Review by Choice Review
Reconstruction didn't fail; it was brutally suppressed by Southern "redeemers," including many Confederate veterans. The Civil War's formal end has long obscured this central fact about postbellum politics. Advocates for freedmen and democracy conscientiously pursued radical reforms. This threat to established order provoked not merely "riots" but massive, quasi-military repression. This is largely familiar, but emphasizing the dangers freedmen faced in exercising their rights helps to better understand Reconstruction. Egerton (LeMoyne College) has written extensively on revolutionary and early national history (e.g., Gabriel's Rebellion, CH, Feb'94, 31-3406). This work ventures into later years, extending his concern with racial violence and black resistance. This is a very "Du Boisian" work, sharing the great scholar's view that Reconstruction wasn't just about rebuilding the Southern economy, but reconstructing democracy throughout the US. Recounting Northern blacks' struggles for voting rights and the national quest for universal public education bolsters Du Bois's insight, as do sections assessing Reconstruction in scholarly and popular memory. Through detailed evaluations of officeholders and other activists, Egerton asserts that Reconstruction was the most progressive era in US history. Proponents of the 1960s and, especially, the New Deal may differ, but Egerton's strong case stimulates debate. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/collections. T. P. Johnson University of Massachusetts, Boston
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
AS THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY of the Civil War heads toward its conclusion, the anniversary of Reconstruction, the turbulent era that followed, looms on the horizon. Properly commemorating it poses a challenge, since for no period of American history does a wider gap exist between scholarly understanding and public consciousness. For much of the past century, historians portrayed Reconstruction as a time of corruption and misgovernment, the lowest point in the saga of American democracy. The supposed heroes of the story were Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, who sought to defend constitutional government against Radical Republicans bent on punishing the defeated South, and the Ku Klux Klan, which fought to restore "home rule" (that is, white supremacy). The chief mistake of Reconstruction was conferring the right to vote on African-Americans, who, it was said, were incapable of exercising it intelligently. This interpretation has long since been abandoned by historians, who now see Reconstruction as a laudable, if flawed, effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery. But the old view retains a remarkable hold on the popular imagination, including the pernicious idea, of which one hears echoes today, that expanding the rights and powers of blacks constitutes a punishment to whites. This is unfortunate, because understanding issues that continue to roil American politics - the definition of citizenship, the meaning of equality, the relative powers of the national and state governments - requires knowledge of Reconstruction. For this reason alone, the appearance of Douglas R. Egerton's "The Wars of Reconstruction" is especially welcome. The book offers little that will surprise scholars of the period, but its dramatic account will challenge and enlighten those who still cling to the older outlook. In some ways, "The Wars of Reconstruction" defies current trends in Reconstruction scholarship. Recent historians have sought to embed Southern events in a national and international context, bringing into the story the development of the West and the imperial ambitions of the reunited nation (during Reconstruction, the United States purchased Alaska and sought to annex the Dominican Republic). But Reconstruction's central story, Egerton insists, takes place in the South, in the struggle of former slaves to breathe substantive meaning into the freedom they had acquired. Egerton, a professor of history at Le Moyne College, pays a price for this local emphasis. Those seeking a clear, chronological narrative will not find it here, nor will they get a full sense of the legal revolution that rewrote the laws and Constitution to grant equal citizenship to every person born in the United States. But it has striking benefits as well. Drawing on an array of scholarly monographs, local newspapers and other sources, Egerton paints a dramatic portrait of on-the-ground struggles for equality in an era of great hope and brutal disappointment. The core of the book relates the efforts of black Americans and those Egerton somewhat anachronistically refers to as their "progressive" white allies to lay the foundations for a black community enjoying social, economic and political equality. He devotes particular attention to the establishment of schools in the South by the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created by Congress to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. Egerton is fully aware that bureau agents and white teachers could be "patronizing" in hectoring blacks about middle-class mores. Yet he rejects the view, advanced by some scholars, that freedmen's education was simply a form of social control. To former slaves, he observes, Northern teachers were dedicated, resourceful and courageous. Egerton underscores the significance of the Southern constitutional conventions of 1867 and 1868, the first racially integrated governmental bodies in American history. They produced forward-looking documents that established the region's first statewide public school systems, eliminated racial distinctions in voting and, in some cases, guaranteed citizens equal access to public transportation and accommodations. There followed the South's first truly democratic elections, which produced governments in which black officials played a role at all levels, from sheriffs and school board officials to members of legislatures and Congress. The new governments sought, in Egerton's words, to reform "every aspect of society." Of course, these changes also produced a violent reaction. As his title suggests, Egerton devotes considerable attention to the actions of homegrown "terrorists" like the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations, which systematically targeted local political leaders and teachers and were probably responsible for the deaths of more Americans than Osama bin Laden. Egerton makes the important point that the old idea of the South being subject to an overbearing military occupation is a myth. The Army was rapidly demobilized after the war ended. "Reconstruction did not fail," Egerton states, "it was violently overthrown." Yet elsewhere, he seems to argue that the entire experiment was doomed even before it began. As the Civil War ended, he claims, traumatized white Southerners were prepared to accept "whatever terms the victorious North saw fit to impose." But Johnson immediately handed power back to leading white Southerners, opening the door for the region's "aggressive reactionaries" to try to reduce blacks to a condition as close to slavery as possible. There is no question that Johnson - a deeply racist, inflexible political leader - lacked Lincoln's qualities of greatness. But as the historian Michael Perman showed many years ago in "Reunion Without Compromise," it is a serious mistake to exaggerate the spirit of acquiescence in the white South in 1865. Egerton's own evidence of sweeping violence against the freed people suggests that the failure of Reconstruction cannot wholly be blamed on Johnson. Moreover, his account directs attention away from the North's own retreat from the ideal of equality. Egerton makes the valuable point that speaking simply of the failure of Reconstruction ignores the era's accomplishments, including "spectacular gains" in black literacy and the success of some former slaves in acquiring land. Nonetheless, the abandonment of Reconstruction was a disaster not only for black America but also for the national commitment to democracy. It was followed by "a new campaign in the wars of Reconstruction," this one over history. Through the writings of some historians and in films like "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind," a deeply racist image of Reconstruction achieved widespread circulation. Its alleged horrors became justifications for the disenfranchisement of black Southern voters. Internationally, although Egerton does not make this point, Reconstruction's "failure" was invoked in places as far-flung as Australia and South Africa to demonstrate the incapacity of nonwhite people for self-government. "The Wars of Reconstruction" ends with the recent controversy about erecting a monument to Denmark Vesey in Charleston, S.C., where he plotted a slave insurrection. Egerton might have reflected more fully on the abysmal state of Reconstruction itself in public history. Of the National Park Service's hundreds of historical sites, only the Andrew Johnson Homestead in Tennessee deals centrally with Reconstruction (in what can charitably be called a dated manner). Monuments to Confederate heroes, including leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, dot the Southern landscape, but virtually none to black officials of Reconstruction. It took South Carolina until 1998 to install a portrait of the black justice Jonathan J. Wright in its Supreme Court building, alongside likenesses of the other members of the court in the state's history. The Denmark Vesey monument remains unfinished. So, in many ways, does Reconstruction. ERIC FONER, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery," winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in history.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 9, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this challenging history of America's first age of "progressive reform," Egerton, a professor of history at Le Moyne College, argues that the era of Reconstruction constituted the "most democratic" decades of the 19th century. Following the wartime contributions of African-American soldiers who "learned to march and read at the same time," came demands for suffrage and equality. The result is a chaotic nation reshaped by political activism, land reclamation, the reuniting of freed families, the creation of new unions and banking institutions, and, especially, the establishment of educational opportunities for African-Americans-a community that "everywhere emphasized cooperation" in the post-bellum period. These triumphs and the subsequent setbacks under Andrew Johnson's watch, followed by a "spike in white vigilantism" and local "political assassinations," are captured vividly through extensive use of primary source material. Key figures develop into rich characters, balancing Egerton's own objective, wide-seeing perspective, which even explores the revisionist Reconstruction histories that informed the American consciousness, particularly the pernicious effects of influential racist cinema. All told, Egerton's study is an adept exploration of a past era of monumental relevance to the present and is recommended for any student of political conflict, social upheaval, and the perennial struggle against oppression. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The meaning of the American Civil War and Reconstruction has long been contested terrain. Egerton (history, LeMoyne Coll.; Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America) delineates the circumstances during and after the war that favored progress in black-white relations and in advancing the nation toward a more just and democratic society. His approach follows in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois's classic Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935). Emphasizing action and reaction, Egerton situates Reconstruction's multifaceted promises over the tangled roots of conservative white racial supremacy and class lines that choked chances for either inter-racial accord or the growth of cooperative community. He explains how a broad spectrum of blacks and their dedicated white allies risked life and limb to advance their progressive cause only to be repulsed by vigilante white terrorism and the apathy and disdain of the nation's white majority. VERDICT Egerton's work joins scads of writing on Reconstruction but robustly updates much historiography as it focuses on the degree of Americans' commitment to practice the nation's foundational principle "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A richly detailed history of former slaves' rising to political involvement in the American South after the Civil War. Egerton (History/Le Moyne Coll.; Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War, 2010, etc.) recalls Reconstruction at the state and local levels, where thousands of black veterans, activists, ministers, assemblymen and others, with help from white allies, integrated streetcars and schools and ran for office in this "first progressive era in the nation's history." It was a remarkable time: Black voting and education surged across the South, and African-Americans held three of four congressional seats in South Carolina--the state most identified with slavery and secession. Many forces were at work: More than 175,000 African-Americans had served in the Union Army, and many became voters, activists, and eventually, state and federal officeholders. The federal Freedmen's Bureau sponsored hundreds of schools for freed children, and black churches became increasingly significant. For all that, the "window of enormous opportunity" for reform was lost, mainly due to inaction by Andrew Johnson, "a racist, accidental president," and whites' guerrilla war against black Republicans. As states passed black codes to stymie gains, whites torched interracial schools and churches, blaming Northern agitators for filling freedmen's heads with visions of equality. Egerton offers sharp sketches of freedmen, including Tunis Campbell, a black activist who supervised resettlement in Georgia; Oberlin-educated Blanche Kelso Bruce, who served as a U.S. senator from Mississippi; and war hero Robert Smalls, whose mistreatment on a Charleston streetcar prompted threats of a boycott of public transportation. He suggests that popular culture (Gone with the Wind, etc.) has sentimentalized the Old South and inaccurately portrayed Reconstruction as a vindictive, undemocratic period. An illuminating view of an era whose reform spirit would live on in the 1960s civil rights movement.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
