Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

In Holmes’s vision, the only enemies left by 1895 were the “temptations of wallowing ease.”73 Rooted in this ideology of manliness and an antimodern scorn for commerce and materialism, which many veterans ironically felt deeply ambivalent about, the soldiers’ reunion, both metaphorically and in reality, had become by the 1890s the dominant mode of Civil War memory. If the old soldiers could find each other, bridge every bloody chasm, and celebrate their former strenuous life, then the rest of society could follow in step. That the emancipationist legacy of the Civil War was lost amidst the celebration of a soldiers’ faith and that racism never emerged as an enemy of society equal to “wallowing ease” tell us much about that epoch’s memory. When the Blue and the Gray gathered for reunions, and the press and photographers swarmed to record their spectacles, they were men from a simpler and more compelling time. As new generations of Americans came of age, as millions of immigrants flooded the country’s shores, and as racial hatred and violence reached unprecedented levels, the old veterans provided a mother lode of nostalgia to an age that needed escape from its cities, its boardrooms, its dangerous and confusing machines, and its economic panics. These old veterans did not fight about something fundamental to national self-definition or human freedom as much as they represented a prior heroic age, a time of authentic, romantic experience. Such was Holmes’s warning to the you...