Book Review: Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War

Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War. By Hilary N. Green. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025. Softcover, 400 pp., $35.00.

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

While some studies on Civil War memory appeared in the early and mid-twentieth century, those associated with the beginnings of a widening scholarly emergence on this topic focused primarily on Confederate subjects, particularly the Lost Cause. Books like Gaines M. Foster’s Ghosts of Confederate Memory: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (Oxford University Press, 1987); The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (University Press of Kansas, 1996) by William C. Davis; and The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Indiana University Press, 2000) by Gary Gallagher and Alan Nolan, immediately come to mind.

However, David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap/Harvard, 2001) arguably opened up additional avenues of Civil War memory for scholars to explore. His categorization of three primary strains of memory (Lost Cause, reconciliationist, and emancipationist) has helped create a respected separate genre in Civil War scholarship. Over the almost twenty-five years since the publication of Race and Reunion, hundreds if not thousands of books, scholarly articles, theses, and dissertations have covered a diverse array of Civil War memory topics. An exciting and much anticipated addition to this ever-expanding field of study is Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War by Hilary N. Green.

In the book’s introduction, Green explains that her main question is: “What are the various ways African Americans have remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy.” It is an intriguing question, because as Green also notes, Black people experienced the war in many different ways and from diverse personal and geographic perspectives. These included both “enslaved and free, but also as soldier, contraband, refugee, and/or civilian in both the United States and the Confederate States of America.” (5) And although Black Civil War memory has received much less scholarly attention than other subjects, it has always been present. Green emphasizes that “Collectively, African American alternative public spaces, whether the porch, church, or segregated classroom, served as important spheres of African American Civil War commemorative culture. By refusing to forget, everyday African Americans rejected local, regional, and at times, national impulses encouraging them to accept white understandings of the Civil War and their racial subordination in the politicized Civil War commemorative landscape.” (7)

Along with traditional archives—Black newspapers being particularly important—, but photographs, postcards, and other ephemera, too, Green also taps into what she calls “porch archives,” some of which are oral traditions and histories told from generation to generation at family and community gatherings. Also utilized are songs and poetry to provide perspectives on historical events and commemorative practices that might not otherwise appear in traditional primary sources like letters and diaries, but that are challenging to sometimes find from Black chroniclers for a whole host of reasons.

Green organizes Unforgettable Sacrifice into three parts. Part I contains four chapters, Part II includes two chapters, and Part III also consists of two chapters. Each part begins with a “Porch Lesson.” “The Porch Lessons reveal how the personal is political. They serve not only as love letters to my family and community kinkeepers who inspired this work but how I listened to their insistent demands to be heard by the profession,” Green explains. (10)

Green’s focus in Part I are those Black Civil War memory accounts from her own maternal family’s experience in south-central Pennsylvania and include looks at the threats to Black people there during Confederate invasions in 1863 and 1864; the November 1865 Grand Reception in Harrisburg for USCT soldiers; post-war Black political efforts for extended rights; and regional African American participation in GAR activities.

In Part II, Green recognizes groups that she feels have “adopted” her. One chapter examines the emancipation commemorative efforts by Black Richmonders, while the other chapter explores the underappreciated Black Civil War memory work that African American women in family, church, and school settings have encouraged generation after generation.

Part III’s two chapters center around Green’s paternal heritage and Civil War-related events in the South Carolina lowcountry. This part’s first chapter explains that Black Civil War memory received perhaps an unexpected but significant boost by the release of the major motion picture Glory, as well as the rediscovery of a wartime burial ground for Black soldiers on Folly Beach and their subsequent reburial. Both the movie and the reinterment process brought new outside interest to Black Civil War soldiers. The other chapter looks at efforts to include Black military service and civilian memory into the area’s official sesquicentennial events. A thought provoking conclusion and epilogue close the book.

Green’s research is impressive for both its breadth and depth. The notes and bibliography sections combine to fill over 110 pages. But perhaps more striking is her engaging writing and her daring willingness to explore outside the box and think about new methodologies, examine non-traditional sources, and blaze fresh approaches to this important topic.

At the end of her introduction, Green writes, “We, in the present, must tend to the Civil War memories that proved to be unforgettable by African Americans.” With Unforgettable Sacrifice Green has tended well.