The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers J. Matthew Gallman The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. By Mark Wahlgren Summers. Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. x, 517. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-1757-2.) It has been more than a quarter century since Eric Foner published Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988). Previously, competing schools of scholars had produced dramatically different treatments of the postwar decades, developing a rich historiography that tended to focus on large moral and ethical judgments and conflicting perspectives on how white men in power treated the South’s freedpeople. Foner’s book recast that conversation by putting African Americans at the center of the narrative, both as historical actors exercising substantial agency and as human victims of unspeakable horrors. Since 1988 many historians have added new dimensions to our understanding of Reconstruction, but Foner’s formulation of Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution” in search of racial justice remains paramount. In his new synthesis Mark Wahlgren Summers draws a valuable distinction between what Foner accomplished and how he intended to tell the story. By “placing the struggle for equality and a meaningful freedom at its center,” Foner created a powerful history that “speaks … to our time” (p. 3). But Summers has some doubts about whether Foner’s framework “speaks quite [End Page 455] as well to their time” (p. 3). This question calls to mind recent debates about the central motivations of the North during the war years. Was it a war for emancipation, or was it a war for Union, with emancipation becoming an important—but still secondary—goal? Most victorious northerners wished to see the restoration of the Union. Talk of “equal rights” came fairly late in the game and—although certainly a goal shared by many—visions of racial equality were never as central to popular thinking as the return to a republic of largely independent states, free of the evils of slavery. Summers is deft at telling this complex political story, with attention to the great diversity among southern states and the significance of national events and colorful individuals in shaping the narrative. A superb spinner of tales, Summers loves yarns about unscrupulous crooks and ironic twists challenging preconceived notions. The prose is excellent, sprinkled with clever puns that a more stodgy editor might have overruled. The result is a book that sometimes reads as if one were sitting across the table from a hugely informed and amusing fellow, sharing a beer and telling stories about politics. In this world where individuals and events matter, the disappointing results of Reconstruction were not preordained, even if they were reasonably predictable. Southern white conservatives were happiest to cooperate with some modest social reforms, and even with black voters, when they were enjoying economic prosperity. But when markets soured, the shallowness of their interest in racial equality became evident. Northerners were appropriately aghast at some developments in the old Confederacy, and a federal military presence really did produce positive results for freedpeople on occasion, but the nation’s enduring commitment to a federal role in supposedly independent states proved similarly thin. In an explicit dissent from familiar periodization, Summers sees Redemption as essentially complete by 1873, with the celebrated election of 1876 little more than a fascinating coda. The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction is an important book, full of details and insights, and it deserves serious attention. It is not really a criticism to return to where Summers began, with the observation that while Foner wrote for “our time,” he perhaps did not fully capture “their” time. Summers thus makes the important point that contemporaries understood Reconstruction as a “postscript to the war” and not as the start of a “revolution” (p. 3). But “their,” in Summers’s book, does seem to be limited to the men (nearly all white) who held the power, read the important newspapers, and made the vital decisions. In that context, the intricacies of sharecropping—to suggest just one topic—receive modest attention, either as a...