Every so often I read a book that so overwhelms me with its breadth and depth of information that I wish I had already read it twice in the hope of clinging to just a little bit more of its knowledge. Race and Reunion is such a book. David Blight documents the aftermath of the American Civil War, when two previously warring factions had to come to terms with still being part of the same country and make sense of the bloody years that had just passed. Conflicting ideologies competed to interpret the events of the Civil War, sometimes with violent outcomes, and in the end they created a vile system of white supremacy and oppression alongside unfulfilled potential. How emancipation transitioned to Jim Crow isn’t the core focus of the book, it is far more expansive than that, but it would do as a pithy summary.
I would love to give a comprehensive account of what Race and Reunion covers but I don’t feel like I’ve fully internalised all of it. In an unusual move, for me at least, I listened to this as an audiobook and while I have no complaints about that as a production, I certainly don’t feel like it was the optimal way for me to take all this information in. I took a lot on board, but I think I may need to read a physical copy to really understand all of the threads that David Blight pulls together to create his portrait of post-Civil War society. Each chapter in Race and Reunion is a comprehensive deep dive into one aspect of Civil War memory that all build together to create a masterful portrait of approximately five decades of American memory.
For me the standout theme, the one that will stick with me the longest, is the tripartite division between Lost Cause, Reconciliationist, and Emancipationist narratives. The slow triumph of Reconciliation, and how it surrendered to Southern terms and opened the door for Lost Cause interpretations, was a prominent theme throughout the book and really helped me to better understand how the Lost Cause, being a philosophy of the defeated South, eventually became such a dominant element in American society. This is far from the only theme in Blight’s book, but it was the one that stood out the most to me and had the most profound impact on my understanding of the end of the nineteenth century. Blight also makes clear the internal conflict that existed within those groups and expanded my understanding of who belonged to those movements. History is complicated and I love it when works of history embrace that complexity and do their best to explain it, even if the end result can make my head hurt.
My second favorite section was Blight’s coverage of post-war literature and how popular literary trends shaped both memory of the war and pre-war society. In particular, I was fascinated and horrified by his coverage of the dominance of plantation stories written by whites with a delusional notion of what black life was like in the antebellum south. While much of this section of the book was deeply distressing, something that is true for most of its length really, there were some bright spots, including a small number of emancipationist post-war works of fiction that I may end up reading myself. Given how much the popularity of the Lost Cause owes to works of mass media and pop culture this section felt particularly relevant and important to our understanding of how the Lost Cause became so pervasive.
Blight also does a good job at not limiting himself to just white memory of the war. The book dives deep into how black Americans, both freed slaves and those born free, had to come to terms with what the war meant as well as the slow slide into Jim Crow and white supremacy that followed. This analysis helps to ensure that Blight’s portrait of postwar memory is diverse and complex, which is probably the book’s greatest strength.
Blight is a good writer and the information is presented clearly and coherently, this is not dense academic prose, but at the same time this is heavy stuff. The book documents the triumph of white supremacy and does not shy away from the many crimes committed against Black Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s an unflinching look at American history, and so can be quite difficult and enraging to read. This is a valuable work of history and one that I would highly recommend but also brace yourself before you dive in because the water is shocking and cruel.
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