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

Blight's Race and Reunion is an ambitious, elegant work on the first fifty years of Civil War memory that weaves together several disciplines in masterful fashion but ultimately leaves some critical questions unanswered. Consider, for example, this provocative fact. In May 1867, Gerrit Smith was one of eighteen men who posted bail for imprisoned ex-Confederate president Jefferson Davis. What makes this development so interesting is that Smith had once been part of the "Secret Six," a group that funded John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Just two years after the end of slavery, a radical abolitionist offered a dramatic gesture of reconciliation to the foremost living symbol of the Slave Power.

For those who sought national reconstruction after the bloody Civil War, it was a triumphant moment. The former rebel leader never again spent time behind bars—never even faced trial. He remained unrepentant, writing a combative memoir and stoking popular affection for what many white southerners came to call their "Lost Cause."

Others, especially African-Americans, saw in Davis' release an ominous sign. By the late 1860s, the desire for reunion was already overwhelming calls for socioeconomic change and racial equality. Thenation was well on its way toward a post-Civil War culture of separation and discrimination.

Significantly, Blight labels the bail episode "a strange sideshow" (59). The author depicts a steady retreat from the principles of what he terms the "emancipationist vision" of the Civil War (2). Again and again, Blight demonstrates the extent to which bitterness over race replaced sectional antagonism as the fundamental divide of American life. Nonetheless, Blight's conclusion falls short of declaring, as some historians have done, that the South lost the war but won the contest for its legacy. Instead, he shows with exquisite care exactly how the emancipationist view "lived to fight another day" and helped establish a powerful "prelude to future reckonings" (397).

Blight's sources for this complicated analysis are wide-ranging. Heexamines the various customs of graveside decoration and the birth of Memorial Day. In a tightly written chapter, he explores the all- encompassing "soldier's faith" and surprising blue-gray solidarity of postwar recollections. He also devotes considerable attention to literary figures of the era, both familiar (Walt Whitman) and less well known (Albion Tourgée). Throughout, he offers insightful summaries of major political events and cultural rituals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

With such a broad canvass, however, some areas inevitably seem unfinished. There is little discussion of postwar electoral results or legislative debates. Blight passes quickly over key economic trends, though acknowledging their power to shape the larger debate. He refrains from analyzing monuments, material culture, or other physical embodiments of a nation obsessed with memorializing its great conflict.

Surely, these deficits are forgivable in what is already a lengthy volume, but the question remains whether the broad categories that Blight imposes on patterns of postwar memory were somehow less relevant to participants like Gerrit Smith than more immediate concerns of getting votes or making profits. This issue of motivation Blight, despite his extraordinary accomplishment, does not address.