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

This thought-provoking work spans the period between 1863 and 1915 with the aim of examining the cultural and societal impact, stemming from the U.S. Civil War, of the interrelated themes of race and reunion. It is a book about how Americans of that period remembered their Civil War. Thus it is an important book for Civil War historians particularly, because it provides a disturbing glimpse of how much of the primary source material we use so routinely in our research may have been influenced more heavily by biases and private agendas than previously thought. Never has that fact—a fact about which we are all cautious—been more clearly elucidated than in this work. More importantly, however, it is a book about race and about how post-1865 events failed to vindicate the cause of emancipation.

Blight proposes three competing visions of the war that shaped the way it was ultimately remembered. The first, and earliest, was the "reconciliationist" vision that sought to find meaning in the war's ghastly toll of death and destruction. Ultimately joining the reconciliationist view was the "white supremacist vision" that was largely propagated by southerners and which eventually contributed to the nation "a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms" (p. 2). Jointly, those two views overwhelmed the "emancipationist" vision of black equality held by African Americans and abolitionists. Swept up in a sentimental quest for reconciliation, Americans over time largely erased from their collective memory the idea that slavery and emancipation were what the war had been about. According to Blight, reconciliation between North and South meant forgetting some distasteful aspects of the past. Racial prejudice and white supremacist tendencies allowed emancipation and the idea of black social equality to fit neatly into that category of things best forgotten. The bulk of his work is devoted to describing the means by which the emancipationist vision was submerged beneath the nostalgic theme of reunion embraced by white northerners and southerners alike. It was a theme in which "everyone was right, no one was wrong, and something so transforming as the Civil War had been rendered a mutual victory" (p. 386). Blight, in turn, celebrates the fact that the emancipationist view never really died. Instead, it surfaced again, and Blight finds the remnants of its legacy present in the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Writing dispassionately about an historical topic that by its very nature may serve to stoke the fires of resentment is no easy task. Blight does not tread very carefully around those sensibilities. For him, there was a right side and a wrong side, and he is discomfited by the fact that efforts at reunion blurred that distinction. He disdains the idea of a "mutual victory," and has no sympathy for the "Lost Cause" or for the way unreconstructed Confederates exerted a negative impact on the nation's collective memory of the war. Recent political events in Washington, D.C., have shown that the issues of race and segregation are rightfully still sensitive and emotionally charged ones. One might argue that the former Senate majority leader from Mississippi was victimized by the flawed memories that have informed the nation's perception of its history.

Military historians will find this book fascinating for its insightful depiction of the way in which much of our present understanding of the war seems to be based so solidly on the manipulated memories of its participants. His chapters covering the topics of soldiers' reminiscences, memorials, and veterans' organizations' publications, are especially instructive. Overall, this well written and copiously documented work constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the war itself and of how postwar reflections were affected by the dual issues of race and the desire for reunion.