Rating: 
Summary: The meaning of the War?
Review: In Race and Reunion, David Blight argues that white Americans from both the north and south redefined their understanding of the causes and meaning of the Civil War as they attempted to reconstruct the nation. For Blight, the causes of the war were alternately the preservation of the Union or of slavery, and its most important legacy was emancipation. This interpretation was rejected during the post-war era, however, because it stood in the way of reconciliation and renewal. After an initial period of deep hostility between the sections while wartime atrocities were still fresh in their minds, Americans began to remember the war by focusing upon the shared experiences of both sides, thereby reducing their focus on their initial differences. For many, it no longer mattered which side had been right, only that all had fought for deeply held beliefs with honor and glory. As demonstrated in the massive amount of evidence Blight has gathered from popularized histories, magazines, and fiction, the war and its participants were romanticized in a way that served to erase both its tragedy and its causes. The centrality of race and slavery in the conflict were thereby forgotten by most, eventually to the point that southern apologists could even maintain that they had been right in preserving slavery, and few but black Americans would argue. Indeed, in the memories of former slaves and their descendents, the importance of emancipation was central to their understanding of the war, and the rejection of that interpretation by whites was a huge betrayal. Most whites however were exhausted by acrimony; they wanted to rebuild the nation and move forward, and could only do so by ceasing to argue a cause they felt the war had settled. Although Blight fails to address it, it is likely that northern whites came to view southern sentiment more charitably not simply because they were too exhausted by war to fully implement civil rights for former slaves, or because they wanted to make amends with white southerners, but because with the growth of industrialism and its concurrent labor problems, the idea that a slave society had been able to keep social harmony and prevent such conflicts between labor and capital was appealing and believable in and of itself. Blight persuasively shows that whites "remembered" and redefined the war precisely by forgetting it. However, the book is marred by his failure to use similar evidence that the war ever meant the same things to its participants that it does to him in the first place. Simply saying that northerners went to war to "preserve the union and end slavery" is not enough. Undoubtedly those were important motivations, but the complexities behind them are as deep as those involved in remembrance. Indeed, most northerners did not go to war to end slavery, so it should not surprise us that emancipation and race figured less prominently in their memories of the war than Blight would hope. For southerners, preserving slavery was certainly the primary cause of the war, but Blight fails to see that slavery involved more than just the ownership of blacks. Everything that southerners believed in was shaped by the centrality of slavery to their entire society-we cannot discount their contention that they were fighting for freedom and democracy, or anything else, because their understanding of all those things rested on slavery itself. Nor should we be surprised at their reaction to Reconstruction, for it turned everything they believed or understood about that society upside down. Blight then has succeeded in showing us how the war came to be remembered, but not how that memory differed from its participants' original understanding of it, or how reconciliation could have developed any differently.
Rating:
Summary: revisionist history
Review: What one reviewer here refers to as "advocacy" is only good revisionist history, offering correction to more than 100 years of Lost Cause nonsense and reconciliation propaganda that began in earnest within two weeks of the South's loss at Gettysburg. I would only point to other contemporary historians whose work supplements and supports Blight's excellent book and thesis: Carol Reardon, Gary Gallagher,David Glassburg, Eric Foner and James McPherson. This is a contentious subject and the interpretation is unsettling to many (neo-Confederates, in particular) who remain mired in the kind of Ken Burns myth-making that the Civil War was a tragedy with a happy ending, that the war was necessary so the country could be forever united. A happy conclusion, of course, unless you happen to be African American. Highly recommended reading, a tonic to ages of partisan recollection that distorted the meaning of Civil War and allowed most Americans to continue wallowing in nostalgia and ancestor worship while avoiding the issue of slavery and its truly tragic consequences.
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