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    Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
    Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
    Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
    Audiobook20 hours

    Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

    Written by David W. Blight

    Narrated by David Colacci

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.

    In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.

    Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 30, 2019
    ISBN9781977336040
    Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
    Author

    David W. Blight

    David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others.

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    Reviews for Race and Reunion

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    • 5/5
      Who Shaped Your View of the American Civil War?

      Even before the Civil War ended, people began forming their own memories about it, in particular about what caused it. Depending upon when and where you grew up in the U.S., it’s a good bet you may not share the same understanding of the cause. In fact, if you think about the Civil War at all, you probably focus on the battles, the generals, the valiantness of soldiers, and the like. You may not even use the term Civil War, but maybe War Between the States, or the War for Southern Independence, to name but a few. It’s worth pausing and asking yourself why many of us still to this day, more than 150 years after the guns silenced, carry around varying memories of among the most monumental periods in American History. Because, as David W. Blight, Yale prof and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center (for the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition) shows, a second struggle ensued. This involved words, societies, memorials, monuments, and a generalized racism that continues to this day. Memory, as Blight forcefully demonstrates, is quite malleable.

      In brief summary, three strains of thought regarding the war developed in the years following its conclusion. These were emancipationists, white supremacists, and reconciliationists. For a time, the emancipationists prevailed, primarily during Reconstruction (voting rights, approximate equal treatment under the law, and the like). But nearly after the war’s end, whites (think the Klan, separation of races, distorted histories) began terrorizing freedmen, white leaders rebelled against Reconstruction (even today many recall it as harsh retribution), and writers started constructing a mythology that cast the Antebellum South and the war in a golden hue, which, among other things, portrayed slaves as loyal and faithful to their masters, as liking their condition, and most perniciously as simple minded and barbaric (if not taken in hand and guided by the white race). You can find and read works by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Dixon, and Margaret Mitchell, all of whom’s titles are available on Amazon, to experience these first-hand.

      In short, the South, with the acquiesce of reconcilationists, rewrote history and this rewrite pervaded even the North. Those interested in reconciliation and moving forward did so by ignoring the virulent racism in the South. Rather than a war to end slavery, the aftermath became something of a reversal to memorialize aspects of the Antebellum South, it became the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and memorialization because the honoring of old traditions at graveyards, with marches, and plenty of speechifying honoring the dead, even if what was called honor came in the service of an evil cause.

      How this came about makes for a fascinating historical tale told well and in detail by Blight. More, though, it serves as yet another illustration of how propagandizing can distort and even change the collective memory of events, because memory isn’t necessarily factual and it can be, and has been more than once, molded.
    • 5/5
      Two occurrences in recent years have drawn me to think on how the meaning of history influences modern conceptions widely held in the national mind. While at a funeral in Richmond I sat by an elderly, very Southern, woman. I mentioned how rich is Richmond in museums and remarked on its famous boulevard of monuments to Confederate notables. She told me she was distantly related to Kirby Smith, a lesser known general in Confederate army. She said it was important to revere "our Southern heritage". I thought, "what on earth does that mean?" What is to revere about a political revolt that sought to dissolve the union and whose motivating aim was the preservation of slavery. What about the 100+ years of overt white supremacy with its lynchings and social and political suppression? The second occurrence was (and still is) the controversy roiling about the "Silent Sam" statue on the campus of UNC (and Charlottesville, too). How is it that 150+ years after the end of the Civil War this issue generates such hostility on both sides? Reverence as a desirable virtue? What would we think of reverence for history in modern Germany that resulted in statues of Nazi military and political leaders placed in every village square?History is memory. Memory is inherently a matter of interpretation, never neutral and quite often shaped by powerful contemporaneous social, political and cultural forces. David Blight gives a masterful analysis of how memories of the Civil War were hugely influenced by its losing side and with the nearly cavalier acceptance nationally by academia and literature/journalism. His themes can be succinctly summarized as: the drive toward reconciliation, sentimentality and romanticism replacing revulsion of the horrors, reaction to the perceived oppression of Reconstruction, a false portrayal of the halcyon days of benign slavery in literature, the threat to white supremacy resulting from emancipation, and distortions to the point of falsehoods about the causes of the conflict. All of this infused the so-called "Lost Cause" portrayal of the South's military defeat.Its defeat forcibly rejoined the southern states to the union. But, how would the hostilities and bitterness of the bloodiest war in history ever be resolved? Blight argues convincingly that fairly soon after the end of the war the two sides drifted toward reconciliation, that the perpetuation of animus must at some point diminish and disappear. We see this, do we not, after every war. The opponents accept each other on new terms and even become allies. For the South, however, this did not entail wiping away their beliefs in the righteousness of their cause. (Do today's Germans think that Nazi ideology is, or ever was, proper?) The South's defeat did not produce an epiphany on the errors of its ways. Rather, notions arose that the South's casus belli remained morally proper, that secession was politically justified and that defeat was due only to the North's overwhelming advantages in resources. What was important for memory to extol was valor, what was to be suppressed were morally and politically dubious instigating factors. The conflict, thus, became in Southern eyes the "War Between the States" or the "War of Northern Aggression".How, then, to deal with the view that the decades-long tension over slavery was a primary cause? Southerners evoked the idea that slavery was a beneficent relationship between the races that the slaves actually cherished, that the disruption of this natural state of relations was detrimental to both races. In this view, Negroes were helplessly child-like who benefited from the guidance and protection of the beneficent masters. Underlying this theme, of course, was the imperative to Southerners to preserve absolute supremacy over the emancipated slaves, politically, culturally and socially. This, as we know, resulted in the "Jim Crow" era of political repression in all its ugly manifestations.If its ethos was virtuous, if its defeat was due only to a far more powerful enemy, then efforts of the victors to reorder the South politically and socially were heinously wrong. So emerged the distorted historical theses on Reconstruction. I recall from my now distant high school days the teaching on those reviled characters -- the "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" -- who imposed corrupt regimes on the Southern states. The image of blacks as incompetent and nearly savage in their new found political voice was a prominent feature of textbooks of the day. Blight points out that a major strategy of promoters of the "redemption" of the South's was to capture the minds of the young. It is astonishing to realize that a great number of purportedly professional historians adopted this perspective. As the wag said, "History is the way by which we betray the past." Is revisionism sometimes a product of rethinking stimulated by contemporary views? Yes, of course, history can never ignore its ongoing obligation to correct its errors, to get things right.Perhaps, then, we should not wonder why, in 21st century America, there is renewed attention to the meaning of memorials that commemorate an ideology based on racism and oppression. When our president spews forth his "dog whistle" messages on racism, when he posits the virtue of a film like "Gone with the Wind" as a model of film making, when hostility and violence erupts over removing symbols of racism from the public square, we know that history is deeply responsible to fulfilling its responsibility to the public psyche.
    • 4/5
      A history of just how fast white Americans decided that they’d fixed slavery and that everybody on the battlefield was noble. I was amazed all over again by how fast even high Confederate officials began insisting that they hadn’t seceded over slavery, but over mumble mumble federal overreach—it took only a few years, though it was deliberately cultivated and alternative accounts erased in organized fashion by Southern history leagues, often led by white women. African-Americans and some allies held out for a different view, but the Southern white insistence a mere twenty years later that they’d actually won the peace has a depressing truth absent from the rest of the white supremacist story. Also, white southerners insisted that they hadn’t really lost the war as a matter of soldiering; they’d just been overwhelmed by Northern resources. Nice to get to redefine what it means to lose, I guess.
    • 4/5
      Iinsightful.
    • 4/5
      This is a 2001 book by a history professor at Amherst. It studies the way the country viewed the Civil War during the period from 1865 t o 1915, and how the South "won" all it fought for except slavery. The South was able to do this because of prejudice against blacks in the North. I think I knew what this book told me, and the point made is an obvious one. I am surely glad the civil rights movement after World War II changed the view of so many. This is a good book, telling of an important fact in U.S. history but that I needed to read a whole book (of 485 pages) about it is questionable.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      This is an excellent, and extremely well-documented, history of Reconstruction and the years afterward, and how the ideas of what the Civil War stood for were shaped in those years. I first became interested in this subject after reading Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic last year. I was so amazed by some of the differences between how the Civil War is remembered in the North and in the South, and this book really lets you see how those differences were nourished and evolved. If you follow the news, you may recall a controversy in Virginia earlier this year, when Governor Bob McDonnell issued a statement declaring April "Confederate History Month" and didn't mention slavery at all. To understand how the "Lost Cause" came to be totally separated from what many of us (in the North at least) considered to be the true and lasting cause of the war, slavery, this book is an essential too. It is exhaustively researched and very dense, and ultimately fascinated. For anyone interested in American history, the Civil War and its effects, or the constantly changing view of race in America, I can highly recommend this one, although it may take you a while to read it. Four and a half stars.
    • 4/5
      I didn't read the entire book; I only read parts of it for a university history class. It was really interesting, though, and also quite disturbing. It discusses the many ways in which the way the Civil War has been commemorated and remembered have shifted our perception about why the war started in the first place, and what it was about. Mostly, the parts I read focused on the way that reconciliation between the white people of both sections (North and South) took precedence over any attempt at giving equality to the black who had been freed, which explains a LOT about racism in our modern society.