Though the last to jump on the Neff versus Blight bandwagon, I’m on board with everyone’s analysis that Neff sees commemoration of the dead in direct conflict with Blight’s reconciliationist narrative. As Neff says, “Anything that provoked memory was … antithetical to any attempt toward reunion based on forgetting the injuries of the past” (210). Blight, on the other hand, pointed to this “politics of forgetting” as a central tenet of his pro-reconciliationist argument.

However, I think Neff may underestimate Blight and his conception of his proposed reconciliationist model. Neff argues that emphasis on reunion overshadows the South’s lingering sectionalist sentiments. In Race and Reunion, Blight is careful to assess certain concessions the North made to the South during the fragile postbellum (and, especially, post-Reconstruction) era, as ultimately leading to a national reunion on Southern terms.

Neff seems to think Blight has missed this point, and the greater point of Southerners understanding and manipulating their agency within the system (214). This is something we touched upon last week, but may prove important as we begin curating the Omeka exhibit: despite overarching reconciliationist sentiments, divergent notions still existed, and played important roles in the production of public memory. For example, when in 1900 the first Confederate dead were allowed reburial in the Arlington National Cemetery, “Southerners continued to preserve the sentiments of sectionalism” (229).

I think it is this understanding of divergent sentiments that allows select groups in Houston to build a monument to a fallen Confederate hero while still participating in the larger narrative of reunion.

Speaking of divergent notions, Neff makes strong arguments for the importance of language and its interpretation by the sections. Upon Lincoln’s death, both the North and the South ultimately see the late President’s assassination as designed by God, and therefore both unavoidable, and beneficial. That “God Almighty ordered this event or it could have never taken place” means one thing to a northerner and a completely different thing to someone from the South (97).

Similarly, in Chapter 3 and discussions about national cemeteries, Neff bluntly states, “…not for many years to come was the term national meant to include those who had not died loyal to the nation” (132). This control over language enables northerners to honor and commemorate their (Union) dead without overtly stripping southerners of theirs. Indeed, in 1898 when President McKinley suggests “‘…we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers…’” (222) he is resorting to the “possessive language” (223) so often utilized by the North.

Further, this language simultaneously denies access to blacks. Neff states that reunion necessitated the reincorporation of two alien groups (84). This construction of “our dead” places value judgments on northerners over southerners and blacks. For Blight, the tension lies between race and reunion. For Neff, the overarching importance of commemorating the dead (and the death culture of the period), precludes the possibility of reconciliation with either.

In Honoring the Civil War Dead, John Neff makes it a brief six pages before he first mentions the work of David Blight. Such a confluence was undoubtedly inevitable as Neff is challenging the idea of reconciliationism, a paradigm popular not only among Civil War historians but also in public memory. It certainly seems to be the consensus among us, myself included, that Neff and Blight present conflicting arguments regarding sectional reunion in the wake of the Civil War. While Blight holds that the North largely sacrificed racial reunion in the name of an economically and politically-charged sectional reunion, Neff proposes that the idea of a reconciled North and South was nothing but the result of:

“a late-season and formulaic assertion of the Cause Victorious” (206).

Reunion as presented by Neff is one full of cracks and factions refusing to surrender their memory of the War even in the name of reconciliation. This is a striking dichotomy to Blight’s reunion, which appears robust and much more widespread in Race and Reunion. It is quite evident, therefore, that these two reunions cannot coexist without one side at least partially ceding to the other. Thus the question is raised of which historian should acquiesce?

After reading both books, it seems to me that Blight is the one who must tip his hat to Neff. The reason for such sentiment is that Neff directly calls Blight out for silencing the role of commemoration of the dead in the development of pubic memory. Indeed Blight’s thesis uses a great deal of socio-economic and political arguments to support it. Neff, however, perceives the subsumption of commemoration of the dead under larger political and economic realms as Blight’s primary mistake. In the process of underestimating and overlooking the role of commemoration, Blight fails to see that

“remembering the dead proved to be an impediment to national healing” (6).

The “face off on reconciliation,” as Jocelyn puts it, continues throughout the duration of the book as Blight remains in Neff’s crosshairs. Neff continues to bring attention to evidence that directly undermines Blight’s thesis of reunion. While the two agree that by the 1890’s the North had a choice to either defend emancipation or pursue sectional reunion, Neff claims that the desire for the latter wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as Blight insists. Blight seems to have silenced the words of those like William H. Lambert, who spoke on Memorial Day in 1879 and reminded everyone that death could not be molded and converted into an instrument for reunion. Overall, Neff helps us see that people like Lambert, the creation of “national” cemeteries that sought to protect the Union dead from the hostile Southern cause, and even the turbulent reality of the blue-grey reunions that Blight so fervently champions, are all visible cracks in the once perceived idea of a clean cut sectional reunion.

It is interesting to note at the end that Neff and Blight often reference the same primary sources, such as the Confederate Veteran. Despite this, they reach opposing conclusions. This only continues to confirm that historians make different choices even when using the same sources, as Trouillot taught us in week 1.

A final thought does not allow me to accept Neff’s argument completely without question. One particular statement with the potential to stimulate skepticism was:

“on the whole, the color line of segregation that pertained in the nation’s cemeteries was between blue and gray, not black and white” (134).

Neff does admit that racially integrated cemeteries were rare at the time, but does this claim perhaps undervalue the ongoing struggle African-Americans faced in preserving their memory? Both Neff and Blight seem to agree that the emancipationist legacy gets the short end of the stick in the end, but it seems possible that Neff is deemphasizing the constant adversity blacks faced in protecting their meaning of the war to make room for his thesis about the continuous memory battle between the North and South.

To answer Kat’s question regarding whether Neff and Blight’s conception of post-Civil War reconciliation and remembrance can coexist: “No, absolutely not.” Blight’s entire argument hinges on the power of forgetting and creating a fiction from which people can move forward by seeing the past through rose-colored glasses. Neff begins his book with gruesome depictions of Civil War death and its impact on soldiers and Americans alike, essentially saying that, while it may be possible to forget or downplay some of the causes of the war, the vast number of horrific deaths would serve as a constant reminder of how bloody and gruesome a conflict it actually was.

For Neff, it was not just that a large number of soldiers died, it was that they died in a way that was completely foreign to Americans prior to the Civil War. Thus, not only did Americans have a completely different concept of the death toll a war could cost a population, they also had a completely different understanding of how death took place, as they had seen countless friends and loved ones die alone and away from any friends or family. This new form of death was so shocking to Americans, Neff says, that it is impossible to forget or move past. Particularly indicative of the unreasonable impact these deaths had on the American post-war psyche was the obsession with essentially digging up graves and reburying them in a more dignified manner. It was almost as though since Americans did not feel like their Civil War dead had found a proper resting place the first time around, they saw it as an almost noble cause to disturb the remains of the dead in hopes of laying them to rest somewhere more dignified. Neff puts it most succinctly, saying “the dead were the measures of the living.” (207) The living hoped to find peace by ensuring that the dead were properly and appropriately commemorated in keeping with their understanding of the war and its causes.

To further drive home his point, Neff questions many of Blight’s statements regarding reconciliation. Instead of focusing on events that demonstrate reconciliation, as Blight did, he highlights the fights over where bodies should be laid to rest, the segregation of Confederate and Union graves, and the discrepancies in the ways in which great war figures such as Lincoln and Davis’s deaths were commemorated in the North and South. He directly attacks Blight’s example of the epitome of reconciliation—the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg—saying that while it was well attended by Civil War veterans, the vast majority were Northern soldiers (215). This was not just a one-time occurrence, Neff said, but rather a repeating pattern where even where there were events that may appear to be examples of reconciliation, they still were far better attended by one half of the nation than by another. Neff also points to discrepancies between the numbers of monuments built  at Gettysburg, saying that the North again invested far more money and resources into commemorating this battleground than their southern counterparts. (213)

One of Neff’s arguments that I found most interesting was the one centering around the treatment of black soldiers, and how that played into the North concept of the Cause Victorious. Neff mentions that, during the war, there was a great deal of contradiction in the rhetoric of soldiers and generals regarding black soldiers. Despite the fact that the war was being front to improve the condition of blacks in America by emancipating huge numbers of them from slavery, blacks were treated very unequally during the war. They were pushed out into battle first, received worse medical treatment, and, after the war, they frequently received far less commemoration than white graves. These contradictions were, according to Neff, very difficult for Northerners to handle, because these realizations contrasted so sharply with the sentiments of the Cause Victorious, that they were fighting for a noble cause and achieved this goal. This led to people such as Meigs attempting to justify things such as the segregation of black and white graves by saying that it would be unfair to black soldiers to honor them in the same place as white soldiers because they had clearly sacrificed so much more (199). Debates such as these are one of the reasons Civil War cemeteries were some of the first nationally-sponsored integrated cemeteries in American history.

Of all the points Neff makes, though, the one which I found most interesting was one he left completely unexplored. He notes that one of the most ignored reasons for reconciliation was the Spanish-American War, where American soldiers were once again fighting, dying and being buried side-by-side. (221) This argument seems to make logical sense, but it is an idea I would like to see further qualified, explored, and justified.

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration the Problem of Reconciliation by John R. Neff

In Honoring the Civil War Dead, John R. Neff takes a considerable step away from the previous interpretations of commemoration and reconciliation that we have encountered.  Stepping away from the ideas of memory as reconciliation between Northerners and Southerners that were forwarded by David W. Blight, Neff presents an entirely different interpretation of memory in which memory and reconciliation cannot coexist on the table of reunion.  Presenting the issues of the Lost Cause mythos revered by Southerners and the Cause Victorious ideology that was central to Northern interpretations of the Civil War, Neff argues that memory and commemoration could not coexist with true reconciliation as the memory of the causes of the dead cannot be silenced, nor should this impossibility of reconciliation be overlooked by historians in the portrayal of reunion. As Neff states,

“By stressing reunion and the ease by which we assume it took place, we miss the persistence of antagonism, of bitterness, of animosity.  We wrench out of its proper context the deep division that remained for many years after the war ended.  (…)Similarly, we underestimate the power of a reconciliations position as a manipulative tool in the hands of Southerners who had no reunion sentiment.” (Neff, 214)

This attack on reunion historians such as Blight is biting, as Neff strikes at all their examples of white reunion as the ultimate in the reunion movement of veterans meeting on former battle grounds to remember and forget.  Saying, “Reunion, and its attendant rituals, were widespread, but still only a façade.  Also, reunion was only possible for the living; the dead remained permanently unreconciled, and any serious attempt to remember and commemorate them inevitably involved a confrontation with the tenets of the Cause Victorious,” Neff illustrates the culmination of his work on commemoration and its meaning in the post Civil War period. (Neff, 214) To Neff, commemoration in its act of remembering the fallen and their causes could not exist in a time of reunion as the dead could not be separated from the causes of the original schism. These causes, the Cause Victorious and the Lost Cause form a language to commemoration that Neff explores throughout the book.

The Cause Victorious to Neff was the idea of the dual emancipation of the slaves and reunion of the nation under the Union (Neff, 182), whereas the Lost Cause was the idea that the South only lost because of a lack of numbers and resources and Union did not win, but merely outlasted the handicapped South allowing the South honor in its fight and motivations to fight (Neff, 144).  These sectional ideas of the Civil War were to Neff best displayed and remembered through the acts of commemoration that followed the war as a means of coping with the massive death.  This overwhelming death, Neff was careful to explain, poses a considerable challenge to the nation, as none of the honored dead met the “good death” ideal of slowing passing with honor while surrounded by family. This good death, or lack of it, forms a driving motivation for the commemoration of the fallen in an attempt to make reparations for their ungraceful death.  To illustrate this ideal of a “good death” and the public’s need to inaccurately ascribe it to the fallen Neff describes the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis as well as the attempts to describe them as matching the “good death” schema.  Neff also then explains how this good death idea was incorporated into the burial of the soldier dead on both sides with honor, notably in the Northern reinternments immediately following the war and the Southern women’s actions to commemorate the fallen despite political consequences that is idealized in the poem and painting, The Burial of Latané.   All of which attempt to explain of how the ideals of a good and honorable death or at least burial were attempted to be achieved in the massive commemoration movements following the Civil War.

Throughout Honoring the Civil War Death, Neff is careful to illustrate the underlying tensions that prevented the full reconciliation or reunion of the North and South, and how in almost all situations, the commemoration of the dead became the central battleground of these tensions as the motivations of these men and the honor bestowed upon them clashed with the attempt at forming a national identity. He ends with the conclusion that, “Until we have reached an understanding of that war’s place within our national identity, we, like Americans a century ago, will remain hopelessly, willingly and reverently among the congregation of the dead.” This is far from the conclusions of Blight upon the reunion of the nation and reconciliation being built upon the “combined remembrance with healing, and therefore, with forgetting,” (Blight, 389) and his understanding of race relations at the cost of reunion of whites.  Can these two understandings of reunion coexist? In what other ways does Neff depart from Blight’s understanding?

Also, for consideration in our further discussion of the Dick Dowling memorial, Neff had much to say about commemoration—its motivation and meaning in the context of competing sectional ideals. How were these motivations and causes at play in the commemoration of Dick Dowling which we are currently studying?  Can we learn anything by considering “The Cause Victorious” as versus the “Lost Cause” in our understanding of the surrounding context of the Dowling statue?

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.