Why Generals?

Generals’ memoir writing raises questions about how Civil War memory developed and how it still operates. In approaching their memoirs, the discussion follows three strands: the relation of the memoirs to the postwar publishing boom and its new Civil War memory market; the relations among memory, imagination, history, and literature; the relations between audience expectations and first-person narratives by leading actors in historical events. Northern publishers tended to publish memoirs from both sides of the war, but Mark Twain’s company did not, sticking to memoirs by northern generals. The memoirs he published appeared before the Library of Congress classification system emerged to sort American writing into distinct categories such as history, which Thomas Jefferson’s earlier classification system linked to memory, and literature, which Jefferson linked with imagination. Civil War generals’ memoirs blended memory and imagination, history, and literature.