The South, Pollard wrote, “must wear the crown of thorns before she can assume that of victory.”As the decades after the war went by, that post-bellum victory seemed assured. In his essential book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” David W. Blight detailed how a white narrative of the war took hold, North and South, after Appomattox. In this recasting of reality, the Civil War was a family quarrel in which both sides were doing the best they could according to their lights. White Americans chose to celebrate one another without reference to the actual causes and implications of the war. So white Americans decided to recall something else.

Source: New York Times August 23, 2020 09:00 UTC