by David W. Blight
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Product Description
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's 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 America's 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. Blight's 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.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 The South Wins the Reconstruction, 2007-09-22
A nation's memory is composed of many facets some of which are mythical while others are more accurate. David W. Blight's book examines in detail how American memory of the Civil War during the period from 1863, the war's turning point, to 1915, its semicentennial, was constructed. His dissection of this memory revolves around his primary theme of the interplay of race and reunion and how reunion triumphed over emancipation: Southern white-supremacists joined with Northern and Southern reconciliationists to overcome emancipationists' efforts. He analyzes in detail the various facets of the composition and formation of this memory providing a valuable avenue for understanding the fifty-two years he covers and also insights to American racial history to the twenty-first century.
Race and Reunion uses many primary sources covering a broad range of thought, including fiction and nonfiction, which gives his book give a comprehensive view of the many aspects of the memory of the war. Several of these sources show the surprising overt intention of some Southerners soon after the war to ensure that not only would Reconstruction be overthrown but that the South would return to the status quo antebellum by promulgating its view of the war. Politics helped sink radical Reconstruction and efforts of Southern writers and historians ensured that the Southern view of history would prevail. Slavery could not be reinstituted, but the subservient relationship of blacks could, and through the efforts of Southern writers, orators, politicians, and much physical violence, it was. Jim Crow laws then ensured resubjugation of blacks.
Southern women's groups, writers in periodicals such as the Southern Magazine and later the papers published by the Southern Historical Society, joined with unreconstructed rebels such as former General Jubal A. Early to attempt "to vindicate Southern secession and glorify the Confederate soldier ... [and] to launch a propaganda assault on popular history and memory (p. 79)." Some Southern authors even made the amazing argument that had the North not begun the war, the South would have ended slavery on its own. In addition, because the North, especially New England, was responsible for transporting slaves from Africa to America, it was more blameworthy than the South for the institution of slavery; therefore, since all shared responsibility and blame, neither section should be singled out.
The Southern "Lost Cause" school formed to help Southerners cope with the devastating military and economic losses and to ensure that its military loss would not carry over to political and social arenas. It joined with the romantic "moonlight and magnolia" view in the late nineteenth century which was epitomized by D.W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation film epic. The film graphically portrayed virtually all of the stereotypes espoused by the Lost Cause school most importantly showing how child-like blacks adhered to the Southern cause and detailed the "evils" of Radical Republican Reconstruction which included black rule, Northern Carpetbaggers, and Southern Scalawags.
One of the chief tenets of the Lost Cause school was its portrayal of black slaves by writers such as Nelson Page as faithful, loyal workers and servants who actually benefited by slavery. Slavery took untutored, uneducated, pagan, non-English speaking savages and gave them Christianity, the English language, and worthwhile skills needed to become civilized. Here, slaves loved their masters and were better off under slavery than they were under Reconstruction.
The white Southern efforts to restore its antebellum weltanschauung succeeded for many reasons, the primary one being the desire found in most white Americans to come to a final resolution for the devastation and death brought by the war. Once both sides passed the initial period of shock and anger immediately after the war, moves towards reconciliation began especially among veterans. The Lost Cause school tenet which celebrated the valor, patriotism, and sacrifices of the Southern soldier soon accepted white Northern soldiers as part of that cohort. Shared memories of these soldiers helped to paper over hatreds engendered during the war except for some who still carried memories of prisoner of war experiences. But despite these, most veterans came to share the common experiences of war and their reconciliation helped the sections to join in mutually forgetting the horrors of war and in the celebration of the soldiers' valor. The famous 1913 Gettysburg reunion of veterans from both sides epitomized this spirit. In this spirit of forgetting and of a new nationalism, the "Race Problem" was shunted aside as too divisive and difficult to resolve. Too, the majority of whites saw no evils in resubjugation of blacks believing that emancipation was sufficient by itself. The "Separate but equal" doctrine promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision was acceptable to whites. Certainly white society did not want blacks as social equals.
Race and Reunion is an extraordinarily valuable book. Despite some unnecessary repetitions of its theme perhaps due to the book's somewhat non-sequential structure, its lucid depiction of how the South's view of the Civil War overcame emancipationist's efforts is clearly shown by his use of a plethora of sources. Especially important is his effective use of black citizens including authors, speakers, clergy, veterans, former slaves, and college professors, to portray black majority and minority views. Despite efforts of writers like W. E. B. Du Bois, blacks lost most of the benefits of emancipation but more importantly, the Southern views of the war persisted long after 1915 as the established American memory. Not until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's was the South's victory in establishing its memory of the Civil War as the "correct" American history overcome.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A top pick, 2006-01-05
Race and Reunion is definitely on my "top ten list" for Civil War books. The story of how the war was remembered, and its significance debated is as important, if not more so, as the various battles. Blight uses a wide range of sources North and South, concluding his narrative with the 50th anniversary commemorations.
I agree somewhat with the critique that that Blight is too dismissive of the positives of the re-unionist movement. Although post 1876 re-unionism helped ensconce Jim Crow, the genuine embrace of moderate northerners and southerners was beneficial to nationalist growth to such an extent it is now taken for granted. You might compare the French and American Armies of World War I if you don't think there was a positive effect of such a reunion; the legacy of the French Revolution being bitterer. I would recommend reading Ari Hoogenboom's biography of Rutherford B. Hayes for further evidence of the positives of the reunion movement.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
The Civil War in American Memory, 2005-10-24
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.
15 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
 A deeply flawed book, 2005-08-23
Despite book prizes and many good reviews, this is a deeply flawed book. The author states in his prologue that he will be selective about sources and what he will discuss in the book. This is not a good way for an author to introduce a subject which he clearly views as divisive in American history. Blight has an agenda and follows it throughout the narrative. The writer has a deep problem with the reconcialtion and reunion of the North and South after the Civil War and links everything to racism North and South. He portrays a reconciliation that is an unwritten conspiracy to subvert emancipation to sectional reconciliation. One glaring ommission in the book is that reconciliation was government policy promulgated by Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Admiral Porter. It was a conscious decision to try to bring the South back into the Union in as easy a manner as possible without the retributions other nations extract from defeated foes. After Lincoln's death radical reconstruction exacted what revenge it could from the South. The South resents the excesses of Reconstruction. Throughout the book Blight fails to see how Reconstruction coupled with the stigma of defeat could legitimately influence Southern White thinking. Although not stated, Blight also seems to have the attitude that Reconstruction should have been a permanent state of affairs for the South. If a little reconstruction was good, a whole lot more would be better. It is not hard to imagine that Blight would have approved of "re-education camps" to deal with any lingering Southern hostility.
Blight's racial prism is often used to denigrate the efforts that Northerners made to free the slaves. As an example the Underground Railroad is treated as mostly myth in which White Northerners could make up or embellish stories about how they helped slaves escape. He gives credit to a few noble individuals but downplays the extent of White participation in the liberation of blacks.
Blight also overlooks the deep-seated American character that has spared excessive retribution in conflicts with our enemies. This applies to our attitudes to German and Japan after WWII. Far removed from the racial overtones of the Civil War, most Americans have tried to forget old animosities. This includes the veterans of more modern wars, just as it did the veterans of the Civil War. This is in sharp contrast to, for instance, British veterans of WWII in the Pacific who have never forgiven the Japanese for their atrocities.
Blight fails to examine the deep-seated belief that both Northerners and Southerners considered themselves Americans. Blight fails to examine the tragedy of the Civil War as the American Iliad. This concept has made the American Civil War a subject of deep interest not just to Americans but to people around the world. It was a war thrust upon the country but unsettled problems. As soon as it was over people wanted to return to a sense of a "normal" American. But this is not a part of Blight's race driven view of why the country so desperately wanted to unite after this most horrible of American wars. His is the conspiracy of some dark racial divide both North and South
Blight makes some important points regarding the Lost Cause mythology that has driven an enormous amount of study and writing over the decades since the Civil War ended. The segregation and racism of the South after Reonstruction is to be deplored. Racism also tainted the North, perhaps actually growing stronger than when blacks were honored by the Republican press during the Civil War as soldiers for the cause. Many Southerners still recite a history that exempts slavery as the root cause of the war despite the decades of conflict which led up to the final eruption into outright war. Southerners have had a hard time accepting the defeat by the North during the war except through overwhelming force. It is hard to accept that an army of "mudsills" defeated the flower of Southern manhood.
The reason to read this book is to understand how many in the academic world always look for the worst in American society. In many ways it is not about the history of the reunion of the North and South after the Civil War. It is a deep seated view that America is permanently tainted by racism and other deep flaws of character. Unfortunately, many have taken this book as a "bible" of sorts to interpret the Civil War and the brave men both North and South who fought it and then tried to make America whole again.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
A beautiful work of history, 2004-11-17
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 which wrests the conflict from the clutches of tweed-clad 19th century historians and re-enactors in blue and gray, placing it squarely in the center of the American experience.
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