Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

As orator of the day, the Virginia legislature chose the Reverend Moses Drury Hoge, pastor of the Richmond Second Presbyterian Church. During the war, Hoge had given the daily prayer at the Confederate Congress and served as a blockade runner as well as chaplain at a Richmond training camp. Confederate defeat had apparently crushed Hoge psychologically in 1865. But ten years later, on that bright autumn day, he rose to the occasion and announced that Southerners were living in a “new era of our history.” Preparing Lost Causers for the long haul, Hoge declared “defeat” the “discipline which trains the truly heroic soul.” In his finale, Hoge reached his most important theme: the overthrow of Reconstruction and the demand for a political return to a status quo antebellum. “If it be objected that we have already entered upon one of those political revolutions that never go backward,” Hoge proclaimed, “then I ask, who gave to anyone the authority to say so?” Hoge summoned the audience to return to the old ways, to the old nation. Their duty in the new era was to return to “a Union as our fathers framed . . . the Constitution in its old supremacy.”34 Amidst a massive performance of Confederate remembrance on this day, neither the Gettysburg Address nor the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments existed. In short, the civic meaning of emancipation itself fell among the litter on the streets of Richmond. As Southerners mourned their dead hero and their dead Confederacy, ...