David Blight

David Blights Misunderstanding of the UGRR: Hasty Conclusions about the tubing Railroad

David Blight is among our most celebrated abolitionist historians.

Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale

The director of Yales Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, he has been influential in perpetuating the view that the Underground Railroad was more legend than reality, and more the bravado of old men puffing up their achievements.

His book, lead and reunification: The Civil contend in American Memory bright articulated the thesis that the true story of the Civil War was distorted by apologists for the South and northerners seeking reconciliation with the South. He showed that because the South was ashamed of its role in the brutal, inhuman, and racist establishment of slavery, they wanted to lay the wars cause on other factors like economics rather than its real cause, the abolition of slavery.

Underground Railroad

Blight has applied this theory to the history of the Underground Railroad, and Wilbur Siebert is his proverbial bogeyman. Sieberts work is less about the creation of reunion literature per se than about the scope and character of the audition for romantic memory of the Civil War era, he wrote in Race and Reunion.



He tapped into a vast reservoir of Northerners overeager to claim their places, or that of their parents, in a heroic legacy, this cadence not so much as soldiers in the war, however as veterans of the old liberty life guard, as hotshot Connecticut man called his father.

According to Blight, the reality is that the alleged profits of depots and conductors by which fugitive slaves escaped to freedom . . . had never been as elaborate as legend portrayed it, and he brush aside the traditional story of the Underground Railroad as drippy retrospection.

It takes Blight only eight pages in his 512 page book, Race and Reunion, to write off the Underground Railroad. On reading it, unity gets a feeling of...If you want to get a replete essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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