ABSTRACT
When scholars speak of reconciliation after the U.S. Civil War, they tend to emphasize the importance of memories of the war in the political cultural battles over reconciliation. And they often describe the process as involving the lessening of animosities and the cooling of heated emotions. This chapter aims to add a new dimension to the literature by arguing that refashioning the cultural bonds of nationhood after 1865 involved not only stories about the past, but stories about the present as well. It reveals the extent to which this postwar cultural readjustment involved not only the experience of a range of emotions, but also the public attribution of emotions to those on the other side. To do so, the chapter analyzes the writings and speeches of white southerners in the half-century after Appomattox. From the beginning of Reconstruction, they argued that northern hatred for the South lay behind the victors’ attempts endow African Americans with civil rights. Such accusations of northerners’ persistent lack of “sympathy” for the South buttressed opposition to Reconstruction and echoed down through the subsequent decades. It was the North, they argued, that needed an emotional reformation, not them, and they framed the dawn of this perceived transformation in the early twentieth century as the advent of sectional harmony. For many white southerners, the process of coming to terms with the North after the Civil War was as much about publicly critiquing the sentiments of their sectional counterparts as it was about acknowledging or changing their own. Narrating the present, in this case and perhaps in others, proved a potent way to argue over the past and to attempt to shape the future.
