48 pages • 1 hour read
David W. BlightRace and Reunion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Tension Between Sectional Reunion and Racial Justice
Blight argues that when the Civil War concluded, the United States had to resolve two issues: reunion between North and South, and race. The United States never bridged the gap between these two problems, and in fact it widened in the 50 years after the war. This widening gap culminated in a white supremacist nation where Black Americans continued the struggle for equal civil and political rights into the 20th century. Moreover, modern controversies, like those surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, trace their origins to the time frame on which Blight focuses his analysis.
Soon after the Civil War’s end, most Republicans retreated from their commitment to political and civil rights for newly emancipated Black Americans. Although slavery was abolished, Black Americans were granted the rights of citizenship, and Black men gained suffrage, the newfound rights that emancipation brought were quickly eroded.
Although moderate Republican President Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved peoples in rebel states, much of the Republican commitment to racial justice died with Lincoln’s assassination and the subsequent degeneration of radical Republicanism. Blight notes that most moderate Republicans favored reconciliation which, in time, absorbed Southern, white supremacist ideology. The work of Union veteran and poet Walt Whitman is an early example of this Northern reconciliationism. For Whitman, the Civil War had not been about slavery, and he condemned the federal policy of Reconstruction as too extreme because it empowered Black Americans. Likewise, he believed the Union should help the South’s recovery and did not view the former Confederacy as a foe. Whitman’s writing acts as a “mirror of the larger culture’s tendencies toward a reconciliation that would postpone, or evade altogether, its racial reckoning” (22).
While many stressed an emancipationist vision of the war, including Black Americans who created their own memories and memorials to the war, this perspective was overwhelmed by white-dominated reunion ideology. Such ideology found expression in public rituals, like Blue-Gray veterans’ reunions, literature that romanticized a mythical and picturesque Old South populated by happy slaves, soldiers’ recollections that suppressed the war’s brutality, and Southern-dominated historical works. All gave rise to the ideology of the “Lost Cause,” which suggested that the war had never been about slavery and that enslaved peoples had been satisfied with their condition. Moreover, the Republican Party rejected Radical Reconstruction and eventually retreated from Reconstruction all together with the informal Compromise of 1877. This retreat handed victory to white supremacists in the South. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan succeeded in suppressing Black voters and crushing what remained of the Republican Party in the South. Blight states, “In the South, private nostalgia, public memory, and Reconstruction politics coalesced among whites to produce an increasingly lethal environment for the experiment in black equality forged out of the war” (42).
The South thus fought and won this 50-year propaganda campaign, as most Americans internalized Lost Cause ideology. This new battlefront reversed Northern Civil War victory and left Black Americans to cope with decades of racial injustice, against which the United States still struggles.
Evolution of the Lost Cause
Blight’s extensive research grounded in innumerable primary sources proves that the Southern Lost Cause myth developed over the 50 years after the end of the Civil War, emerging as the hegemonic form of public memory. Southerners, including organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, deliberately crafted and promoted Lost Cause mythology while Northerners surrendered to this Southern propaganda war in pursuit of reunion.
Blight argues that white Southerners knew that race and reunion were linked and disliked this linkage. In the early years after the war’s end, Northern traveler John R. Dennett met Southerners in Richmond hotels where they admitted to their loss while also decrying their “subjugation” to newly freed Black Americans. Lost Cause thinking also appears in Richmond’s newspaper, the Dispatch, which resumed circulation in 1865. In its first issue, the editors say nothing about slavery or emancipation. Instead, they emphasize
virtually all the ingredients (except organizations and rituals) that would form the Lost Cause: a public memory, a cult of the fallen soldier, a righteous political cause defeated only by a superior industrial might, a heritage community awaiting its exodus, and a people forming a collective identity as victims and survivors (38).
Southerners selectively chose their memories and launched this new ideological war as soon as the South surrendered at Appomattox. Blight identifies three significant components that facilitated Southern victory in this ideological war. First, proponents of the Lost Cause controlled the writing and circulation of Civil War history. Second, white supremacy was integral to its development. Finally, women played a leading role in promoting this myth. Records from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) illustrate this three-pronged approach. Blight shows that the UDC successfully manipulated historical records, argued against slavery as the war’s cause, and injected Lost Cause mythology into systems of education. UDC historian, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, for example, “was active in historical work, and for twenty-seven years she was principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute, a school for girls in Athens” (279). During the early 1900s, she compiled scrapbooks that collected pieces in support of the Lost Cause. She gave public speeches promoting the image of an idyllic Old South filled with happily enslaved people, and she argued that emancipation led to “black racial decline” (281).
The Lost Cause became “national reunion on Southern terms” (265), and Northerners absorbed and promoted this mythology. For instance, at a Memorial Day event in Baltimore in 1879, speaker A. M. Keiley said that Southerners seceded because of devotion to their home states. Likewise, some Northern newspapers, including the New York Times, lionized Robert E. Lee in their coverage of his monument unveiling in Richmond in 1890. Moreover, the paper called the monument a “national” one, instead of casting it as a memorial for an individual who rebelled against the Union. Though some former Confederates, like John Mosby, attacked the Lost Cause, voices like his were few. Blight concludes, “That the Mildred Rutherfords prevailed in Southern memory over the John Mosbys demonstrates how and why the Lost Cause left such an enduring burden in national memory” (299).
Black Civil War Memory
Although Blight’s work focuses on white supremacy’s successful dominance of public memory after the Civil War, he does not exclude Black narratives or Black contributions to public memory from his analysis. He proves that the white supremacist version of reconciliation was a conscious effort through the abundance of evidence from Black Americans who actively confronted and countered this racist version of Civil War memory. That work continues unfinished.
Black activists, academics, writers, orators, and veterans cautioned the nation against a reunion that ignored slavery’s centrality in the war’s birth. They highlighted the fact that emancipation was not the end but the beginning of a new national regeneration. Furthermore, they exposed the racism inherent in Lost Cause ideology and argued that Northern failures to protect Black Americans in the South led to a terroristic environment. This environment sought to replicate the subjugation associated with slavery and undid the progress of the new Constitutional Amendments giving Black Americans civil and political rights.
Abolitionist and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass is one of the most notable figures to warn the nation about the course it would take as the Union emerged from the war and undertook sectarian reunion. For example, he argued that new Memorial Day celebrations must center the morality of the war and condemned the South for causing their own distress. He told those who heard him speak during a memorial event in New York City not to fall into sentimentality or “seek reunion in the mutuality of soldiers’ sacrifice” (92). The war was, Douglass said, about slavery and a conflict of ideologies.
Later activists and thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells carried on the torch that Douglass lit. Wells exposed the horrors of racist lynchings that plagued the postwar South, challenging Booker T. Washington’s school of “Black progress” by showing that no matter how much Black Americans achieved, they still faced constant racist violence. Du Bois likewise suggested “the nation’s central turning point had been misshapen by white supremacy and the necessity of a mythological reunion” (32). The missteps of the Reconstruction era left the nation with a permanently scarred memory. Dr. Martin Luther King acknowledged this distorted memory in his “I Have a Dream” speech, given at the March on Washington in 1963. As Blight notes in a caption, King looked for “a day when his people are ‘free at last’ in a land of true racial reconciliation, but only after the unforgettable reminder that a century after the Civil War, black people are still ‘not free’” (396).
