Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001.

Book Review

Before the American Civil War even ended people looked for meaning in the dead and the living. David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory provides readers with three leading memories of the Civil War: (1) the reconciliationist vision that extolled the dedication of Union and Confederate soldiers without entertaining discourse on the causes and motives of the Civil War, (2) the white supremacist vision that would minimize the role of race and slavery as a cause of the war and justification of the South’s social order before the war, and (3) the emancipationist remembrance that struggled to provide the rebirth of the nation with black citizenship and black equality. These three visions would propel Americans out of the Civil War and Reconstruction years to well into the nineteenth century. 

Blight relies heavily on poet Walt Whitman for the root of reconciliationist thought and ideology. Serving the wounded and dying of both armies, Whitman became the epitome of the sectional reconciler: understanding of soldiers’ death and their need to mourn, commemorate, and memorialize all the death on both sides.(1) In fact, Blight credits Whitman with building and illuminating “the literary avenue to reunion.”(2) After the Civil War many Americans wanted to forget the Civil War and its causes. Sectional reconciliation would allow both the North and South to come together and rebuild the nation. Just days after the surrender at Appomattox the first mutual ceremony involving a parade and the decoration of the graves of the dead with spring flowers took place. (3) What was known then as ‘Decoration Day,’ would later become known as Memorial Day, spread throughout the North and South as a way to mutually sympathize and respect the dead of both sides. (4) Veterans themselves also needed a way to recollect and reunite. With a wave of fraternalism, soldiers’ reunions became a way for veterans to reminisce and express their shared trauma. These aging veterans were able to reconcile themselves together through commemoration of a common valor shared in the Civil War. 

Even with themes of reconciliation abounding in American culture and literature, Blight maintains that the white supremacist vision of the Civil War and Reconstruction took the place of the reconcilationist vision, especially in the South. In the beginning, Southerners had begun to remember the Civil War as the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause was the voice of reconciliation, but equally demeaned blacks, and crushed black adult’s rights. (5) The three elements that maintained prominence in the Lost Cause were the movement’s effort to write and control history, its use of white supremacy, and the place of women in its development. (6) And so, what began as a white counterrevolution during Reconstruction became the genesis of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. (7) The Lost Cause developed into the South’s narrative of racial victory. (8) Specifically using the literary works of Thomas Nelson Page, Blight proves his point about the white supremacist vision. Because of Page’s fiction that depicted the plantation legend and agrarian virtue, he became a literary superstar for the South.(9) Undoubtedly, one of the most racially biased figures Blight utilizes as an example of white supremacy and black hatred is Mildred Lewis Rutherford of Athens, Georgia. As historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Rutherford was able to collect a massive library of the racist underworld and Lost Cause ideology. With essays, photographs and postcards, Rutherford filled scrapbooks with examples of lynchings, ‘loyal’ ex-slaves and Klansmen. (10) The white supremacist vision took deep root in the South, eventually leading to the Jim Crow era of Southern society and becoming ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. 

According to Blight, lingering in the background of both the reconciliationist and white supremacist visions stood the emancipationist remembrance of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Led by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, the narrative of black Civil War memory was of a national rebirth and redefinition. (11) In a lengthy chapter, “Black Memory and Progress of the Race,” Blight cites Booker T. Washington as leading the rhetoric on the “progress of the race” and the race problem. (12) Washington’s “progress of the race” theory viewed the beginning of of Negro life in America as the end of slavery, along with blacks emerging from slavery as a Christian people. (13) Washington pushed an “accommodationism” society, where blacks should demonstrate gratitude for past lives laid down and sacrifices made. (14) Blight goes on to paint Washington as the ultimate apologizer for the black race, both for their color and inability to live up to standards set by whites. Emancipationism fused the rebirth and redefinition led by Douglass and the accommodationism vision led by Washington.

As the 50th anniversary of the Civil War loomed, Americans had seen economic and social change, along with sectional reconciliation. (15) At the supremely segregated reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, Blight points out that whites took the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction from blacks, leaving blacks as outsiders looking in - a trend that would continue throughout the nineteenth century. (16)

Blight’s use of contemporary literature and resources is impressive; however, Race and Reunion is not easy to read, in part because of the frequent borrowing from other sources. Blight could have had a greater eye for detail, as in his frequent omission of a closing parenthesis. Even more detracting is the transposition of the abbreviation for the Son’s of Confederate Veterans as SVC instead of SCV. (17) Other than Presidential elections in the two decades following the Civil War does Blight reference the political climate. Perhaps anticipating such criticism, Blight points out in his prologue that he does put considerable attention on Reconstruction politics while leaving out “late-nineteenth-century presidential politics.” (18) This omission of nineteenth century political climate by Blight leaves much unsaid for the plight of African-Americans into the nineteenth century. 

As the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and Professor of History at Yale University, David W. Blight is a leading expert on the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Race and Reunion received many book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize. (19)

¹ David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001), 23. 

² Blight, Race and Reunion, 20. 

³ Blight, Race and Reunion, 65. 

⁴ Blight, Race and Reunion, 84. 

⁵ Blight, Race and Reunion, 272. 

⁶ Blight, Race and Reunion, 259. 

⁷ Blight, Race and Reunion, 112.

⁸ Blight, Race and Reunion, 291. 

⁹ Blight, Race and Reunion, 225. 

¹⁰ Blight, Race and Reunion, 289-290.

¹¹ Blight, Race and Reunion, 303. 

¹² Blight, Race and Reunion, 300. 

¹³ Blight, Race and Reunion, 320. 

¹⁴ Blight, Race and Reunion, 348. 

¹⁵ Blight, Race and Reunion, 359. 

¹⁶ Blight, Race and Reunion, 366. 

¹⁷ Blight, Race and Reunion, 272. 

¹⁸ Blight, Race and Reunion, 2. 

¹⁹ Yale University Department of History. “David Blight.” accessed May 19, 2014, history.yale.edu/people/david-blight.