.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.