This was not a book that I was intending to read. When Allen Guelzo’s short history of Reconstruction came out in April I took a quick look at it and decided it had little that I did not already know between its covers. However, my experience in reviewing several recent books on Reconstruction forced me to give this slim volume a second look.
I have long recommended Eric Foner’s Reconstruction to those of you who asked me what one book to read on the subject. Several of you wrote to me telling me that the book is just too long at 752 pages and too academic. In response, this year I read and reviewed three newer surveys of Reconstruction. I still got some messages from folks saying that these 500 page books were too great a time commitment for someone just beginning to explore the subject.
So, I bought Guelzo’s new book, if not for me, then for you dear reader.
The first point to make is that this book is really concise. It’s main text is just 131 pages long. If that is still long for you, please don’t send me any notes asking for something even more concise. Its concision makes it easier to follow the basic outlines of Reconstruction history. Guelzo covers most of the main events of Reconstruction in a page or two each, so the risk of getting lost in any individual incident is minimized. Brevity has its strong points.
Unfortunately, Guelzo spends most of his space on the first three years of the post-war period, so by the time you get to the election of Grant in 1868 half of the book is gone. The period from 1869-1877 is really just sketched in, followed by an interesting, but brief, breeze through the years from 1877 to 1900, a period that other historians think was still part of Reconstruction. There is a concise timeline of Reconstruction that some might find useful after the books conclusion.
I have read several of Guelzo’s other books and really have not had much trouble with his writing style, but others have told me that they really dislike it. I know in our Monday night video chats, Guelzo seems to strike a lot of folks here the wrong way. I would say that if you have read another Guezo book and come away unhappy with the style, you are likely to have the same reaction to this one. It is pretty much par for the Guelzo course stylistically.
I think that Guelzo missed the opportunity to combine brevity with accessibility in Reconstruction: A Concise History. Unfortunately this is not Reconstruction for the masses, or at least the masses of educated readers of history.
Guelzo argues that the Reconstruction Republican Party did not sell-out the Blacks of the South. It is more accurate to say, perhaps, that they lost the Post-War war. Guelzo writes:
Nor is there any evidence that the victorious Republicans who attempted to build a bourgeois South among the ruins of the old plantation order ever panicked at the prospect of empowering blacks or poor whites, or betrayed them by establishing a self-protecting alliance with the dethroned aristocrats. And the freedpeople hardly experienced a taste of Marxist alienation; they instead experienced bourgeois frustration at their exclusion from material accumulation and democratic and judicial process, and that was how they articulated it. If Reconstruction was indeed a bourgeois revolution, it was a pure bourgeois revolution—a self-contained revolutionary event outside the boundaries of Marxist theory. And if it failed, it was not because it sold out, but because it was overthrown by the resurgent political power of a bloodied but unbowed aristocracy.
Guelzo, Allen C.. Reconstruction: A Concise History (p. 11). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
While I agree with some of what appears in the above paragraph, it also illustrates some problems with the book. First, I am not sure how much further the average reader would continue onward after encountering this on page 11. It seems dense and jargony to me. I don’t know why he could not have made his point in a more readable way.
Secondly, with Guelzo apparently the court historian of the Murdoch media empire and the National Review, I wondered how much his holding harmless the GOP for the failures of Reconstruction owed to his contemporary political alignment. I agree with him that Reconstruction was overthrown, but he does not do a convincing job of explaining why that overthrow could not have been prevented by the Republicans.
Okay, now I have that off of my chest.
Guezo examines what he says are the overlooked successes of Reconstruction which he claims have been ignored by most historians writing after Foner. I am going to let Guelzo tell you what the first one is:
•Reconstruction restored a federal Union, for which the North had been fighting from the start, and corrected the centrifugal forces of the American federal Union that had brought on the war in the first place.
Guelzo, Allen C.. Reconstruction: A Concise History (pp. 11-12). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
I agree with Guelzo that this was an important achievement, but it is hardly overlooked. In fact it is such a common place that it is typically mentioned early in most histories of Reconstruction and appears in most conclusions.
His second overlooked conclusion is controversial among those who have never studied civil conflict and revolution in other countries. Guelzo writes:
•Reconstruction followed the route of generosity—it created no conquered provinces, no mass executions for treason. As Walt Whitman wrote, almost in self-congratulation, Reconstruction “has been paralleled nowhere in the world—in any other country on the globe the whole batch of the Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.” Ironically, most of the violence that pockmarked Reconstruction was inflicted on the victors, not the vanquished.
Guelzo, Allen C.. Reconstruction: A Concise History (p. 12). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Of course, there are still white Americans who complain that Black male suffrage was “forced” on the South, but apart from a temporary diminution in the power of white supremacy in the South there was very little punishment of those who took up arms against the United States and killed tens of thousands of United States soldiers. Was the lack of severity really an accomplishment of Reconstruction though? A more severe approach might have included the forfeiture of the land of large slaveowners and its redistribution to the slaves that had made it grow.
Guelzo’s third accomplishment is one I agree with. Black institutions like the Black Church and black colleges were essentially begun during Reconstruction. The small Black Bourgeois was a creation of Reconstruction Era African Americans.
•The freedpeople made only modest economic gains in moving out of the shadow of slavery into freedom and self-ownership. But there were still beachheads for black Southerners all across the South in terms of property ownership and embourgeoisment, which would form the soil out of which the civil rights movement would flourish eighty years later.
The fourth Reconstruction accomplishment I am fully in agreement. Without Reconstruction, even with its failures, the starting of the modern Civil Rights movement might have come much later and with a more limited agenda. The first phase of the movement, from 1954 to 1964 essentially focused on realizing the legal gains of Reconstruction. Guelzo writes:
•The freedpeople made only modest economic gains in moving out of the shadow of slavery into freedom and self-ownership. But there were still beachheads for black Southerners all across the South in terms of property ownership and embourgeoisment, which would form the soil out of which the civil rights movement would flourish eighty years later.
Guelzo, Allen C.. Reconstruction: A Concise History (p. 12). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
I cannot imagine any time after 1877 and before 1947 that the 14th Amendment could have been passed and ratified. A worse Reconstruction would have delayed the advance of civil rights by six decades, at least.
Reconstruction was at the height of its failure at its very beginning. Andrew Johnson surrendered any chance of using the immediate post-war period for the radical reforms needed to insure even the most basic rights of freedpeople. According to Guelzo:
What was more appalling was the realization that Johnson’s governors promised to do little more than return the South, and the freed slaves, to a status only marginally different from what had prevailed before the war. These “quondam rebels,” complained a Louisianan who had suffered real “rebel persecution,” may “talk like union men and have ears like union men but they don’t smell much like union men.” (p. 22)
Instead of pressing the defeated Confederates to accept the new order, Johnson issued proclamations restoring the rights of whites who took up arms against the United States without granting those same rights to blacks. “To recalcitrant Southerners, the proclamations were like a second wind” says the author. (p. 23) Guelzo correctly assesses the situation:
The Johnson proclamations revived Southern hopes for pulling some form of victory back from the abyss of defeat and seemed to the Cincinnati journalist Whitelaw Reid “to have called into active utterance all the hostility to Northerners.” Strategies of resistance now began to take substance, and Confederate veteran Reuban Wilson hoped that “with the aid of the democratic party (which is bound to be very strong) of the north we will be able to check the republican party in their wild scheme.” (p.24)
White voters in the South showed just how unreconstructed they were in elections in 1866 and 1867.
“Republican confidence,” Guelzo says, “turned to disbelieving fury, as offices and legislatures filled up with generously pardoned Confederates, who only a few months before had been striving to overturn the government they now expected to rejoin.” (pp. 24-25)
The new state legislatures devoted their limited funds to trying to pay off their Confederate debts and their limited attentions to protecting former Confederates. They also spent a lot of time trying to define exactly who was white and limiting the opportunities for freedom of black people. This was not reassuring to Republicans.
The crowing glory of the all white electorates of the former Confederacy was their purposeful antagonizing of their conquerors. Guelzo informs us that A”ll told, Johnson’s self-reconstructed states chose for senators and representatives (in addition to Stephens) six Confederate cabinet officers, four Confederate generals, and fifty-eight members of the Confederate Congress.” (p. 25). None of these white Democratic legislatures found the time to take any steps to place blacks on a level playing field with whites.
Guelzo argues that President Johnson naively believed that Southern whites would do the right thing. I think he is too generous in his assessment of Johnson’s failure. This blatantly racist president showed almost no regard for the rights of African Americans.
Johnson’s decision to walk away from the Republicans and embrace Southern conservatives and Northern Democrats crippled Reconstruction and spelled the end of his presidency. These were the same Northern Democrats who could declare in a state convention; “We want no Negro equality,” Wisconsin Democrats exclaimed, as “it would degrade and brutify our race, giving Negro Husbands and Negro progeny to our fair daughters and sisters.” When voters rejected Johnson’s new racist electoral coalition in congressional elections in November 1866, Republicans began stripping Johnson’s power to control Reconstruction three months later.
The Southern conservatives responded with the Ku Klux Klan. In response to the disqualification from voting of some leading Confederates by congressional Republicans, writes Guelzo, Southern whites imposed “a kind of counter-disfranchisement on blacks through intimidation.” I am not sure that this is an accurate characterization. Southern whites had already disenfranchised blacks long before Congressional Reconstruction was even a proposal. There was nothing “counter” about the disenfranchisement of blacks.
Nor was the violence of the Klan anything new for black people. There bodies had regularly been the targets of physical abuse during slavery when overseers whipped them and slave patrols hunted them down with dogs who tore their flesh with their sharp teeth. The experiences of war had created a generation of Southern men inured to the use of deadly violence for political and racial ends. There were few moral limits in the South restraining the actions white men could take to control black bodies.
The terrorism reached its first climax in the Fall of 1868, just before the election of U.S. Grant to the presidency.
Although Grant won in 1868 in an Electoral College landslide and he captured a significant majority of the popular vote, the Democrats picked up 22 seats in the House of Representatives. The Democrats were on their way to a slow recovery of their fortunes.
Reconstruction was not helped by the Republicans in the South. Guelzo rejects the charge that the Southern Republicans were any more corrupt than the Democrats who had preceded them in office. “They were more incompetent than corrupt; and the corrupt among them were not more corrupt than the slaveholding regimes that had preceded them,” Guelzo writes. “But incompetence and corruption were not what the hour called for…” (p. 73)
While Texas and Georgia had balanced budgets, the other Southern states all went into debts funding new educational projects and infrastructure. This contributed to movement of poorer whites away from the Republican Party. The failure by the Federal government to even try to break up the great planter landholders meant that the old slavearchy would reemerge as the Bourbon political leadership. No longer the lords of the slaves, they were still the lords of the land and white resistance would coalesce around them. The Republicans also were damaged by their own in-fighting, which turned violent in Arkansas. By 1876 only South Carolina and Louisiana still had Republican governments.
Guelzo identifies another contributing factor to the problems of the Republicans; “the lack of a single commanding leader who could bind together the disparate threads of African American identity into a single movement.” (p. 108) I have to say that I have not seen this cited as a factor in Republican failure before. I don’t think that any other historian has even held out the possibility that the disparate former slave communities of the South could have invested a single African American man with the power of a “commanding leader” who could settle all rivalries among state and local black leaders and “bind together” the movement for civil rights. Not even Southern white conservatives had such a leader, so I am not sure why Guelzo thinks that this was even a possibility.
When the Democrats took over the House of Representatives in 1875, they insured that funding for Federal intervention in the South was at an end. Contrary to the belief of some folks here on Civil War Talk, the South on the eve of the 1876 elections was hardly an occupied territory. There were only 1,600 Federal troops in the entire Department of the South. These included 165 men in South Carolina and 123 in Louisiana. With the Compromise of 1877, the new Hayes government withdrew the final props holding up the two interracial governments remaining in the former Confederacy.
Guelzo ends his narrative with the story of the last day of Republican rule in South Carolina:
Daniel Chamberlain surrendered the governorship he claimed to have won in South Carolina to Wade Hampton on April 10, 1877, with what could be taken as the epitaph of Reconstruction: “Today . . . by order of the President whom your votes alone rescued from overwhelming defeat, the Government of the United States abandons you.” (p. 114)
Although Guelzo uses the mid-20th Century timeframe for Reconstruction, 1865 to 1877, he pays some tribute to more modern modern scholarship by acknowledging that in some states the African American communities were not all completely overwhelmed on the same date in 1877. Reconstruction’s gains persisted in some localities until 1900.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately Guelzo’s book is not the short layperson’s introduction to the subject of Reconstruction that I hoped it might be. It is not necessarily the best choice for you as your “first book” on this understudied area of our history. Those who have done a little reading on the period from 1865 to 1877 will find that Guelzo ties together some of what you already know, but those readers who have only studied the Civil War and just want to find out what happened next might occasionally find themselves scratching their heads at Guelzo’s rapid march through the period. Of course, Guelzo was writing his own book and the fact that this was not exactly what I was looking for can’t be held against the author.
The book breaks little new interpretive ground and surfaces no previously ignore major primary sources. It does contains a very useful treatment of the role of the Supreme Court in reasserting its powers over the legislature and executive, a subject too often wanting in other books on the period. Although it is a common notion that the Supreme Court undermined Grant’s Reconstruction policies, the book shows us how in a fittingly concise way.
If you have liked Guelzo’s previous writing and you know a little about Reconstruction, you are likely to enjoy this book. If you don’t care for Guelzo’s style, you will find more of the same here. Overall, this is a thumbs up book for me, with reservations.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
