Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

"That book and its impact are critiqued in one of the books I did recommend, which is David Blight’s Race and Reunion . As he points out, after the war a battle over the memory of the war began. The South portrayed its efforts as militarily astute and admirable. The notion that slavery was a cause of the war disappears from Southern writing. Slave plantations are portrayed as honorable and idyllic, without any hint of the horrors of slavery. “The most distinctive and widespread experience of the Civil War was the loss of loved ones” The Lost Cause was part of a movement by the defeated to recast the meaning of the war. It was an effective effort. As David Blight points out in Race and Reunion , the Civil War’s emancipationist legacy—as a victory for human possibility, black citizenship and equal justice before the law—becomes eroded by the efforts of Pollard and others in the South who conveyed a reconciliationist message— emphasizing the bravery of both sides and marginalizing the promises to freedman which were part of the purpose of the Northern war effort and the post-Civil War amendments. The guarantee of black male suffrage under the 15th Amendment and the 14th Amendment guarantees of citizenship were further marginalized by Supreme Court decisions made after the emergence of the ‘lost cause’ view."