The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers published by the University of North Carolina Press (2014) 522 pages Hardcover $42.00, Kindle $9.99.
I am often asked to recommend books on the Reconstruction Era. Over the last seven years I have read almost than 200 books on the subject. Most are studies of specific aspects of the period. When asked about an overview of Reconstruction, I invariably recommend Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. I often receive the response that the person has started Foner, but, for one reason or another, has abandoned it. Perhaps it is the book’s length, over seven hundred pages, or its rigorously academic approach to the subject. Over the last year, I have read several general works on Reconstruction that might be more approachable for general reader. I will be offering reviews of three of these over the next two months. The first of these books is The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers.
The Ordeal of the Reunion is both significantly shorter than Foner’s masterpiece and written in a more accessible style for the general reader, without sacrificing the standards of academic scholarship. It also has the advantage of being able to mine new research developed by scholars over the last two decades, since Foner’s work was first published. This would not be a bad first book for students of the Civil War who are curious about what happened next. For those with a deeper acquaintance with Reconstruction, I learned something new in every chapter. There is a lot of information and interpretation in Summer’s 522 pages.
When I was growing up, Reconstruction was typically examined from the perspective of the late 20th Century and the question was always “Why did it fail?” Why weren’t problems that we could not solve in the 1960s and 1970s solved in the 1860s and 1870s? This ahistorical approach was not helpful in understanding the period on its own terms. Summers does much to correct this misapprehension of history.
Summers writes that at the end of the Civil War, Northern Unionists “would have liked to see justice done; but they must have security—a settlement that would stick, assuring that there would be no new war, no new wounds.” For several years, furthering the rights of African Americans served the end of security for the reunited country. When the threat of renewed disunion faded, the urgency to defend black southerners declined. Summers reminds us that in 1865 “most white Americans had not been looking for a revolution.” (p. 4)
Within the expectations of whites, Reconstruction was far from a failure. Summer writes that “if we see Reconstruction’s purpose as making sure that the main goals of the war would be fulfilled, of a Union held together forever, of a North and South able to work together, of slavery extirpated, and sectional rivalries confined, of a permanent banishment of the fear of vaunting appeals to state sovereignty, backed by armed force, then Reconstruction looks like what in that respect it was, a lasting and unappreciated success.” (p. 4) By 1875 it was apparent that the South would not leave the Union, initiate a new war against the national government, or reimpose slavery.
The end of the Civil War in the Spring of 1865 was followed by the rapid demobilization of the Union army. While modern Neo-Confederates recall Reconstruction as a period of military despotism in the South, the disbanding of the conquering armies was dramatic and precipitous. Before the last Confederates had surrendered, Union soldiers were already heading home. In May, 1865, a million men had been under arms. Over the next three months, 600,000 of these volunteers were mustered out. Half of those remaining left before the end of November. Summers writes that “Whatever the war had done to America, it had not turned it into a garrison state.” (p. 36)
Union soldiers still in uniform at the end of the summer of 1865 clamored to go home no matter what their enlistment agreements had specified as their terms of service. The sentiment for a return to peaceful pursuits was understandable, but black people in the South were still the routine objects of private control by whites. Summers describes their situation:
Many owners tried to conceal the news of emancipation from their slaves. In the more remote places, they may not have known for sure themselves. In the Virginia backcountry, freedpeople unaware that their status had changed worked months beyond the close of the war, and in Texas as long as three years. One Mississippi boy found out only when his brother rode onto the property and scooped him up to carry him off. (p. 45)
Summers provides a number of examples of the ways the liminal moment of liberation played out between “masters” and “slaves.” He writes:
Some masters wept as they told their slaves that they were free, either from the tension of a dramatic moment or because they now separated from people who in some distant way had been family or, at least, property with sentimental value. Told that “Jinny” was free along with the others on one farm, the “missus” found it the worst blow. “ ‘My ma gimme Jinny w’en I was sixteen year’ ol,’ ” she burst out. “An’ she start cry.” Commonly, white accounts expressed a sense of resentment, tendering liberty to an ungrateful people, with no understanding of what they had been given— and, more to the point, what they had lost. “Our nurse Susan took herself off this morning leaving us nigg#rless indeed,” a Georgian noted in his diary. “The more I see of these beings the more certain I feel that they have very small souls—if any!” (p. 47)
Summers tells the familiar story of the second great blow against Reconstruction, the accidental president Andrew Johnson’s conservative course of reestablishment of white supremacy in the former Confederacy. The Tennessee Jacksonian not only hobbled Reconstruction, he crippled his own presidency by parting with the constituency that had elevated him to national office. As the president labored to create his own political party, three of his cabinet secretaries resigned and a veil of mistrust descended between his shrinking circle of supporters and the Republican Party. The Radicals went from constituting a faction of the Republican Party to providing its principal Congressional leadership as the party recoiled in disgust at Johnson’s appeasement of the former Confederates.
Any possible appeal Johnson’s Confederate-friendly National Union Party might have had to voters was trashed when white terror flourished under Johnson’s weak enforcement of laws protecting the recently emancipated African American populations of the South. His unwillingness to value the lives of black Americans led to a backlash against appeasement in the 1866 Congressional elections.
With a sense that the American people were behind them, the Radicals increased the role of military commanders in protecting the freedmen from massacres and disenfranchisement. Limited resources kept these soldiers from regulating the violence of white terrorists, but any army role led to cries of military dictatorship. Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin warned of military tyranny. Summers says that:
Carl Schurz, the Missouri radical, knew tyranny well. He had fled Germany for his life after the collapse of the revolution of 1848. If Senator Doolittle had bothered to talk with “some little German boy” on his recent European tour, Schurz suggested, he might have come back wiser. He would have learned how the Hungarian revolution of the 1840s ended, with long rows of gallows rising, all liberally used. If the North had done like the czars and emperors, Confederate generals would have become carrion long ago rather than teaching school, promoting railroad enterprises— and helping write the Democratic national platform in New York. (p. 116)
Summers provides interesting discussions of the politics of the parties during the Reconstruction. The Impeachment of Johnson and the election of 1868 are explained in insightful and entertaining ways. In the run-up to the election, Summers says;
Democrats wanted no peace that accepted either a Fourteenth Amendment or impartial suffrage as settled facts… The party’s eastern bankers and businessmen in the party had a particular interest in changing the topic to the one on which they and their western critics agreed, the unconstitutionality of Reconstruction and the need to keep America a “white man’s country.” When former Union general Frank Blair Jr. issued a letter announcing that a Democratic administration would declare the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional and that the president would use the army to overturn the new governments, he fired many a partisan heart. … Backroom intrigues brought one favorite son after another to the fore. Then Clement Vallandigham, the Peace Democrat whose accommodation to the new realities had made him one of Chase’s most outspoken backers, rose to propose the name of the presiding officer, New York’s wartime governor, Horatio Seymour. Genuinely appalled, Seymour tried to refuse; he was hustled weeping out of the hall before delegates could take him at his word. As soon as Pendleton’s opponents had carried Seymour through, they looked for a Union war hero from the West to balance the ticket. Blair seemed ready-made for it. The platform fit him better than Seymour. It called for universal amnesty and declared the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional, null and void.
By 1868 the Democrats felt secure enough to decry Reconstruction on a daily basis. Summers reminds us that; Democratic claims of widespread disfranchisements depended on fabulous figures. They counted 200,000 white Virginians and 70,000 Texans as supposedly denied the right to vote; the real numbers may have approached 12,000 and 4,000, respectively. Most of the readmitted states opened the ballot box to all adult males. Civilian courts had reopened and only tiny numbers of soldiers remained in most parts of the South.
The much-denounced military tyranny in the South was, in fact, so weak that white terrorist groups steadily increased in size and violence in the months leading up to Grant’s first election. Summers describes the bloody course of politics in this period:
The evidence for the regular, random beatings and killings of black Republicans showed that it took no masks or midnight mobs to do the job. Many of the assaults came from individuals singling out other individuals, usually ones they knew, and there was a constant pattern that wove only indirectly into politics. But much of it was institutional. Starting in 1866 or 1867, the organizations to enforce white supremacy had been growing throughout the Deep South. The most prominent was the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1868, Louisiana saw the worst of the pre-election violence. As Summers describes it:
Negro churches and schoolhouses were burned. Two Republican newspapers were smashed. Their editors were beaten or shot to death. In Caddo Parish, the guess was that more than forty-two blacks lost their lives in October alone. In Bossier Parish, an affray resulted in a full-scale “Negro hunt,” in which at least 162 blacks were murdered, and over 100 more wounded. In late October, a quarrel between a storekeeper and some blacks in St. Bernard Parish opened four days of massacre, in which more than two dozen blacks were killed. A “reign of terror has been inaugurated by the Democracy throughout this state,” Stephen B. Packard, Republican state chairman, wrote from New Orleans. “Hundreds of republicans have been killed. Republican residences, churches, school houses, printing offices are being sacked, flags & fixtures of club rooms destroyed. Registration certificates of republicans taken by armed bands. Democratic secret organizations press & party are in resistance to the laws & advise overthrow of state Government.” (p. 149)
The election of Grant was a signal victory hailed by the Radicals. Johnson would soon be replaced with a president pledged to equal civil rights. The 1868 election results should have set off nightmares of future problems. Grant had won the popular vote, yet most white voters had supported the Democrats. It was ultimately the overwhelming support of African Americans that threw the election to Grant.
By 1870, the Reconstruction impulse was waning in white America. Three constitutional amendments and a raft of civil rights and Reconstruction acts had become law. Many Northerners felt the mission of Reconstruction had been fulfilled and it was time for the country to move on. Democrats, whose urban administrations were rotten with graft, but still they demanded civil service reform. Republicans, looking for a wedge issue, attacked the Catholic Schools to detach the bigot vote from the Democrats. Summers discusses this 19th Century version of the culture wars:
Using government on behalf of moral causes stirred the most visceral of feelings. However obvious it might be to Protestant schoolteachers that students would benefit from regular readings of the King James version of the Bible, Catholics wanted no such indoctrination. In 1869, the Cincinnati Board of Education raised a public tempest when it forbade Bible reading as a violation of the state’s constitution. Opponents tried to require merger of the parochial and public schools, and gave way gracelessly only after the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the board’s decision. The board of education in Long Island City expelled a few Catholic children for refusing to participate in Bible readings; the one in Brattleboro, Vermont, expelled hundreds. In New York, Tammany Hall pushed through a requirement that one-fifth of the funds that the state collected for education go to nonpublic schools—meaning, especially in New York City, the Catholic ones. There and elsewhere, aid for parochial education spurred tumult and efforts to amend the state constitutions to keep any religion from cashing in on the states’ largesse.41 As enthusiasm for Reconstruction issues slackened, Republicans grew readier to identify themselves with cultural ones. Some thought they had found the new national crusade in a constitutional amendment declaring Christianity the nation’s religion or in revealing the pope’s designs against the public schoolhouse. A manufactured panic convulsed lawmakers in New York and Ohio when Democrats proposed to allow Catholic prisoners to seek consolation from priests, and not from just Protestant chaplains. (p. 247)
As blacks came under increasing attack in the South, “President Grant spoke out aggressively—on behalf of the separation of church and state.” Joining the Protestant Crusade was more politically productive than taking new measures to protect civil rights in the endlessly conflictive South. By the late period of the Grant presidency the old anti-slavery party now rested on the three pillars of opposition to “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” As Temperance and anti-Catholicism grew in importance, the party’s commitment to African Americans declined.
The Protestant Crusade reminded immigrants of the Republican Party’s absorption of elements of the Know Nothing Party a decade and a half earlier. Mark Summers observes
Supporting liquor regulation or Protestant values therefore came at a mounting cost as war issues lost their hold. The Woman’s Crusade, and all the other efforts to restrict drinking, produced resentment not just in regular customers but especially in German Americans, for whom the biergarten was not simply a rendezvous for getting drunk but a pleasant place for a family outing and a valued part of their culture. They did not have to listen long to hear the note behind so many temperance utterances. “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” one orator shouted, “this country must be Americanized, and if the foreigners don’t like that they can go back where they came from.” (p. 248)
The Republicans’ Protestant Crusade showed the dangerous impact of a party committed to the use of politics as an agency of moral reform. And, of course, this would be a morality of a peculiar form that transferred public wealth to railroad magnates, crushed workers’ organizations, and pushed Native Americans off of their lands. It also sustained corruption in Reconstruction governments while gradually diminishing the capital it was willing to expend on the freedpeople.
The Republicans gained votes by joining the Protestant Crusade among those who saw the nation’s moral fabric threatening to tear apart, but they alienated the fastest growing sector of the electorate. Many immigrant communities became hereditary Democratic bastions for a century because of the turn to Neo-Know Nothingism by the Republican Party in the mid-1870s. Summers writes:
Win or lose, the moral crusades only confirmed to Catholics and many Germans of all faiths that the Republican conscience, however forgiving it might be of carpetbag thieves and southern ignoramuses, hardened into brass against anybody’s conscience but its own. Democrats reminded voters that the same dogmatism that believed in using the law to impose one group’s religious views on everybody else fit perfectly with the belief in using the law to impose their own racial views on everybody else. In both cases, they left to law what should be left to individual conscience. It also brought home to many others, native and foreign-born, that a government with power to protect could use it just as easily to oppress, and not just south of the Mason-Dixon Line. If after 1874 the Republicans had to fight for their majorities in every state between the Housatonic and the Mississippi, their use of the state as an agent of moral uplift deserved some of the blame.45 At the same time, the crusading spirit of many of Reconstruction’s strongest supporters had found new outlets as the question of remaking the South seemed to find an answer. They would not return to their earlier commitment when the moment of crisis came. In that respect, Reconstruction would perish not simply because of its failures but because of its apparent success. (p. 249)
Mark Summers provides a good overview of the rise and fall and resurrection of white terrorism and communal violence during the 1870s. He also effectively dispels the image of Grant as a military dictator promoting legal rights for blacks at the point of a (Yankee) bayonet. For all the horrific violence inflicted by the Ku Kluxers and other night riders, Grant only suspended the writ of habeas corpus in South Carolina, and only there after dozens of assassinations and terrorist acts.
In Mississippi, for instance, the highest number of U.S. soldiers detailed for duty there was 328. By 1873 that number had fallen to 144, and by 1874 there were only 45, according to Summers. The author writes that the “only way most residents saw any of them was by paying them a visit at one of the five posts where they were stationed.” (p. 269)
Even where the United States Attorney prosecuted suspected terrorists under the Ku Klux Klan Acts, the prosecutions were in civil courts, not before military tribunals. No death penalties were handed down, although the arrested terrorists often became martyrs in the mythology of the white communities that succored them. Although enforcement of the Ku Klux Klan Acts by Grant was weak, he did demonstrate that where the law was forcefully applied in South Carolina the night riding killers were reigned in.
Summers also does a good job of covering the issue of governmental corruption. By the 1870s, what we would now consider corruption was pervasive. Of course, it hade been before the Reconstruction Era as well. Government jobs paid poorly and they offered officeholders opportunities for enrichment through fees, bribes, self-dealing, and insider trading. This was as common in the North as in the South and it was practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike. It is beyond ironic that Southern former-slaveowners travelled to Tammany Hall in Manhattan in 1868 to denounce the corrupt practices of the Reconstruction governments supported by their former slaves and to denounce the Republicans for trying to enslave white men.
The corruption of American life only expanded during the Civil War as the government grew in size and budget. The war ushered in the Age of Shoddy as everyone, except the industrial and financial elites was required to sacrifice for the Glorious Cause. The saw their opportunities and they took ‘em, even if it meant that Brooks Brothers uniforms fell apart in the rain and ammunition failed. Politcians saw no reason they should not have a piece of the action, especially since while budgets expanded, accountability did not.
And yet, while we may imagine that we would have opposed the corrupt, men like Boss Tweed were largely supported by the communities they helped rule. The good-government types had made some governments so good that they let the poor starve rather than violate the sacred precepts of Adam Smith. Tweed, on the other hand, built great public works (with a smidgen going into his own pocket). He helped establish the Metropolitan Museum of Art and configured part of Central Park. State spending on those in need increased by 600% under his guidance and orphanages, hospitals and homes for the friendless were funded.
In other words, there was good being done by fundamentally bad men.
Summers writes that “by the 1870s it seemed Americans could hardly look anywhere without finding corruption. Every state had complaints about lawmakers’ stupidity, perversity, and crookedness. As the Chicago Times grumbled, “The average state legislature did more in a single session than all the atheistic agencies on earth to persuade people that there was no God.”” (p. 279)
New Jersey’s state government was described as “a lobby containing a state legislature.”
Corruption was not unique to the South, but Southern corruption would take on a special meaning, Summers argues, “because black voters were on trial, and, however unjustly, the whole experiment in black suffrage would get the blame for misbehavior.” (p. 296) As newspaper coverage of Reconstruction in the mid-1870s shifted from white violence to Republican corruption, Northerners relaxed their interests in protecting the rights of the black electorate. Republican infighting, often over the spoils of office, further weakened the Radicals.
From 1873-1876 the African American communities and their white allies fought a rearguard action for the preservation of the remaining Reconstruction governments. By 1877, Reconstruction was in full retreat and in some places routed. Not all the gains of Reconstruction were lost with the “Corrupt Deal” decising the 1876 Presidential Election.
Of course, legal slavery was dead. So was any notion of states taking up arms against the general government. The power of the Federal government to intervene against state discrimination was established, even if rarely employed. Blacks did not have the rights to go to school with whites, but they did have a right to an education. Black illiteracy greatly exceed ed that of whites, but where almost no black children went to school or knew how to read in the South before 1860, the majority did both in the years after 1877. Before 1860, black churches and civic organizations were often banned, they flourished even after Grant left office. In 1888 there were 15,000 black school teachers, forming the backbone of a formerly non-existent black middle class. Dozens of Normal Schools to train black teachers and a number of black colleges set up during Reconstruction trained African American intellectual leaders. These institutions would provide the intellectual shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement 80 years later.
The Ordeal of the Reunion can be read both as an introduction to Reconstruction and as a supplement to Eric Foner’s work. It is scholarly without being pedantic and the writing and organization of the book are superior. It also has the advantage of covering events outside of Washington and the South, for those less familiar with the general history of this period. At less than ten dollars, I recommend that you buy the Kindle version if you don’t mind reading on a device.
