ABSTRACT
Today, civil wars have become the dominant form of conflict around the world. Contemporary studies of making peace after internal strife, however, at first suggest more differences than similarities between twenty-first-century wars and the U.S. Civil War of the nineteenth century. They include the importance of confronting crimes and atrocities of the past and of having help from an external, international agency to negotiate terms—neither of which occurred in America. But the comparison has merit: one takeaway from current-day discussions concerns the importance of reconciliation as operating hand in glove with questions of political power that last across generations. Reconciliation is not divorced from a political settlement, a position which contradicts a trend in the literature of the U.S. Civil War to separate the two ingredients. Yet the U.S. Civil War shows that reconciliation itself is often a political strategy; that even the people claiming to foster it may hide an underlying agenda at odds with sectional healing. This chapter puts the politics back into issues of reconciliation after the U.S. Civil War.
