Race and Reunion

Race and Reunion by David W. Blight was published in 2001. It is about the history of American Civil War memory, specifically focusing on the 50-year period (1865-1915) after the war’s conclusion. It centers the competing themes of racial equality and sectional reunion. The book won numerous awards, including the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Merle Curti Award, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the James A. Rawley Prize. Another work by this author is Frederick Douglas: Prophet of Freedom.

Summary

Blight uses a variety of firsthand accounts from the period to illuminate how emancipationist views of the war compared to and competed with reconciliationist and white supremacist memories. These primary sources include literature, manuscripts, magazines, and newspapers.

Emancipationist views of the war were quickly overcome by pressures to swiftly reunite the country, forget slavery as the war’s cause, forgive Confederate rebellion, and retreat from a commitment to Black enfranchisement and civil rights. In the years following the war’s end, Southerners crafted the narrative of the “Lost Cause,” the myth that the South rebelled for moral reasons that had little to do with slavery, and that men who fought on both sides did so with courage worthy of recognition and praise. Moreover, this mythology suggested that enslaved peoples were happy prior to the war and loyal to benevolent slave owners.

This perspective manifested in the unveiling of monuments to Confederate leaders, the production of the “plantation school” of Southern literature, Blue-Gray reunion events, and the writing and teaching of biased history, especially under the influence of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Many Northerners accepted this narrative, and moderate Republican leaders eventually ended the process of Reconstruction, thus allowing white supremacists to dominate Southern governments, suppress Black voting rights, and usher in an era of terrorism directed at Black Americans.

Nevertheless, some white emancipationists and Black Americans argued against reconciliationist and white supremacist memories of the war that ignored slavery and the need to secure Black civil and political rights. Writers like Albion W. Tourgée criticized the literature of a mythical and idyllic Old South, and Black authors, activists, and orators, including Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke against these sentimentalist perspectives and centered enslavement and Black rights in their commentaries on the war and its aftermath. Investigative journalist, Ida B. Wells, wrote exposés on the frequent postwar lynching of Black Americans, through which whites forced free Black people into submission. Black Americans furthermore memorialized the war’s dead in their own ways; in Charleston, North Carolina, they held among the first celebrations that led to Memorial Day.

However, in the 50 years after the Civil War’s end, the selective memories of the Lost Cause, white supremacy, and reconciliationism triumphed. Despite losing the Civil War, the South emerged victorious in this respect. Yet emancipationist visions did not disappear. Rather, they “lived on to fight another day” (397). The racism embedded in these triumphal memories, however, contributed to another “mass movement for human rights” that emerged to “crush the nation’s racial apartheid system that had been forged out of the reunion” (397). The movement for Black civil rights in the 1960s is the fruit of this historical reunion rooted in white supremacist reconciliationism.