Between 1961 and 1965, an extensive commemoration marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’s seminal conflict. In 1957, Congress and President Dwight
D. Eisenhower established the United States Civil War Centennial Commission, consisting of 25 members and headed by Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of Union general Ulysses S. Grant. The centennial project aimed to commemorate the heroism and sacrifice of both Union and Confederate soldiers, and it sought more generally to highlight a reunited nation in a time of civil rights agitation and cold war conflict.
From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the initial planning of the centennial observances, Americans in both the North and South recalled the conflict through public ceremonies, historical scholarship, and popular culture. In doing so, they engaged in sometimes contentious, but mostly united, efforts to define the significance of the war in terms of shared sacrifice. The commission’s message of national unity, personal sacrifice, and battlefield heroism reflected a broader aim to find common ground amid the divisive political, economic, and social issues that arose from the war—issues that persisted in the racial conflict in American society in the early 1960s. In the South, especially, the Civil War centennial served to repair southern identity by focusing on the heroism and political culture of southern society. Battle reenactments of the firing on Fort Sumter and the Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run allowed southern men to reclaim the political legacy of the war at the same time that many were working to preserve racial segregation.
By the time the commemoration began in 1961, the escalating cold war, coupled with the emerging Civil Rights movement, complicated plans for patriotic pageantry. In keeping with the cold war culture’s focus on forging national unity, the centennial’s leaders sought to exclude the legacy of slavery, the impact of emancipation, and the military sacrifice of African Americans from the commemoration. They also acquiesced to segregating the centennial’s public facilities—a decision countered when President John F. Kennedy, in his first action on civil rights, repealed an order segregating centennial observances in Charleston, South Carolina. The early observances of the centennial also provoked widespread indignation from African Americans, who pressed for projects focused on less-than-patriotic aspects of the war. Civil rights leaders pushed for the centennial pageantry to consider the legacy of emancipation and urged policymakers to sign civil rights legislation overturning Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory public practices in the South. While Confederate reenactors staged public ceremonies honoring southern succession and heralding the legacy of racial separation, civil rights leaders staged their own centennial celebration in September 1963 to mark President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
As African-American voices joined the Civil War debate, President Kennedy replaced Centennial Commission leader Grant with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins. Together with civil rights activists and revisionist Civil War historians, Nevins recast centennial observances away from battle reenactments and toward more integrated ceremonies. By 1965, however, enthusiasm for the Civil War commemoration declined as planners were unable to bridge the divide between southern memories of the war and African-American claims for racial inclusion in public life. In the spring of 1965, as southern public officials focused attention on civil rights demonstrations and worked to prevent public integration, the Civil War centennial came to an unheralded close.
Further reading: Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The America Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Jon Wiener, “Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights: The Civil War Centennial in Context, 1960-1965,” in Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004).
— David E. Goldberg
World History
