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.