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Much of David W. Blight’s work, “For Something beyond the Battlefield”: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War, discusses Douglass’ pledge to “never forget” and his effort to forge memory into action. Blight details Douglass’ five sources for his meaning behind the Civil War: “his belief that the war had been an ideological struggle and not merely the test of a generation’s loyalty and valor; his sense of refurbished nationalism made possible by emancipation, Union victory, and Radical Reconstruction; his confrontation with the resurgent racism and Lost Cause mythology of the postwar period; his critique of America’s peculiar dilemma of historical amnesia, and his personal psychological stake in preserving an Afro-American and abolitionist memory of the war.” Having done some reading on the Civil War and Frederick Douglass previously, I think Blight does a nice job outlining much of Douglass’ arguments and personal stances on the post-war memory, as well as, the difference in opinions by those who do not side with the abolitionist and teleological memory of the war. Furthermore, one thing that caught my eye and I believe established Blight’s work as credible and thorough was the amount of sources he used throughout the argument. He drew upon many different speeches and quotations from Douglass and sprinkled them well in his work. Along with detailing Douglass’ five sources and an overview of his memory of the war, he did a nice job supplementing that with important opinions of others during that period and historically famous arguments that agreed and also went against Douglass’ perspective of the Civil War. Overall, I thought this was good work and gave us some real good first hand opinions of the nineteenth century’s most prominent Afro-American intellectual and others who had an influence on post-war ideals.
With that being said, however, I want to focus on a point that Blight just barely mentioned but stopped me from reading and made me think about a little bit. This challenge to Douglass’ meaning of memory is interesting and probably raises some intriguing questions about those in this time period who had substantial influence and power but had no stake in the actual fighting that was occurring. Blight explains how Douglass’ action was more of an inner struggle than a physical test claiming, “Perhaps his remoteness from the carnage enabled him to sustain an ideological conception of the war throughout his life.” A sentence that was masked but much of the bulk of this work was the claim that stuck out most in my eyes. I believe he is right, what if Douglass’ opinion is mainly shaped from an outsiders perspective? Would his argument be more credible or influential if he fought in the war and actually experienced the memory he is trying to preserve? Would his memory of the Civil War be different if he served behind the lines? I think these all are valid questions as we consider Douglass’ memory as somewhat of an outsider’s viewpoint. As Holmes states, “the true hero—the deepest memory—of the Civil War was the soldier on either side, thoughtless of ideology, which faced the ‘experience of battle…” I think this is an interesting point and certainly deserves some attention regardless of personal stance.
I think it is important to remember those that were transformed by personal experience during the Civil War. As an intellectual, Douglass’ viewpoint cannot comprehend the soldier’s war experience and how those men remember the war. It is a question for thought as Douglass’ memory could be argued to be a “quest to save the freedom of his people and the meaning of his own life.” Like some of us mentioned in our posts last week (Mike and others), the feminist movement and Douglass’ argument can be seen similarly as sometimes they did not reach to a wider audience at the time and their voice wasn’t heard as much due to their relatively narrow views and opinions (ex. Success of the WCTU).