Race and Reunion

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson’s addressed Civil War veterans at the “Peace Jubilee” held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This gathering of both Union and Confederate veterans marked the 50th anniversary of the battle at Gettysburg and exemplifies the sentiment of reconciliation that the remainder of the book studies. The reunion “was about forging unifying myths and making remembering safe. Neither space nor time was allowed […] for considering the causes, transformations, and results of the war” (9). Moreover, acknowledgement of enslavement’s end was absent from the Jubilee as were Black veterans, making it a “Jim Crow reunion.” The Jubilee highlights white supremacy’s ascendency in the war’s aftermath.

Wilson’s Peace Jubilee speech contrasts significantly with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It illuminates the white reconciliationist version of Civil War memory that took shape in the decades since the war’s conclusion. Wilson spoke about a healed nation and the “quarrel forgotten” while also praising the veterans’ “splendid valor” and “manly devotion” (11). Lincoln’s famous speech, in contrast, addressed the reasons for the Civil War and the mass death that occurred at Gettysburg. For Lincoln, the war was a new revolution, and he “seemed to see fitfully that the rebirth would be rooted in the challenge of human equality in a nation, ready or not, governed somehow by and for all the people” (13-14). This principle of equality that was “embedded in the idea of the Second American Revolution had become the ‘quarrel forgotten’ on the statute books of Jim Crow America” (14).

One cannot, however, fully understand Lincoln’s address without knowledge of Frederick Douglass’s emancipationist contribution to understanding the war’s purpose and its memory. Blight calls Douglass Lincoln’s “alter ego” and “the intellectual godfather of the Gettysburg Address” (15). Douglass’s emancipationist perspective appears in virtually everything he wrote and the speeches he gave. He viewed the war’s purpose as one of “National regeneration” (18). This regeneration must result in equal rights for Black Americans. Poet Walt Whitman also saw the war as one from which the country could undergo a rebirth, but he had a conservative view of Reconstruction that excluded and disempowered Black Americans.

As the Civil War concluded, Black Americans were especially conscious that they were living during a time of significant change. Every soldier who fought for the Union fought for its restoration, but Black veterans specifically fought to have equal rights. Reconciliation meant equality for them. Yet the end of enslavement, paired with the effort to reunite the nation, led to a Black struggle for survival in a country where white supremacy dominated social and political institutions. Freedom for Black Americans came with limited rights. Reunion and Black Americans’ rights were at odds.

The Reconstruction era sought to reconcile two forces that worked in opposition: emancipation and reconciliation of the Northern and Southern states. Memorializing the dead and remembering the war’s difficulties were easier than addressing the root cause of the war and ideological issues.

The ruins that the Civil War left generated a new and rising interest in the country’s “historic landscapes.” Northern travelers, like John T. Trowbridge and John R. Dennett, authored accounts of their battlefield tours from North to South. Their encounters with white Southerners revealed that former Confederates realized that reunion and race were linked and did not like it. Virginians, for example, told Dennett that they felt subjugated and proclaimed that they would never accept Black leadership. The myth of the southern “Lost Cause” had already begun its emergence.

White Southerners confirm this perspective. Exiled from her family’s plantation during the war, Kate Stone wrote bitterly about being “subjugated” and “conquered.” She expressed disdain for the Black soldiers she saw when she returned home after the war. Stone later became active in the movement to memorialize Confederate soldiers and took on a leadership role in the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She exemplifies the way that white southerners turned “defeat into a triumphant remembrance” (40).

White views of regeneration contrast with Black experiences. Frederick Douglass contended that Black Americans could not move forward by ignoring history, and Black veterans argued they deserved commissions as officers in the military forces that occupied the Reconstruction South. Although the North lay victorious, Reconstruction had “to determine just how defeated the south really was, and to establish how free emancipated slaves really were” (44). President Andrew Johnson’s perspective was lenient, giving power to whites and none to Black Southerners. Moreover, he repeatedly vetoed the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Black Americans citizenship, and he denied the Freedman’s Bureau’s attempt to redistribute land to former slaves. Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens condemned Johnson’s leniency and suggested that his policies allowed white Southerners’ disloyalty to continue and grow. Radical Reconstructionists eventually seized control of federal policy, and the First Reconstruction Act of 1867 “made black suffrage a condition of readmission to the Union” (47). Black Southerners engaged in political activity, in conjunction with white Republicans, by founding schools and reforming taxation.

Moderate Republicans, however, challenged radicals, and competing definitions of “healing” and “justice” emerged. For moderates, it was enough that freedmen gained voting rights. Radical Republicans, in contrast, wanted to postpone healing in pursuit of greater justice. The moderate stance, however, gained more traction. Republican Horace Greeley represents this moderate position on reconciliation that emerged in the 1860s. He was one of several who put up funds to support former Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s bail and then “began to build a political career around the grand aim of sectional reunion” (59). He publicly stated that men on both sides of the conflict had exhibited bravery and called on Americans to forget the war’s causes and ignore the country’s history of enslavement. Although radicals voiced their opposition to moderate perspectives like Greeley’s, he also received widespread praise, reflective of the turn Reconstruction took in years to come.

After the war’s end, Northerners and Southerners began to memorialize the dead, establishing the roots of what became Memorial Day. Although these early decoration or memorial days started for spiritual reasons, they soon developed political and reconciliationist tones.

The first Decoration Day occurred in May of 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, when Black Southerners and Northern abolitionists joined forces to hold a parade and decorate gravestones. Blight notes, “In such collective performances, blacks in Charleston proclaimed their freedom and converted destruction into new life. In richly symbolic parades and other ceremonies they announced their rebirth” (67). These early rituals thus embodied the emancipationist vision of postwar America.

Although Memorial Day’s roots lie with Black Southerners, others also claimed ownership of what became Memorial Day. The first Memorial Day commemoration in the north took place in 1868, when Union veterans decorated the graves of their fallen comrades and called for a day of national remembrance. In the decades that followed, all over the country people memorialized the Civil War dead each spring. Many of the speeches given at these ceremonies came with reconciliationist overtones, thus giving these spiritual events a political character.

White Southerners developed their own rituals and constructed memorial monuments to the dead in towns and cities across the southern states. Cemeteries of Civil War dead dotted the landscape and, during Reconstruction, became the focal points for memorialization. In the 1870s, memorial groups actively engaged in promotion of the mythical Lost Cause through their ceremonies and through publications like the Southern Historical Society Papers, which actively countered the emancipationist view of the war. Monument unveilings also shaped southern memories and promoted the Lost Cause. In Richmond, Virginia, the Democratic governor prohibited Black militiamen and Black Republican assembly members from participating in the parade before the unveiling of a monument honoring the Southern general, Stonewall Jackson.

Northerners and Southerners also began to hold joint ritual commemorations in the 1870s, signifying reconciliation’s ascendency. In Raleigh, North Carolina Black veterans had always taken part in memorial rituals, but in 1875, when northern and southern veterans collaborated, Black residents were excluded. Similarly, a huge Memorial Day event took place in New York City in 1877 that paid homage to both Union and Confederate dead. A former Confederate general, Roger A. Pryor, gave a speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in which he praised southern soldiers, claimed the Civil War was not about enslavement, and denounced Reconstruction. Although emancipationist interpretations of the war were not absent, they now existed “on the margins” (92).