Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Pryor did not hide the issue of race behind a rhetoric of reunion. The war had nothing directly to do with slavery, he proclaimed, in what became an article of faith to Southern vindicationists and their Northern allies. Southerners were comfortably reconciled to the destruction of slavery because it had only been the “occasion not the cause of secession.” Slavery was an impersonal force in history, a natural phenomenon subject only to divine control and beyond all human responsibility. It was good while it lasted, good once it was gone; no Southerner fought in its defense, and no Northerner died to end it. It just went away, like a change in the weather. Pryor declared with audacious confidence that “impartial history will record that slavery fell not by any effort of man’s will, but by the immediate intervention and act of the Almighty himself; and in the anthem of praise ascending to heaven for the emancipation of four million human beings, the voice of the Confederate soldier mingles its note of devout gratulation.”50 In such selective and politically charged uses of memory, the devout could claim anything. Everyone responsible for slavery—and the war—had already achieved absolution, even a resurrection. To Pryor, Southerners were the best Unionists because they understood fully how radical Reconstruction had been a scheme “devised to balk the ambition of the white race.” Southerners knew best how their own “shelter and support” lay within the Union because of the fear...