Response to Pages 210-End of Race and Reunion, by David W. Blight

Blight does indeed redeem himself in his second half of Race and Reunion, by finally paying due attention to the African American community and its interpretation of the Civil War.  While Blight attempts to tell this story to the best of his abilities, it appears that there are many factors that have, in fact, silenced the history of African American memory in the post-war period.  The widespread acceptance of the white narratives of the Lost Cause, romanticism of the antebellum South, and the narratives of the war and the popular reconciliationist view effectively dominated the discussion and interpretation of the Civil War until the end of the 19th century.

Drawing on Jaclyn’s question, “How would postbellum generations (both immediately and over time) understand, reflect upon, and ultimately accept or reject their ancestors role in their country’s past?” both white reconciliationists and black leaders would attempt to rewrite the historical understandings of their predecessors’ roles in order to define the understanding of the war in the decades following the war. White narratives of the Lost Cause, romanticism of the War, and reconciliation form a complicated and interwoven storyline of the Civil War that neither places blame nor passes judgment on the South following the end of Reconstruction and each carefully avoid the issue of race and its causal nature in the Civil War, a departure in the postwar era from the original understandings of the war on both sides.  Drawing on a theme of reconciliation and reunion, popular literature came to rely on the nostalgia and concocted image of the simple, plantation life.  This nostalgic view of the South provided a means to understanding the South and stepping toward reconciliation on Southern terms, however for this nostalgia to take place, readers in both the North and South needed to believe in both a romantic, heroic war without moral right and wrong and a “faithful slave” image of the African American enjoying his bondage. (Blight, 229)

Incorporating the Lost Cause and many other reconciliationist themes of day, popular literature was just one front on which the African American and emancipationist interpretation of the war was silenced while the next generation attempted to understand and redefine their ancestor’s role in the country’s past.  Blight also draws considerable attention to the memorialization efforts of the UDC and the UCV, as well as their considerable attempts to build the history of the war in a more forgiving light upon the Confederacy.  This construction of history along the lines of a particular ideology allowed the Confederacy to maintain its honor and view itself as just, while also allowing it particular power in dictating the terms of reconciliation and using history itself as a form of political influence.  As Blight states,

“Historical memory, therefore, was a weapon with which to engage in the struggle over political policy and a means to sustain the social and racial order.” (Blight, 282)

I found this argument of history as a weapon, which Ryan brought up initially as particularly poignant when considering the fact that at this time African American voices are being silenced in this overwhelming outpouring of nostalgia, acclaim, and historical justification of the confederacy as a means of reaching reunion.  However despite this careful shaping of historical understanding by the UCV and UDC, black leaders also attempted to shape “a historical memory devoted to racial justice” as a means of providing a rallying point and common history to the black community (Blight, 362) that would redefine the next generation’s understanding of the past.  Yet as already mentioned by Jaclyn, Ryan and Jocelyn, divisions on how the African American past should be remembered divided Washington and Du Bois, as well as Douglass and Crummell.

These divisions between where memory should fit in the Black understanding of their past, whether it should be fully remembered as a stepping stone for the future or should be left in the past as to protect individuals from “potentially paralyzing memories.” (Blight, 317)  All these disagreements gave way to the founding of four distinctly African American methods of Civil War memory: 1) the memory of slavery as a burden; 2) the celebration of past as a means of judging the “progress of race”; 3) Black history as part of a larger destiny; 4) a tragic passage from an old order to a new one. (Blight, 300) Four different understandings from which black leaders would attempt to build their collective history. Yet despite this attempt at collective understanding, African American voices were still largely unheard with the exception of Booker T. Washington who’s celebration model fit into the already existing reconciliationist theme.

From the white popular literature and historical development of the Lost Cause, romanticism and reconciliationist understandings of the Civil War in the postbellum era to the many methods of African American Civil War memory, individuals would both immediately and overtime attempt to shape a new understandings of their ancestors’ past in order to reflect and accept or reject its meaning.  All of these methods would carry political weight and would have the potential to be used as a weapon, however, none would better understand the careful production of history and gentle silencing of a particular narrative than the Northern and Southern reconciliationists who all but dismissed African American thoughts and reasoning for the causeless, blameless understanding of the Civil War that was popular in the post-Reconstruction and reunion time period Blight described.

As Jaclyn already said, Blight most certainly redeems himself and does an adequate job of treating the question of race and African American’s roles in Civil War memory. Though I stand by my judgment that the first part of the book does not treat the question of race adequately, the second half more than makes up for it. Furthermore, as I suggested in class, the absence of black discourse highlights Blight’s point that, as Jaclyn mentioned, there was no real space for black memory until the end of the 19^th century.

In the second half of the book, I personally enjoyed watching the white memory surrounding the Civil War become increasingly absurd and out of touch with what had actually taken place. I found it particularly interesting that Americans tended to seek out this sentimentalist Civil War memory in times of hardship. As race relations in the South were becoming increasingly problematic, the dialogue turned to recollections of the ideal faithful slave, who would never have dreamed of doing such a thing and who was happy living under his or her master’s rule. Likewise, when the nation fell apart again during the Great Depression of the 1930s, movies such as Gone With the Wind stole American’s hearts and imaginations with their fanciful and romantic depictions of the Antebellum South.

At the same time as this romanticization was happening, white Americans were running out of ways they could interpret and remember the war, which I believe helped to open the door for black discourse on Civil War memory. In her post, Jaclyn asked about how Civil War memory changed with generations, and I agree that there are definite generational shifts in Civil War memory. One of Blight’s points in the Race and Reunion is that Civil War memory has changed dramatically over the years and that it has done so to serve the needs of the time period. In the immediate wake of the war, soldiers needed to find a way to remember the war and establish a dialogue that did not incriminate or undermine the heroism of either side. Thus, the honor and valiant bravery of Civil War veterans was emphasized. As memories of the war began to fade and a new generation appeared that had not lived through the war, or who had been very young when it was taking place, there became more of an interest in retelling the story of the war—sugarcoated, of course, so as not to offend the many living, active, and now influential Civil War veterans. Thus, there was an interest in collecting personal narratives of soldiers and also of their family members who had kept relics. Eventually, though, these established factual memories ran out and people began to notice deficiencies in the stories, which led them to replace these stories with increasingly sentimental retellings of the war.

It was at this point that black Americans began to also start vocalizing their thoughts about the war. It was as though now that white Americans were essentially running out of thins to say regarding the war, there was finally some space in which they, too, could begin to share their thoughts through conferences, commemorations of emancipation, and memoirs. One of the most interesting things in this discourse that I found was that some African Americans seem to have internalized white discourse to such a great extent that even they were reluctant to condemn slavery outright. Instead of saying that slavery never should have taken place, Washington likened emancipation to a kind of rebirth, a natural next stage in a cycle. Benjamin Tanner took this point even farther, saying that far from being destroyed by the institution of slavery, blacks had actually benefitted from it. While Blight cites other African Americans who did not take this point of view, I was still shocked that this was even a mode of interpretation coming from the black community, since it so neatly and cleanly absolved the South and slavery of any sort of blame. How this discourse came into being was unclear to me; was it because they were unable to cope with the idea that slavery had been that terrible and they thought this was the easiest way to move on? I found it particularly striking given that, prior to the war, there had been many blacks who spoke out against the evils and inhumanity of the injustices they suffered such as being separated from their families.  Perhaps they are also speaking like this at the time because Americans, not even black Americans, were ready to begin reaffirming that slavery was an unjust institution given the racial violence and injustice that was taking place in many parts of the South thanks to groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Regardless, I found it powerfully shocking to see how white views and thoughts on the Civil War were so dominant that they had managed to permeate black society and lead them to positions that, if examined today, anyone—black or white—would consider absurd.

Indeed the second half of Race and Reunion vindicates Blight from any argument alleging a silencing of African-Americans. Although my doubts from last week were initially sustained as Blight’s credit to Albion Tourgee for supporting the emancipationist memory took center stage, Blight subsequently quickly gave African-Americans their voice in the book. Not only does he emphasize the roles of prominent African-Americans other than Frederick Douglass such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois as Jaclyn points out, but Blight shows that all blacks were participants in the struggle for public memory. While last week I perceived Blight’s approach as a silencing of the African-American masses, I now see Blight’s assertion that:

“Silence of rhetorical condemnation were about the only options open to blacks in 1890” (270).

African-American memory was not only suppressed by the Lost Cause ideology, but also by Northern reconciliationists and many realists such as Ambrose Bierce, who embraced no ideological cause in his narrative of the Civil War. It can be concluded, therefore, that the role of African-Americans is not being silenced in Race and Reunion. Rather, Blight is demonstrating how blacks were silenced in the past. For me, the second half of the book attests to this fact more than the first.

To add to Jaclyn’s point on the du Bois-Washington conflict, the Douglass-Crummell dichotomy as presented by Blight was also very useful in understanding the African-American dilemma. While Douglass believed black memory should not be abandoned, Crummell claimed that blacks could not healthily live in past memories (319). Blight’s insistence that they were both right only confirms the predicament blacks faced when deciding how to remember the Civil War.

Near the end of the book, I found myself asking an interesting question: when did the Lost Cause-Reconciliationist dominance over the Emancipationist memory become inevitable? Was the racial reunion destined to be overshadowing by an economically-fuelled sectional reconciliation ever since the surrender at Appomattox? Perhaps there is no single point in history when reconciliation overtook emancipation for good, but Blight certainly shows how one memory is capable of shadowing another; why a group would absorb the Lost Cause words from Mildred Rutherford instead of the claims from John Mosby, a southerner who upheld slavery as the cause of the War. It is because memory is not a thing of the past, but rather a weapon whose form and functionality is constantly changing so to best serve the present.

It certainly does seem that all memory is prelude to future generations for just as reconciliationism nearly extinguished the emancipation memory, Blight stands here today as part of the effort to revive it. Blight’s purpose today is not to paint Jefferson Davis as a villain or Ulysses S. Grant as a hero, but to exhibit that the realm of public memory is not the fixed narrative grade-school textbooks would have us believe, but rather it is a constant struggle between ideologies and perspectives, between spotlights and silences.

Blight, pp. 210 – end

To my understanding, Blight has redeemed himself in the eyes of our arguments from last week. Not only do a series of important black intellectuals join Douglass in Blight’s narrative struggle for the emancipationist legacy of the war, but he presents other strands of black collective memory, most notably in the Washington-Du Bois conflict.

As Blight outlines on p. 364:

“The Du Bois–Washington conflict over social and political strategy should be seen not only as a division over philosophy and leadership methods, but also as a dispute over how and if blacks should embrace the American reunion to which their rights were increasingly sacrificed.”

Washington was a darling of the North-South reconciliationist camp, delivering in 1895 his “Atlanta Compromise” speech which “gave all those who wished it a license to forget the war” (325). This fit nearly perfectly into the intersectional reconciliationist ‘politics of forgetting’ that spent decades after the war marinating in public Memory.

His philosophy took root in “social accommodationist” foundations, touting uplift and the industrial progress of blacks. Du Bois, on the other hand, urged the building of a “positive history” (362) which would encourage black self-respect, and an opposition of a reconciliation “marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men,” whose “mistreatment caused the war” (363).

In this conflict, and among the other strains of black collective memory competing for the ultimate public legacy of the Civil War, the question of forgetting the past plays a central role. Should slaves forget they were slaves as part of a dark and empty past? Or should the reality of their past mark a specific period of time in the larger narrative of black history showing the ultimate progress of the ‘race’? As Blight offers, “One of the burdens of black memory was that progress and horror had to occupy the same narrative” (336). If the silencing (or non-silencing) of blacks’ slave past were the means, what ends was the nebulous ‘black collective memory’ hoping to achieve?

My final thought on Blight’s highlighting of the archive-silencing of blacks’ narratives comes halfway through the chapter on black memory:

“It was America’s national tragedy that the memories of slavery that were popularized and sold in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the romantic fantasies of dialect writers, not the actual remembrance of the slaves themselves” [emphasis added] (313).

Once again, we see Blight nodding toward the commodification of (black) history, which apparently becomes salable in the first decades of the twentieth century (367). Now that intersectional reconciliation has taken place, and the whites of America have eased their mutually heroic minds, they can turn to the ‘other’ narrative that has been fighting for recognition, and decide whether or not to give it collective national attention.

As we will hopefully see in our discussion on Wednesday, this topic merits a continuation of in-depth, thoughtful analyses, but I would like to raise a new topic Blight gives us in the second half of the book: the intergenerational conflict of memory.

Blight tells of the conflict between southern black generations, but also that of national white generations. How thoroughly entrenched did the UDC’s memory-making efforts become with the passing of time? How would postbellum generations (both immediately and over time) understand, reflect upon, and ultimately accept or reject their ancestors role in their country’s past?

I like Blight’s closing thought enough to use it as mine: “All memory is prelude” (397). Prelude to the generations to come, who will rewrite and reshape the past according to their needs in the present? Prelude to the “post-game” analysis of professional historians who will incorporate it into their scholarly historiography? Perhaps here we can understand Blight’s argument on memory versus Memory: the former is the prelude to the latter.

Once again being the last to comment, I find myself facing a multitude of opinions from Jocelyn, Ryan and Jaclyn.  Addressing the question raised by Jocelyn, “Did Blight adequately treat African Americans and their role in Civil War memory, or is he, ironically, silencing the role they played in a novel that tries to draw attention to the marginalization of race in Civil War memory and discourse during the first 50 years following the war?” I agree most with Jacyln, that in this case I believe the fault lies not with Blight himself, but instead with a silencing at the source.

This silencing at the source is an issue very present in Blight’s mind as he explains the history of Memorial/Decoration day in the African American community and importantly how the role of African Americans in creating the tradition was almost silence itself in the years following the war.  As Blight explains how the first Decoration Day was almost lost to silencing:

“A measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice a year later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies memorial Association of Charlestown received an inquiry for information about the May 1, 1865, parade.  A United Daughters of the Confederacy official wanted to know if it was true that blacks and their white abolitionist friends had engaged in such a burial rite.  Mrs. S.C. Beckwith responded tersely: ‘I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.’” (Blight, 71)

This almost-silence, displays just one incidence of the possible silences that took place in the compilation of sources throughout the time period.  Reconstruction, as Blight explains, was a tumultuous time in which the issues and meaning of the war were perhaps the most hotly contested subject.  In this context of debates over the centrality of race and slavery to the bloodshed of the war, it is understandable that in favor of a reconcillationist view or reunionist viewpoint, it may be easier to simply neglect the remembrance of the racially different.  This neglect in sources and the production of history that Jaclyn points out goes beyond the issues of public consumption that she discussed, and instead into a greater issue of the place of history in the construction of the future.

Blight is sure to talk throughout about the reunionist and reconcillationist viewpoints of the Civil War, and how both promptly neglected the Reconstruction debate over meaning.  Instead, Blight portrays throughout this segment of Race and Reunion that when faced with the “struggle between the need for sectional reunion and the crusade for racial equality,” according to Ryan, the most parties tended toward sectional reunion over a continuation of debate and disunity.  This portrayal of the move toward reunion and the silencing of race in the narrative of the Civil War in the 50 years following, is well explained in Blight’s book as he is hyper aware of the silences in his own work, as Jocelyn explained.

Yet, I might go further to say that Blight makes us more than aware of the silences he creates, he also makes us aware of how silences could be used as policy towards a political aim, for by ignoring the issue of race, leaders could move on from Reconstruction and hopefully towards reunion, no matter how shallow that reunion may be on incomplete terms especially considering the racial unrest troubling the South and resulting in KKK action and lynchings.  As Blight concludes, “As American society slid slowly into a racial nightmare, most veterans on both sides were having an ‘adorable’ reunion.” (Blight,  210)

Therefore, considering the lack of coverage by Blight over the minority African Americans in a majority society, I agree with Ryan that the question that remains to be answered is, what is the “role that African-Americans played in both remembering and exercising their past?”  Finding the answer to that question, beyond the usual sources might finally be able to help Blight support his claims made in Race and Reunion and answer many modern historical questions.  Therefore, we as researchers must keep in mind to look for the minority opinion and the changing memory of particular events while researching Sabine Pass.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
David Blight

Perhaps I am far too enamored of Blight’s narrative style, well-defined goal, and/or the change of pace from last week’s reading on Sabine Pass, but I found the first 210 pages of Blight insightful. In our post-Trouillot era, we’re all hyper-attuned to silences and the power struggles inherent in the production of history. While I see from where Jocelyn and Ryan derive their point about the silencing of African-American memory, I’m not quite convinced Blight is as at fault as he may appear on the surface.

[Pardon the interruption as I check the table of contents to see the title of Chapter 9, “Black Memory and Progress of the Race,” something I think Ryan pointed out regarding reflecting on the book halfway through.]

Yes, Blight relies heavily on Douglass as a promoter of the emancipationist legacy. Yes, he only allots two pages at the end of Chapter 5 (but also 4 pages in Chapter 6) to narratives from an African-American perspective. But perhaps this isn’t a silencing through erasure, but a silence in the source-creation, something over which Blight has no control.

Blight expends a fair amount of energy pointing to the “commodification” of Civil War memory narratives (176, among others). We’ve discussed the production of history for public consumption—who is the audience, what the audience has the capacity to understand, what is politically salient at the time—but have delved less into the arena of memory for monetary gain. Blight’s discussions of Century magazine led me back to his earlier arguments about the unappealing quality of realism in memorial narratives (151). The production for the “mass-market culture” affected which narratives were brought to the fore, and how those narratives were constructed.

All of this to suggest perhaps the market for a black narrative wasn’t as lucrative as the market for reconciliationism. Therefore, sources weren’t created, and Blight doesn’t have anything to point at as evidence of African-American conceptions of the legacy of the war. Frederick Douglass was well-established and had the means to make his memories known. Perhaps other blacks, Union soldiers or Confederate freedmen, didn’t have such access or such tools. And as we see during Reconstruction, even though the Union Army became a liberating force by 1863, its contingent members didn’t necessarily (or uniformly) believe in political rights and equality for blacks in the post-war era. It creates a feedback: The narrative of blacks is suppressed because it doesn’t have an audience because the audience isn’t interested in the narrative of blacks (when it can spend its time reading about the mutual honor and bravery of soldiers on either side of the conflict).

Maybe this is something we will see Blight resolve for Jocelyn and Ryan as the book draws to a close.

I’d like to bring up a few closing thoughts to allow a proper marinating period before discussion tomorrow. With all of the discussion around the reconciliationist legacy (at the subjugation of theme of race), almost every narrative Blight presents has taken soldiers out of their context to show soldiers’ “higher morality” (95), the “mutuality of … sacrifice” (192), and virtuousness, couched in terms of “honor, devotion, sacrifice and love of country” (206), almost always ignoring what and why they were fighting to begin with. I think as we build the Omeka exhibit we need to keep in mind the importance of contextuality, and placing our information in its proper historical setting.

Second, a source-silence I found interesting was that of the prison narrative, a narrative which was unpopular (read: unsalable) because it “lacked heroics, personal resolutions, and the life-affirming elements of humane reconciliation.” With the reconciliationist legacy, everyone (who is white) wins (or has the capacity to win). The prison narrative doesn’t fit quite so neatly into that framework, and was often tossed aside for fear of alienating southerners who were trying to “reconcile” or be reconciled.

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.