Race and Reunion by David W. Blight

Author:David W. Blight [Blight, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0674008197
Publisher: Harvard University Press

ALTHOUGH SOME DIEHARDS remained thoroughly unreconstructed for the rest of their lives, what made possible the reconciliationist phase of the Lost Cause (1880s and beyond) is that Southerners found they could transform loss on the battlefield into a reunion on terms largely of their own choosing. New South promoters and Lost Cause diehards may have differed somewhat over how slavery should be remembered, but most shared a refurbished commitment to white supremacy and a desire for renewed economic growth. Reconciliationist spokesmen of the Lost Cause could announce acceptance of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as John Goode did at a monument unveiling in Culpeper, Virginia, in 1881, but equally claim that “all powers of the earth could not compel us to write the word ‘traitor’ with our own hands upon the graves of our heroic and martyred dead.” At the same unveiling ceremony, Virginia’s ex-governor James Kemper and future governor Fitzhugh Lee (both former generals) declared that they had “never done any treason” in a cause more “free of crime” than any in history.20 Keeping diehards like Early in check, Kemper and Lee were conservatives who helped usher their state into the era of reunion with a proud and respected sense of their Lost Cause.

As Southerners began to unveil their local soldiers’ monuments, and as their victory over Reconstruction became part of their narrative of Confederate heritage, Lost Cause orators moved from mournful to more triumphant tones. At the October 1878 unveiling of the Confederate monument in the town square of Augusta, Georgia, one of that state’s most popular Lost Cause voices, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., argued that the South had fought for “liberty” and “freedom” and had lost only because it had been “overborne by superior numbers and weightier munitions.” Then he quickly shifted to a victory narrative. The ultimate verdict of the war awaited the history of their own time. “Nothing has been absolutely determined except the question of comparative strength,” said Jones. “The issue furnished only a physical solution of the moral, social, and political propositions.” To Jones, the South could still win the war politically. The “political privileges” and “vested rights” of Southerners, he declared, “are, in a moral point of view, unaffected by the result of the contest.”21

Thus was the Lost Cause transformed into national reunion on Southern terms. A Memorial Day speaker in Baltimore in 1879 invested such sentiments even deeper in local pride and vindication. At bottom, argued A. M. Keiley, it was “love of state and love of home” for which Southerners fought the war. In a speech that was otherwise not very reconciliationist, Keiley announced that he found “reconciliation easy with him who says, ‘I answered the summons of Massachusetts or Ohio,’ for I answered the summons of Virginia, and hers alone.” Keiley predicted that each year “this platform of reconciliation will more and more assert itself” and the nation would revive from its roots in state sovereignty and local rule.22 Keiley may have been only partly right with this prediction; a new nationalism fueled the reunion, as did fear of radical populism.

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