Book Review

The study of historical memory is no mere academic exercise. Historical memory matters in contemporary political discussions, both despite and because of the public's seeming indifference to historical questions. Recent controversies over the Confederate battle flag make the application of these generalizations to the Civil War obvious, but the relationship is anything but simple. David W. Blight uses "divergent voices North and South, black and white" to craft a complex book. Although the study of memory has often been weakened by postmodern theorizing about social construction, Blight, while not ignoring the interdisciplinary literature of memory, writes with a passionate moral commitment that expresses clear preferences for some forms of historical memory over others. His thesis is refreshingly straightforward: during the half century after the Civil War, the sections reconciled and the races divided.	1
For Blight "reunion" and "race" were always linked, and his three main categories of Civil War memory, reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist, coexisted in a world of tension, irony, and contradiction. By the time of the great Gettysburg reunion in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson declared an end to sectional strife by ignoring racial strife and when justice had been sacrificed to sentiment, troubling questions about Civil War memory remained unresolved even as the voices of those people who would still discuss the legacies of slavery had trouble finding an audience.	2
The battle over the war's meaning had in fact begun before the fighting had ended. The Union army's treatment of African American soldiers, the problem of restoring "loyalty" in the Confederate states, and the battle scarring of the southern landscape all raised questions about historical memory. Blight deftly interweaves discussions of Reconstruction politics with an analysis of memorial days and monuments. Thus releasing Jefferson Davis from prison, with strong support from the abolitionists Gerritt Smith and Horace Greeley, became a prelude to sectional reconciliation that soon led to Yankee-Rebel reunions and coincided with northern abandonment of the "southern question." Blight carefully shows how during elections in 1868, 1872, 1874, and 1876, in the midst of a sometimes violent counterrevolution in the South launched by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups, appeals for sectional reconciliation and racial justice became mutually exclusive as conflicts over historical memory had both real and terrible consequences for newly enfranchised African Americans.	3
Although Frederick Douglass and a few others still spoke of a "war between men of thought as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield," by the 1880s commemorating military sacrifice had become the dominant theme in public ceremonies. Except for African American leaders and a few white neo-abolitionists, descriptions of the war as a battle between right and wrong quickly faded. Ironically, of course, many historians have themselves contributed to a blurring of moral distinctions by emphasizing the pervasive racism of northern culture, and anyone who has read the comments from Union officers and enlisted men on emancipation will realize that a common racism as well as a common valor united Blue and Gray. Indeed, Blight too often ignores how many of the attitudes and recollections that he deplores as either sentimental or reactionary were in fact quite common during the war itself. Fraternization between the two sides, for example, and even statements blaming generals and politicians for keeping a war going that the common soldiers could have easily settled among themselves, were not simply postwar creations.	. . .