Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American History.
by David W. Blight. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. 512 pp. $35.00 U.S. (cloth), $16.95 U.S. (paper).The creation of Civil War memory never stops. As Americans debate the presence of the Confederate flag atop a Southern statehouse or absorb the stunning impact of documentary photographs in Ken Burn's PBS "Civil War" series, they engage in public and private acts of memory. The years 1861-65 remain alive as Americans search for their meaning in modern society. Along with the Revolution, Pearl Harbor, and the events of September 11, 2001, the Civil War acts as a defining agent of the American past, present, and future. Americans' memory of that event both reflects and shapes how Americans think of themselves today.
David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory addresses the evolution of such memory between 1863 and 1913, the fiftieth anniversary of both emancipation and the Battle of Gettysburg. The memory that Blight describes is rooted both in historical time and in the manner in which both memory and the historical context in which it exists have changed over time. To Blight, Americans' memory of their Civil War can best--indeed only--be understood as a product of the history that shaped it. To attempt to remember it in any other way would be to do the opposite--to forget. As Albion Tourgee warned, "Only fools forget...."
Blight explains how the half-century after the war marked the growth and ascendancy of the Southern-turned national or "reconciliationist" memory of the Civil War. As the nineteenth century ebbed and as common goals of industrialization and imperialism commanded a growing consensus among white Americans, the latter sought to reconcile their differences on a platform of a shared Civil War memory which celebrated the bravery of both Northern and Southern white soldiers at the expense of almost everything related to African Americans. Banished was the memory of slavery as a principal cause of the war, of emancipation as its greatest accomplishment, of the contributions of black soldiers, and of Reconstruction as a noble experiment. In its place, the reconciliation of North and South dictated a memory of two noble causes (the Southern defense of state and individual white rights and the Northern defense of the Union), the discounting of the black military contribution, and the angry dismissal of Reconstruction as a "tragic era" in American social, political, and economic history. At the same time, the segregated society that paralleled Southern progressivism and reconciliation with the North replaced the memory of emancipation with the reality of Jim Crow.
It was not that African-Americans surrendered easily. Blight charts a landscape of contested memory as white reconciliation and white supremacy squeezed black Americans out of the politics and economics of America and confined their Civil War memories to near oblivion. Try as they might, and they certainly did try, African Americans celebrated their accomplishments on the sidelines. By 1913, just as there was for schools, housing, public transportation, there was a Jim Crow section for black Civil War memory. African Americans struggled to keep their past alive but did so increasingly among themselves with little support from whites.
None of this happened overnight. During the Reconstruction years, Northern politicians and veterans joined with their African-American counterparts to keep the memory of emancipation and black military accomplishment alive. Indeed, as long as Northerners were willing to support the Reconstruction amendments to the United States Constitution, their efforts sustained the memory of the events that had brought these amendments about. Such sustenance, however, angered Southern whites whose determination to bring Reconstruction to an end contributed to an entirely different memory, one that celebrated the bravery and honour of Southern soldiers and the nobility of their cause. Over time, this version of Civil War memory began to resonate in the North. As Northerners focused increasingly on industrial expansion--an expansion now welcomed in the South--they tired of promoting civil rights for African Americans. At the same time, white Union Army veterans' bitter memories of war softened amidst Southerners' call for a mutual admiration of each other's honour, skill, and bravery. The North was ready and the 1913 celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg emerged as nothing less than an intersectional, or better still, national lovefest.
To accomplish this feat required some work but Southerners proved willing and capable. Blight's chapter entitled "The Lost Cause and Causes Not Lost." says it all. Here he addresses the efforts of a wide variety of Southern individuals and organizations that strived to define the Southern version of Civil War memory. Jubal Early, Thomas Nelson Page, the United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Southern Historical Society, the Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Review, were but several of the many people, organizations, and magazines, whose writing, efforts, and dissemination fashioned a memory of happy slaves, courageous soldiers, and noble surrender against impossible odds. There were many symbols, but perhaps the massive Antonin Mercie statue of Robert E. Lee unveiled in Atlanta during the national Memorial Day celebration on May 29, 1890 said it best. Between 100,000 and 150,000 people attended, 20,000 marched, and veterans held both the Confederate and United States flags high. As Blight explains, "Lost Cause ideology, especially the notions that slavery really did not cause the war and that Reconstruction was the vicious oppression of an innocent South and the exploitation of ignorant blacks, sunk deeper with each passing year into the South's and the nation's memory" (p. 282).
The best African Americans could do was mount as vigorous a campaign as possible to save their own memory and to remind white Americans of its legitimacy. Amidst segregation, lynching, "The Birth of a Nation," and the none too helpful leadership of Booker T. Washington, black activists fought back. Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Tanner, Henry McNeal Turner, Ida B. Wells, Monroe Trotter, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP all fought to keep emancipation, African-American soldiers, the Gettysburg Address, and Reconstmction's civil rights agenda front and center in the minds and memories of Americans. Among most African Americans and some northern whites, they succeeded. They too had their statue. Boston's Augustus Saint-Gaudens bronze relief of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment attracted the strong support of white Union Army veterans, and even Booker T. Washington, who spoke at the statue's unveiling, tempered his accommodationist message with vigorous praise for the exploits of the men being honoured. But it was not enough. Up against the force of national reconciliation, African-American efforts stood little chance.
Race and Reunion is a powerful, articulate, and important book. It serves to remind us how memory, like everything else, has its own history, and how history--with peoples' attendant memory of it--is shaped by those with tools powerful enough to do so. Turn of the century white Americans possessed such tools in the form of racial ascendency, economic power, and an urge for national reconciliation. Against these forces, African Americans countered with their own articulate determination, but under the circumstance of Jim Crow America it was hardly enough. Nor would it be for another half century. Until the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the African-American agenda remained suppressed and the memories upon which it was based hidden from the eyes of mainstream Americans. Indeed, even after the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and others to raise the modern and historical profile of African Americans including Ken Burn's thoughtful Civil War television series--the force of reconciliationist memory remains strong. "To this day, at the beginning of the twenty-first century," Blight warns, "much of Civil War nostalgia is still rooted in the fateful choices made in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century." One need only listen to the debate over what sort of history to commemorate at Gettysburg these days or witness the quarrel over the Confederate flag and where it should fly to recognize the truth in this statement.
Richard P. Fuke Wilfrid Laurier University
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Fuke, Richard P. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Canadian Journal of History |
| Date: | Dec 1, 2002 |
| Words: | 1337 |
| Previous Article: | Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California. |
| Next Article: | The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom. |
| Topics: | |
| Lincoln Seen and Heard. |
| A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865. |