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.The Northern Halseys apparently believed that the war had settled theissues surrounding slavery and the sectional crisis for good.Their acceptanceof such a clear-cut outcome to the conflict allowed them to talk about movingon and forgetting the past.Forgetting, then, was less a neutral position than itwas a stance loaded with assumptions about the war and its aftermath.JosephHalsey obviously did not accept these assumptions, particularly about theend of slavery, and therefore could not forget the war as easily as his fam-ily.This may explain why he did not take the oath to the United States untillate 1866.The Halseys thus had difficulty disconnecting the past the war, slavery,and its politics from the present while assisting a destitute family member.And they never entirely succeeded.Letters into the 1870s continued the dis-pute over the war and Reconstruction, as the brothers shifted their Unionand Confederate loyalties to Republican and Democratic Party affiliations. Idont [sic] like your [Joseph s] continued assaults on the puritan, as you termit, and republican notions of your Northern kin and the almost contemptuousway you speak of them, complained Abraham in 1877, as though nothing& nobody outside of Virginia & the Democratic party were worthy of anyconsideration. Such political debates were compounded as new personal is- 172 reconciliationssues arose, such as Joseph s refusal to send his children to Northern schools.Joseph also caused a stir among his siblings in 1871, after their father s death,when he asked that his portion of their inherited property be sold for much-needed money.His brothers resisted his attempt to break up the family landfor fear it signaled Joseph s renouncement of his birth right. This family spostwar difficulties stemmed from the fact that the wartime divisions betweenthem something the Union Halseys wanted to attribute to politics hadin some ways deepened and widened after the war.Their differences werebased not just on their views on wartime issues but on their disparate experi-ences of that war that left a father and three brothers prosperous and the fourthbrother destitute.The past had become too intertwined with everyday fi-nancial and material concerns to be neatly separated and forgotten.Yet theirdesire to put the past behind them was shared by many other Americans inthe postwar years.60the past also loomed large for divided families dealing with the questionof their legacy.Many nineteenth-century Americans were keenly aware oftheir bloodlines, valuing genealogy and record keeping as an important familyduty.Stories of the past were passed down from generation to generation in aneffort to keep alive a tradition that would inspire unity and a common prideamong kin.In the wake of the Civil War, many families turned to document-ing their relatives experiences in battle.Stories about the wartime heroics offamily members were epitomized by Varina Davis s two-volume work abouther husband, the Confederate president.Former soldiers also documentedtheir ordeals in memoirs.These accounts gave descendants, both Union andConfederate, something to be proud of and helped ease their memories ofthose tumultuous four years.This process, though, was not so easily accom-plished for divided kin: What should a family do when its wartime legacyincluded internecine division?61This was an important question for the Ellets of Washington, D.C., andthe Cabells of Virginia.On the surface, the Ellets had a proud story to tellabout the family s valor during the war.One member, Charles Ellet Jr., gaineddistinction for lending his engineering skills to the construction of the Unionsteam ram fleet in the Mississippi and for commanding that fleet as a colo-nel.Ellet steered the fleet to several victories, including one in June 1862 atMemphis, where he fell mortally wounded on the deck of his flagship, theQueen of the West
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