![]() The basic problem in the wartime North was that there was no settled political purpose: was the war to restore the union, or to free the slaves (366)? Lincoln was able to navigate the shoals and rapids of Northern politics to achieve coherent goals, but by the war’s end Lincoln was dead. This was more than the dead on both sides at Gettysburg. ![]() By the century’s end, it was estimated that 60,000 African-Americans had been lynched (64). Washington and the North chose to turn a blind eye. Armed vigilantes, the Ku Klux Klan, terrorised African-Americans in a sustained campaign to ensure that they remained effectively disenfranchised. Southern rage was directed at the newly freed slaves. The North aimed its rage at Britain (which Blight does not describe), to the point of threatening war (Bingham 2005). ![]() It is striking how little rage North and South directed towards each other. The Civil War killed almost as many Americans as all America’s foreign wars put together (64). At the same time, however, everyone had to come to terms with the vast numbers of the war dead, which required a different narrative. The text in the image reads Race and Reuinion in brown lettering, within the subtitle The Civil War in American Memory in white below this.Īt the end of the war, the dominant narrative was emancipationist: the North wanted to end slavery, the South resisted and attempted to secede by armed force, but the North won. In the background the top image of an extract of a document in handwritten text fades into the bottom image of a rural setting, all in sepia tone. Image: The 2001 edition dust cover image for David W. Blight’s text examines how Americans came to terms with the American Civil War, and what part amnesia played in their deliberations. To do this, I will look at David Blight’s 2001 book Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory. Jasanoff, Higgins, and Smith and Grey are good examples in the context of a critique of British imperialism Clarke and Wilson in the context of Scottish nationalism. It has been much discussed in recent years. In this article, I aim to explore the concept of amnesia in history: how people forget or are made to forget some aspects of the past and remember others. 1 Blight tells the story of how these three groups jostled and contended with each other in the half-century after the war’s end, as each sought its own usable past. He identifies three groups at the end of the Civil War: the Northern whites, the Southern whites and the African-Americans. Blight argues that people need a “usable past… a positive history with which to build self-respect” (362). Folk memories of the American Civil War run deep and have endured in the hearts of the American people. The Mississippian was referring to the siege of Vicksburg of 1863, a century and a half in the past. You made us eat rats.” This remark, made less than a decade ago, was uttered by a resident of Vicksburg in Mississippi to the Massachusetts-born travel writer Paul Theroux (Theroux 2016: 110).
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