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As crucial as the pivotal national victory in the American Civil War is how our nation recalled the significance of that turning point event. In Professor David Blight’s exciting history of Civil War memory, ‘Race and Reunion,’ how and why the American people committed that event to their historical consciousness shows 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 changing of the Civil War, a compact ‘reconciliations’ 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 noblest consequence of that war. On the other hand, ‘reconciliations’ propose a vision that holds the South as the victim of the Civil War, Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster, and the nobility of both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank as mutually heroic soldiers. Completely absent in the ‘reconciliation’ 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. Coming up 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 vision and tenacity to hold steadfastly to the moral purposes of the Civil War. His telling question, asked in 1875, rips to shreds the fatuous emptiness of reconciliations views: ‘If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?’
The civil rights years, in which the nation was compelled to make read the promises of emancipation and the Civil War Amendments, prove that any memory is central to a nation’s self-image. For nearly one hundred years, our country accepted as dogma the ‘Magnolia and Moonlight’ theory of Southern society, our national consciousness saw slavery as compassionate. Our culture denounced Reconstruction and determined to honor both Northern and Southern soldiers as equally devoted and honorable. Only in the past generation have Americans rediscovered the emancipationist vision and been compelled to use that memory as the yardstick to national policy.
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