Despite his defeat, Greeley's campaign persuaded many Northerners to view their former enemies more sympathetically and to abandon the idea of federal intervention on behalf of the former slaves. We Love and works issued by the new Southern Historical Society promoted a memory of a war in which slavery played no part and blacks participated only as faithful servants who protected their masters' property. Old-time mammies and loyal slaves were celebrated in memoirs, tributes and statues. In this highly selective, not to say grossly misleading, memory, the legions of blacks who fled plantations to seek freedom behind Union lines and the 200,000 who fought for the Union were forgotten. Even today, of the thousands of Civil War monuments throughout the country only a handful contain an image of a black soldier.
Ironies abound in the triumph of the reconciliationist outlook.
Gettysburg, site of the greatest Northern victory, was transformed into a shrine to the Confederacy centered on Pickett's charge, the high tide of the Southern cause. Even Memorial Day, whose origin lay in 1865 when thousands of black South Carolinians placed flowers on the graves of Union soldiers, soon became an occasion for expressions of white nationalism and reconciliation. Rather than the crisis of a nation divided by antagonistic labor systems and ideologies, the war became a tragic conflict that nonetheless accomplished the task of solidifying the nation. The abandonment of the nation's commitment to equal rights for former slaves was the basis on which former white antagonists could unite in the romance of reunion. Blacks were not the only ones forgotten in this story.