David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
Biography: David Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies at Yale University. He has written extensively on reconstruction and African Americans, including biographies of Frederick Douglass, his 2018 one being optioned for film/documentary rights. Race and Reunion is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, Abraham Lincoln Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, and four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes in intellectual history and social history, the James Rawley Prize for race relations, and the Ellis Hawley Prize for political history.
Overview: This book describes how Americans decided to remember the devastation of the Civil War during the decades that followed. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War.
Central Thesis: There existed three computing memories of the Civil War between Reconstruction and about 1920:
- Emancipationist: African-Americans and Republicans viewed the war as a struggle for freedom and a redefinition of the meaning and values of the nation.
- White supremacist: Also known as the Lost Cause, which treated the Civil War as a justified southern attempt to resist Yankee political and economic domination and preserve a way of life that fit blacks and whites better.
- Reconciliationist: This vision was fused with the white supremacist vision to dominate the memory of and scholarship on the Civil War until well into the 20th century. The reconciliationist vision was geared toward healing and national reunification after the war, and it was epitomized by soldiers’ reunions on battlefields where white soldiers walked the old killing fields together in amity.
Scope of Book: Blight demonstrates how, between 1863 and 1913, America reconciled its memory of the Civil War as not an emancipationist vision, but rather a reconciled version of events propagated by Lost Cause ideology.
- In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation.
- The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray.
- Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Deep dive into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’ reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day.
- Always a minority, abolitionists and radical Republicans took advantage of hatreds fresh from the war to impose military rule and restore black rights. Within a few years, most Northerners lost their war fever. Support for Reconstruction faded, then disappeared in the mid-1870s, another failure. By this time both South and North were fashioning memories of the war that bore little resemblance to the facts.
- In the South, the war became a doomed, but noble, struggle for freedom and states’ rights; in the North it was a triumphant, but tragic, struggle to preserve the Union. Hatred—at least between soldiers—disappeared: since both sides “did no wrong.” Slavery and emancipation disappeared from the narrative.
- Under reconciliation, the focus shifted from the war’s political and racial significance to the shared sacrifice and valor of the soldiers and the tragedy of death and loss. This allowed the Lost Cause to fester and reintroduce white supremacy as it hinged on this version while being enforced by UDC and UCV activism.
Commentary: Excellent read that outlines, clearly, the reality of the Lost Cause and where Jim Crow comes from. An essential read for all historians of war or American history. I think it clearly shows how easy it is to win the war but lose the peace if one is not careful. This book should be paired with Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me