Albert B. Moore

The Montgomery pageant perfectly illustrates the themes that dominated Alabama's commemoration of the Civil War. The romance and nostalgia of the Lost Cause pervaded these ceremonies that celebrated an idealized Confederate past of heroic virtue and patriotic devotion. The soldiers and women of the Confederacy were held up as model southerners and Americans whose example could inspire the present generation. Left out of the history that these Alabamians remembered and presented to the public was the racial legacy of the Civil War. In most events held across the state, there was no mention of emancipation, black troops, or the cruel realities of slavery. White Alabamians had no room for these subjects in their carefully constructed narrative about their heroic ancestors. They clung to the idealized Confederate heritage that they wanted to believe in, and they would not soil it by introducing the war's divisive racial issues. But black Alabamians focused on the very subjects that whites wanted to ignore. They stressed the legacy of emancipation and held their own commemorative activities. In particular, the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation caused African Americans to celebrate, but it also caused them to examine their past and present struggles for equal rights, and the romantic rhetoric of white Alabamians became a potent ideological weapon to challenge this struggle. Along with this romantic rhetoric of white southern valor and virtue during the Civil War came distinct echoes from Alabamians of the same rhetoric of reunion that was prevalent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This rhetoric of reunion at the turn of the century had been a rallying cry for national unity. North and South needed to reunite around their mutual heritage of valor and courage. But this reunion was only...