The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner Matthew Karp The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner. Foreword by Edward L. Ayers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 276. $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-086395-1.) In the early 1950s, C. Vann Woodward released a burst of scholarship whose intellectual and political impact has probably never been equaled in southern history: The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), a field-defining survey; Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951), an influential monograph on the Compromise of 1877; “The Irony of Southern History,” his 1952 Southern Historical Association presidential address that was an iconic exploration of southern identity; and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955), a subversive account of segregation’s origins that Martin Luther King Jr. is famously said to have called “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” When Strange Career was published, Woodward was just forty-six years old. He worked actively for another four decades, giving lectures, writing essays, leading organizations, and training graduate students. Yet Woodward, at the peak of his powers, never produced another book of original historical research. It was not for lack of trying: across the 1960s and beyond, Woodward persevered with a number of book projects, chief among them a long-promised, much-discussed, and lucratively contracted narrative of Reconstruction. It never appeared. For biographers and close readers of his scholarship—a category that includes a fair portion of all southern historians since 1955—the interlocking stories of Woodward’s efflorescence and its eclipse retain intrinsic interest, above and beyond the rich content of the work itself. This volume of previously unpublished writing, skillfully edited and introduced by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner, sheds considerable light on both sides of the Woodward conundrum. It is principally drawn from two series of invited university talks Woodward delivered at the summit of his career: the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, given at Louisiana State University in his scholarly annus mirabilis of 1951; and the Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, given at Cornell University in 1964, as he attempted to shape his research into a book on Reconstruction. A 1969 lecture Woodward delivered at Yale University, on “The Problem of Failure in American History,” serves as a kind of coda. As Ring, Gardner, and Edward L. Ayers (who contributes a foreword) all note, Woodward’s interest in the idea of failure—during Reconstruction and across U.S. history— overlaid his own intellectual struggles with a kind of tragic irony that Woodward himself would have appreciated, if not exactly relished. [End Page 383] The lectures printed here easily justify the work of restoration undertaken by Ring and Gardner. Many of Woodward’s lavish talents as a historian are on display: his flair for arresting, sharply framed topic sentences—“Never in history had the franchise been conferred on a proletariat so utterly deprived” (p. 221); “The advent of Republicanism marked the advent of class politics in the South” (p. 225)—and his gift for compact characterization, marked by a telling anecdote, as when he introduces the unworldly antislavery prophet Theodore Dwight Weld, who “often had to go to the window to see whether it was winter or summer” (p. 61), or the formidable southern abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who announced their new religious commitments with a ceremony: “Then one solemn morning the sisters destroyed a set of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which Angelina had purchased, according to Sarah, ‘before she was serious’” (p. 65). At his best, as in the irresistible Origins, Woodward’s sentences and characters together conjure a kind of narrative momentum seldom achieved by other great historians, even those whose interpretations we now find more persuasive. Enough hints of that mysterious alchemy are visible here, in this raw form, for scholars today to take note. When we read Woodward’s editors at Louisiana State University Press, contracted to publish the revised Fleming lectures, urging him to keep “coining the golden prose”—practically...