Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

But Pryor did not restrict himself merely to the subject of the heroic soldier. Given such a forum, the Confederate partisan gave a full-throated condemnation of Reconstruction as “that dismal period—massacres of the helpless, violations of the ballot, usurpations of force on the popular will and the independence of the States.” Pryor fashioned a beguiling version of the evil image of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction years were a time, he said, of “alien rule and federal domination by which sovereign states were reduced to the impotence of satrapies.” The reunion now possible after the Compromise of 1877 was, therefore, a victory over Reconstruction, over racial equality, and over federal enforcement against the South. “Fallen it [Reconstruction] is at last,” declared Pryor, “fallen like Lucifer never to hope again; fallen by the thunderbolt of the people’s wrath.”49 Twelve years after Appomattox, a former Confederate general and voice of the Lost Cause explained to his Yankee audience, many of whom were Union veterans, that the South’s vindication was the nation’s triumph. Long live the new Union, Pryor in effect announced—a Union saved from the Devil of radical Republicanism and black suffrage by the Confederate veteran. Over the next four decades, this theme would continue to flourish in new literary and political forms.