Race And Reunion Analysis

David W. Blight’s theme of Race and Reunion is the study of “how Americans remembered their most divisive and tragic experience during the fifty-year period after the Civil War.” He attempts to probe the interrelationship between race and reunion in American culture and society that occurred for the next fifty-years following the Civil War. Blight argues there is a clash of contending memories in public memory between Northern and Southern Americans. Blight contends there are three overall visions of Civil War memory that collided and combined over time: the reconciliationist, the white supremacist, and the emancipationist visions. Blight argues that the emancipationist visions is evident during the Reconstruction period citing the Constitutional Amendments and Civil Rights Acts that were enacted to protect the black freeman. He presents evidence that black’s enjoyed a sense of equality and freedom never before experienced under slavery. For example, they
The Lost Cause, is an assertion by the South that the Civil War was about state’s rights not slavery. Claiming that slavery was benevolent, rather than the usually cruel and violent reality. Bright asserts the belief started immediately following the war and continued to dominate public opinion and the scholarship until the 1930s. He presents three key elements that resulted in the spread of the Lost Cause: “the movement’s effort to write and control the history of the war and its aftermath; its use of white supremacy as both means and ends; and the place of women in its development.” The meaning of benevolent is demonstrated by authors Thomas Page and Joel Harris claiming that slaves were “happy” under slavery. That slaves remained on the plantations, protecting their master’s property or fighting alongside their master’s on the Confederate