There was a period from roughly 1877 to the early 1910s that historians call the “reunion era” or sometimes “the Great Reconciliation.” Historians sometimes use “sectional reconciliation” or “the reunion of North and South.”
It carries no title nor official observance, but the effects remain.
Politicians pursued it to end the bitter feelings between the loyal states and the insurrectionist states of our Civil War. A stronger country emerged, so they argued, with this reconciliation.
It featured:
The public acknowledgement of both United States and Confederate state soldiers with joint memorials and reunions.
The naming of federal military bases after soldiers who had waged war against the United States for four long years. One of the most notorious was Fort Bragg, named after an insurrectionist officer generally viewed as a competent administrator but an ineffective field commander. He ordered the killing or maiming of thousands of Americans.
Personally, my family benefited as the government provided identical tombstones for two great-grandfathers, one a U.S. soldier and one a Confederate. They still stand in a lonely cemetery less the fifty feet apart.
The families of close friends didn’t fare as well. The reconciliation put the final nails into the coffin of Reconstruction and enabled the horrible effects of the Jim Crow era.
Last week we celebrated the surrender of the Confederacy. May we all hope for final victory.
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