Race and Reunion

“For many whites, especially veterans and their family members, healing from the war was not the same proposition as doing justice to the four million emancipated slaves and their descendants.”

Blight notes the inherent conflict between restoring the Union and providing protection and racial justice for Black Americans. These tensions emerged almost as soon as the Civil War concluded and only became more strained in the decades that followed. Rather than reunify the country while acknowledging its dark history of enslavement and providing for Black political and civil rights, the nation leaned into white supremacy and a mythic history of the war that ignored, or even denied, slavery and emancipation’s historical significance.

“But the new nation awaiting rebirth also had the thought of black equality on one side, the knowledge of sectional reunion on the other side, and no muse yet in the middle holding their hands.”

Blight notes the inherent conflict between restoring the Union and providing protection and racial justice for Black Americans. These tensions emerged almost as soon as the Civil War concluded and only became more strained in the decades that followed. Rather than reunify the country while acknowledging its dark history of enslavement and providing for Black political and civil rights, the nation leaned into white supremacy and a mythic history of the war that ignored, or even denied, slavery and emancipation’s historical significance.

“Reconstruction was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdict at Appomattox.”

In April 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Terms of this surrender included parole for Confederates who laid down their arms and no federal charges for the surrendering rebels.