The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900
by Paul Herman Buck
Summary
Paul Herman Buck's study follows the decades after Appomattox as Northern and Southern white Americans rebuilt a shared national feeling out of a war that had just killed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen. Buck traces reunion through the channels where it actually took shape: veterans' reunions that put Union and Confederate soldiers on the same platform, popular fiction and magazine writing that recast the war as a shared regional tragedy rather than a moral reckoning, and the political retreat in Washington that let Reconstruction era protections for Black citizens lapse in exchange for sectional peace. He carries the story from 1865 through the Compromise of 1877 and on to the close of the century, when Northern attention to the South's Black population had largely faded even as segregation hardened into law.
Buck was a Harvard historian writing barely seventy years after the war he examines, close enough to his subject that some of the veterans and public figures whose sentiments he traces were still within living memory when he researched it. His central argument, still debated by historians of Reconstruction, is that sectional reconciliation was real and genuinely felt on both sides, but that white Americans achieved it by quietly setting aside the political and civil equality the war had supposedly settled. Reading the book means watching a nation congratulate itself on healing a wound that, in Buck's own account, it had actually stopped tending on one side. It reads as a work of institutional and cultural history rather than battlefield narrative, built from newspapers, memoirs, and the sentimental literature of reunion rather than campaign reports, and it suits a reader more interested in how a country talks itself into forgetting than in the war itself.
Historical Context & Significance
The Road to Reunion won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for History. Buck had joined the Harvard history faculty in the 1920s, and the book, published the year before it won, established the scholarly reputation that carried him into decades of university administration, including service as Harvard's first provost.
The book became a standard account of postwar sectional reconciliation for a generation of historians, and its central claim, that reunion between North and South was purchased through the abandonment of Black civil rights, has remained a starting point for later Reconstruction scholarship even as historians have continued to argue over how deliberately that trade was made. Buck went on to write on the history of American education and university libraries, but The Road to Reunion remains the work for which he is chiefly remembered.