Black Suffrage: Lincoln’s Last Goal

Abstract

because it is central to understanding the evolution of Civil War memory in the nineteenth century. When a generation has no actual memory of the war, they harness the strands of collective memory created by the wartime generation; selective remembering and forgetting shape the historical memory of the war. In the case of the Civil War, a contested historical memory emerged because different groups embraced the disparate collective memories of the wartime generations. White Americans accepted the nations rise to world power, this study ends at the dawn of this new era; imperialism’s racialized world order prompted many white Americans to embrace reconciliation and Lost Cause ideology. Black Americans and their white allies, often the survivors of the Unionist Civil War generation, advocated Douglass’s memory and the Union Cause because it served a contemporary need to fight racebased discrimination and the de jure racialized domestic social order created by Plessy v Ferguson. None of these comments diminish the importance of this book; I would strongly recommend its use in college classrooms because of its thorough research and nuanced analysis. Using funerals makes an intangible idea like memory very concrete. Sadly, almost everyone has been affected by grief and the memories it invokes, even if this mourning is private and not a shared sorrow.