Race And Reunion : The Civil War

In “Reconstruction Revisited”, Eric Foner reexamines the political, social, and economic experiences of black and white Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War. With the help of many historian works, Foner gives equal representation to both sides of the Reconstruction argument.

As soon as President Andrew Johnson signed a Proclamation which promised order and peace to the United States on August 20th, 1865, the Civil War was formally ended. Though the Confederates had been dominated, there was still a battle to preserve the Southern lifestyle against the impeding Northern republican ideals. President Lincoln had plans to peacefully restore the country to the Union it was prior to the war, but his assassination created set-backs to his plan. While both the North and the South were working toward reconciliation in the nation, the north was more interested in creating a controlling, centralized government while the south was concerned with protecting and preserving their southern customs and ideals. While there were many attempts at reconstructing, the Reconstruction era ultimately failed at unifying the Union under agreed terms due to the constant disagreements between the north and the south.

The American Civil War was the deadliest warfare in American history soil; leaving approximately 620 thousand dead and over 300 thousand wounded. One would ask, who or what was the massive roles that played? During the nineteenth century, as the newborn nation, United States used racial identity, such as slaves or free blacks, and firearms were involved in the Civil War. I believe through this research paper, my learning from my K-12 schooling has not change significantly.

The tensions of the Civil War are very much still alive in the Southern United States one hundred and fifty years after the Confederacy surrendered to Union forces to end the war. While the tensions may have mitigated away from full-fledged war between North and South, there still remain tensions along racial and cultural lines well beyond the war. In Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic these long standing tensions left over from the war are delved into by Horwitz as he makes his way across the south to see how the old Confederacy is viewed in the modern world of the United States. What Horwitz found was a dualistic society differing views on the Confederacy and the events of the Civil War. Dualities left from the war in aspects such as racial tensions, the meaning of the Confederate flag even between North and South entirely. Those living in the South can be seen holding a resonating connection to the Civil War. It becomes clear in Confederates in the Attic the Civil War not only became the catalyst of such dualities in Southern society, but still further shape and perpetuate these dualities long after the Civil Wars conclusion.

The excerpt The Ending the War: The Push for National Reconciliation by David Blight, edited by Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum and Jon Gjerde, in Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays (Wadsworth, Cengage Leaning 2012) Blight argues historical memory that holds more importance than that of the Civil War. Like the Revolution, the memory of the Civil War played a role after the conflict. The concurrent issues in American society after the Civil War and against legislation to increase not decrease the racial problem in the South. Newly freed African Americans struggling to assimilate to society and be accepted as equal citizens in the reconstruction of the Union. This excerpt is rhetorically effective with statements on

As David Blight says in his novel, Race and Reunion, after the Civil War and emancipation, Americans were faced with the overwhelming task of trying to understand the relationship between “two profound ideas—healing and justice.” While he admits that both had to occur on some level, healing from the war was not the same “proposition” for many whites, especially veterans, as doing justice for the millions of emancipated slaves and their descendants (Blight 3). Blight claims that African Americans did not want an apology for slavery, but instead a helping hand. Thus, after the Civil War, two visions of Civil War memory arose and combined: the reconciliationist vison, which focused on the issue of dealing with the dead from the battlefields, hospitals, and prisons, and the emancipationist vision, which focused on African Americans’ remembrance of their own freedom and in conceptions of the war as the “liberation of [African Americans] to citizenship and Constitutional equality” (Blight 2).

The Civil War caused a shift in the ways that many Americans thought about slavery and race. Chandra Manning’s What this Cruel War Was Over helps readers understand how soldiers viewed slavery during the Civil War. The book is a narrative, which follows the life of Union soldier who is from Massachusetts. Chandra Manning used letters, diaries and regimental newspapers to gain an understanding of soldiers’ views of slavery. The main character, Charles Brewster has never encountered slaves. However, he believes that Negroes are inferior. He does not meet slaves until he enters the war in the southern states of Maryland and Virginia. Charles Brewster views the slaves first as contraband. He believes the slaves are a burden and should be sent back to their owners because of the fugitive slave laws. Union soldiers focus shifted before the end of the war. They believed slavery was cruel and inhumane, expressing strong desire to liberate the slaves. As the war progresses, soldiers view slaves and slavery in a different light. This paper, by referring to the themes and characters presented in Chandra Manning’s What this Cruel War Was Over, analyzes how the issue of slavery and race shifted in the eyes of white Union soldiers’ during Civil War times.

Since the end of the American Civil War, a movement started and continues to persist explaining the South’s reason for seceding from the Union and fighting the Civil War. This is the Lost Cause. Developed shortly after the defeat of the South as is shown in Edward Pollards book The Lost Cause Regained, this dogma has persisted throughout America into the current day. The influence of the Lost Cause can be seen in our media, historic sites and memorial, and this is derived from the continual use of early pro-southern books book authors like Edward Pollard. These influences continue to educate those interested in the cause of the South. The Lost Cause highlights the challenges modern historians face when analyzing the Lost Cause against the

Sometimes history just makes absolutely no sense for instance it is said that all men were created equal and yet African Americans and slaves are treated badly and have absolutely no say in the government, they aren’t even considered a citizen, Even freed “Black men” have very little rights, another fine example why things in history makes no sense is that women were treated as second class citizen but then during Jefferson’s time women were one of the most important roles in the white house. Abraham freed slaves also makes no sense during the civil war period he said that slaves under his control were freed but the north didn’t support slaves and the south didn’t see Abraham as a president so he freed no one. Jefferson did many things that make no sense but one of them was when he purchased Louisiana from France he bought it with no permission and Jefferson was the one who was all against breaking the rules.

Nina Silber’s historical analysis in The Romance of Reunion, takes an in depth look at the groundwork that was behind the reconstruction of the nation after the Civil War. While most historians refer to the political agenda behind fixing the segregated nation, Silber takes a moderately different approach and focuses more on reunification, rather than reconstruction. Her argument is made very clear throughout the book and through the use of numerous illustrations that were developed during this time period, Silber created an approach to the situation that generally focused on the opposing views of gender roles within the North and the South.

In Nicholas Lemann’s narrative, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, the Reconstruction era in the south is portrayed in a different perspective. In contrast to the glamourized displays one normally sees in textbooks or films, this story is as aggressive and gruesome as the war prior to it. The story illustrates how Reconstruction collapsed as a movement. One would assume it failed due to the lack of strength from the Republican Party; however it was caused by the hash intimidation and unnerving if not tactics white southerners developed. These tactics were later on used by the Democratic Party during the time elections. Not only that, Lemann also describes the horrid bloodlust the Whites endured as they engaged the African-American

Historians have often described the reconciliation between northerners and southerners after the Civil War as a process of selective forgetting. The shared Union and Confederate experience of courage-under-fire quickly supplanted the root causes of the war and the longstanding sectional acrimony between North and South in the public memory. As Michael Kammen suggested in his 1991 book Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture historical meaning is imbued with concern for the present. For many Americans, North and South in the late nineteenth-century, “present” concerns were economic progress and stability. Sectional discord and enmity stood in the way of rebuilding the nation, and prosperity required letting bygones-be-bygones. New narratives sutured from selected historical memories were crafted to expedite the national healing process and to appeal to the sentiments of northerners who romanticized the bucolic Old South and its aristocratic order. Although nostalgia for a pre-industrial past played its part in fostering reunion, Reiko Hillyer, in Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space, argues that it was the mutual economic interests of northern capitalists and southern boosters that were central to reconciliation, and shaping the development of the New South.

The purpose of historian David Blight's book is to provide a history of how Americans remembered the Civil War for the fifty years after the end of the war. He pays particular attention to race and reunion in the American culture and society and how the differing memories of the people during this period about the war intermingled or clashed. He uses this book continues the work of other historians in what he believes to be the central problem of how Americans choose to remember and forget the Civil War.

Reconstruction did not come to a complete end at 1877; the effects of the war have listed for generations, even until today. This is evident in the most recent chapter of Davidson and Lytle’s After The Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, which delves into the story of the millions of slaves that had recently been freed following the end of the American Civil War in 1865 through interviews of thousands of former slaves in the 1930s. Throughout the chapter, the authors explore the themes of deception and mistrust in both history and its re-telling in accounts of former slaves, plantation owners, and Union soldiers.

Blair, shapes the foundation which this nation's future's path is moving towards keeping a firm hold on Ex slaves with emancipationist. Healing the nations and reuniting the union after the Civil War not putting it into the injustice against African-Americans Fualed the reconciliation. Yet, why did the union allow this war to confide over slavery and gaining equal rights for all men, to only be not enforce with the reunion of the south. Blight, glances into the remembrance of the civil wars experience for both sides and how the idea of reuniting the United States northern and southern would need to heal at the same time while integrating reconciliation between these two groups to only demoralize the major conflict of the civil war.