Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Abstract

The study of historical memory is no mere academic exercise. Historical memory matters in contemporary political discussions, both despite and because of the public's seeming indifference to historical questions. Recent controversies over the Confederate battle flag make the application of these generalizations to the Civil War obvious, but the relationship is anything but simple. David W. Blight uses “divergent voices North and South, black and white” to craft a complex book. Although the study of memory has often been weakened by postmodern theorizing about social construction, Blight, while not ignoring the interdisciplinary literature of memory, writes with a passionate moral commitment that expresses clear preferences for some forms of historical memory over others. His thesis is refreshingly straightforward: during the half century after the Civil War, the sections reconciled and the races divided. For Blight “reunion” and “race” were always linked, and his three main categories of Civil War memory, reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist, coexisted in a world of tension, irony, and contradiction. By the time of the great Gettysburg reunion in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson declared an end to sectional strife by ignoring racial strife and when justice had been sacrificed to sentiment, troubling questions about Civil War memory remained unresolved even as the voices of those people who would still discuss the legacies of slavery had trouble finding an audience.