Tag: Memory of Civil War

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Douglass' Predicament


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Frederick Douglass is often portrayed in a positive manner to the general public in historical thought, as he experienced slavery first hand and after he found freedom he became an ardent activist for abolition and African American rights.  He wrote extensively about his opinions and himself, as David W. Blight demonstrated he wrote at least three autobiographies.  Through these writings, however, Blight was able to uncover a Frederick Douglass who was stingy and hypocritical.  Blight demonstrates on two occasions the hypocrisy of Douglass:  his strong support of the Republican party which often abandoned black and while attacking individualistic northerners who wished to forget was issues while preaching self reliance to African Americans.

Both examples of hypocrisy are in direct relation to Douglass’ desire to remember the civil war, and provide no aid to the south in Reconstruction.  He was appalled by the idea of helping the south recover and the adoration of southern war heroes.  Douglass felt that forgetting the war meant forgetting its ideals, as he felt that the northern cause was primarily against slavery; or at least he wanted everyone to think it was.  His goals put him in a difficult position, as the Republican Party led the Union War movement he wished to remember, but they did not do much for the African American cause.

In the issue of individualistic northerners, a characteristic he agreed with, and their desire to forget the war, which he opposed, we see the issue brought up in class last week in our discussion of women where a disagreement with one characteristic of society did not mean disagreement with the society as a whole.  Douglass did not want to change all of society; he just wanted African Americans to achieve equal footing.  His desire to celebrate the union victory proves this, as historically the victors of war are praised while the losers regarded in a negative fashion.  The sentiment after the civil war to “forgive and forget,” however, was a more revolutionary sentiment.  Douglass vouched for a more conventional view of war in hopes to aid his desire to change society.

In AJ’s post, he raised the question of Douglass’ credibility, asking if he would be more credible if he had participated in the physical conflict of the war.  While this is a possibility, the bind he found himself in after the Civil War, as Blight puts it, “between the country’s historic racism and his own embrace of individualism.” This predicament led him to portray hypocritical tendencies, both real and perceived, that discredited him more than fighting in the war would have improved his credibility.

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An Outsider's Memory


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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).