Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful work of history
Review: On the canvas of American historical memory, it proved much easier to unite the Blue and the Gray than it has to connect the black with the white. David Blight's brilliant work on the memory of the Civil War argues that in the fifty years following General Lee's surrender, the war's deepest meanings were debated and negotiated, with crucial consequences for the future of the nation. In the end, the need for sectional reunion combined with virulent white supremacy to inculcate a purposeful forgetting of the racial underpinning and egalitarian possibility of the Civil War. The North allowed the South to completely dictate the terms on which the conflict would be remembered, subscribing to a narrative in which the mutual valor of soldiers from both sections was elevated, the blame for slavery eradicated, and African Americans left to fend for themselves in the era of Jim Crow.
Blight's principal contribution, beyond providing the most complete and profound study of historical memory and the Civil War yet attempted, is his suggestion that culture and memory, not politics, were primarily responsible for the nation's failure to remain true to the emancipationist meaning of the war. Tracing the development of the memory of the Civil War in American consciousness from the 1863 Gettysburg Address to the all-white North/South reunion that commemorated the battle of Gettysburg 50 years later, Blight argues that the South, through the work of historical societies, Lost Cause novelists, women's groups, and veterans associations, "forged one of the most highly orchestrated grassroots partisan histories ever conceived," in which both sections shared the blame equally and the racial causes and consequences of the war were conspicuously silent. In its zeal to heal the scars of the war and reconstruction, the North accepted the southern reading of history, choosing reunion over race, and leaving the egalitarian promises of the war unfulfilled. In this cultural context, African American efforts to remember the racial meaning of the war were marginalized as completely as were African Americans themselves.
For all its considerable brilliance, Race and Reunion is slightly tarnished by the feeling of inevitability accorded to the processes described above. While expertly explaining how the South's victory in the realm of historical memory trumped the North's victory on the battlefield, Blight fails to explain how it could have been otherwise. One gets the sense that the North's failure to forcefully impose its own reading of the war immediately after the cessation of hostilities was its downfall - it seems that the emancipationist vision of the Civil War was doomed by 1866, due to the cataclysmic psychological impact of the war, the deep-rooted need for sectional reconciliation, and the greater ideological unity of the South. This slight criticism aside, Blight's work is a monumental achievement and an invaluable contribution to the study of the Civil War which wrests the conflict from the clutches of tweed-clad 19th century historians and re-enactors in blue and gray, placing it squarely in the center of the American experience.
Rating:
Summary: Readable, informative, challenges your preconceptions
Review: (Just so you know - I was a student of Dr. Blight's when he was a Professor of History at North Central College of Chicago, IL.)I found this book to be challenging, in that it thoroughly demolished my preconceptions of the nature of the relationships between whites and blacks prior-to, during and especially following the Civil War. On the other hand, I have a much clearer understanding of the dynamics of these interactions, relationships, and agendas, and their impact upon our present day world. Although definitely a scholarly work, I found Dr. Blight's work to be very readable. The material is clearly presented, and it is well-written and well researched. I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a solid understanding of the evolution of racial relations in America.
Rating:
Summary: profound examination of Civil War and national memory
Review: As crucial as the pivotal national victory in the American Civil War is how our nation recalled the significance of that watershed event. In Professor David Blight's profoundly stirring history of Civil War memory, "Race and Reunion," how and why the American people committed that event to their historical consciousness looms as significant as the event itself. Professor Blight's study of the fifty-year period following the Civil War will leave those who yearn for racial justice deeply disappointed. It is a cruel irony that deliberate forgetfulness of the past is a central theme of this powerful historical study. For in our nation's purposeful historical amnesia and racist refashioning of the Civil War, a consensus "reconciliationist" view of that pivotal experience sowed the seeds of institutional racism and the deliberate obliteration of the very cause of the Civil War itself. Blight's exhaustive research, presented in stirring, graceful prose, paints a dreary portrait of post-Civil War America; for all intents and purposes, the South may have lost the Civil War but it certainly won the battle in its unapologetic and energetic attempt to have the nation perceive history through the South's eyes. Professor Blight describes an ongoing battle between two deeply different visions of Civil War memory. The "emancipationist" vision absorbs the notion of the Civil War as a revolutionary event, one which not only abolishes slavery but begins the process by which African-Americans may become full and equal partners in a multi-racial society. Emancipationists point to Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" in their understanding of the centrality of slavery to the Civil War and its eradication as the most noble consequence of that war. On the other hand, "reconciliationists" propose a vision that holds the South as the victim of the Civil War, Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster and nobility of both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank as mutually heroic soldiers. Completely absent in the "reconciliationist" view are African-Americans, other than as loyal, grateful slaves, willing to please their masters and hurt by any ill-guided attempts at freedom or equality. Professor Blight is completely convincing in his arguments. Even today, with many American communities celebrating "Civil War Days," Americans feel more comfortable examining battles, proclaiming the mutual valor of both sides and celebrating reunion than examining our national racial past. Emancipationists tend to make people feel uncomfortable; their idealistic commitments to justice and racial equality invariably place second to materialistic concerns. In this sense, we in the early twenty-first century tend to unknowingly mirror Americans of one hundred years ago. This fine history is not necessarily pessimistic. Looming large is Frederick Douglass, whose passionate commitment to emancipationist views informs his entire public life. He, more than any other character, seems to possess the vision and tenacity to hold steadfastly to the moral purposes of the Civil War. His telling question, asked in 1875, rips to shreds the fatuous emptiness of reconciliationist views: "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?" The civil rights years, in which the nation was compelled to make read the promises of emancipation and the Civil War Amendments, proves that any memory is central to a nation's self-image. For nearly one hundred years, our country accepted as dogma the "Magnolia and Moonlight" theory of Soutern society; our national consciousness saw slavery as benign (even beneficent to African-Ameicans), our culture excoriated Reconstruction (how else can we explain the success of "Gone with the Wind" and its predecessor in racist ideology, "Birth of a Nation") and determined to honor both Northern and Southern soldiers as equally devoted and honorable. Only in the past generation have Americans rediscovered the emancipationist vision and been compelled to use that memory as the yardstick to national policy. Professor David Blight has written a vital and important history. It deserves the largest audience.
Rating:
Summary: A Book That Needed To Be Written
Review: David Blight's "Race and Reunion" is the latest and best addition to the growing literature on memory in U.S. history. And there is no event that continues to scorch American memory quite like the Civil War. Blight traces the intimate connections among the growth of the Lost Cause ideology, North-South reconciliation, and the resurgence of white supremacy--not only in the South but throughout the nation. He shows how the promise of a new nation incorporating African Americans--outlined in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural, and in the 14th and 15th Amendments--was sacrificed on the altar of white North-South reunion. Though ostensibly treating the period after the Civil War, Blight cannot avoid the questions of morality and causality forever lurking in public and scholarly debate over that conflict. To his credit, he does not concede the moral parity of North and South. Certainly, the northern states practiced forms of white supremacy, before and after the war. Certainly, the northern states were, historically, complicit in the creation and maintenance of slavery. But it was southerners who attempted to dissolve the nation by going to war to protect slavery. What did they expect the federal government to do? Let them go? What did they expect Lincoln to do after the war started? Protect slaveholders' property rights? The treason of secessionism only played into the abolitionists hands. And, make no mistake, in every definition of the word, secessionists were traitors. Despite the veil of patriotism draped upon them by the deluded past and present, the Confederates set out to destroy the nation, the union. In this sense, they put modern-day "traitors" like the "American Taliban" to shame. Moreover, they turned to treason for the basest of reasons--to maintain their illegitimate power over another group of people. The previous reviewer asserts that many Confederate officers disapproved of slavery. That is true. It is also irrelevant. They knew all too well what they were fighting for. The Confederate government and Constitution were quite honest about it. No measure of Confederate gallantry, largely imagined by post-bellum Civil War buffs, can alter these historical circumstances. You may claim the legality of secession. So what? You may argue for the nobility and honor for the Confederate cause. Absurd. If the Confederate flag had nothing to do with white supremacy, why does it always appear in public when blacks are pressing for their rights? If the Confederate legacy has nothing to do with race, why don't black southerners join you in celebrating it? The Confederates lost. And despite the whining of the past 137 years, they got off pretty easy--their Reconstruction myths aside. Today, Confederate disciples are allowed to display their flag--even modern-day German Nazis can't do that! No. The only genuine betrayal of southerners was that of black southerners, who spent a century waiting for the federal government to enforce the Constitution--a story that emerges only too cleary in Blight's book. So, kudos to him for exploring this story, and perhaps making headway against the banality of most Civil War discussions.
Rating: 
Summary: Stimulating, yet Northern view point
Review: David Blight's book has shed much light on the impact the War Between the States (Civil War) has had upon the American mind. However, Northern apologists continue to refuse the Southerner to have his/her view point on this topic, as if to deny that there were not two distinct competing cultures in this conflict; one agrarian and the other industrial. More strikingly is the way the author lays claim to the supposed moral high ground of the Union army in fighting for emancipation and the underlying claim that the South fought to maintain slavery (Gen's Lee, Polk, Cleburne, Johnston, Col Mosby and many others did not advocate slavery nor own them). Sadly, the author fails to mentioned that we are the only Western nation to have allegedly fight a war to end slavery. The North had black codes which refused blacks the right to vote, own property, and attend schools, yet this is not mentioned. Hardly freedom. Blight's book is interesting in tracing the impact the conflict has had upon our memories and nation. The conflict truly established an enduring legacy of American fortitude and will. However, I was somewhat disappointed that he hardly gave attention to the rise of pragmatism in the US shortly after 1865, thus contributing to Jim Crow laws and segregation(not the correct means to deal with cultural problems). Blight also failed to show a grasp of antebellum race relations and that Southernors, despite slavery, were more yoked together then during the Northern Reconstruction time period. Although I gave it only 2 stars (generliazed view of the social/cultural issues surrounding the War and typical victors' history), it is worth buying.
Rating:
Summary: confederates saw the civil war as purely over slavery
Review: David Blight's work, although not new to the historiography, brings certain elements of the Civil War to the forefront. His use of race as a focal point is refreshing. While most people believe the war was fought entirely because of slavery, Blight again reminds the reader that it was not unitl 1863 that race and slavery became the focal point of the war. His even-handed approach to telling the story of the Civil War was outstanding. Again, a must read for those truly interested in American History.
Rating:
Summary: Challenging Memory
Review: David W. Blight has written a monumental study about the central place of memory in American life. While Race and Reunion specifically deals with the end of the Civil War to 1913 (the fiftieth reunion of Gettysburg), it is a powerful reminder that how we think about our past defines our present and shapes our future.
Blight's book is a necessary antidote for the easy nostalgia that too many Americans feel for ugly periods of our history. Indeed, the recent comments by Senator Trent Lott show that we have not fully learned the lessons that are so evident in this book.
As Bernard Malamud wrote in The Fixer: "There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil."
Race and Reunion tells how slavery went from being seen as corrupt to being remembered as an integral part of a respectable lifestyle. It also explains how the myths of the Lost Cause were told and retold throughout the nation until most of them became part of our accepted history.
Blight uses extensive citations in his reconstruction of the campaign to legitimize the Confederate cause, the honor of rebel soldiers, and the belief that slavery was a mostly benign practice. The success of those wishing to rehabilitate the Old South was astonishing. Blight details a fact that I had never known, and one that is among the most outrageous in our history. In 1923, the United States Senate appropriated $200,000 for a memorial to beloved and faithful mammies. This monument would have been located on Massachusetts Avenue and would have been the only national monument depicting African American "heroes." Thankfully, the bill died in the House.
Throughout this book there are other detailed analyses of how emancipation and reconstruction were all but deleted from our nation's collective understanding of the causes and outcomes of the war. The value of Race and Reunion cannot be overstated. Professor Blight's work offers its readers the chance to begin to understand our tragic past and troubled present.
Rating: 
Summary: How the South Won the Peace
Review: David W. Blight's thorough research, assembled into the seminal book "Race and Reunion" demonstrates how our nation lost the great opportunity created by the Civil War to lay a solid foundation for racial equality and justice. Professor Blight explains how the desire to reunite the (white components) of the nation in reconciliation and brotherhood pushed the issue of African Americans and their rights to the sidelines. The causes of the Civil War--slavery and the status of African Americans in our society--were de-emphasized, and the virtues and nobility of the fighting man, both North and South was lauded. Neither was right, neither was wrong; both were brave, and their causes just. The idea that we should not judge veterans by the cause they fought lives with us today: this reviewer once participated in a dinner honoring a Russian pilot that fought for North Korea during the Korean War. Why did the Air Force honor a man who killed Americans for what many would consider one of the most evil regimes imaginable? Because he was a great "warrior." Our desire to avoid judging warriors began with the Civil War. It has damaged our moral sensibilities since. By reducing the Civil War to chivalrous recollections, the essential meaning of the war became lost, and the South was able to build myths of the Lost Cause, the happy slave, and an Antebellum Utopia. Reconstruction went down in US history books as a chapter of regional oppression. Professor Blight demonstrates that this was not by chance: the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and other organizations worked to ensure their views were in textbooks across the nation. They promoted the "faithful slave" image, awarded laudatory reminiscences of the Klan, and erected "Mammy" memorials. Their goals were not innocent. One UDC member claimed (page 290) " . . .we can always feel sure that white supremacy is God-given and will last." Professor Blight's work is thick with primary sources, and his words shows deep knowledge of 19th Century politics, fiction, perceptions and viewpoints. The book is not easily read from cover-to-cover: it is lengthy and divided into chapters where the content is occasionally duplicative. Among the best sections is one describing the struggle within the black community to come to grips with their declining fortunes as Jim Crow and lynchings spread across the South. It is a story not often mentioned, and in great need of study. Another section on racist Plantation Literature revealed a topic completely new to this reader. I owe thanks to Professor Blight for showing how a culture's fictionalized past can warp the present and future. The author provides some excellent photographs that place the text in time and space. This reviewer would have like a bit more material on the Antebellum South's views, and a perhaps a chart or two to show when organizations began and ended, when events exactly occurred, and the like. I was a bit unsure exactly what reconstruction meant, in real terms, by the text. A clearer explanation would have been helpful. This might be simply a symptom of this reviewer's ignorance, however. This book is an essential one for those who like to focus upon the combat aspects of the Civil War, in that it explains how one can waste much blood and yet surrender goals for peace. It would also be useful for those individuals working in the contemporary national security apparatus, to help them understand that conflicts do not end when the guns go silent. Military victories must be followed by perception management, sometimes for decades. The text is well footnoted, and has an excellent index.
Rating:
Summary: Reconstruction versus Reconciliation
Review: Following the end of the Civil War, there was a tension between those who favored a strict reconstuction of the governments of the defeated South and those who favored a reconciliationist approach. The reconstructionists, led by the Radical Republicans in Congress wanted to protect,implement, and perhaps expand the rights of the newly freed blacks. The reconciliationists favored putting the Civil War behind the United States and creating a sense of nationalism among sections that, up to 1865, had been bitter enemies. Professor Blight traces the tension between these two competing visions from 1863, when President Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address, through 1913, which witnessed a reunion of Civil War veterans at Gettysburg and a commemorative speech by the then-President, Woodrow Wilson. Professor Blight drawns heavily on the work of recent scholars such as Eric Foner (and his predecessors) which has changed the way many historians view the Reconstruction Era. Professors Blight and Foner reject the view that Reconstruction was primarily an era of carpetbaggers, corruption and victimization of the South. The see it instead as a necessary attempt to protect black Americans. Reconstuction was gradually rejected and came to an end in 1876. The end of Reconstruction saw the rise of Jim Crow and segregation in the South with tragic consequences that would not be redressed until the Civil Rights Era of the mid-twentieth Century. The consequences remain with us. According to Professor Blight, the Reconciliationist picture relegated the treatment of Black Americans to secondary significance. This picture focused instead on the common threads that existed between North and South and particularly between their fighting forces. The militaries of both sides were motivated by patriotism, valor and courage, as they saw it. They fought for what they believed in, with, in the Reconciliatist approach, the cause of the War in slavery carefully omitted or marginalized. The Reconciliationist approach led in time, Professor Blight argues, to the myth of the Lost Cause and to the romanticization of the Old South. Professor Blight has amassed a great amount of learning and familiarity with primary source material to discuss the Reconstuctionist and Reconciliationist approaches to American History subsequent to the Civil War. He treats in detail much important American literature, including writers such as Walt Whitman, Steven Crane, Joel Chandler Harris, and Ambrose Bierce, among many others. He discusses Civil War writing by battlefiled participants that appeared in great quantity beginning in the late 1870's together with the memoirs of Civil War Generals, particularly Grant and Sherman. He discusses the work of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington and other black leaders. And he discusses works from politicians and apologists in both North and South. The book is an excellent study of the American experience following the Civil War. I think it is persuasive for the most part. In places, I think Professor Blight creates too much of a dichotomy between the Reconstructionist and Reconciliationist pictures. I think there was and is room for both visions. More importantly, the sources Professor Blight discusses show that there were many competing versions of the Civil War and its meanings, not all of which fall readily into the camp of either Reconstruction and Reconciliation. Following the Civil War, the United States needed to both secure the Civil Rights of Black Americans and also provide for a new American union and sense of Nationalism. Neither purpose was achieved fully or entirely well. We are working on them both today. Professor Blight has shown the tragedy of the War. He has also shown the serious consequences to our country of the long delay in fully addressing the Civil Rights of all American people. This is a worthwhile, thoughtful study of the legacy of the Civil War, but it does not provide the only word on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: confederates saw the civil war as purely over slavery
Review: From the Mississippi declaration of secession: "..Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. "
Texas:"...was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits - a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time."
Georgia:"..For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."
South Carolinia:"The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right."
Confederate Constitution:"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law [, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves] shall be passed." Jefferson Davis:".. the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable.."
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