Five Best Books of the Last Year on Reconstruction

October is National Book Book Month and here are some new volumes that have come out in the last year that really raise standards for studying the Reconstruction Era. The links give a more expanded review of the books.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 by Manisha Sinha published by Liveright Press (2024) is a very good introduction for the educated reader to the Reconstruction Era. For Americans whose main knowledge of Reconstruction came from a one-week treatment during high school history classes, this book expands the time period back to when Lincoln was elected president, covers Reconstruction during the Civil War that began with the acceptance of escaped slaves by Union troops under General Butler and the creations of the Freedmen’s Bureau under Lincoln. It continues with the expansion of white and Black abolitionists into advocates for further civil rights expansion without regard to race or gender.

Professor Sinha looks at the durable nature of post-war grass-roots organizing and the imperfect legal protections that were erected when Radical Republicans briefly held sway in Congress. These laws, ranging from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to the 14th Amendment, had their protections scaled back by the Gilded Age Supreme Court, but they became the basis for the rapid increase in civil rights protections during the 1950s and 1960s. Sinha also describes the violent destruction of civil rights for Blacks by the Red Shirts and white supremacists in the South and by the wealthy elites in the North who saw the implications that these laws had on their relations with Northern factory workers of the new Industrial Age.

 

The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World by Don Doyle published by Princeton University Press (2024) explores the impact of Reconstruction on world history.  The book opens with Europe receiving the news that a Confederate agent had assassinated Abraham Lincoln as the Civil War ended. While many conservatives consigned the murdered president to hell, the middle and working classes of these European powers held massive public outpourings of grief.

Don Doyle presents a convincing case that U.S. diplomacy saw the public support after Lincoln’s death as a chance to mobilize the democratic elements of world society to create an international system that would support the United States while gaining human rights for people around the world.

Doyle delves deeply into not only American sources, but also those from the European empires and Latin American writings. While I have been studying this era of American history for twenty years, many of these I had not heard of before. Some were real revelations.

 

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth Varon published by Simon & Schuster (2023) looks at one of the most interesting people of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. James Longstreet had been consigned by the Lost Cause theoreticians of the last century to being treated as a secondary figure because of his post-war support for African American civil rights and his desire to admit that the Confederacy’s cause was really lost and could not be revived. No, he said, “the South can’t do it again!”

There have been several new biographies of Longstreet after the Civil War Centennial in the 1960s. Varon’s biography departs from other recent books on Longstreet by paying as much attention to the general’s life after the war as she does to his life between Fort Sumter and Appomattox.

 

Adelbert Ames, the Civil War, and the Creation of Modern America by Michael Megelsh published by Kent State University Press (2024) is an interesting biography of a young Civil War general who went on to become the governor of Mississippi and the senator from that state. While not as famous as James Longstreet, he played a major role in Reconstruction in the South, and, before “White Redemption” in 1875, he was one of the political leaders who worked with the Black majority in many parts of the South to secure their rights. In his final year in office as governor, former Confederates unleashed the “Mississippi Plan” against Ames and his Black supporters which led to unprecedented numbers of killings of people of color by the Red Shirts, the deprivation of Blacks’ right to vote, and the start of the impeachment of Gov. Ames.

For those of you who enjoyed last year’s bio of Ben Butler by Elizabeth Leonard, you should know that Ames was Butler’s son-in-law.

 

Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich published Knopf (2023) 480 pages tells a gripping tale of how President Grant waged a counterinsurgency war on the terrorists who had hopes of subverting democracy. Grant had seen his efforts to reach out to the former-Confederates nonviolently had been met with ever broadening racist violence. He was also concerned that within his own party, a new “Liberal Republican” faction had arisen calling for the party to stop making civil equality of Black people its main program. The “Liberal Republicans,” under the leadership of Carl Schurz and Horace Greeley, believed the party should focus on civil service reform rather than civil rights.

With Grant pressing through the Enforcement Act of 1870, he had the statutory power to enforce the 14th Amendment’s recognition of Black citizenship. According to Bordewich, “It was a dramatic departure: until now, Klan crimes had been treated strictly as state, not federal, offenses despite the fact that southern courts almost everywhere refused to convict Klansmen of anything at all.”

Bordewich does a fine job of telling the story of the brave ex-slaves whose testimony forced Grant to take action, the determination by Grant to defend democratic norms, and the intelligent tactics adopted by the army’s man-on-the-ground in South Carolina, Major Lewis Merrill. He also disturbingly relates the changes in strategy by leading white supremacists that later deprived millions of African Americans of their basic rights that Black sacrifices had won.

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