Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory [Hardcover]

Professor Blight explains how the desire to reunite the (white components) of the nation in reconciliation and brotherhood pushed the issue of African Americans and their rights to the sidelines. The causes of the Civil War--slavery and the status of African Americans in our society--were de-emphasized, and the virtues and nobility of the fighting man, both North and South was lauded. Neither was right, neither was wrong; both were brave, and their causes just. The idea that we should not judge veterans by the cause they fought lives with us today: this reviewer once participated in a dinner honoring a Russian pilot that fought for North Korea during the Korean War. Why did the Air Force honor a man who killed Americans for what many would consider one of the most evil regimes imaginable? Because he was a great "warrior." Our desire to avoid judging warriors began with the Civil War. It has damaged our moral sensibilities since.

By reducing the Civil War to chivalrous recollections, the essential meaning of the war became lost, and the South was able to build myths of the Lost Cause, the happy slave, and an Antebellum Utopia. Reconstruction went down in US history books as a chapter of regional oppression. Professor Blight demonstrates that this was not by chance: the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and other organizations worked to ensure their views were in textbooks across the nation. They promoted the "faithful slave" image, awarded laudatory reminiscences of the Klan, and erected "Mammy" memorials. Their goals were not innocent. One UDC member claimed (page 290) " . . .we can always feel sure that white supremacy is God-given and will last."

Professor Blight's work is thick with primary sources, and his words shows deep knowledge of 19th Century politics, fiction, perceptions and viewpoints. The book is not easily read from cover-to-cover: it is lengthy and divided into chapters where the content is occasionally duplicative. Among the best sections is one describing the struggle within the black community to come to grips with their declining fortunes as Jim Crow and lynchings spread across the South. It is a story not often mentioned, and in great need of study. Another section on racist Plantation Literature revealed a topic completely new to this reader. I owe thanks to Professor Blight for showing how a culture's fictionalized past can warp the present and future.

The author provides some excellent photographs that place the text in time and space. This reviewer would have like a bit more material on the Antebellum South's views, and a perhaps a chart or two to show when organizations began and ended, when events exactly occurred, and the like. I was a bit unsure exactly what reconstruction meant, in real terms, by the text. A clearer explanation would have been helpful. This might be simply a symptom of this reviewer's ignorance, however.

This book is an essential one for those who like to focus upon the combat aspects of the Civil War, in that it explains how one can waste much blood and yet surrender goals for peace. It would also be useful for those individuals working in the contemporary national security apparatus, to help them understand that conflicts do not end when the guns go silent. Military victories must be followed by perception management, sometimes for decades. The text is well footnoted, and has an excellent index.

The centrality of race and slavery in the conflict were thereby forgotten by most, eventually to the point that southern apologists could even maintain that they had been right in preserving slavery, and few but black Americans would argue. Indeed, in the memories of former slaves and their descendents, the importance of emancipation was central to their understanding of the war, and the rejection of that interpretation by whites was a huge betrayal. Most whites however were exhausted by acrimony; they wanted to rebuild the nation and move forward, and could only do so by ceasing to argue a cause they felt the war had settled. Although Blight fails to address it, it is likely that northern whites came to view southern sentiment more charitably not simply because they were too exhausted by war to fully implement civil rights for former slaves, or because they wanted to make amends with white southerners, but because with the growth of industrialism and its concurrent labor problems, the idea that a slave society had been able to keep social harmony and prevent such conflicts between labor and capital was appealing and believable in and of itself.

Blight persuasively shows that whites "remembered" and redefined the war precisely by forgetting it. However, the book is marred by his failure to use similar evidence that the war ever meant the same things to its participants that it does to him in the first place. Simply saying that northerners went to war to "preserve the union and end slavery" is not enough. Undoubtedly those were important motivations, but the complexities behind them are as deep as those involved in remembrance. Indeed, most northerners did not go to war to end slavery, so it should not surprise us that emancipation and race figured less prominently in their memories of the war than Blight would hope. For southerners, preserving slavery was certainly the primary cause of the war, but Blight fails to see that slavery involved more than just the ownership of blacks. Everything that southerners believed in was shaped by the centrality of slavery to their entire society-we cannot discount their contention that they were fighting for freedom and democracy, or anything else, because their understanding of all those things rested on slavery itself. Nor should we be surprised at their reaction to Reconstruction, for it turned everything they believed or understood about that society upside down. Blight then has succeeded in showing us how the war came to be remembered, but not how that memory differed from its participants' original understanding of it, or how reconciliation could have developed any differently.