There is an understandable reluctance to make any bold claims about David Blight’s Race and Reunion after pausing in the middle for contemplation. At the halfway point, however, there are two conclusions that can be made about Blight’s account of the Civil War in American memory. The first is that Blight has stayed true to his purpose for writing as displayed upfront in the prologue. There is little doubt about Blight’s focus on the ways contending memories of the Civil War clashed and interacted with each other in the post-war years. Agreeing with Jocelyn, however, my second conclusion casts an asterisk on Blight’s execution as he indeed silences the role that African-Americans played in the memory process.
The silencing that Davis Blight employs is intriguing in the sense that he does not completely omit the role of race in the shaping of different Civil War memories. Regardless, there is a fundamental difference between recognizing the presence of race and devoting sufficient attention to what it has to say.
All throughout the first six chapters of the book, Blight analyzes the Reconstruction-era struggle between the need for sectional reunion and the crusade for racial equality. In this light, Blight notes that Reconstruction was really a battle over the meaning of the war: what had been won, what had been lost, and the very definition of liberty. Blight’s analysis of post-war politics, the founding of Memorial Day, and soldiers’ memoirs proves that although race was on everybody’s mind, it was progressively absent on the forefront of public and political conversation. However, as he demonstrates the ways in which reconciliationist overtook emancipationist memory, Blight does not explore African-American sources sufficiently. I say “sufficiently” because, as Jocelyn points out, he does frequently reference the words of Frederick Douglass, affirm the black origins of Memorial Day, and examine the specific ways in which African-American memories and experiences were suppressed. In all his different ways of emphasizing how the economically and politically-fueled reconciliationist memory prevailed, Blight largely silences the actual role African-Americans played in keeping the emancipationist memory alive. With the exception of Frederick Douglass, credit for the preservation of emancipationist memory is primarily given to the select white radical republicans that campaigned for it. Blight himself admits that radical republicans only possessed two years of crucial sway (54), therefore, failing to explain how the emancipationist memory could survive, albeit often muted, in the coming decades. The answer of course lies in the role that African-Americans played in both remembering and exercising their past.
The most outstanding red flag signaling Blight’s silencing came in Chapter Five, which discussed soldiers’ memories in the ensuing decades and the production of memoirs as they contributed to Lost Cause, reconciliationist and emancipationist ideologies. The chapter, spanning thirty pages exactly, devotes approximately the final two pages to the voices of black veterans. Indeed Blight is underlining how the emancipationist memory receded and that even in the 1870’s African-Americans were silenced, yet perhaps he should have taken this time to allow for a few more of their voices to be heard. I certainly understand that Blight is not providing a complete historiography of soldiers’ memories, but his analysis is failing to accent just how alive black memories were despite their silencing.
In his method of showing how reunion conquered race, Blight is accomplishing his goal, yet doing so in a manner that silences African-Americans.