Race and Reunion

Albion Tourgée was a Union veteran and writer who critiqued the nostalgic and romanticized “plantation school” of southern literature that emerged in the late 1800s. An emancipationist view of the Civil War characterizes his work, with Tourgeé believing that “the war’s meaning and responsibility were […] sacrificed on the altar of reunion” (219).

Booker T. Washington was an African American academic, author, and orator who was born into enslavement in the South but was freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He favored a reconciliationist perspective while also promoting Black civil rights. He pushed for “a reunion of ex-slaves and ex-masters around mutual economic need” (332). Washington also believed that white Americans would develop respect for Black men and women who exhibited “racial progress,” thus fostering the Union’s reconciliation. The NAACP and W. E. B. Du Bois criticized Washington’s conciliatory stance.

Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in Maryland during the 1830s, settled in a colony of freed slaves in Massachusetts, and became a prominent and influential advocate for slavery’s abolition and social reformation. Blight argues that Douglass’s commitment to abolitionism and emancipation influenced President Lincoln. He opposed reconciliationist views of the Civil War, criticized sentimentalism, and always asserted that the war had been about ideology. Douglass repeatedly stated in his written work and public speeches that the South chose secession because of slavery.

Horace Greeley was a politician and editor of the New York Tribune. He was an abolitionist, moderate Republican, and reconciliationist, though he supported citizenship and suffrage for Black Americans. His willingness to supply bail money for former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and the public commendations he gave to veterans from both sides of the conflict, exemplify his reconciliationist perspective. In 1872, he ran for the presidency as a Liberal Republican and distanced himself from his abolitionist past. This new party opposed Republican incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant and allied with Democrats. After Greeley’s defeat, the party disintegrated, but his promotion of reconciliation had a lasting impact on society.

Ida B. Wells was a Black journalist and civil rights advocate who was born enslaved in Mississippi and freed under the Emancipation Proclamation. She became a teacher and later an investigative journalist who published articles on the epidemic of lynching, exposing the lie that Black men who were murdered by white mobs were rapists. Wells countered the notion—promoted by Booker T. Washington and others—that “Black progress” was the key to reconciliation, and she upended “the calm in the culture of national reconciliation” (336).

Union general and Civil War veteran Ulysses S. Grant was elected president of the United States in 1868 as a conservative Republican. His election marks the political decline of Radical Republicanism, which favored strict federal Reconstruction policies, including military occupation of the southern states and political protections for Black Americans living in the South. Shortly before his death in 1885, Grant authored a popular reconciliationist memoir.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a Black American academic and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was an activist who promoted Black civil rights and spoke out against the violence and intimidation of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. He was also a critic of Bookerism, arguing against Black submission to white notions of “progress.” In the 1960s, he gave up his US citizenship and relocated to Ghana.