Race and Reunion

The Civil War in American Memory

David W. Blight

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780674417656
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia della guerra civile americana

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti award
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize 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 Reunion is 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.

ONE

The Dead and the Living

And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others—to me the main interest I found, (and still, on recollection, find) in the rank and file of the armies, both sides, and in those specimens amid the hospitals, and even the dead on the field.

—WALT WHITMAN, Specimen Days, 1882

THE LONG AND TROUBLED CAREER of Civil War memory began well before the conflict ended. It took root in the dead and the living. The living were compelled to find meaning in the dead and, as in most wars, the dead would have a hold on the living. In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln referred to the “brave men” who had “consecrated” the ground of that battlefield above the “power” of his words to “add or detract.”¹ Implied in the rest of that speech was the notion that the difference between the living and the dead was that the living were compelled to remember, and from the stuff of memory, create a new nation from the wreckage of the old.

ON JULY 3, 1913, a day of withering heat in Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson took a cruise aboard the Mayflower down the Potomac River toward Chesapeake Bay. A small party of aides and journalists accompanied a harassed President who was eager to be a historical tourist for a day at the Yorktown Revolutionary War battlefield. The following day, July 4, Wilson was to address an extraordinary gathering of Union and Confederate veterans at America’s most famous battlefield—Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

During his visit to the Yorktown sites, Wilson went almost entirely unrecognized by the variety of local people he encountered. Only a young white girl recognized the President as she offered to be his guide through the house that had served as Lord Cornwallis’s headquarters. Neither the clerk at the court house, nor the local sheriff, who had a campaign photograph of Wilson on his own wall, recognized their famous visitor. Most poignantly, as Wilson entered and returned to the wharf he met several blacks who called him “Uncle” but did not recognize the President. According to press reports, a “group of old-fashioned darkies sitting around some equally old-fashioned scales” offered to weigh the tourists. After a jaunty exchange, Wilson consented and tipped the scales at 181 pounds. The next morning at Gettysburg Wilson would weigh in on another matter, speaking to the world about the meaning of the Civil War and of fifty years of the nation’s remembering and forgetting. That he had gone virtually unrecognized on either side of the color line in a small corner of Virginia the day before may hardly have mattered much to the President. But perhaps the unnamed, and almost invisible, blacks hanging around a Potomac River wharf near a great historic site of Old Virginia (Wilson’s home state) represent an appropriate backdrop for the resounding event that Wilson would visit within twenty-four hours. The ignorance of the clerk and sheriff is remarkable. But it is hardly surprising that rural black Virginians would not know Wilson; since 1904 none of them had been able to vote in the state without passing literacy tests, paying poll taxes, and meeting all but impossible property restrictions. They spent so much of their segregated lives being “disrecognized” by whites that recognizing a President might take special knowledge.²

President Wilson had initially declined to appear at the fiftieth-anniversary Blue-Gray reunion to be held in the Pennsylvania town July 1–4, preferring a vacation trip with his family in Cornish, New Hampshire. But circumstances, and the urgings of Congressman A. Mitchell Palmer, made him “constrained to consent to be present at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg,” as he wrote to his wife, Ellen. Wilson realized that this reunion “was something we had to take very seriously indeed. It is no ordinary celebration.” Wilson privately expressed his awareness of being the first Southerner elected President since the Civil War. “Both blue and gray are to be there,” he observed. “It is to celebrate the end of all feeling as well as the end of all strife between the sections.” Wilson was also acutely aware that he followed Abraham Lincoln’s footsteps to Gettysburg. “Fifty years ago, almost, also on the fourth of July, Mr. Lincoln was there (in the midst of business of the most serious and pressing kind, and at great personal cost and sacrifice to himself). If the President should refuse to go this time . . . it would be hotly resented . . . it would be suggested that he is a Southerner and out of sympathy with the occasion.”³ Sometime between changing his plans on June 28, when he announced that he would attend the reunion, and July 4, Wilson wrote his own short, restrained Gettysburg address.

The 1913 reunion at Gettysburg was a ritual like none other that had occurred in America. It had been designed to be a festival of sectional reconciliation and patriotism. The states appropriated some $1,750,000 to pay the transportation of any Civil War veteran from any part of the country. The federal government, through Congress and the War Department, appropriated approximately $450,000 to build a “Great Camp” to house and feed the veterans. A total of 53,407 veterans attended the reunion, and as many spectators were estimated to have descended on the town of Gettysburg during the week of the event, all riding the special cars of some forty-seven railroad companies operating in or through Pennsylvania. As it stood in American culture in the early twentieth century, Civil War memory never saw a more fully orchestrated expression than at Gettysburg on the battle’s semicentennial.⁴

Once the old men had arrived in their uniforms, decked out in ribbons and graced with silver beards, the tent city on the battlefield became one of the most extraordinary spectacles Americans had ever seen. For most observers, the veterans were men out of another time, icons that stimulated a sense of pride, history, and amusement all at once. They were an irresistible medium through which Americans could envision part of their inheritance and be deflected by it at the same time. They were at once the embodiment of Civil War nostalgia, symbols of a lost age of heroism, and the fulfillment of that most human of needs—civic and spiritual reconciliation.

As bands played, suffragettes lobbied the tented grounds, shouting “votes for women.” The recently formed Boy Scouts of America served as aides to the old soldiers, and members of the regular U.S. Army guarded the proceedings. Newspapers gushed with amazement. “You may search the world’s history in vain for such a spectacle,” announced the Columbus Citizen (Ohio). The sense of completeness of the national reunion was especially prevalent in the newspapers. The National Tribune (an official organ of the Grand Army of the Republic, GAR) rejoiced over the “death of sectionalism” and the ongoing “obliterating of Mason and Dixon’s line.” And the Confederate Veteran could declare with full confidence that “the day of differences and jealousies is past.” The London Times of England marveled that, however pathetic their feebleness, the mingled veterans were “eradicating forever the scars of the civil war in a way that no amount of preaching or political maneuvering could have done.” Glorious remembrance was all but overwhelmed by an even more glorious forgetting. “Thank God for Gettysburg, hosanna!” proclaimed the Louisville Courier-Journal. “God bless us everyone, alike the Blue and the Gray, the Gray and the Blue! The world ne’er witnessed such a sight as this. Beholding, can we say happy is the nation that hath no history?”⁵

On the third day of the reunion, July 3, the governors of the various states spoke in a giant tent constructed on the field where Pickett’s Charge had occurred fifty years earlier. Governor William Hodges Mann of Virginia struck the most meaningful chord of memory: “We are not here to discuss the Genesis of the war, but men who have tried each other in the storm and smoke of battle are here to discuss this great fight . . . we came here, I say, not to discuss what caused the war of 1861–65, but to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man” (emphasis added).⁶ Like the politics of reconciliation, which was several decades old by 1913, this reunion was about forging unifying myths and making remembering safe. Neither space nor time was allowed at Gettysburg for considering the causes, transformations, and results of the war; no place was reserved for the legacies of emancipation or the conflicted and unresolved history of Reconstruction. Because the planners had allowed no space for surviving black veterans, they had also left no space on the programs for a discussion of that second great outcome of the war—the failures of racial reconciliation.

Of course, nations rarely commemorate their disasters and tragedies, unless compelled by forces that will not let the politics of memory rest. One should not diminish the profoundly meaningful experiences of the veterans themselves at such a reunion; the nation, through the psyches of old soldiers, had achieved a great deal of healing. But the 1913 “Peace Jubilee,” as the organizers called it, was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies. At a time when lynching had developed into a social ritual of its own horrifying kind, and when the American apartheid had become fully entrenched, many black leaders and editors found the sectional love feast at Gettysburg more than they could bear. “A Reunion of whom?” asked the Washington Bee. Only those who “fought for the preservation of the Union and the extinction of human slavery,” or also those who “fought to destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery, and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit and sophistry to propagate a national sentiment in favor of their nefarious contention that emancipation, reconstruction and enfranchisement are a dismal failure?”⁷ Black responses to such reunions as that at Gettysburg in 1913, and a host of similar events, demonstrated how fundamentally at odds black memories were with the national reunion. In that disconnection lay an American tragedy not yet fully told by 1913, and one utterly out of place at Blue-Gray reunions.

Woodrow Wilson did not likely think of this disconnection between black and white memories as he arrived at the Gettysburg train station on the morning of July 4. Wilson did not come to Gettysburg as a historian probing the past. Whisked in a car out to the battlefield where the great tent awaited with several thousand veterans crammed inside, Wilson, the Virginian-President, stood before the entrance, flanked by a Union veteran in long beard, holding a small U.S. flag, and a Confederate veteran in long mustache, holding a small Confederate flag. Behind him, Governors John K.

On July 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected President since the Civil War, spoke on the battlefield at Gettysburg during the fiftieth anniversary Blue-Gray reunion and declared the war America’s “quarrel forgotten.” (Record Group 25, Pennsylvania State Archives)

Tener (Pennsylvania) and William H. Mann (Virginia) followed him into the tent, as the President doffed his top hat. As the assembled throng of old veterans rose on the ground and in high-rise bleachers, Wilson strode to the stage. Wilson stood without a podium, the great beams of the tent arched behind him, the script in his left hand, and began to speak. He had not come to discuss the genesis or the results of the war. He declared it an “impertinence to discourse upon how the battle went, how it ended,” or even “what it signified.” Wilson’s charge, he claimed, was to comprehend the central question: What had the fifty years since the battle meant? His answer struck the mystic chord of memory that most white Americans were prepared to hear:

They have meant peace and union and vigor, and the maturity and might of a great nation. How wholesome and healing the peace has been! We have found one another again as brothers and comrades, in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men! (emphasis added)⁸

Wilson strained to look ahead and not to the past, to call the younger generation to a moral equivalent of war, doing battle “not with armies but with principalities and powers and wickedness in high places.” He appealed to a new “host” for a new age, not the “ghostly hosts who fought upon these battlefields long ago and are gone.” That new host was the teeming masses of the Progressive era, “the great and the small without class or difference of kind or race or origin; and undivided in interest.” Wilson’s great gift for mixing idealism with ambiguity was in perfect form. After this sole mention of race, and probably without the slightest thought of Jim Crow’s legal reign, Wilson proclaimed that “our constitutions are their [the people’s] articles of enlistment. The orders of the day are the laws upon our statute books.” After the obligatory endorsement of the valor of the past, Wilson devoted the majority of his fifteen-minute speech to the present and the future. “The day of our country’s life has but broadened into morning,” he concluded. “Do not put uniforms by. Put the harness of the present on.”⁹ These were telling words for the future war President who had studied the Civil War with keen interest.

After the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” Governor Tener immediately escorted Wilson to his car and back to the train station. In all, Wilson had spent less than an hour in Gettysburg; before noon he was on his private car en route to New York City, and eventually on to a New Hampshire retreat with his family. Within fifteen minutes of the conclusion of Wilson’s speech, the closing ceremony of the reunion took place. At high noon, all across the town and hillsides of Gettysburg, cooks and generals, Boy Scouts and veterans, journalists and tourists, Congressmen and latrine cleaners, all came to attention. The colors were lowered to half mast at all the regimental or unit headquarters throughout the tent city. A lone bugle played taps, and in the distance a battery of cannon fired intermittently. Then, for the next five minutes, the vast crowd stood in utter silence and paid the “Tribute to Our Honored Dead.”¹⁰ As Wilson’s train sped away in retreat, and as the fifty thousand assembled veterans tried to look down through what the President had called “those fifty crowded years” to fathom the meaning of the war and its aftermath, the dead and the living, the memories and the sun-baked oblivion, who can know what stories played on their hearts? In collective silence what memories careened back and forth between gleaming monuments and flapping flags? How did the silence of the honored dead speak?

THE FIVE MINUTES of silence to honor the dead on July 4, 1913, was two minutes longer than Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech on November 19, 1863, dedicating an unfinished cemetery for more than twelve thousand soldiers (many whose names were unknown) still in the process of being properly reburied. Since the battle nearly five months before, Gettysburg had been a community in shock and a macabre scene. Makeshift graves had been hastily dug all over the fields where men fell; others had been dug up by families looking for loved ones. Serious health hazards had threatened the local population, and hogs had fed on human body parts protruding from the ground. The horror that was the real battle of Gettysburg was to be transformed into something proper, solemn, perhaps even exalted by the carefully planned cemetery to be dedicated in November. The struggle to define the Civil War in America and determine its meaning did not begin at Gettysburg on that late autumn day, but it did receive an important ideological infusion.

Lincoln’s brief speech followed the official address—a long funereal oration by one of the nation’s premier orators, Edward Everett. Rich in detail about the battle and its participants, partisan and unflinching in its descriptions of the carnage, Everett’s nearly two-hour effort held the audience of twenty thousand in his customary spell. Drawing inspiration from Pericles’s funereal oration during the Peloponnesian War, Everett established America’s ancient lineage of sacred bloodletting. He laid responsibility for the “crime of rebellion,” and therefore, all the death, in the hands of Southern leaders. But no matter how long the war or the scale of death, Everett saw a future of “reconciliation,” a revived spirit of Union forged in such apocalyptic and necessary sacrifice.¹¹

As Lincoln assumed his function in the dedication (intended to be largely ceremonial), only about one-third of the Gettysburg dead had actually been buried in the new cemetery. Lincoln’s address contained n...