Beyond the Battlefield

Beyond the Battlefield

By David Blight

David W. Blight's book Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War, is an intriguing look back into the Civil War era which is very heavily studied but misunderstood according to Blight. Blight focuses on how memory shapes history Blight feels, while the Civil War accomplished it goal of abolishing slavery, it fell short of its ultimate potential to pave the way for equality. Blight attempts to prove that the Civil War does little to bring equality to blacks. This book is a composite of twelve essays which are spilt into three parts. The Preludes describe blacks during the era before the Civil War and their struggle to over come slavery and describes the causes, course and consequences of the war. Problems in Civil War memory describes black history and deals with how during and after the war Americans seemed to forget the true meaning of the war which was race. And the postludes describes some for the leaders of black society and how they are attempting to keep the memory and the real meaning of the Civil War alive and explains the purpose of studying historical memory.

Memory plays a very important in how history is interpreted. As time goes on and an event slips further into the past some of the memory's that are passed on are distorted and can change entirely. Things that happened during the Civil War that may have seemed important are replaced with things that may seem more important to us now. Blight states "History can be read by or belong to everyone; it assesses change and progress over time and is more relative, more contingent upon place, chronology and scale. Memory, however, is often treated as a sacred set of potentially absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community." (p.2) Blight traces the perception of the war back to those who were involved, both white and black, and then discuses how they have evolved. I found this point in the book most interesting because this way of thought is now only involved with the Civil War but can be seen when discussing most events in history.

Blight found that people after didn't really care about the meaning of the war which was to free the slaves but rather focus more on the fact that it was just two groups of Americans fighting for what they believed in. The goal of many civil rights leaders was to bring the focus to the fact that the confederacy engaged in this war in order to keep ownership of their slaves. In one of Blight's essays he describes the Civil War semicentennial. He describes the way the government paid the way to any veteran of the war to make the trip to the Gettysburg battlefield. He goes on to talk about the old Union soldiers getting together with the old Confederate soldiers to share war stories and talk about old times. Blight even goes so far as to describe the kind of toilet facilities the battlefield had. There was so much detail and attention put into this celebration but one thing was missing. There were few if any black veterans, north or south, in attendance and the subject of slavery was absence as well. President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech on the final day of the gathering in which he said "We have found one another again as brothers and comrades, in arms, enemy's no longer generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten." The President of the United States was at a Civil War reunion discussing, if not encouraging people to not let the cause of the war bother them but celebrate the courage and honor in which the soldiers fought for their beliefs.

In a different essay Blight goes on to discuss filmmaker Ken Burns and his eleven hour documentary The Civil War. The documentary was very popular when it first aired in 1990. In it Burns identified slavery as the war's root cause, gave occasional attention to African-American issues, and chose Barbara Fields, a black woman, as the only professional historian to appear on camera, Southern apologists denounced his documentary as an exercise in political correctness. Yet as Blight deftly demonstrates, the history in Burns' epic film was more traditional than groundbreaking. Burns emphasized battlefield confrontation over social revolution, and he concluded with the pat assertion that the Civil War made Americans one people - conveniently ignoring the fact that the century following Appomattox would see the white majority deliberately exclude the black minority from full membership in American society.

Ken Burns failed to grasp the fact that the tragedy of the Civil War did not end when the Confederate armies laid down their arms. Blight's writings show that the men who lost the military struggle managed to prevail both politically and culturally before the dawn of the twentieth century. As Senator Trent Lott's recent fall from grace reminds us, the battle over Civil War memory continues to affect the state of the nation.1

Frederick Douglass played a big role in not only trying to preserve the proper memory of the Civil War but even before the war was one of the foremost leaders

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