Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900

Civil War America

by Nina Silber

The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, and one that served to reinforce Victorian values as well as northern hegemony, was the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman. Southern men also were represented as affirming traditional gender roles. As northern men wrestled with their nation's increasingly global and aggressive foreign policy, the military virtues extolled in Confederate legend became more admired than reviled. By the 1890s, concludes Silber, northern whites had accepted not only a newly resplendent image of Dixie but also a sentimentalized view of postwar reunion.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, Civil War, American History

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

Nina Silber is a professor at Boston University, where she has taught in both the History Department and the American and New England Studies Program since 1990. Her research and teaching focus on the US Civil War, US women’s history, and the history of the American South.

Reviews

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a refreshing history of the social side of Reconstruction, but not from the South's point of view, but the North's. Silber's central question is how the North coped with the end of the Civil War and reconcilliation with the South, and ultimately argues that the North relied on the act of forgetting to reconcile with the South, which contrasts from the South's intense intense reliance on remembering to keep the "Lost Cause" alive.

Silber does an excellent job supporting this by pointing towards the rapid industrialization of the North post-war and the new project of the American Empire. The North looked to the Antebellum South as a romantic time in the past where change was not so rapid and gender and ethnic relations were not in such a constant state of flux. Additionally, to engage in imperialism and and create its own Empire the United States needed to be united again, which hastened the willingness of the North to accept the South even after such a bloody and terrible conflict.

Of course Silber identifies major hold-outs in reconciling with the South, such as Northern African Americans, Northern abolitionists, and many Union Civil War veterans, but she makes it clear through excellent primary source research that the majority of Northern people, even some abolitionists and veterans, came to forgive the South and forget the war as best they could. The title is "Romance of Reunion" because Silber spends much of the book drawing the North's view of the South to be womanly, and now that the masculine North has gotten her back under control and under his command they can reconcile and reignite their marriage union. While this sounds a bit of a stretch at first, Silber proves time and time again that this gendered language and these gendered concepts were widely used when discussing the North and South through primary source evidence. Overall, "Romance of Reunion" gives much needed insight into why the North accepted the South so readily back into the country despite the Civil War.

[kerrycat · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In many ways, this has turned out to be a study about remembering" but "forgetfulness, not memory, appears to be the dominant theme in reunion culture."

So much of this made me think, well, of course (thank you, presentism), but to pull this together brought it into a larger picture that really makes the fierce turnaround of opinion in such short time all the more unbelievable and honestly, more than a little frightening. The inclusion of James's 'The Bostonians' didn't hurt my opinion of this necessary piece of Reconstruction/Reunion studies, either. I realize that I am 23 years late to the party, and thank Anne Boyd Rioux for the direction.