Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Allen B. Ballard

David W. Blight. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2001. 397 pp. $29.95.

In his book Race and Reunion, David Blight, Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College, has written a sweeping and comprehensive survey of the way in which the Civil War settled itself into the collective memory of Americans, black and white. At a time when works such as The Wind Done Gone and Cane River attest to an awakening interest among black Americans in the Civil War and its ramifications for contemporary African American life, Blight has written the best work yet on the era from 1865 to 1914.

The book shows us how Southerners, decisively whipped on the battlefield, managed, nevertheless, to wrest a victory on the intellectual, social, and economic fronts. They did this by willfully manipulating the national press, historiography, and literature to show that the war had been about states rights, the right to property, and the right to live an agrarian life free of the class strife that supposedly plagued the industrialized North. And so was born the myth of the "Lost Cause," popularized in the movies Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. Historians, lodged in the nation's greatest universities, wrote book after book extolling the virtues of the "civilization" that had been lost when the South was defeated.

Blight's book describes in detail just how all of this took place. It was a manipulation of history only made possible by the acceptance in the North of the belief that white Southerners knew best how to take care of the "black problem." And it required a willful suspension of the belief that blacks had even been a subject of the war, much less participated in it as soldiers (they were ten percent of the Union forces by the end of the war.)

The first part of the book deals with the Reconstruction period and ends with the fateful Compromise of 1877, which resulted in the election of Rutherford Hayes and the withdrawal of Union troops from the South, thus effectively leaving black Southerners to the tender mercies of those who had wanted to keep them in slavery. It was a reconciliation that Frederick Douglass railed against: "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring" (Blight's emphasis). As Blight notes, "Some of the war's greatest results, the civil and political liberties of African Americans, were slowly becoming sacrificial offerings on the altar of reunion."

In the middle section of the book, Blight discusses the memories of white soldiers about the war and their growing sense that both Northern and Southern soldiers were bound together as brothers by the character and mettle that they had shown during the bloody encounters that marked the four-year struggle. As they came to see it, the war had been the ultimate test of white manhood, not a clash of good and evil. Thus the cults of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and Nathan Bedford Forrest began to grow. Blight moves on to contrast the writings of Ambrose Bierce, perhaps the most prolific of the postwar veteran Union writers, and those of W. E. B. Du Bois. Bierce's work was full of ambivalence about the results of the war in terms of African American emancipation, and it was tinged with admiration for the Confederate foe. Du Bois, on the other hand, focused on the tragic fate of "the nameless freedpeople, liberated and selfliberated in a terrible war."

Blight points to the 1890 unveiling of a Richmond monument to Robert E. Lee as marking the beginning of the entry of the Lost Cause into acceptance by mainstream white America. But here, as in many other sections of this fine work, he gives the African American perspective: "Three blacks who [served] on the Richmond city council voted against . . . the appropriation for the monument." Nevertheless, images of "loving Mammies" and "faithful slaves" became the bedstone of Southern revisionist historians' attempts to show that "emancipation had ruined an ideal in race relations."

Blight devotes a full chapter to the black view of the Civil War. The thought and actions of such intellectuals and activists as Frederick Douglass, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Alexander Crummell, Francis E. W. Harper, Edward Blyden, and Booker T. Washington are closely analyzed to determine how African Americans reacted to the slow but sure disappearance of the hope for freedom in the years after the war. Blight's discussion of these issues is characterized by true mastery of his sources and excellent synthesis of a great mass of material.

This is not a book to be read quickly. Blight goes on at too great a length about some topics and sometimes loses the thread of his argument. And much that he writes about will be familiar to those who are either Civil War or African American specialists. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that never has such a broad and all-encompassing work been written about how the memory of the Civil War took root in the minds of Americans. It is required reading for those who want to know the substance behind the arguments currently raging about the place of Civil War monuments and Rebel flags in present-day American life.