Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Such spectacles of reconciliation were emotionally irresistible for most people; they carried a redemptive, uplifting appeal. They embodied patriotism, a new nationalism, and the human need for healing. But they were also the occasion for their organizers to proclaim the terms of such reconciliation. For John Underwood, the purpose of the Chicago reunion was “harmonious forgetfulness.” “It is not now profitable to discuss the right or wrong of the past,” declared Underwood, “neither should the question be raised as to the morals of Massachusetts selling her slaves and South Carolina holding hers, nor as to the profit of merchandising the negro on the block in New York or from the sugar cane fields of the Mississippi ‘coasts’ and cotton plantations in other parts of the South.”65 In this vision of the terms of Blue-Gray reunion, slavery was everyone’s and no one’s responsibility. America’s bloody racial history was to be banished from consciousness; the only notions of equality contemplated were soldiers’ heroism and the exchange of the business deal.