Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (review)

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. By David W. Blight. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 512. $29.95.)

What Americans needed to remember about the Civil War, wrote Union veteran and advocate of black rights Albion W. Tourgée in 1884, "is not the battles, the marches, the conflicts, not the courage, the suffering, the blood, but only the causes that underlay the struggle and the results that followed from it" (220). Tourgée was fighting a losing battle, as David Blight makes clear in this splendid study of the changes in the ways that whites and blacks in North and South remembered the war and understood its meaning during the half century after the conflict. For Tourgée, as for millions of other Northern whites initially and for almost all African Americans, the causes of the war were slavery and the South's determination to preserve it; the results were a new birth of freedom in a reunited nation and a new charter of equal rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

By 1913, however, at the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Gettysburg, which attracted five thousand aging veterans and many more spectators, Governor William Hodges Mann of Virginia expressed a view that had come to be shared by nearly all Americans except blacks and a small minority of Yankees. "We are not here," intoned Mann, "to discuss what caused the war of 1861-65, but to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man" (9). The custodians of Confederate memory had won their postwar battle to celebrate the South's Lost Cause as a valiant crusade for constitutional liberties and states' rights that was overwhelmed only by brute force. Slavery had little to do with causing the war, in this version of history, and reconciliation of the two sections that had fought a "brothers' war" was a more important consequence than the abolition of slavery. In 1888, only four years after his plea for a memory of causes and consequences, Tourgée conceded defeat. In the "field of American fiction today," he wrote, "the Confederate soldier is the popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern in type, but distinctly Confederate in sympathy" (220).

Flush with victory in 1865 and determined to secure "the fruits of victory" by planting Yankee institutions and values in the conquered South and empowering white Unionists and black freedmen in the domain once ruled by the planter aristocracy, the Northern people within a generation had yielded the field to the guardians of Confederate memory. How did this happen? Blight portrays an ongoing tension between healing and justice during the postwar years. Three visions of the war's meaning competed in a variety of forums: a reconciliationist vision, an emancipationist vision, and a white supremacist vision. Blight skillfully traces the kaleidoscopic interactions and transformations of these visions in popular literature, war memoirs, Memorial Day ceremonies, veterans' reunions, anniversary commemorations, monument building, political rhetoric, and other forums. With seeming inevitability, the reconciliationist and white supremacist visions merged to prevail over the emancipationist vision. The aging boys in blue and gray shook hands across the bloody chasm in a gush of sentimental concord that left no room for the black men in blue who had fought for the freedom and equal rights of their people. The view of the war and Reconstruction portrayed in Birth of a Nation prevailed in the North as well as the South. By 1913 "a combination of white supremacist and reconciliationist memories had conquered all others," writes Blight. "The Gettysburg reunion took place as a national ritual in which the ghost of slavery, the very questions of cause and consequence, might be exorcised once and for all--and an epic conflict among whites elevated into national mythology" (387, 390).

There were dissenters from this mythology, of course. Chief among them until his...