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 19th 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.