The Wars of Reconstruction

November 11, 2013
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.

December 15, 2013
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.

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February 1, 2014

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 interracial 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

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