Race And Reunion Sparknotes

Over the course of centuries, Americans faced many hardships when it came to dealing with the economy and the social and political living. One thing that most really struck these Americans was the Civil War because they became in need for a reason for this war. David Blight, the author of Race and Reunion, argues that there had been two competing interests: healing and justice, in which one of them began to fade away: this is because many Americans had a different perspective of the Civil War, which eventually overpowered justice.

For example, Blight’s argument can clearly be seen in his novel Race and Reunion within the Prologue. It is evident that he tries to share the two competing interests: “Americans faced an overwhelming task after

the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas — healing and justice.

On some level, both had to occur: but given potency of racial assumptions and power in nineteenth-century America, these two aims never developed in historical balance,”(Blight, Race and Reunion, 3). He mentions that Americans were having a difficult time trying to find a meaning behind the war. He continues to mention that their meaning for the war changed: they had the reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist visions. Both the reconciliation and white supremacist visions developed into healing. He states that “these two aims never developed in historical balance between the outcomes of sectional healing and racial justice was simply America’s inevitable historical condition, and celebrate the remarkable swiftness of the reunion,” (Blight Race and Reunion, 3). This being said, not only is Blight arguing that it was unavoidable, but it was the fact that these people began to celebrate the reunion and togetherness of the North and South, by forgetting the true meaning of the war. This was because they searched for a valid reason and some justification. As Bailey mentions: “The memory of slavery, emancipation, and the fourteenth amendment's never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old

and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism, and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong, in the remembered Civil War,” (Blight Race and Reunion, 4). Americans knew that the idea of slavery is what created such a controversy: whether it was in politics or social living. There was the idea of separation between the North and South that had still continued during reconstruction. The idea of healing is what brought them together because it was something that both sides related about.