The Civil War And Emancipation - 1036 Words

The Civil War, at first, was about slavery; however, the meaning of the war began to change, and it began to be associated with healing. There were actually two main visions of the Civil War, and Blight calls these â€Å"twin goals† and â€Å"competing interests.† One was to deal with the negative impacts, which brought about a sense of healing. The second was regarding the emancipation of slaves. One vision was about healing, while the other was about justice, and Blight notes this in the prologue and states, â€Å"Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas–healing and justice† (Blight, Prologue, page 3). In addition, in part two of Blight’s video†¦show more content†¦He states, â€Å"We never found an adequate way in this society to put healing and justice in a historical balance† (Blight, online resource). Only one had to win over the other, and the winner was healing. He also says the same in Chapter 1; he concludes, â€Å"But the new nation awaiting rebirth also had the thought of black equality on one side, the knowledge of sectional reunion on the other side, and no muse yet in the middle holding their hands† (Blight, Chapter 1, page 30). Again, Blight’s argument is that it probably never even was possible for there to exist a balance between healing and justice. Blight states in the prologue, â€Å"Defeated white southerners and black former slaves faced each other on the ground, seeing and knowing the awful chasm between their experiences, unaware that any path would lead to their reconciliation† (Blight, Prologue, page 3). The sacrificing of racial justice was an inevitable cost of attempts to reconcile between the north and the south. An example of that from Chapter 22 in Bailey is the Ku Klux Klan. Numerous whites disliked the success that blacks were experiencing, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan. Members of the society instilled fear into blacks in order to prevent them from voting. They used extreme violence, which, by the 1890s, led to nearly the disenfranchisement of all blacks. Basically, because attempts to forge reconciliation between the north and the south