Blood and Ink

This chapter investigates the ways in which the Civil War dead appeared in nineteenth-century histories of the war. As the practice and philosophy of history both evolved, the dead provided a means of navigating the crisis of historical representation precipitated by the conflict. On one hand, they are routinely depersonalized, reduced to “objective” data, so as to contain the unexampled carnage of the war and to demarcate, by contrast, a more enlightened postwar modernity. On the other, the dead are revered as sacred relics that provide a sense of stabilizing connection to a common history. Ultimately, the tension between these modes of historical consciousneᶊ is resolved by a teleological narrative of national self-creation. This narrative, linked to the rise of American imperialism, tended to subsume, without fully negating, the social alienation that wayward attachments to the dead, in both Southern history and African American counter-history, could nourish.