Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War.

Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. By David W. Blight. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, c. 2002. Pp. xiv, 301. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55849-361-1; cloth, $70.00, ISBN 1-55849-344-1.)

In Beyond the Battlefield, David W. Blight offers twelve of his essays, four of them previously unpublished or hard to find. The majority revolve around themes developed in his masterful study, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), which justly won a slew of prizes. Five do not. One of these offers a very useful overview of African American attitudes during the coming of the Civil War; another provides an intriguing analysis of one northern soldier's motives for fighting in that war. The others look, respectively, at the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, the histories written about W. E. B. Du Bois, and the career of Nathan Irvin Huggins. These three offer new and helpful insights; Blight is a superb reader with an amazing ability to clarify meanings and explicate the personal and social context in which intellectuals work.

The remaining essays revolve around the meaning and memory of the Civil War. Alas for harried graduate students preparing for general exams or others seeking an article that summarizes the argument of a long book, none offers such an overview of Race and Reunion. Nor do any of the essays advance or refine its interpretation, since all appeared before the book's publication. Yet, collecting earlier essays does allow authors, as Blight puts it, to trace "the archaeology of their own work over time," and that becomes the primary value for readers as well (p. [ix]). Readers who "dig" in the foundations of Race and Reunion will no doubt discover various artifacts that will cast new light on the larger work, but one in particular merits mention. There appears to be--the archaeological record often proves ephemeral after all--a subtle shift in interpreting the importance of the Lost Cause in shaping American memory. In the first article in which Blight began to develop his interpretation, he observed that during Reconstruction many white northerners shared white southerners' commitment to white supremacy. That essay also treated a national resurgence of racism and the influence of the Lost Cause as distinct forces leading Frederick Douglass to worry about the abandonment of the emancipationist legacy of the war, the idea that the war should bring equality as well as freedom. In a later piece, though, Blight said less about northern racism and stressed instead that an aggressive Lost Cause mythology triumphed over the emancipationist interpretation. In Race and Reunion, too, the Lost Cause receives most of the blame for creating a white supremacist memory of the war.

The Lost Cause certainly fostered white supremacy, but should the earlier emphasis on a resurgent racism nationwide and especially northern white supremacy during Reconstruction have received more emphasis in Race and Reunion? In an essay in Beyond the Battlefield, Blight convincingly shows how both Douglass and Abraham Lincoln believed the war should transform the nation and bring equality to African Americans. But how many whites in the North conceived of the war in such terms? Long ago C. Vann Woodward proclaimed equality a northern war aim but one "that popular convictions were not prepared to sustain." ("Equality: The Deferred Commitment," in The Burden of Southern History [Baton Rouge, 1960], 83.) If Woodward was right, it changes the politics of memory in the postwar period. Advocates for the emancipationist legacy not only had to battle southern advocates of the Lost Cause but also convince many white northerners. The eventual dominant memory of the Civil War becomes less the result of the Lost Cause's triumph than of the persistence of nationally held white racial attitudes. To raise the issue in no way undermines Blight's accomplishments. Like Douglass and Du Bois before him, Blight seeks to force Americans to face the tragic nature of the Civil War. They should not revel in its glories, he reminds them, but confront its fundamental issue, slavery. He subtly pushes them to embrace the emancipationist interpretation of the war and to address the racism so deeply intertwined with the history of American freedom.

Blight thereby joins the battle for historical memory that he studies. He is to be commended, not criticized, for his efforts, especially because he studies memory as he demands that others do, with the historian's usual devotion to "evidence and the search for reality" (p. 3). He draws a stark line of demarcation between memory and history. Unlike history, he writes in the introduction, memory is more religious than secular, "owned" not "interpreted," "passed down" not "revised," based on the authority of the community not that of the academy (p. 2). Yet the title of the introduction is "The Confluence of History and Memory," and in one essay Blight suggests he shares Du Bois's view "that written history cannot be completely disengaged from social memory" (p. 145). Indeed it cannot. Following Blight's lead, historians would do well to continue to uphold the standards of history even as they realize that the difference between what they do and what they label "memory" will appear far less stark to succeeding generations.

GAINES M. FOSTER

Louisiana State University