Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory.

By David W. Blight. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. [xii], 512. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-00332-2.)

David W. Blight's book has accomplished for Paul H. Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning Road to Reunion (Boston, 1937) what Kenneth M. Stampp's Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956) did for U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918): recognizing and appreciating the place of African Americans in central aspects of the American past. In doing so, Blight makes clear that white southerners' defenses of their past were so effective and enduring that even Buck's mid-twentieth-century work still depended on the truncated memories and meanings that had emerged from the War for Southern Independence.

Blight describes his book as "necessarily ... a synthetic and selective work on a vast topic" (p. 1). The topic is the Civil War memories of southerners and northerners, black and white, and it certainly is vast, yet Blight has worked imaginatively and responsibly through a wide array of printed and manuscript sources, including the large collections of reminiscences published during the 1880s from both sides of the war. His book is a fascinating and impressive example of scholarship.

Blight begins his frequently eloquent interpretations of the reminiscences in 1863 with emancipation. He concludes his story in 1913 with the enormous reunion of over 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans at a huge tented camp celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. That celebration is one of the ironies of which Blight often quietly reminds us. Gettysburg may have been the Confederacy's high-water mark and Robert E. Lee's greatest defeat, yet Confederate veterans by the thousands flocked to the state-funded reunion. Although almost 200,000 black men fought for the Union, the veterans at the Gettysburg reunion in 1913 were all white. The cooks, carpenters, and other skilled workers who served the veterans were almost all black.

For African Americans, memories of the war began with the Emancipation Proclamation, which was repeatedly recalled in black churches and at public places but almost always only by African Americans. Blacks were the first to create Memorial Day in 1865 in Charleston (!), but the North's and South's Memorial Days soon followed, largely ignoring emancipation. After Reconstruction as before, black leaders, especially Frederick Douglass and George Washington Williams, struggled year in and year out to remember that African Americans had not only endured bondage, they had also acted to end it and had fought to sustain the Union and their own freedom. Their audiences, however, were largely blacks.

Blight wryly summarizes white southerners' defenses of the past by noting that slavery "was good while it lasted, good once it was gone; no Southerner fought in its defense and no Northerner died to end it" (p. 91). Secession was not treason, but simply a constitutional right of an oppressed people, and which required no war.

During Reconstruction and after, northern memories gradually shifted away from the Radical political demands for black suffrage and came to recognize that both sides had suffered and died during the terrible war they had shared. Most white Americans by the end of Reconstruction came to believe that reconciliation between the regions could work. A price of that reconciliation was a deliberate denigration of African Americans by southern writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, or organizations like the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They portrayed slaves as loyal protectors of women and children; some even asserted that blacks had served in the Confederate army. Among African Americans, however, memories could be complex, especially when slavery was depicted by whites as fantasy, while KKK threats and violence during and after Reconstruction were experiences that black Americans could not easily forget. The difficulty for blacks, as Blight poignantly writes in his powerful chapter 9, was how African Americans sought to "understand and use the legacy of slavery and the Civil War era, how to preserve and destroy the past" (p. 318).

Only a small number of white northerners who served in the Union armies in the South chose to remember their experiences among blacks. Among the most articulate in Blight's book were Albion Tourgee, the well-known novelist and Reconstruction figure in the postwar South, and Ambrose Bierce, the embittered satirist and perhaps America's most realistic novelist at the end of the century. Blight also shows that recollections by northerners of the Underground Railroad might well have expressed African American audacity and purposefulness, yet, as Blight notes, many writers about the Railroad often garnered instead a sense of self-esteem in remembering the war. Some offered, as Blight remarks, "an alternative veteranhood" (p. 234).

Blight's picture of the invisibility of African Americans in the minds of northerners by the end of the century is certainly overpowering in its details and diversity of sources. Nonetheless, southern unity was not as overwhelming as Blight seems to suggest. Only in passing does he mention the Readjusters in Virginia in the early 1880s and the southern Populists of the 1890s, though in both historical movements thousands of white southerners joined with blacks in pursuit of a new biracial politics in the region. The impression is left, too, that it was not exceptional persuasiveness from the supporters of the Lost Cause that overwhelmed the North's eagerness to accept the fantasies about slavery and blacks. For although the Grand Army of the Republic became a powerful political force in the North, its hundreds of posts were almost entirely segregated. Indeed, even during the middle years of Reconstruction, as Blight recognizes, a substantial Liberal Republican movement of the North was already quite prepared to accept reunion in exchange for the loss of black civil rights in the South. So if there is a criticism that could be made about this splendidly analyzed and beautifully written book, it is the slighting of the North's eagerness to accept the vicious onslaughts from the propagandists of the Lost Cause.

In sum, Blight's engaging and elegant story of the "road to reunion" may well be more deserving of a Pulitzer Prize than Buck's was the first time around.

CARL N. DEGLER
Stanford University