U.S. Social Movements through Biography

Introduction

Issues in Teaching the American Civil War

Perhaps one of the most difficult issues educators face when teaching the Civil War, or any defining historical event, is the flawed nature of American memory.  In her article challenging the historicizing of the American Civil Rights movement, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall describes the act of remembrance as a “form of forgetting.” Hall argues that American memory, through acts of remembrance like “heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture” has created a popular narrative of the Civil Rights movement that “distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.”¹  Her words ring true in remembering, or perhaps misremembering, the American Civil War, too.  In all acts of remembering and commemorating America’s bloody battle between brothers, the causes and consequences of the Civil War have been reshaped by American memory. 

Collective memory is a term made up of vastly different definitions among scholars in the humanities and social studies fields.  For some scholars, collective memory is a static narrative that represents how a cultural group remembers a historical event.  For other scholars, collective memory is the opposite of a static narrative, and rather, a process of collective remembering defined as a “repeated reconstruction of representations of the past.”  What most scholars can agree on is that collective memory is “a form of memory that transcends individuals and is shared by a group.”  Often, the group that creates the dominant collective memory through narration and commemoration of a historical event is the group with power and social status.²  

For the purposes of this unit, I will refer generally to the “American memory” to represent the dominant, collective memory of the Civil War as a static, simplistic narrative shaped by heroes and villains that resulted in a tidy triumph for freedom.  The American memory that I refer to in the unit will represent the ways in which the war is commemorated in cultural artefacts such as statues, as well as the ways in which the war is remembered through the canonization of texts, such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  In this unit, students will challenge the notion of the dominant American memory of the Civil War, and develop a more nuanced understanding of what the people living and participating in the war felt they were fighting for.

The formation of America’s collective memory of the Civil War began almost immediately upon the conclusion of the war.  According to David Blight, Northern and Southern American society came to a reconciliation over mutual soldier sacrifice and the “gallantry” of the brave men, on both the Confederate and Union sides.  The nation’s reconciliation over a shared grief of its nearly 600,000 dead, white soldiers effectively “airbrushed Emancipation out of the picture.”  As Emancipation was increasingly pushed aside in the American memory, so too was the duty of the nation to ensure true equality for her newly emancipated African American citizens.³  With the wholehearted embrace of the North, the former slave society of the South quickly developed black codes to prevent equality for Black Americans, and the Jim Crow era emerged.  Thus, teaching the Civil War from a collective American memory eager to move on in the post-Civil War era has the potential to not only create a misunderstanding of the Civil War era itself, but may also lead to an arguably more damaging misunderstanding-- the consequences of America’s failure in the post-Civil War era to fulfill its promise of equality for all Americans, a failure that persists today.

Moreover, American memory has a way of canonizing selective literature as wholly representative of an era, and then teaching that canon to its school children.  The nature of literature textbooks and the demand of curriculum pacing guides often provide little context for historical documents, and even less variety of texts for students to analyze and interpret.  As a result, students may develop limited understanding of highly complex events that leave them ill prepared to understand the events and social movements that follow and persist in the wake of these events. 

One example of this type of canonization exists in my ninth grade English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, which dictates that students read and analyze Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Lincoln’s speech is praiseworthy, and certainly a historical text deserving student attention and analysis.  The speech is eloquent, and Lincoln’s message is clear-- the fight at Gettysburg was a fight for union and freedom.  If asked to interpret this speech in the context of what soldiers were fighting for at the Battle of Gettysburg, or in the Civil War more generally, a student might suggest that the Union army fought for freedom and the express purpose of emancipating enslaved African Americans.  While this interpretation holds some truth, it does not account for the varied motivations of Union soldiers fighting in the Civil War, nor the wide spectrum of Northern sentiments regarding slavery and equal rights for emancipated African Americans.  The thin understanding of Northern society during the Civil War inferred solely from an analysis of Lincoln’s speech would not adequately represent the divergent and dynamic views of the war during the war years, nor does this interpretation adequately account for the decades-long struggle for freedom and equality that followed the Civil War. 

The problem is not that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is canonized as a seminal U.S. history text in 9th grade ELA classrooms.  Rather, the problem is that the popular canon for teaching Civil War literature is too narrow and simplistic, and contributes to the act of forgetting the visible and invisible outcomes of the Civil War. 

Solutions to Teaching the American Civil War

In an effort to address the challenges I have outlined, I aim to develop a curriculum unit that contextualizes the social climate leading up to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and expands the canon of literature related to the Battle of Gettysburg.  In addition to analyzing and interpreting Lincoln’s speech, students will investigate a number of primary source documents from military leaders, soldiers, women, and African Americans to better understand and respond to the question-- what were the people at Gettysburg fighting for? 

By providing students with the opportunity to analyze and interpret primary documents from a wider cast of actors, they will not only develop a more holistic understanding of Gettysburg, the focal event from which these documents emerge, but they will develop a better understanding of the different meanings that different people assigned to the Civil War as they lived through and participated in the war.  Moreover, these documents and activities will help students build a fund of knowledge from which to make connections to social movements that preceded and succeeded the Civil War era. 

Students will make comparisons between these texts throughout this unit to prepare them for the culminating writing task.  The final writing task of the unit will prompt students to compare Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Frederick Douglass’ Our Work is Not Done.  Students will specifically infer each author’s reason for fighting or otherwise participating in the war effort based on textual evidence.  Additionally, students will analyze how Douglass’ rhetoric and author’s purpose aligns, or does not align, with Lincoln’s address.

My overall goal for the unit is for students to reflect on the complexities of the Civil War that account for the continued struggle for equality in the post-Civil War era.  Students will need to grapple with the varied motivations for fighting and how these diverse interests could coalesce into a Union victory, but would also prove largely indifferent to ensuring equality for African Americans in the years following the war.