HOW WARS ARE REMEMBERED
An albumen print of Alexander Gardner’s shocking photograph showing Confederate dead along the Hagerstown Pike after the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), September 17, 1862. The battle remains the bloodiest day in American history. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
BY ROB HAVERS, Ph.D.
W
hen the announcement about my impending move to the American Civil War Museum became public, an old colleague of mine, with whom I had team-taught military history at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst many years ago, called me and was enthusiastic about the move. He knew as well as I that the American Civil War is a conflict that continues to fascinate and appall us – a conflict that broke and re-forged a nation. That imperfect Union is one whose imperfections we still grapple today.
1 8 SUMMER 2021
The Civil War continues to fascinate us, especially in Virginia, in large part because of its staggering human toll. As we make plain in our permanent exhibition, A People’s Contest, roughly 2% of the American people lost their lives between 1861-65 – some 750,000 men and women. Extrapolate those percentages to the contemporary US population of 330 million and the equivalent numbers of dead would be around 6.6 million. Those numbers could and should give us pause when we think of the cost of the Civil War. The Civil War also continues to fascinate – and to challenge – us because of how and why it was commemorated and remembered. All conflicts, whenever and wherever they have been fought,
often continue to be fought in the pages of history books and beyond in public commemoration. My own area of academic research explored the reality of life in a particular Japanese prisoner of war camp, one in which the prisoners were able to assert a far greater degree of autonomy over their existence and where they sought every opportunity to frustrate their Japanese captors. Despite the courage and stubbornness as prisoners, their experiences were often obscured by a more commonplace and popular perception of the experiences of Japanese-held POWs, that of broken men who were essentially powerless. This idea became the shorthand for understanding that experience. While
