Race and Reunion

“But the new nation awaiting rebirth also had the thought of black equality on one side, the knowledge of sectional reunion on the other side, and no muse yet in the middle holding their hands.”

Blight notes the inherent conflict between restoring the Union and providing protection and racial justice for Black Americans. These tensions emerged almost as soon as the Civil War concluded and only became more strained in the decades that followed. Rather than reunify the country while acknowledging its dark history of enslavement and providing for Black political and civil rights, the nation leaned into white supremacy and a mythic history of the war that ignored, or even denied, slavery and emancipation’s historical significance.

“Reconstruction was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdict at Appomattox.”

In April 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Terms of this surrender included parole for Confederates who laid down their arms and no federal charges for the surrendering rebels. The process of federal Reconstruction, which based troops in the southern states to be readmitted to the Union, forced the country to resolve what Blight terms a "national blood feud” while also trying to rebuild from the war’s devastation. This problem made Reconstruction a contentious policy that Southerners considered humiliating and hence rejected. Perhaps because Grant’s terms at Appomattox were lenient, the South was emboldened to continue their rebellion via resistance to Reconstruction policy, a battle that they eventually won.

“America’s ‘historic landscapes’ became more interesting because of the Civil War.”

In the first several decades after the Civil War’s conclusion, travel writers toured former battle sites in the still devastated South. Their published accounts show that landscapes that were new in comparison to European sites now lay in ruin. This gave them a kind of history, albeit new history, which made them more interesting to read about and visit for Americans. The popular Civil War tourist industry that flourishes today thus originated not long after the war ended.

“That evasion [of slavery and emancipation] would be critical to Southern memory of the war.”

After the Civil War, the Southern newspaper the Richmond Dispatch was resurrected. Blight’s analysis of the paper’s inaugural issue shows the reader how the Lost Cause myth began to form early on. The paper’s first editorial upon resuming publication praised Southern courage and gave no acknowledgment of slavery as the conflict’s source, nor did the editors say anything about emancipation.

“In the South, private nostalgia, public memory, and Reconstruction politics coalesced among whites to produce and increasingly lethal environment for the experiment in black equality forged out of the war.”

Blight acknowledges the role that the intersection of rituals and politics played in creating a South that minimized the significance of slavery in the war’s cause. This intersection also helped birth an environment in which white supremacy dominated the social and political landscapes to suppress Black rights.

“Republican Reconstruction was at least an attempt to build a new house—a reinvented republic. The citizens who lived in it would have to find ways to heal at the same time they learned to live in a more just world. The tragedy of Reconstruction is rooted in this American paradox: the imperative of healing and the imperative of justice could not, ultimately, cohabitate in the same house.”

Although Reconstruction ultimately failed and Republicans retreated from policies considered radical, had it continued, Reconstruction might have taken reunion of the nation down a different path. Blight sees its failure as tragic because it proves that the Union could not resolve the tension between reunification and guaranteeing political and civil rights for emancipated Black Americans and their descendants.

“Death on such a scale demanded meaning.”

The Civil War’s mass casualties caused trauma for survivors on both sides of the conflict. Americans had to psychologically process and cope with deaths of so many loved ones, and they did so by arguing that their deaths were not without cause. This psychological need led to the erection of memorials and celebration of Decoration Days that gave rise to the national holiday Americans now known as Memorial Day.

“The soldierly virtue of devotion, whatever the cause, was within a decade of the war already well-rehearsed as a means to sectional peace. Indeed, it became a rhetorical weapon of great potency in the retreat from and overthrow of Reconstruction.”

Blight shows that within a mere 10 years after the war’s end, Civil War discourse frequently included both-sides-ism that praised the dedication and bravery of soldiers who fought on behalf of the North and the South. These declarations heralded courage no matter the cause and erased discussion of the war’s origins—slavery—from these early conversations. Americans, including many who fought on the side of the Union and/or were dedicated abolitionists, were willing to forget to reunite the nation.

“White rage led quickly to individual and organized violence against the churches, schools, homes, farmsteads, and bodies of black citizens, as well as against their white Republican allies.”

White supremacist terrorism in the form of organized mob violence emerged in the South not long after the Civil War ended. It was a response to the humiliation of defeat and white intolerance of federal troops stationed in the Southern states as an early provision of Reconstruction. Whites would not accept Black independence and agency or freedmen and women exercising their new political and civil rights. White supremacist terrorism was a way for whites to reclaim some of the power they lost when enslaved people were emancipated and when they lost the war.

“In the memorialization that swept over America in the decades after the war, no monuments ever commemorated the pitiful deaths of the Joseph and Willis Flints across the South. These stories and legacies, as much a part of the struggle over the meaning of the Civil war as Pickett’s Charge or Sherman’s March to the Sea, never found a place in the nation’s epic.”

Blight highlights the erasure of Black victims of racist violence from the historical narrative about the Civil War and its legacy. Publications recounted and celebrated battles, and the public memorialized the war’s dead through events and monument unveilings. But Black victims of white mob violence, like Joseph and Willis Flint who were murdered by a white mob because of a sharecropping conflict, received no such recognition for their suffering.

“The contested legacy of Klan violence deformed understandings of history, unsettled black memories for decades, inspired white Southerners in their struggle for self-determination and local rule, and most immediately, played a pivotal role in the electoral politics of the 1870s.” 

The white supremacist and domestic terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan flourished in the South, particularly as Reconstruction ended. Their influence shaped narratives about the war and its legacies, terrorized Black families for decades, and dominated Southern politics, as they prevented Black voters from exercising their rights and ran Republicans out of office. Moreover, their violent influence contributed to the death of radical Republicanism, the driving force behind Reconstruction, in the 1870s.

“The daring necessary to capture a full realism about war-making fit neither the tastes of Victorian America nor the growing imperatives of sectional reconciliation.”

Although the American public was hungry for and consumed literature about the war, including soldiers’ recollections, they were not willing to read about the war’s realistic brutality. Rather, they preferred nostalgic and sentimental literature and memories that focused more on adventure and family saga. Confronting the truth simply did not suit the desire for reunion.

“The lifeblood of reunion was the mutuality of soldiers’ sacrifice in a land where the rhetoric and reality of emancipation and racial equality occupied only the margins of history.”

Reflections on the war, including written accounts and speeches, tended to focus on the shared sacrifices of veterans from the North and South. This focus suited the spirit of reunion. Emancipationist perspectives and discussion of continued racial injustices did not fit the narrative of a happy and reunited nation.

“Most black Civil War veterans had their own mythic sense of cause to preserve. In season and out, wherever an audience gathered, they fought the nation’s forgetfulness. By liberating slaves and themselves, black soldiers insisted that they had helped remake America.”

Although white, reconciliationist voices dominated the discourse of Civil War memory, Black voices were not absent, nor should readers overlook them. Black veterans worked to preserve their recollections of the war and claimed an important role in reshaping, reunifying, and rebuilding the country.

“The Lost Cause took root in a Southern culture awash in an admixture of physical destruction, the psychological trauma of defeat, a Democratic Party resisting Reconstruction, racial violence, and with time, an abiding sentimentalism.”

Blight explains why Lost Cause ideology took strong root in the South. It suited the psychological needs of humiliated Southerners who had to cope with the physical ruin of their landscapes and traumatic losses. Moreover, the Democratic Party dominated Southern politics and fought Reconstruction policy while allowing mob violence to terrorize Black Southerners and prevent them from exercising their political and civil rights. Thus, Southerners retreated into a mythological, nostalgic, and romanticized past in which enslaved people were happy with their lot in life, loyal to their enslavers, and the North had inflicted the Civil War on a victimized South.

“And so, in such reasoning, was the Civil War about and not about slavery.” 

Blight dissects Jefferson Davis’s memoir and tome on the Confederacy’s history in which Davis promotes the Lost Cause. Davis suggests that slavery was only tangential to the war, and that the North was the tyrannical aggressor while loyal slaves attended kind Southern slave owners. For Davis, sovereign Southerners were protecting more than their values. In this way, Davis paradoxically denies the role that slavery played in the war’s birth while also acknowledging its significance.

“Their conservative rebellion now seemed an antidote to the new ethnic invasion of America’s shores, and especially to farmers’ and workers’ revolts. In the bewildering technological and industrial society, and amidst resurgent racism, a white boy growing up in America in the 1890s might find safe havens in the past and present by just being a Confederate.” 

Blight explains how Lost Cause ideology was a weapon that Southerners used to claim an identity and find a kind of safety in Gilded Age America. The nation was changing in ways they found threatening and unacceptable, particularly because of industrialization and an influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

“Loyal slaves, who never really wanted their freedom, were far more prominent in the Southern imagination in 1915 than they had ever been in 1865.”

Plantation school literature celebrated the trope of the loyal slave, a myth widely perpetuated via this popular genre of literature in the decades following the war. Southern writers suggested that enslaved people had been happier under slavery and were so loyal to their enslavers that they protected them, their families, and their property during the Civil War. This image of the loyal slave, however, is a myth that says much more about the way that Americans deliberately chose to remember the antebellum South than it does about historical reality.

“It was America’s national tragedy that the memories of slavery that were popularized and sold in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the romantic fantasies of dialect writers not the actual remembrance of ex-slaves themselves.”

Blight sees the emergence of racist dialect literature and stories about the Old South that contain caricatures of fictitious loyal slaves as a stain on America’s historical memory of the Civil War. These works popularized a mythology that infected national memory and marginalized the memories of Black Americans who experienced slavery, thus obscuring the truth for years to come.

“Grant’s lenient terms at Appomattox had transfigured in forty years into a slow surrender of a different kind. The age of Jim Crow was not only the creation of aggressive Southern legislatures, but the result of the North’s long retreat from the racial legacies of the war.”

Blight traces the North’s willingness to accommodate Southern attitudes to the very beginning of the war’s end—the South’s surrender at Appomattox in Virginia. Over the course of the next four decades, the North became more and more lenient toward and accepting of the South’s distorted memories of the war. Northerners also allowed the South to implement Jim Crow laws that countered the amendments to the Constitution that ended slavery, made Black Americans citizens, and gave suffrage to Black men. Although the South surrendered at Appomattox, it is the North that surrendered to racist Southern agendas.

“The Southern victory over Reconstruction replaced Union victory in the war and Jim Crow laws replaced the Fourteenth Amendment in their places of honor and national memory.”

With the Compromise of 1877, Southerners succeeded in ending the federal policy of Reconstruction. This new victory undid the North’s triumph in the Civil War by allowing the South to implement Jim Crow laws that suppressed the rights Black Americans had been given because of the Civil War. Blight asks his readers to consider who the real victors were in the Civil War.

“Much of the emancipationist vision of Civil War memory was so ill-fitted to this reunion narrative that during the semicentennial it simply had to coexist in isolation from national remembrance of an epic fight and an intersectional inheritance of reunion.”

Blight explains why Black veterans and emancipationist views on the Civil War did not appear at the Peace Jubilee in 1913. If the majority of Americans believed the nation was firmly reunited, they could not abide perspectives suggesting that divisions still existed and that those divisions were centered on race. Rather than acknowledge this truth, the attendees and organizers of the Jubilee deliberately ignored and excluded it.

“Homilies about reunion, though altogether well meaning, masked as much as they revealed. Naturally, monuments and reunions had always combined remembrance with healing and, therefore, with forgetting.”

Blight reflects on the discourse of reunion that appeared in newspapers and other forms of public address. Although they demonstrate a consistent desire to heal and reunite a scarred nation, what they do not acknowledge reveals much about the state of reunification, too. Their failure to address emancipation and race are evidence of a conscious desire to forget and manufacture reconciliationist memories that were wrapped in white supremacy.