Coda

Without Mark Twain, the Civil War memory market would not have developed as it did, and without the Civil War there never would have been a Mark Twain. Although his short piece “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” has received more attention, Twain’s longest meditations on Civil War memory and Civil War imagination appeared in Life on the Mississippi (1883). In that book the changeableness of the Mississippi River becomes a metaphor for the changeableness of Civil War memory, which combines with imagination in Civil War memoir writing. What Twain understood about the market for Civil War memoirs is that first-person narratives by leading actors satisfy readers’ appetites for both generalization and specificity. Such narratives began the twentieth-century memoir boom that continues today. We now take it for granted that leading actors in political and cultural events will write first-person memoirs, but in the United States they have not always done so. The ascendancy of the memoir genre, now so dominant, began in the late nineteenth-century with Civil War generals’ first-person accounts.