Remembering and Forgetting

Throughout time, as events happen, both big and small, the human race has held many of the memories that were shaped and created by those events. Since humans have had the ability to remember, only those who participated in or witnessed it knew the memories of an event. Of course, sometimes this meant that large groups had very similar memories, with each individual possessing a unique memory. Events could be shared with larger publics, spreading information and the memories of others; but those memories did not come to belong to others, they merely became public. The “public” is a term that is used to describe groups of varying sizes, from a small group of like-minded individuals, to a community, or even an entire society that can be as small as a county or as large as a country. When individuals and the wider population share memories, they become public memory, something that is shared by a group of people. Sometimes the memories are nearly the same; sometimes they have similarities or only a few differences. Either way, the memories are known by all (both public and individual), often passed down through generations, shared widely and repeated often, and they are often confused. While memories can become confused, this confusion stems not from a memory, but from how the memories are perceived and used.

Historical and Memory trends are also a creation of history and memory, but in a different sense. These trends are often based on first-hand (or once again, the next generations’s) experience with an event. The experiences as well as the memories and ideas that surround them change over time and allow those who own them to shape their own ideals and worries about how later generations will remember. In other words, this is a fear of what history will say in the future.

One of the first trends is the “Treasure of Virtue” that the North held over the former Confederacy in the years following the war, and for some time after (Cloyd, 2010, 37). This Treasure of Virtue is the idea that the North was more virtuous, not only because it had won the Civil War, but also because it had fought for a much more gallant cause. Specifically, saving the Union, ending slavery, as well as other cultural and political issues that were at the root of this assumed virtue. This argument is only reinforced by the fact that after the war southerners had to come to terms with their loss: not only of the war, but also of their way of life, ideals, and also the reasons why they felt the war was worth fighting (Foster, 1987, 20-21).

This eventually manifested into the trend that is now known as the Lost Cause Theory, which gave many southerners and veterans a reason to defend their honor and memories of the war. The Lost Cause is best summed up as the “Twentieth-century nonchalance about the war’s outcome resulted not from the unimportance of its loss to the war generation but to the way in which that and the succeeding generations accepted defeat and interpreted the war in the years from 1865 to 1913” (Foster, 1987, 4). This movement in thought, belief, and culture has been recognized by some as the former Confederacy’s attempt at saving-face, or merely attempting to survive in the post-war world.

The last trend is the belief that there was a push, especially from veterans of the war, to maintain a proper memory of the war (Cloyd, 2010, 67). Veterans who had survived prisons were more likely to promote their memories and stories from the prisons, over those stories from the battlefields. This push would have meant that they were shifting focus from stories of the battlefield, to stories of the prisons. This argument is not so much based on sectional divide, but on the divide of soldiers and where their time was spent (this argument is often broken up sectionally, but not always).

The physical remains of Camp Morton are as important to the story and history as any argument, trend, or analysis. What is left of Camp Morton is important because there are no remains of the camp. Within a few years of the ending of the war and the closing of the prison, the area was returned to its original use as the Indiana State Fairgrounds, and by the time the bodies of those left here were buried for their final time at Crown Hill Cemetery, the area that was once Camp Morton had been turned into residential housing to support the growing population of Indianapolis. However, the monuments and markers to Camp Morton and the POWs that lived and died their still stand across Indianapolis. It is those monuments and the people who placed, moved, and still care for them that contribute to the memory and history of Camp Morton.

By focusing on memory arguments, historical and memory trends, coupled with the physical remains of Camp Morton, it becomes possible to understand why Camp Morton should have been remembered, and why it was forgotten.