Download PDF Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Download PDF Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

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Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Download PDF Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

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Review

“Blight describes how Americans decided to remember the devastation of the Civil War during the decades that followed...[He] has distilled a mass of historical material into an impressive, clearly written volume that...reads well and rings true.”―Kirkus Reviews“Blight traces America's tragic pursuit of national reunification and reconciliation after the Civil War at the expense of the conflict's emancipationist legacy. He ponders such threats to this legacy as Lost Cause myths, fading and sometimes revisionist veteran recollections, financial panics and commercial greed, political scandals, 'loyal' slave narratives, urbanization and industrialization, and the emotionally charged rituals of war-related celebration days among others. The author resurrects the voices and prose of African American activists who fought to preserve the emancipationist legacy in an indifferent, even hostile, milieu.”―John Carver Edwards, Library Journal“This book effectively traces both the growth and development of what became, by the turn of the twentieth century and the debut of The Birth of a Nation, the dominant racist representation of the Civil War. A major work of American history, this volume's documentation of the active and exceedingly articulate voices of protest against this inaccurate and unjust imagining of history is just one of its accomplishments.”―Publishers Weekly“[Blight examines] discordant chords of memory about the Civil War...in this incisive discussion of how the conflict was popularly remembered in the half-century following Appomattox...Blight recounts the strong tide in the post-war years for 'reunion on Southern terms'...Freed blacks suffered the consequence of the ascendance of a sentimental view of the war and amnesia about its central issue.”―Gilbert Taylor, Booklist“As Blight conclusively demonstrates, the [post-Civil War] United States was caught up almost immediately in a 'tormented relationship between healing and justice,' and the abolitionist, emancipationist view of the war's aims quickly receded into the background...African Americans kept alive their own memories of slavery, the war and Reconstruction...but not until long after World War I did they begin to find a hearing for their grievances and yearnings.”―Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World“In Race and Reunion, David W. Blight demonstrates that as soon as the guns fell silent, debate over how to remember the Civil War began...Blight's study of how Americans remembered the Civil War in the 50 years after Appomattox exemplifies these themes. It is the most comprehensive and insightful study of the memory of the Civil War yet to appear...Blight tells this story in a lucid style and with an entirely appropriate measure of indignation...Race and Reunion demonstrates forcefully that...it still matters very much how we remember the Civil War.”―Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review“[Blight] begins and ends his tour de force study of America's memory of the [Civil] War at the Gettysburg reunion and notes that black veterans were virtually invisible on that occasion--the black presence at Gettysburg in 1913 was as menial laborers--and that while Wilson spoke, his administration was aggressively segregating federal agencies in Washington...This is a story of mammoth and tragic sweep, with consequences that are very much alive in present-day America. David Blight tells it with a passionate, soulful voice, a voice of conviction based on an intimate knowledge of a sweeping array of sources. Race and Reunion is a brilliant book.”―Mark Dunkelman, Providence Sunday Journal“Denying that the South fought for slavery [in the Civil War] was a key element in a decades-long ideological battle eventually settled in a devil's bargain: reconciliation between whites North and South, purchased at the price of racial segregation. The story of how that bargain was struck is told by historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory...Race and Reunion is a deeply unsettling, pioneering work that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer: questions that should continue to trouble us...The myths and lies forged over a century ago still have us locked in their chains.”―Paul Henry Rosenberg, Philadelphia City Paper“Blight's eclecticism and erudition make this sweeping historical saga a pleasure to read...This powerful book is a part of [an] intellectual and political tradition. Race and Reunion challenges us to take seriously the clashes over the Civil War's contested legacies and symbols, which Americans continue to debate into the twenty-first century.”―Catherine Clinton, American Prospect“David Blight's Race and Reunion is one of the most fascinating and rewarding scholarly books of the past few years for the general reader with an interest in American history...Blight describes clearly the ways in which the culture of commemoration related to the politics and social struggle of Reconstruction. His haunting account of violence in the post-war South is only one example of the eloquence that characterizes the book...Blight is scrupulously fair in his judgments. He is equally alert to the Northern white self-congratulation that inflated the legend of the Underground Railroad and the racist pretension that shaped the version of history peddled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. He is especially alert to the way that even-handedness has served as a tool for suppressing memory of the moral issues at the heart of the Civil War by turning attention to the spectacle of combat and the bravery of the soldiers on both sides. This sensitivity to social values makes Race and Reunion more than an achievement of scholarship. It is a contribution to contemporary politics and culture that deserves a wide audience.”―Thomas J. Brown, State, SC

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About the Author

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of History at Yale University.

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Product details

Paperback: 528 pages

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; Revised ed. edition (March 1, 2002)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0674008197

ISBN-13: 978-0674008199

Product Dimensions:

6 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.3 out of 5 stars

72 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#98,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This book knocked me out. I could not put it down, and brought it on a 10 day backpack trip in the Sierras, reading every evening. After fairly extensive reading on Reconstruction while writing an academic paper, I discovered a youtube lecture by David Blight on the subject. He was so intelligent, expressive, fair-minded, and able to synthesize and explain diverse materials that I immediately googled him and discovered this book. Race and Reunion treats what happened after Reconstruction - in a nutshell (forgive me Professor!) in order to reunify the north and south, blacks were forgotten/ignored, allowing the country to be stitched back together, in a fashion. Had the North required the South to honor the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment, unification would have been very difficult or impossible. But the North was exhausted by the war and distracted by other pressing matters, Lincoln was gone and had no comparable substitute, and the South was determined to continue to treat blacks as secondary citizens. In a delicate dance, separate memorial days gradually became joint memorial days, as white veterans from both sides began sharing tales of courage, honor, and battle together, and mutual forgiveness evolved. This required the north to look the other way as the South enacted and enforced Jim Crow laws. The book is meticulously researched, and approaches the problems from multiple different points of view, using a wide variety of evidence (such as popular literature of the time). It is clear and readable. This book made me wish that I had become a historian.

Compellingly written and impressively researched, this book shows how the Southern story about the Civil War and its aftermath took over as the national story in the half-century after the Emancipation Proclamation. That story stayed in place until the civil rights movement in the second half of the 20th century, which is a long run for a narrative far removed from what is suggested by the actual evidence about the causes of the war and about racial developments after the war.Blight shows how, after the war, various groups competed to have their story about the war take over as the dominant narrative. African Americans focussed on what it meant for them -- the end of slavery -- and expected freedom and citizenship to lead to full participation in society. Many Southerners, however, almost immediately began to push for as much of a return to the old social order was was possible. In this effort, the construction of "The Lost Cause" myth gave a post-war focus to regional patriotism (the war was only lost because of the crushing numerical and material superiority of the North). At the same time, focussing on states' rights as a cause of the war rather than on slavery gave southerners an acceptable reason to have fought. As to the Northern story, Blight suggests that there wasn't much of one. During the war, saving the union and freeing the slaves were both major motivations for Northerners, but as the war slipped into the past, Northern interest in maintaining the rights of black people faded. In time, race relations in the South became the province of state and local governments, with the North implicitly accepting the abandonment of black rights as the price of national reunion.Blight shows how this happened in very concrete detail: the emergence of a literature of the Lost Cause, the appearance of history and veteran's magazines and organizations advancing the southern view, the building of monuments in the South, the choosing of textbooks, the "reconciliationist" push for Blue/Grey reunions, etc. etc. etc. This was a highly organized and very successful effort to take control of the memory of the Civil War, a process which helped Southern states make race a local issue, not a national one. That, of course, had terrible implications for African Americans.More broadly, this book vividly illustrates how much of the "history" we learn in school and from the culture around us is really a version of history, selected and shaped to bolster patriotism and a sense of group identity. That's not just true of the American South, of course -- every society has its national myth, which forms the basis of its official version of history, including America as a whole. But the sucdess of the Southern story in taking over the national view and national politics -- especially national politics about race -- was remarkable. Clearly, history isn't always written by the victors.Note for those interested in the Civil War -- David Blight, the author of "Race and Reunion", has an EXCELLENT series of podcasts on "The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877" which is available free at I Tunes U at the ITunes store. It comprises 27 lectures, each about 50 minutes long, of which about a third are on pre-war developments, a third on the war itself, and a third on reconstruction. If this series were a book, it would be one of the best I have ever read on the Civil War. It isn't a book, but it is a great listen.

The end of the combat of arms in April 1865 began the combat of memory over the meanings of the American Civil War. For Southern whites and freed former slaves the stakes could not have been higher.White planters knew that if the war was recalled as a revolt by wealthy slave owners against the first modern democracy to preserve black men and women as mere property that they could never again occupy a leading role in the republic they had willingly sacrificed 600,000 lives to destroy.African Americans knew that their transition from chattel to citizenship depended on the support of a Northern electorate whose anger at the haughty manner in which Southerners had plunged the country into the worst war in American history made them a vengeful ally of the freedmen.Writing a hundred years after the war, Robert Penn Warren wrote that Civil War memory still penetrated into the consciousness of America. "The Civil War is our felt history-history lived in the national imagination", he wrote during those early years of the Civil Rights Movement. Penn Warren said that all Americans draw lessons from the war. One lesson is that "slavery looms up mountainously" in the American story, but the other is that "when one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten," or as William Dean Howells put it more succinctly, "What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending".African Americans tried to deny a happy ending to the Civil War, or any ending to it at all, before full equality was achieved.Historian David Blight's important book on the creation of Civil War memory, Race and Reunion, tells the story of how in American culture "romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory...as a culture, we have preferred [the Civil War's] music and pathos to its enduring challenges." He says that the war "haunts us...but often we do not face it."Immediately after the war ended, memory favored freed slaves.Once despised abolitionists were cast as unarmed heroes who had recognized the danger of the Slave Power of the Old South. These abolitionists advanced the theory that the war represented America's march towards equality and full democracy.Less ideologically determined Northern soldiers' memories saw the blacks as allies of the Union army and as the rescuers of lost soldiers and escapees from the South's notorious prisoner of war camps.Both memory sources saw the Southern elites as treasonous, anti-democratic, and barbarously violent.African American leaders like Frederick Douglas worked untiringly to keep these memories alive. They hailed Abraham Lincoln as the bringer of a new birth of freedom to America, insisted that the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of non-whites was central to its meaning, and reminded Northern veterans and their families that nearly 200,000 Southern blacks had volunteered to fight beside them in the Union army to preserve the United States as a haven of freedom.But, Blight says, "in the half century after the war, as the sections reconciled, by and large, the races divided." This was reflected in popular novels of the time. By the 1890s romantic fiction often involved secret love affairs between the daughter of a Confederate veteran and the son of a Union soldier. The parents at first try to stand in the way of a match that would unite two families that three decades earlier were involved in deadly warfare. When the lovers marry, they bring about a reconciliation of the families, symbolic of the reconciliation of the North and South. There, were, Blight writes, no similar romances of racial reconciliation in which the daughter of a planter marries the son of a freedman as a harbinger of reconciliation between former slave owner and slave.To emerge as a world power, the United States had to craft a nationalism that had never existed during its first century of independence. A country in which the powerful in the North and the powerful in the South were permanently at odds could never challenge Britain, France, or Germany on the world stage.Blight writes that "The memory of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism". Instead of examining the war's deeper meanings, Northerners gradually accepted the Southern white claim that the war was never about slavery and that the real focus of history should be on the heroism of the young white Americans involved in the war, their loyalty to what they believed to be right, and their devotion to duty.Southern white interest in maintaining this fiction was so great that state school boards across the South barred the use of textbooks that included a realistic treatment of race in their discussions of the war. National textbook publishers accordingly de-historicized their books to protect the tender sensibilities of the grandchildren of the Confederates.The extremes to which the Southern white effort to control history were willing to go can be seen in the 1911 response to an essay on the war by an academic historian. Enoch M. Banks taught at the University of Florida. He published an article on the war's Fiftieth Anniversary in which he said that after full study of the issue he had concluded that the "fundamental cause of secession and the Civil War...was the institution of slavery". This essay stirred a firestorm of denunciation across the South where newspapers denounced his "false and dangerous" views. State funding for the university was threatened and Banks resigned his professorship.As the North accepted the Southern white interpretation of the war, it also embraced its notions of racial segregation, and, Blight says, a "segregated society demanded a segregated historical memory." The new history of the war that emerged in the early 20th Century, essentially wrote blacks out of its narrative. When African Americans tried to assert their freedom as central to the war by holding Emancipation Day celebrations and commemorations of Lincoln's birthday every year, they came to be viewed as distorters of the true meaning of the war. Blight says that for blacks "Lincoln was their icon" and the Emancipation Proclamation their Magna Carta, but whites now took a jaundiced view of "Old Abe" and often seemed to forget the Proclamation entirely.In 1875 Fredrick Douglas had asked if war among the whites had brought emancipation for Blacks, what would peace bring? During the half century after he uttered that question, peace meant the increasing degradation of blacks and the whitewashing of memory.

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