Clasping Hands Over the Bloody Divide: Memory, Amnesia, and Racism

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

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in latter ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive." ¹ Bernard Schlink's description of post-World War II memory in Germany evokes the enduring presence of the Civil War within U.S. cultural life. More than a century later, the Confederate "Stars and Bars" still provokes passionate debate over whether it is a symbol of a proud southern history or of white supremacy. The Civil War decided that there would be one United States in 1865, but when the battles were over, the struggle over ideas and politics took center stage. While some historians claim that the U.S. is bound together by an essential unity grounded in civic ideals and shaped by a progressively unfolding history, the drive to build the nation after the Civil War reveals a very different trajectory. Instead, paradoxical processes of unifying and dividing, consolidating and fracturing, remembrance and amnesia tell the story. ²

David Blight traces the interrelationships between two themes, race and reunion, in his insightful and original exploration of how Americans chose to remember the bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century. Blight--a professor of history and black studies at Amherst College, and author of the award-winning Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee--spent ten years researching and writing Race and Reunion. An early contributor to the field of memory studies in the U.S., Blight is among the first historians to combine his deep knowledge of the Civil War with his understanding of memory as a social and cultural force. The re-united nation, writes Blight in Race and Reunion, was shaped by "how people of both sections and races would come to define and commemorate that tragedy, where they would find heroism and villainy, and how they would decide what was lost and what was won" (19).

Struggles over Civil War memory were intrinsically linked to whether an emancipatory or racialized reconciliation would shape structural policy and dominate national discourse. "A nation's existence," noted Ernest Renan in 1882, is "a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life." But as Homi Bhabha reminds us, a nation's existence is also dependent on a "strange forgetting of the history of the nation's past: the violence involved in establishing the nation's writ." ³ To this day, the Civil War still reproduces abrasive legacies, its tectonic layers generating on-going struggles over which narratives become inscribed into public memory.

By approaching the past through the prism of contentious memories, Blight makes a significant contribution to the argument that the interpretation and construction of the past is not just the prerogative of professional historians, or "a historian's 'invention,'" in Raphael Samuel's words. Rather it is "a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands." ⁴ Blight excavates the conflicts, revisions, and negotiations about Civil War memory over a vast and complex cultural terrain. He brings into sharp and comparative relief the similarities and differences between and within the North and the South; white and black Americans; Plantation School writers and intellectuals who supported racial justice; Confederate and Grand Army veterans; and Radical Republicans and states rights' Democrats. Blight locates his "thousand different hands" through extensive research and analysis of commemorations, novels, poems, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, sermons, speeches, letters, government hearings, autobiographies, and slave narratives. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, he draws upon methodologies from social and intellectual history, literary and cultural studies, as he links local memories with national debates over...