
Remembering and Forgetting
Reviewed by Whitley, BlandBland Whitley
Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 32-34

David W. Bright, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in
American Memory. Boston, Harvard University Press, 2001As recent debates over the continued use of the
Confederate battle flag have demonstrated, the legacy of
the Civil War remains a prominent feature in the political
landscape of the South. In Mississippi and South Carolina
the conflict between pro- and anti-flag, forces ignited
the kind of impassioned activism that issues such as
education, economic development, and electoral reform
rarely seem capable of inspiring. Georgia may have
avoided these passions by inaugurating a new flag in the
smoky corridors of the legislature with little prior warning
(although backed by years of proposals), but this
remains to be seen. Already, there are rumbles that white
rural voters may take their anger out on the legislators who supported changing the state flag as well as on
Democratic Governor Roy Barnes. Some observers are
even citing the flag issue as the political wedge that
Republicans have been seeking in their efforts to seize
majorities in the legislature. After all this time the Civil
War persists as a vessel into which different constituencies
pour their political wishes and frustrations. Why do
so many people, particularly conservative white
southerners, cling to the war as a defining element in
their identities?David Blight's masterful work does not set out to
answer this question, but it is essential reading for anyone who might
wish to wrestle with the issues raised by the war and why they
continue to resonate in contemporary America. Covering the fifty years
following Appomattox, Blight analyzes how different groups constructed
their memories of the Civil War and how these memories took root in
the national consciousness or faded into the background. Blight
outlines three main forms of Civil War memory, all of which fostered
their own master narratives: emancipationist, mainly characteristic of
African Americans and their allies; reconciliationist, a largely white northern affair, and white supremacist, the stance of most white southerners. The
main thrust of Blight's account details how
reconciliationism accommodated itself to the white supremacist
narrative, thereby marginalizing the emancipationist
vision. In this regard Civil War memory (and forgetting)
paved the way for the marginalization of African Ameri-
cans in other walks of life. By rejecting the more politically charged
emancipationist interpretation and by choosing sectional healing over
racial justice, northern whites helped helped signal their abdication
of southern affairs to their former enemies.Remembrance of the war began even before the conflict had
ended. The Gettysburg Address announced one path that Americans'
collective memory might trod. By reflecting on the causes of the war
and on the sacrifices of the soldier, Americans might fashion a new,
if familiar, American creed that would finally live up to the
egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. Despite, and in some respects
because of, white southern intransigence, this ideologically charged
interpretation did exert a powerful influence over the public
imagination in the immediate postwar era. It helped shore up radical
Reconstruction, if only temporarily and fostered widespread resentment
of the Confederate cause. The narrative of a reborn nation proved
especially compelling for African Americans whose remembrance was
spiked by public celebrations of emancipation and of the service of black soldiers. In fact, Blight has unearthed evidence which shows that Memorial Day
saw its first incarnation among freed people and their
white allies in Charleston shortly after the war's close. Yet at its moment of triumph, this emancipationist vision was
yielding to the thirst for reconciliation. The central irony running
through Blight's account is the damage that the humane goal of
overcoming sectional hatreds did to the possibility for a more
egalitarian union. The problem with healing divisions was that it
could only be accomplished by stripping war remembrance of any taint
of ideology. Soldiers of either side might be honored for the virtues
of courage and persistence they all shared, but if issues like war causation
or African Americans' claims on equal citizenship appeared, sectional heat grew
too intense. The continued political well-being of blacks depended, in
other words, on the enmity of northern and southern whites. As
Frederick Douglass summed matters up, "If war among the whites brought
peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?"
The reconciliationist impulse emerged first among southern patricians
and northern conservatives, who urged Americans to put the war's
destruction behind them and come together for the common good. Initially a defensive
posture that sought to overcome bitterness of radical Republicans and
Confederate die-hards, reconciliation eventually provided a model for
how white Americans would choose to remember the war. As Reconstruction
collapsed under the weight of southern white violence and as
Republicans began to devote themselves more exclusively to greasing
the wheels of corporate industrialism, northern whites grew
increasingly unwilling to 
examine the political dynamics of the war and its legacy. 
Sentimental paeans to soldiers and immersions in the minutiae of battle strategy replaced analyses of the agonizing issues that still confronted American society.Southern whites were only too happy to participate in these
apolitical remembrances. Yet stripping ideology from memory was never
part of white southerners strategy. On the contrary, they asserted the
righteousness of the Confederate cause, and while acknowledging that
slavery's end might have been a good thing, they discounted slavery as
a source of the conflict. Thus was born the states' rights explanation
that continues to work such mischief in American politics and
culture. As the attention of northern whites drifted away from the
war, southern whites intensified their interest in the recent past. In
the sentimental fiction of writers like Thomas Nelson Page, in the
commemorative exercises of the United Confederate Veterans and the
United Daughters of the Confederacy, and in burgeoning historical
societies, an uncompromising narrative emerged. This narrative
subsumed the reconciliationist vision under a white supremacist
package with several components: the comity exist-

ing between master and slave in the Old South" the states right
defense of secession, the Confederacy's proud defeat as a result of
the superior resources of the North; the suffering of white
southerners under Negro and Carpetbagger rule during Reconstruction
and the white South's triumphant return to its rightful place of
power. The South may have lost the war, but it had succeeded in
preserving white supremacy, thereby providing a model for the North
and the rest of the world.Blight is perhaps not as clear as he needs to be on how and why
northern whites came to accept most aspects of the pro-Confederate
narrative, but accept it they did. Fascination with the Old South as
well as their own racism appear to have been most decisive in this
conversion. Equally important, as Blight asserts, was their
apolitical sentimentality. The romance of sacrifice, of honoring all
those miles of tombstones, and of listening to the sanitized war
stories of grizzled veterans became a substitute for ideology. The
national regeneration, which Lincoln had urged, became the
dissolution of sectional resentments rather than the realization of
America's democratic promise. Thoroughly triangulated, African
Americans could do little but fall back in on themselves. Some such
as Booker T. Washington and his accomodationist followers, accepted
the logic of sectional reconciliation. Other, more radical blacks
rejected the emancipationist vision as useless in a society that had
proved so unwilling to accept them as equal citizens; only emigration
to Africa would allow their regeneration. Douglass's more hopeful and
forceful vision would persist but in virtual subterranean form until
the Civil Rights Movement unleashed it back into
the American consciousness.Collective memories, Blight's relevant work shows, are stubborn
entities. They derive from fundamental events and transformations, and
they plug into ongoing political debates. They also can become
exhausting for those not thoroughly invested in the politics
underlying them. In the flag debates the most politicized groups have
once again been conservative whites and defenders of egalitarianism,
primarily African Americans. By insisting that their particular
visions receive widespread public recognition and symbolic display,
they have demonstrated the importance of the past. As in the earlier
period that Blight has so skillfully analyzed, a third group prefers
to forget for the sake of progress. Through the din of the debate
have emerged complaints that undue attention to history only
distracts people from more important problems. Viewing ideological
battles over the past as an obstacle to capital growth, these
economic progressives have fought to sanitize public space of
controversial symbols. However useful this ahistorical approach has
been in the contemporary fight to remove the Confederate battle flag
from public images, it can never be more than an unsteady supporter
of egalitarian causes and often will work against them. Race
and Reunion teaches us that in an earlier time, white
supremacists exploited the political apathy of reconciliationists,
who spoke a language similar to that of today's economic
progressives, to ensure that their vision of history would gain
ascendence in the South's political culture. The stakes may not be as
high today, but the choices are similar. Which histories we choose to
remember and honor will continue to shape our political landscape in
ways that an ahistorical faith in capitalist progress cannot. Better
that those memories help further the goals of democracy rather than
prop up the specters of past and present racist agendas.Bland Whitley is a doctoral candidate in history at the University
of Florida. He is currently studying historical narratives on
Reconstruction in Mississippi.