Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

In 1887, Tourgée reflected on the explosion of writing on Civil War themes. American readers had come to love the war, Tourgée contended, because by the mid-1880s the political culture had practiced a perverse combination of “oblivion” and “morbid sentimentality” about the conflict. In the interest of reconciliation, questions of “right” and “wrong” in the war and its aftermath were all but banished from political discourse during and after Reconstruction. The very essence of the war’s meaning and responsibility were, in Tourgée’s view, sacrificed on the altar of reunion. The “unparalleled benignity” of the American people, he wrote, “has gone so far that there was even a tendency to forget altogether the fact that a war could not be waged for the preservation of the Union unless some one was responsible for the attempt to destroy it.”17