No historical event has left as deep an imprint on Americas collective memory as the Civil War. In the wars aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and Americas national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Blights sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.
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 in which Samuel Tilden agreed to let Rutherford Hayes take the presidency under the condition that the last remaining Union soldiers would leave the Southern states. This event legitimized allowing the sections to reconcile while the rights of the blacks were denied. This sense of reconciliation can be found amongst the soldiers themselves. Rather than focusing on the causes of the war, past soldiers, both North and South, found commonality in the suffering, bravery, and honor that they experienced during the war. The photo that Blight includes on page 389 illustrates this idea. Taken during the semi-centennial celebration of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, the photo shows ex-Confederate and Union soldiers clasping hands over the stone wall located on the field where Pickett's charge took place. Clearly, the meaning of the war was gradually forgotten as the nation healed and the sections reconciled at the expense of African Americans.
Blight's greatest contribution is that he shows the importance of the role that memories play in the formation of a nation. Like Renan, he understands that how major events have been remembered, or forgotten, have major implications for a nation. Nation-building is a continuous, ongoing process. The ways in which people choose to remember significant events are directly related to this process. Blight uses various statements from a wide variety of individuals as evidence of how different people interpreted the meaning of the Civil War. For example, Blight includes many statements from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to show how they were dissatisfied with the prevailing memory that the majority of Americans held of the Civil War. Special attention is also given to the contrasts between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. When Blight discusses the memory that was conjured from the followers of the Lost Cause, he mentions the role that Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy from 1911 to 1916, had in writing a history of the war that alleviated the South of any wrongdoing. Central to the "Lost Cause" memory is Nelson Page, a Southern writer who showed, in a twisted sort of history, that slaves actually enjoyed living on the plantation and were happy to serve the owners. Moreover, D. W. Griffith's film Birth of Nation attempted to glorify the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed them as the saviors of a war torn south. Blight discusses these various individuals and shows how each contributed to the formation of the three memories that are central to his monograph. Hindsight has shown that the reconciliationist memory gained the most acceptance following the Civil War. As Blight explains in his prologue, "In the end, this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race." Hence, "The essence of the war was...sacrificed on the altar of reunion."
Although the emancipationist memory faded into the subconsciousness of our nation's memory, it would appear once again a century after the Civil War. W.E.B. Du Bois was so insightful when he postulated, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." In a massive attempt to gain rights for African Americans in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement erupted and delivered the emancipationist vision to the forefront of American thought. Martin Luther King Junior realized what reconciliation had meant for the black race when he stated, "One hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free." Blight's Race and Reunion should be read by everyone. Writing in a clear, flowing pose and using a wide variety of sources including literature, Memorial Day orations, and monuments, he shows that the formation of different memories after the Civil War has had a deep impact on American nation-building. Moreover, and perhaps more significant, he explains the harm that was done to African Americans as the meaning of the Civil War was largely forgotten in the years that followed its conclusion.
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