Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?" Fredrick Douglass, an African American and leading abolitionist during the Civil War era, realized the importance of this question at the conclusion of the war. The Confederacy may have been defeated on the battlefield, but how Americans entered the meaning of the war into their historical consciousnesses had major implications for the United States. In his classic essay titled "What is a Nation?" Ernest Renan discussed the concept of memory and how citizens' remembrances of events contribute to nation-building. Furthermore, he asserted that a nation requires a great deal of forgetting. In Race and Reunion, David Blight, a professor of History and black studies at Amherst College, examines three different visions, or memories, that Americans formed in regards to how they interpreted the meaning of the Civil War. These three different memories competed with one another and in the end one memory gained widespread acceptance while the essence of the Civil War was forgotten. As a result of this, the North and South put their differences behind them and reconciled, but at the same time the races divided. Blight's monograph illustrates that different memories - the reconciliationist, emancipationist, and followers of the "Lost Cause" - were held by different groups of people following the war. The Civil War caused an enormous amount of death and destruction and as a result the government needed to decide if they wanted the country to heal or if they wanted to impose justice on the South. Frederick Douglass believed, "There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war" and wanted the federal government to implement policies that would protect the recently freed slaves and bring them to an equal status with their former masters. For a brief period following the war, the Radical Republicans seemed to have some success with securing rights for the blacks through the federal government. However, as followers of the "Lost Cause" began to promulgate their beliefs, the meaning of the Civil War began to be forgotten and historical amnesia began to set in. Through violence and measures taken to write history to support the Southern cause by placing the blame of the war on the North, the emancipationist vision of the war began to fade. Blight focuses on examining the reconciliationist vision of the war and how this memory became enmeshed in the minds of most Americans. Albion Tourgée, a literary figure of the time that adopted an emancipationist vision, asserted, "Only fools forget the causes of war." Yet forgetting the meaning of the war is exactly what happened in the fifty years following America's second revolution. Facing the difficulty of securing rights for the emancipated slaves in the South, the Republicans curtailed their commitment to African Americans. No other event signifies this retreat than the Compromise of 1877 i

On the canvas of American historical memory, it proved much easier to unite the Blue and the Gray than it has to connect the black with the white. David Blight's brilliant work on the memory of the Civil War argues that in the fifty years following General Lee's surrender, the war's deepest meanings were debated and negotiated, with crucial consequences for the future of the nation. In the end, the need for sectional reunion combined with virulent white supremacy to inculcate a purposeful forgetting of the racial underpinning and egalitarian possibility of the Civil War. The North allowed the South to completely dictate the terms on which the conflict would be remembered, subscribing to a narrative in which the mutual valor of soldiers from both sections was elevated, the blame for slavery eradicated, and African Americans left to fend for themselves in the era of Jim Crow. Blight's principal contribution, beyond providing the most complete and profound study of historical memory and the Civil War yet attempted, is his suggestion that culture and memory, not politics, were primarily responsible for the nation's failure to remain true to the emancipationist meaning of the war. Tracing the development of the memory of the Civil War in American consciousness from the 1863 Gettysburg Address to the all-white North/South reunion that commemorated the battle of Gettysburg 50 years later, Blight argues that the South, through the work of historical societies, Lost Cause novelists, women's groups, and veterans associations, "forged one of the most highly orchestrated grassroots partisan histories ever conceived," in which both sections shared the blame equally and the racial causes and consequences of the war were conspicuously silent. In its zeal to heal the scars of the war and reconstruction, the North accepted the southern reading of history, choosing reunion over race, and leaving the egalitarian promises of the war unfulfilled. In this cultural context, African American efforts to remember the racial meaning of the war were marginalized as completely as were African Americans themselves. For all its considerable brilliance, Race and Reunion is slightly tarnished by the feeling of inevitability accorded to the processes described above. While expertly explaining how the South's victory in the realm of historical memory trumped the North's victory on the battlefield, Blight fails to explain how it could have been otherwise. One gets the sense that the North's failure to forcefully impose its own reading of the war immediately after the cessation of hostilities was its downfall - it seems that the emancipationist vision of the Civil War was doomed by 1866, due to the cataclysmic psychological impact of the war, the deep-rooted need for sectional reconciliation, and the greater ideological unity of the South. This slight criticism aside, Blight's work is a monumental achievement and an invaluable contribution to the study of the Civil War w

David W. Blight has written a monumental study about the central place of memory in American life. While Race and Reunion specifically deals with the end of the Civil War to 1913 (the fiftieth reunion of Gettysburg), it is a powerful reminder that how we think about our past defines our present and shapes our future.Blight's book is a necessary antidote for the easy nostalgia that too many Americans feel for ugly periods of our history. Indeed, the recent comments by Senator Trent Lott show that we have not fully learned the lessons that are so evident in this book. As Bernard Malamud wrote in The Fixer: "There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil." Race and Reunion tells how slavery went from being seen as corrupt to being remembered as an integral part of a respectable lifestyle. It also explains how the myths of the Lost Cause were told and retold throughout the nation until most of them became part of our accepted history. Blight uses extensive citations in his reconstruction of the campaign to legitimize the Confederate cause, the honor of rebel soldiers, and the belief that slavery was a mostly benign practice. The success of those wishing to rehabilitate the Old South was astonishing. Blight details a fact that I had never known, and one that is among the most outrageous in our history. In 1923, the United States Senate appropriated $200,000 for a memorial to beloved and faithful mammies. This monument would have been located on Massachusetts Avenue and would have been the only national monument depicting African American "heroes." Thankfully, the bill died in the House.Throughout this book there are other detailed analyses of how emancipation and reconstruction were all but deleted from our nation's collective understanding of the causes and outcomes of the war. The value of Race and Reunion cannot be overstated. Professor Blight's work offers its readers the chance to begin to understand our tragic past and troubled present.

As crucial as the pivotal national victory in the American Civil War is how our nation recalled the significance of that watershed event. In Professor David Blight's profoundly stirring history of Civil War memory, "Race and Reunion," how and why the American people committed that event to their historical consciousness looms as significant as the event itself. Professor Blight's study of the fifty-year period following the Civil War will leave those who yearn for racial justice deeply disappointed. It is a cruel irony that deliberate forgetfulness of the past is a central theme of this powerful historical study. For in our nation's purposeful historical amnesia and racist refashioning of the Civil War, a consensus "reconciliationist" view of that pivotal experience sowed the seeds of institutional racism and the deliberate obliteration of the very cause of the Civil War itself. Blight's exhaustive research, presented in stirring, graceful prose, paints a dreary portrait of post-Civil War America; for all intents and purposes, the South may have lost the Civil War but it certainly won the battle in its unapologetic and energetic attempt to have the nation perceive history through the South's eyes.Professor Blight describes an ongoing battle between two deeply different visions of Civil War memory. The "emancipationist" vision absorbs the notion of the Civil War as a revolutionary event, one which not only abolishes slavery but begins the process by which African-Americans may become full and equal partners in a multi-racial society. Emancipationists point to Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" in their understanding of the centrality of slavery to the Civil War and its eradication as the most noble consequence of that war. On the other hand, "reconciliationists" propose a vision that holds the South as the victim of the Civil War, Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster and nobility of both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank as mutually heroic soldiers. Completely absent in the "reconciliationist" view are African-Americans, other than as loyal, grateful slaves, willing to please their masters and hurt by any ill-guided attempts at freedom or equality. Professor Blight is completely convincing in his arguments. Even today, with many American communities celebrating "Civil War Days," Americans feel more comfortable examining battles, proclaiming the mutual valor of both sides and celebrating reunion than examining our national racial past. Emancipationists tend to make people feel uncomfortable; their idealistic commitments to justice and racial equality invariably place second to materialistic concerns. In this sense, we in the early twenty-first century tend to unknowingly mirror Americans of one hundred years ago.This fine history is not necessarily pessimistic. Looming large is Frederick Douglass, whose passionate commitment to emancipationist views informs his entire public life. He, more than any other character, seems to possess the visi

David Blight's tale about how the North betrayed its African American supporters--soldiers and civilians--and the selective memory that made it possible, is sad and also instructive. As far as it goes, it's thoroughly documented, telling how the first order of American business in 1865, the reconciliation of North and South, was enabled by systematic avoidance of the root cause of the Civil War, slavery, and the social problems which resulted from it, that is, how to incorporate a huge number of Black Americans who were in competition with the Whites for land, jobs, and opportunity in general, in a shattered economy. Blight sustains his thesis fully: that by 1915 the job was complete and American memory picked clean as far as White memory ws concerned. A white Northerner, I was schooled in the "Gone with the Wind" era and remember well the tale of rapacious Northern carpetbaggers, their dupes the bewildered Blacks, and the gallant Southerners who saved their glamorous way of life by pacifying the Blacks (who had been happy in slavery, anyway). Blight does, of course, go into the constitutional issues of the war and the fact that they were resolved, on paper, by a series of amendments signed as the war ended. But the North didn't follow up on them, though it was in the North's power to do so. The Reconstruction period is controversial for just this reason; Blight disentangles the issues well. We could at any time have remembered less selectively, and acted more concretely, to ensure that the causes of the war, plus the problems of the years after Appomattox, were solved in fact, as they had been solved on paper. This was a complex time; and Blight's focus on selective memory and its effects can't go on to the interesting question of "why." What stopped the victors from insisting that our memories produce more concrete justice? Interested readers might like to expand into some other issues of the period 1865-1915, like the need to re-work American thought, in Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club"; the widening problem of poverty in the cities, in Joan Waugh's "Unsentimental Reformer"; or the birth and rise of consumerism, in William Leach's "Land of Desire." These are just three of the issues which sidelined a just and concrete Reconstruction. The resulting avoidance was not merely unjust to the Blacks, it was--and is--tragic for the nation at large because it deprives us all of the gifts they could have bestowed on the community, and of many that they still could. Meanwhile national avoidance, and its setting in selective memory, remain with us. Civil War re-enactors happily volunteer to portray gallant Confederate troops, movies like "Gettysburg" are still produced, Dixie's flag still flies, and Blight's book tells us, unsparingly, just why. Alas, he does us a service.