ANDREW L. SLAP. The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era. (Reconstructing America Series, number 12.) New York: Fordham University Press. Pp. xxv, 206. $70.00

Abstract

In this book Andrew L. Slap differentiates between the Liberal Republican Party, organized to challenge Ulysses S. Grant's re-election, and what he calls a liberal republican movement, a small cohort of editors, intellectuals, and politicians who sought to steer a wayward polity back to its republican moorings. Most historians dismiss these reformers as inept political amateurs, disappointed office seekers, and carping critics excluded from power by their own self-righteousness. This book offers a more sympathetic portrait. Slap joins a growing company of historians who take seriously the ideas and beliefs espoused by political actors. He concentrates on a core of twenty-three liberal republicans who organized meetings in the early 1870s and otherwise promoted reform. Included are well-known figures such as Carl Schurz, David Wells, and the Adamses, and more obscure participants such as Mahlon Sands and Johann B. Stallo. Slap focuses on their public speech and private communication and on pronouncements in such journals as E. L. Godkin's The Nation and Samuel Bowles's Springfield Republican. He argues that the central tenet these men espoused was republicanism. They revered civic virtue and selflessness, decried corruption, denounced tyranny and centralized power, and warned against the tendency to elevate party imperatives over the nation's welfare.