Race and Reunion

The ironies of warfare shaped veterans’ memories. Soldiers experienced extensive brutalities, and what they witnessed and experienced, including starvation and suffering in wartime hospitals or prisons, left them traumatized. Likewise, they lived with the opposing memories of the atrocities they had committed alongside the heroism they exhibited. Both Union and Confederate veterans believed deeply in the principles for which they had taken up arms. Organizations of Civil War veterans on local, state, and national levels took shape and engaged in the communal memorialization of the dead, thus fulfilling many veterans’ psychological needs.

Reconstruction’s political upheaval is evident in soldiers’ recollections. Black veterans’ remembrance diverged from their white Union counterparts who viewed the conflict as over. But for Black Americans, tension raged onward. Officers told Black federal troops to forget the former conflict and move on.

Immediately, postwar veterans’ memories were tucked away in a “state of incubation” and “unsettled,” but with time became “a cultural force” (150). Magazines printed veterans’ stories of the war, as did historical journals. These publications proved very popular, though they rarely covered the war’s true brutality. They provided readers with a mixture of thrilling battles, depoliticized war as popular entertainment, partisan tomes that stressed the politics of causation as well as the war’s results, and works that simply allowed the reader/consumer to compile material like Victorian collectors (151).

In the 1870s, Northern travel accounts that described former battlefields became popular sources of reminiscence. Union veteran Russell H. Conwell, for example, toured the South and published his encounter with the emerging Lost Cause mythology in the form of Confederate flags and images of Confederate general Robert E. Lee hanging on the walls of southern residences. Confederate veterans began publishing sentimental accounts of the war that fed this myth with the Southern Historical Society (SHS) Papers providing an outlet for these stories. By the 1870s, authoring memoirs had taken off among both Northern and Southern veterans. Each side sought justification “for their causes as well as for their personal records” (164). Some sought to justify the atrocities they had committed. Moreover, this emerging body of reminiscent war literature worked to “claim moral victory” (165). Black people and Black voices did not regularly appear in white veterans’ written memories, except in tangential ways.

Nevertheless, Black veterans recorded their own experiences. Union veteran George Washington Williams, for instance, gave a public speech in 1876 in which he highlighted the roles that Black soldiers played in the war and laid “claim to glory in the nation’s memory” (169). Williams’ emancipationist view contrasts with the reconciliationist and mythical Lost Cause perspectives that appeared in much of the veterans’ stories published up to the 1870s. This contrast demonstrates the need for the reunited nation to confront conflicting memories in future years. As Blight concludes, “Some of the real war, and much of an imagined one, was already getting into books” (170).

Union veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term that titles the sixth chapter of Race and Reunion. As of the 1890s, a “soldiers’ faith” dominated the reunification of the country and “veterans’ culture.” It was generated from an “ideology of manliness and an antimodern scorn for commerce and materialism” (208-09). Veterans’ reunions became the major medium through which remembrance of the war took place and shape: “If the old soldiers could find each other, bridge every bloody chasm, and celebrate their former strenuous life, then the rest of society could follow in step” (209). Union and Confederate veterans gathered for reunions, where they would read their personal war narratives. Such gatherings lasted into the 20th century.

Magazines, notably Century, ran innumerable veterans’ stories beginning in the 1880s, driven by the editors’ desire for reunion. Thus, ex-soldiers’ published memories were sources of profit. These publications acted as “a depoliticized vehicle of sectional reconciliation” (175) since they ignored slavery and the war’s effects. The magazine’s efforts proved wildly popular, with veterans who might otherwise have never told their stories seeking out the opportunity to have theirs printed, and women offered up letters from their male kin. Moreover, women authored their own reflections on the war for publication. This media frenzy centered on war reflection “promoted a kind of democratization of memory, especially among whites” (179), as regular folk had their voices heard.

Organizations of veterans, like the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), also served as outlets for the telling of war stories. Veterans assembled at these regular meetings to read formal papers they had drafted highlighting their experiences. Such outlets allowed former soldiers to relive their wartime experiences and to exercise new power over something previously uncontrollable. Blight notes, “While doing so, they cleaned up the battles and campaigns of the real war, rendered it exciting and normal all at once, and made it difficult to face the extended, political meaning of the war.” (182-83). Although the terror of war is not absent from some of these recollections, this theme failed to comply with the reconciliationist desire for healing and reunion, and therefore the public gave these stories little notice.

Sentimental accounts offered a patriotic mythology that praised men on both sides for “what they had accomplished for the larger society” (189). Furthermore, these veterans’ accounts “carried a politics of soldierly difference that tended toward manly reconciliation” (189). Their writings exhibit a desire to find some common ground that reunification of the nation demanded.

Some white officers who had been in command of Black soldiers demanded equal rights for their veterans and their full inclusion in veterans’ groups. But, more commonly, when white veterans wrote about Black soldiers they tended to portray them through a lens of “romantic realism” (192) or ignored race. Black veterans, however, established organizations of their own, since the GAR was segregated, where they could find community and reminisce. Over 100 Black veterans took part in a reunion in Boston during 1887. The experience of Black veterans in the North stands in contrast to those in the Jim Crow south, where their ability to organize was limited by white supremacists. Black veterans also wrote autobiographies that recounted their wartime experiences; George Washington Williams led a push during the 1880s for a national monument to Black Civil War soldiers, but such a memorial did not materialize until later. Blight says:

Williams’s emancipationist vision collided tragically with the commonplace notion of the white man’s war, a war between men of equally strong character and devotion on both sides, a vision destined to reconcile the sections, celebrate a common American manhood, but largely ignore race and black freedom (198).

Thus, by the 1880s, veterans’ groups primarily promoted the themes of fraternity, reconciliation, ideal manliness, and shared admiration for each other’s sacrifices that largely excluded Black men. These white veterans looked back to a mythical golden age of “an older, more wholesome society” (201) that lay untouched by the Gilded Age’s materialism. Blue-Gray reunions served to publicly display this fraternalism and promoted reconciliation. Discussing race at these events would have been anathema. Meanwhile, white supremacy ascended.

Nineteenth century works of literature were a powerful method of communication. They facilitated the growth of the ideology of reconciliation, a nostalgic view of the antebellum South, and Lost Cause mythology. Alternatively, a minority of veterans publicly denounced these inaccuracies and critiqued this sentimentalism. This literature consisted of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction.

In the mid-1880s, former president and Union general Ulysses S. Grant published his memoir as he neared death. Blight describes his tome as “retrained realism in the service of reunion” (212). Although reconciliationism characterizes his work, Grant also acknowledged the South’s commitment to slavery as the war’s genesis. He wrote with respect for Robert E. Lee in his description of Lee’s surrender in 1865, describing him with the fraternalism that tended to characterize soldiers’ memories. His work thus “reinforced Lost Causers, reconciliationists, and war romantics” (215).

During the 1880s and continuing to the turn of the century, Southern authors writing about the prewar South grew in popularity. This “plantation school” of literature, including novels and magazine publications, was markedly reconciliationist, ignored the issue of emancipation, and avoided discussions of the war’s violence. Northern writers emphasized reconciliation and highlighted the courage of soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Novels often included stories about marriages between Northerners and Southerners as symbolic of sectional reunion. As they lived through the industrialization and commercialism of the Gilded Age, many Americans sought mental escape in this romanticized past, or what Blight calls “this former Eden” (224).

Veteran and carpetbagger writer Albion W. Tourgée, however, struck back at these nostalgic representations. As both a novelist and journalist, he took on the “plantation school” that romanticized the Old South, promoting an emancipationist vision of the war. Tourgée saw the war as catastrophic for the nation and “resented the facile sentimentalism of Northern acquiescence to this romantic inducement of national forgetting” (219). He criticized the racist and stereotypical depictions of Black Americans in nostalgic literature, where they appeared as loyal slaves or pitiful characters facing adversity caused by their emancipation. Literary realists, including Stephen Crane who authored the well-known Red Badge of Courage, likewise pushed back against this sentimentality, yet they ignored the violence of war and rather centered masculine courage. Prison narratives, many of which appeared in the 1890s, primarily captured the war’s brutality. Yet these stories also perpetuated racial stereotypes. Simultaneously, white authors conflated imprisonment with enslavement.

Most Northern writers, though, were seduced by nostalgia and sentimentality. Northerners published romanticized accounts of the prewar Underground Railroad that promoted white saviorism. Newspapers printed individual abolitionist accounts, with many claiming their family members had been involved in the Underground Railroad. While there is some truth in these stories, a narcissism characterizes many, and they reflect, much like the literature of the Old South, a Gilded Age desire to retreat into the past. Blight argues that these tales were a way for Northerners to claim “an alternative veteranhood” (234). Moreover, these stories marginalize Black characters who appear as racist stereotypes—the literary equivalent of blackface minstrel show characters. Likewise, such tales fail to acknowledge the war’s emancipationist legacies.

Union veteran and abolitionist Ambrose Bierce published some of the most realistic accounts of the war’s terrors. His work is thus exceptional for its time. Blight writes, “Rather than revealing a survivor’s guilt or gratitude, Bierce seemed to have a survivor’s contempt, an almost adoring hatred, for war” (244). Yet Bierce’s trauma also led to his reconciliationism. The men who fought this war were, in his eyes, “victims of a nation’s folly […] Hence Bierce had no trouble reconciling with his former enemies” (249).

Black activist, writer, and orator W. E. B. Du Bois fervently rejected the nostalgic and mythological literature that white writers produced during the latter 19th century. His 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, centers the Black South and dismantles the Lost Cause. In it, Du Bois describes the turmoil, toil, and terror that emancipated Black Americans experienced. This perspective counters the myth of the happily enslaved people who show up in the romanticized plantation literature. Rather than conclude with the happy union of a North-South marriage or a Blue-Gray reunion, Du Bois presents his audience with “veterans of another conflict” (254). His veterans are the “old male slaveholder—the broken symbol of wealth, power, and sexual domination—and an old black woman, representing ‘Mammy,’ mother, and survivor” (254). Blight questions whether a reunified nation can cross this gap.

The 1896 opening of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s former Virginia mansion as a museum symbolizes the ascendence of the Lost Cause mythology. Featured speaker and ex-Confederate officer, Bradley T. Johnson justified the South’s motivations for seceding from the Union and argued that slavery was not the war’s cause. Rather, he said, that an industrialized Northern mob laid siege to the South’s slave democracy and compared the Confederacy to the birthplace of Western democracy, ancient Athens. He thus reframed the war as one about the preservation of democracy rather than one about Southern states’ right to continue slave labor. He portrayed the North as the oppressor of an enslaved South. Most now realized, he suggested, that the South had been on the side of righteousness. His speech is the embodiment of the Lost Cause.

In the first 20 years after the Civil War, Virginians were the primary shapers of the Lost Cause. By the 1890s, however, Southern organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) took control of this mythology, which they promoted and spread in multiple ways. Their efforts proved successful as they “shaped a national reunion on their own terms” (258). The Lost Cause became what Blight terms a “civil religion” that was linked to a Southern “Christian conception of history” (258). Three factors contributed to the success of their efforts. First, these groups, notably the UDC, exercised power over the war’s genesis and consequences. Second, they implemented the tactics of white supremacists to control the historical narrative. And finally, Southern women played important roles in spreading this ideology. For example, they were instrumental in turning Davis’s former home into a museum.

Jefferson Davis helped guide this Southern narrative by publishing his memoir on the rise and collapse of the Confederacy. He blamed the North for forcing the South into seceding, argued the Southern states were simply defending their rights, and said that slavery was only incidental to the war. Moreover, he argued that enslavement was a good thing for Black Americans by falsely claiming their ancestors came from a brutal and backward continent. Enslavement, Davis said, had the effect of blessing Black Americans with Christianity. He added that slave masters were paternalistic and enslaved peoples loyal to their white enslavers.

Groups of Confederate veterans put the Lost Cause ideology on “new and more permanent footing” (261) while seeking to craft and spread what they viewed as real Southern history. The Southern Historical Society did the same through its journal publications. Blight writes that the editor and members who authored contributions “labored as though they were under a literary siege” (262). Memory was the new battlefront.

Reunion and the Lost Cause were not mutually exclusive. Alongside Lost Causers, proponents of reunion alongside upheld white supremacy and encouraged economic recovery of the South. Although some reconciliationists supported the newly codified amendments that extended citizenship to Black Americans, abolished slavery, and gave Black men the right to vote, they simultaneously excused secessionists and praised the courage of Confederate veterans. Ultimately, the country’s reunion took place “on Southern terms” (265). Blight writes, “The Lost Cause became an integral part of national reconciliation by dint of sheer sentimentalism, by political argument, and by recurrent celebrations and rituals” (266). National memory absorbed the Lost Cause, as exemplified by the 1890 unveiling of the memorial dedicated to Confederate Robert E. Lee located in Richmond, Virginia. While Northern journalists lamented the Confederate flags they saw, they simultaneously praised the South’s love for Lee. Southern papers viewed the unveiling as a new victory in the quest for recognition and respect from their Northern neighbors.

By the 1890s, both the UDC and the UCV played significant roles in promoting the Lost Cause mythology on a national scale. The UDC worked to shape the historical narrative of the war and control what the public learned—or did not learn—about the war’s genesis. Both organizations “established history committees that guarded the Confederate past against all its real and imagined enemies” (274). They also encouraged racist narratives about the fictitious loyal slave, “borrowing heavily from the plantation school of literature” (274). Furthermore, Southerners bigotry blended with nostalgia for the “Old South,” as Southerners weaponized the Lost Cause to lash out at the rising number of immigrants arriving in Gilded Age America and to criticize political radicals. Controlling history gave the Lost Cause “long-term strength,” while the imagined “faithful slave” fed the ideology’s white supremacist bent and provided “staying power” (284). These images abound in Lost Cause nonfiction publications and the UDC’s compilations of memories. They convey more about the postbellum Jim Crow South than about the South as it truly was before the Civil War. Blight says, “In dialect poems written in the voices of loyal slaves, in “darky” minstrel performances, and in unpublished family reminiscences, white Southerners strove to convince themselves that emancipation had ruined an ideal race relations” (286).

“Scalawags,” or former Confederates who joined the Republican Party, countered the Lost Cause. By the 1890s, biracial political Populism emerged to reject the social and economic elitism of the Lost Cause. A few former Confederates, like John Mosby, refused to participate in reunions and conceded that slavery led to the war. Nevertheless, their resistance was unsuccessful. Blight concludes that the nation’s reunification was predicated on a “tragic interdependence” with race.