DAVIS MEMORIAL PART OF "WHITE SUPREMACY MEMORY"

Interview with Yale Historian David W. Blight

In Zocalo Public Square

...There is one (myth) "that the American founding was of a republic, you know, nearly perfect, rooted in classical creeds, and that it was a society that launched itself on a history of improvement.

 We have to find ways to show—we have found ways to show, and it’s in textbooks now, and it’s in curricula, although it’s always under duress—that America was also founded in slavery.

It was founded in a massive slave system that grew in leaps and bounds in the 19th century, and became the stem of the American economy. 

We have to be able to help young people understand that, yes, the creation of the American Republic was an amazing event. There were very few republics on the globe. 

But that also 25 of the 55 signers of the Constitution were slaveholders. There would have been no constitution without the three or four classic compromises on slavery within the constitution. Slavery was the backbone that built the American economy in its first 80 years.

The first (of three competing memories) I called “reconciliationist memory,” which was this story that started immediately after the war, particularly at Appomattox. This idea that everybody fought heroically. Everybody fought for their sense of right, but in the long run they had to find a way to reconcile this terrible division that led to the Civil War.

("History speaks today in an object lesson. The little children march to the memorial in honor of Davis, carrying a Confederate flag in one hand, and a Union flag in the other, showing the love that all parts of the nation now have for each other."  Kate Daffan, of the Daughters of the Confederacy, during dedication  ceremony in Brownsville June 3rd, 1927. )

Reconciliationist memory eventually became probably the most dominant, for lots of reasons.

A second form of memory I called “white supremacist memory.” I remember puzzling a long time about what to call that, but that became, in essence, this Lost Cause ideology. The Lost Cause stories were an ideology, they were a racial ideology. 

This was the story fashioned by ex-Confederates as an explanation of their defeat. In time, it became more than just a kind of nostalgia for an older past, a nostalgia for when they had power, a nostalgia for a greater time in a pastoral past. It eventually became a victory narrative. 

This white supremacist memory became a victory narrative, and the victory they were celebrating was the victory over reconstruction.

The third kind of memory I called “emancipationist memory.” It never flowed off the tongue perfectly, but what I obviously meant by that was this strain of narratives and stories that, borne out of abolitionism, were led by Frederick Douglass and other former abolitionists, but by no means only black abolitionists. 

This strain of story and memory said the war was about slavery. The destruction of slavery in the war and all that bloodshed was its greatest principal result. And the remaking of the American Republic in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and other civil rights laws in reconstruction, was the reinvention of an American Republic.

That emancipationist version of memory is going to, by and large, lose this debate in the 50 years or so after the war. Lose in the sense that the more dominant memory became some combination of reconciliationist and white supremacist memory.

The important thing is that this emancipationist memory never died. 

It always had its tremendous spokesmen. And the lost cause ideology, or white supremacist memory, emanating from the South, always had dissenters as well. Such that by the turn of the century into the early 20th century, and certainly over the course of time, that emancipationist narrative was always there for us to rediscover and re-tap to explain this war much more fully, and much more, I would say, accurately over time.