March 22–29, 2001

books

Warring States

Fighting for the history of the Civil War.

by Paul Henry Rosenberg

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

By David W. Blight
Belknap Press, 576 p., $29.95

In an interview with Southern Partisan magazine, Attorney General John Ashcroft praised the magazine for "set[ting] the record straight… defending Southern patriots like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis." He went on to say, "Traditionalists should do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we will be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda." Senators as liberal as Paul Wellstone spoke up in Ashcroft’s defense, assuring us that he was "no racist." But historically, Ashcroft’s views are anything but innocent. Denying that the South fought for slavery was a key element in a decades-long ideological battle eventually settled in a devil’s bargain: reconciliation between whites North and South, purchased at the price of racial segregation. The story of how that bargain was struck is told by historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

Blight covers a period from 1863 to 1913, exploring three different broad visions of Civil War memory: reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist. The first began with wartime responses to its terrible brutality, epitomized by Walt Whitman’s experience of tending the wounded and dying of both sides. The second sprang from the Emancipation Proclamation and the over 200,000 black combatants who joined the Union Army and Navy. The third was gradually formulated in recovery from the South’s shock of military defeat, and eventually came to dominate reconciliationist thinking in a formula that sacrificed racial reconciliation for the sake of sectional reunion.

Naturally, this could only happen if slavery were skillfully removed from the core meaning of the Civil War. There was no way to make slavery vanish, but it could be presented exactly as Southerners wished it to be: as a lost ideal. Thus, stories of faithful slaves defending plantations against invading Yankee troops became archetypical (like Vietnam War stories about unreturned POWs or protesters spitting on returning troops) while the real history of massive black mobilization on the Union side was virtually forgotten. This cleared the way for a new central story, one of male bonding: a sacred battle between equally noble white brothers who mystically had to fight each other in order to eventually reconcile and unify as they could never have otherwise done. This story, celebrating heroism and valor on both sides, clearly required Lee’s nobility, which meant he must have fought for a noble cause, as the South had always claimed. The triumph of the South’s interpretation facilitated economic reintegration on acceptable terms: segregation and the loss of all black political power.

There were definite stages in the process of reshaping memory, which Blight’s broadly chronological account recognizes without overstressing. Instead, threads of continuity stand out. The overnight popularity of Booker T. Washington’s formula for accommodation to segregation is a case in point. Washington satisfied Southern white supremacist fantasies of black leadership willfully submitting to and celebrating them, which reinforced their long-held mythology of faithful slaves defending the Confederacy. He satisfied white reconciliationists of both sections by denouncing Reconstruction as a mistake: a common white view for nearly a generation before Washington echoed it. At the same time, he satisfied black longings for progress reflected in an emerging literature celebrating black achievements since Emancipation, although he placed definite limits where others would not. The only significant opposition he encountered, among other blacks, was also framed in terms of evolving interpretive traditions with roots predating Emancipation, which provided themes that would prove central to 20th-century leaders as diverse as Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King.

Race and Reunion is a deeply unsettling, pioneering work that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer: questions that should continue to trouble us. John Ashcroft’s Civil War views provide striking testimony that the myths and lies forged over a century ago still have us locked in their chains.