Race and Reunion Quotes

“And a Northerner who had just returned from six months in South Carolina and Georgia informed Thaddeus Stevens in February 1866 that “the spirit which actuated the traitors . . . during the late rebellion is only subdued and allows itself to be nourished by leniency.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“The greatest enthusiasts for Civil War history and memory often displace complicated consequences by endlessly focusing on the contest itself. We sometimes lift ourselves out of historical time, above the details, and render the war safe in a kind of national Passover offering as we view a photograph of the Blue and Gray veterans shaking hands across the stone walls at Gettysburg. Deeply embedded in an American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia for antimodernists and military history buffs, the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“Long before Du Bois wrote of a struggle with the “double consciousness” of being American and black, African American freedmen had to decide how to look backward and forward. Many may have been like the characters Toni Morrison created in Beloved (1987)—haunted by slavery’s physical and psychic tortures, but desperate to live in peace and normalcy. When Paul D says to Sethe, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody, we need some kind of tomorrow,” Morrison imagined herself into the heart of late-nineteenth-century black memory. Memory is sometimes that human burden we can live comfortably neither with nor without.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“While the Reconstruction struggle ensued in Washington and across the South, Edward A. Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote his long manifesto, The Lost Cause, published in 1867. Pollard issued a warning to all who would ever try to shape the memory of the Civil War, much less Reconstruction policy. “All that is left the South,” wrote Pollard, “is the war of ideas.” The war may have decided the “restoration of the union and the excision of slavery,” declared Pollard, “but the war did not decide Negro equality.”39 Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and memory.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“Republican Ebon C. Ingersoll of Illinois, however,”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory