Race and Reunion

In 1897, the city of Boston unveiled the Shaw Memorial. This monument memorializes the Black soldiers of the Union’s 54th infantry and their colonel. One of the regiment’s veterans, Garth Wilkinson James, delivered an emancipationist speech in which he encouraged the biracial audience to remember why the Union soldiers fought. Booker T. Washington gave the event’s final address, which was reconciliationist. He lavished praised on the soldiers who fought on both sides and encouraged Black progress. The context in which this monument to Black men was unveiled is significant. By the late 1890s, the nation’s reunification was finished, and white supremacy achieved dominance. Populism was dead and the Supreme Court had recently issued their “separate but equal” ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. The Shaw memorial thus stands unique within the landscape of Civil War monuments: It was an emancipationist monument unveiled as the country was rife racism and discriminatory practices.

In contrast to the Shaw Memorial, Southerners erected new monuments dedicated to the mythical loyal slaves, paralleling the rise of plantation literature and the popularity of the Lost Cause. The number of lynchings between 1897 and 1906 reached over 800, and though emancipationist thought survived, its flame “lit isolated enclaves in a darkening age of racial antagonism” (345).

In 1898 the United States entered the Spanish-American War after the explosion of the Maine in Cuba’s Havana harbor. The expansionist US saw the conflict as an opportunity to grow its influence in the world. The war became a tool that facilitated the nation’s reunion, giving Americans of all backgrounds a cause around which to rally. However, the war also “exposed the racial paradoxes of […] reunion” (347). Although the war was a success for the US, it also generated “a full national debate over imperialism, a complex black response of patriotism mixed with fierce resistance, a new urgency to control the darker races of the world, and new drumbeats for sectional reunion” (347).

For Black Americans, the war raised new questions like, “How could they help Cubans or Filipinos achieve freedom from Spain when they had not yet managed their own liberation?” (348). Many concluded that the adversity Black Americans faced in the US took precedent. Yet roughly 10,000 Black men enlisted. Those who did, adhering to Washington’s ideology of Black progress, believed that their service would lead to advancement. Others thought that failure to serve might contribute to a white backlash. Black publications debated the war question: One newspaper encouraged Black men to enlist so that they could then fight a war on the home front by retaliating against the racist neighbors who surrounded them. Others articulated strong anti-imperialist views.

President William McKinley recognized the role that the war could play in fostering reunion and touted the conflict as a healing balm. After the first American soldier died in the conflict, newspapers took on a decidedly reconciliationist tone in their reporting, as they argued that the war was a unifying force for the North and South. The US appointed former Confederates as ambassador to Spain and the consulship in Havana. Simultaneously, the United States’ acquisition of new territories stoked racist fears about being overrun by nonwhite people; this form of anti-imperialism was cloaked in white supremacy.

During the late 1800s and into the early 20th century, cities grew, industrialization flourished, and immigrants from southern and eastern European countries arrived in the United States in great numbers. Like the Spanish-American War, this influx of new people stoked white supremacy’s flames. In this environment, reunion reached its zenith as white supremacy and reconciliation “fused into a potent force” (354). Thus, as the Civil War’s fiftieth anniversary approached, reconciliationism “served as a counterweight to economic and social change” (355). Reunion efforts provided unity in the face of what reconciliationists and white supremacists considered new and developing threats.

New reconciliationist histories appeared, like James Ford Rhodes’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. Although this Northern Democrat wrote that slavery gave birth to the Civil War, he “portrayed slavery as more a curse imposed from without than a crime committed by the South and the nation” (357). In his interpretation, the South bore little blame. Furthermore, he suggested that Reconstruction was a radicalist folly that suppressed Southerners. Surviving reviews and letters to Rhodes show that he made the “war comfortable to remember” (359). Other writers blended reconciliationism and white supremacy. Northern author Charles Francis Adams II, for example, attacked Reconstruction, minimized slavery’s role in the war’s origin, and spouted racist and dehumanizing dogma about Black inferiority. According to Blight,

The Southern victory over Reconstruction replaced Union victory in the war and Jim Crow laws replaced the Fourteenth Amendment in their places of honor in national memory. As the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict arrived, just what had been won or lost in the Civil War epoch reached this shaky consensus (361).

Nevertheless, Black Americans laid claim to celebrations surrounding emancipation and Memorial Day. Organizers created exhibitions that highlighted Black history and centered the theme of Black progress, while Black writers published new books also focused on progress. Furthermore, recollections from freedmen and women preserved personal memories of those who endured enslavement.

Other Black leaders worked persistently against accomodationism, reconciliationism, and white supremacy. NAACP cofounder, writer, activist, and academic W. E. B. Du Bois now helmed the emancipationist perspective. He criticized Bookerism and worried that if Black Americans supported reunion on accommodationist terms, they would lose rights they had received after emancipation. In 1915 and 1916, Du Bois authored and staged a pageant titled The Star of Ethiopia in major American cities that “represented almost all modes of black memory—particularly the progressive, patriotic and Ethiopian” (377). His production filled the need for Black Americans to reflect on their history. He also authored an editorial to remind Black Americans that emancipation was a Northern strategy to crush the Confederacy. It was not the result of any moral devotion to enslavement’s wrongness. In his short story, “A Mild Suggestion,” Du Bois likewise addressed the country’s race problem. His Black character suggests that the nation could be freed from this problem if white Americans invited Black people to dinner and then murdered them. His bleak and unsentimental story served as a “prophetic call to a national conscience” (379). Readers were not allowed to forget that the nation still suffered from a gaping wound. In the decades following the Civil War, Black and white memories largely diverged, and Black Americans were “alienated from the national community’s remembrance of its most defining event” (380).

Race and Reunion’s epilogue returns to where the book began: the Peace Jubilee at Gettysburg. Reunion succeeded because of the country’s cultural divide, with the opposing forces of reconciliation and white supremacy on one side and emancipationism on the other. Few Black veterans were at the Peace Jubilee in 1913. This reunion was a public statement of reconciliation in which both sides fought with merit and were without fault. Contemporary newspaper reports, including those from Northern presses, were reconciliationist. The Washington Post proclaimed that arguments over enslavement and the South’s secession from the Union were settled. Enslavement was thus blotted out from historical memory about the war.

Alternatively, Black newspapers “were wary, even resentful, of the celebration at Gettysburg in 1913” (390). Black soldiers and victims of lynchings went unrecognized. In the same year, President Wilson segregated the federal bureaucracy. All this contributed to discontent and discouragement, which even Booker T. Washington acknowledged.

In 1915, D. W. Griffith’s released his white supremacist silent film, Birth of a Nation. It ran in theaters all over the country, promoting the faithful slave narrative and arguing that emancipation was a mistake. The postwar South, in Griffith’s view, was overrun “by deranged radicals and sex-crazed blacks” (395). The NAACP protested the film’s release while Booker T. Washington argued that Griffith was entitled to screen it. Boards censored some scenes, but millions still viewed the film. By 1915, much of the United States had settled on a reconciliationist and white supremacist memory of the war, but such memory did not go unchallenged. It was simply a “prelude” (397).