No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.

In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunionis a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.

Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.

Blight's eclecticism and erudition make this sweeping historical saga a pleasure to read...This powerful book is a part of [an] intellectual and political tradition. Race and Reunionchallenges us to take seriously the clashes over the Civil War's contested legacies and symbols, which Americans continue to debate into the twenty-first century.

David Blight's Race and Reunionis one of the most fascinating and rewarding scholarly books of the past few years for the general reader with an interest in American history...Blight describes clearly the ways in which the culture of commemoration related to the politics and social struggle of Reconstruction. His haunting account of violence in the post-war South is only one example of the eloquence that characterizes the book...Blight is scrupulously fair in his judgments. He is equally alert to the Northern white self-congratulation that inflated the legend of the Underground Railroad and the racist pretension that shaped the version of history peddled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. He is especially alert to the way that even-handedness has served as a tool for suppressing memory of the moral issues at the heart of the Civil War by turning attention to the spectacle of combat and the bravery of the soldiers on both sides. This sensitivity to social values makes Race and Reunionmore than an achievement of scholarship. It is a contribution to contemporary politics and culture that deserves a wide audience.

Blight demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the war, the needs of memory and the excessive focus on battlefield experience all but obliterated the role played by African Americans, and the promises made them. All told, this thoughtful, timely study presents a somewhat pessimistic view of the role played by the memory of this key conflict in the making of American's self-image, which, in the turn to sentiment rather than fact, lost much of its ideological integrity.

[Blight] begins and ends his tour de forcestudy of America's memory of the [Civil] War at the Gettysburg reunion and notes that black veterans were virtually invisible on that occasion--the black presence at Gettysburg in 1913 was as menial laborers--and that while Wilson spoke, his administration was aggressively segregating federal agencies in Washington...This is a story of mammoth and tragic sweep, with consequences that are very much alive in present-day America. David Blight tells it with a passionate, soulful voice, a voice of conviction based on an intimate knowledge of a sweeping array of sources. Race and Reunionis a brilliant book.

As Blight conclusively demonstrates, the [post-Civil War] United States was caught up almost immediately in a 'tormented relationship between healing and justice,' and the abolitionist, emancipationist view of the war's aims quickly receded into the background...African Americans kept alive their own memories of slavery, the war and Reconstruction...but not until long after World War I did they begin to find a hearing for their grievances and yearnings.

Blight's analysis is compelling. His writing has a lyrical quality that underscores the tragic story he has to tell. This is an important book that should command a wide readership among those interested in race relations in the US. It should be required reading in Mississippi.

Denying that the South fought for slavery [in the Civil War] was a key element in a decades-long ideological battle eventually settled in a devil's bargain: reconciliation between whites North and South, purchased at the price of racial segregation. The story of how that bargain was struck is told by historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory...Race and Reunionis a deeply unsettling, pioneering work that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer: questions that should continue to trouble us...The myths and lies forged over a century ago still have us locked in their chains.

In this history, Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, the ritual of Memorial Day, and resurrects African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. 32 halftones.

David W. Blightis Professor of History at <>Yale University.

Prologue

1. The Dead and the Living

2. Regeneration and Reconstruction

3. Decoration Days

4. Reconstruction and Reconciliation

5. Soldiers' Memory

6. Soldiers' Faith

7. The Literature of Reunion and Its Discontents

8. The Lost Cause and Causes Not Lost

9. Black Memory and Progress of the Race

10. Fifty Years of Freedom and Reunion

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index