ABSTRACT
At the 2006 ceremony to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks, along with the ‘Stars and Stripes’ the band played ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. This song was popular with Union armies during the Civil War and expressed northern sentiments of a redemptive force marching forth to end slavery. The choice of this hymn for a ceremony to remember Americans killed in a terrorist attack and to promote unified resolve against the perpetrators of that attack shows the continued importance of Civil War memory in US nationalism. It was during the Civil War that this nationalism, tentative and unclear in form in the antebellum period, was increasingly developed. The experience of the Civil War and the way it has been remembered were crucial in the formation of American nationalism. Indeed after the North’s victory the term ‘nation’ was used, rather than the earlier ‘union’, to describe the American polity.1 In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln called for the maintenance of the ‘bonds of affection’ which bound North and South together and invoked the ‘mystic chords of memory’ to ‘swell the chorus of the Union’.2 Yet, by the time of his Gettysburg Address in 1863, Lincoln was dedicating the memories of the fallen to the proposition, ‘that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom’.3
