Civil War Memories by Robert J. Cook

Author:Robert J. Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

CHAPTER SIX

Centennial Blues

Fighting the Cold War

On August 2, 1956, Albert H. Woolson, a drummer boy who had enlisted in the First Minnesota Heavy Artillery in 1864, died at his home in Duluth, Minnesota. Newspapers listed his age as 109. The old man was the last surviving veteran of the Civil War whose military record could be documented reliably. Even though his regiment had never seen active service, Americans paused to recognize the significance of his death in the midst of waging the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Bruce Catton, a well-known chronicler of the North’s Army of the Potomac, worried about the disappearance of the veterans’ salutary influence on contemporary America. Writing in Life magazine, he described the now-defunct Grand Army of the Republic as “the last living link that bound us intimately to the great morning of national youth.” As long as that venerable organization survived, he contended, even in the form of one old man, “the great day of tragedy and of decision was still a part of living memory. There was an open door into the past, and what we could see through that opening was magically haunted.… But when the final handful of dust drifted down on Albert Woolson’s casket, and the last notes of the bugle hung against the sky, the door swung shut. It cannot be reopened.”1

Writing five years later in anticipation of the centennial commemoration of the Civil War, southern-born author Robert Penn Warren seemed less convinced that Woolson’s death had robbed his compatriots of an indispensable connection to their past. Like Catton, who had encountered Union veterans and their patriotic rituals while growing up in Michigan, Warren had personal ties to the Civil War. His grandfather, Gabriel Thomas Penn, had seen action with the Fifteenth Tennessee Cavalry, fighting at Shiloh and participating in a massacre of black prisoners at Fort Pillow. Grandpa Penn’s stories of the war furnished useful insights into the swirling mix of fact and fiction that influenced continuing remembrance of the war in the United States. Warren’s close relationship with his Rebel forebear also made him aware that the great streams of Civil War memory were still fed by individuals and groups in the present—people born years after the conflict but who glimpsed it at a distance through their interactions with relatives, friends, and neighbors who had belonged to the wartime generation. This was one of the main reasons he could describe the war so confidently as “our only ‘felt’ history—history lived in the national imagination,” even after the death of the last veteran.2

Warren had grown intellectually since 1929, when, as a crusading young Fugitive, he had written an unremarkable pro-southern, anti-abolitionist biography of John Brown. Certainly he had learned enough by the late 1950s to recognize that the Lost Cause—what he called the South’s “Great Alibi” for the region’s failings since 1865—and its northern equivalent, “The Treasury of Virtue,” were tales that Americans told one another to consolidate their sense of being.3 Warren’s

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