The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction by John Patrick Daly

Abstract

Reviewed by: The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction by John Patrick Daly Lorien Foote The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction. By John Patrick Daly. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. 200. Illustrations, notes, index.) The War after the War is a concise, bold synthesis of the recent scholarship on Reconstruction. "Reconstruction was a war," John Patrick Daly asserts (4). When Union and Confederate armies demobilized in 1865, there was no clear peace settlement. Ex-Confederate extremists thus initiated what Daly terms "the Southern Civil War of 1865–1877" (2), a campaign of violence to control local and state governments and defeat a biracial southern coalition composed of White Unionists and Black freedpeople. Daly identifies three phases to the Southern Civil War. The first was the terror phase. Ex-Confederates remained in power throughout the South from 1865 to 1867, and they massacred thousands of African Americans and their White allies. In the second phase (1868–1872), after the United States government divided the South into military districts and organized new southern state governments that enfranchised Black voters, ex-Confederate extremists used guerrilla tactics that attempted to overthrow these biracial governments. Events in Texas take center stage in this portion of Daly's narrative, with excellent coverage of Governor Edmund Davis's use of martial law and biracial state forces to battle the insurgents. In the third phase (1872–77), ex-Confederate extremists created paramilitary armies that fought and won open battles against state forces, exemplified by the Battle of Liberty Place on the streets of New Orleans in 1874. Confederates lost their bid for independence and national power in the American Civil War, but ex-Confederate extremists won the Southern Civil War and reclaimed local political, social, and economic power. Daly argues that the types of violence and number of deaths that occurred in these three phases meet the criteria that some political scientists have established for a conflict to be defined as a civil war. His conclusion juxtaposes the Southern Civil War with the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 to bolster his categorization of violence in the American South as civil war. The identification and description of the three phases of violence in the South from 1865 to 1877 is very useful. But Daly does not define "war" in the opening of the book, and this absence is not just a matter of semantics. As a political scientist quoted in the conclusion points out, war involves organized violence, and Daly writes in the final few pages of the book that civil war is "two armed and organized factions (148)." Daly's discussion of the terror that ex-Confederates inflicted from 1865 to 1867 is a litany of massacres, assassinations, and torture; there is rarely mention of Black people and White Unionists fighting back. In the streets of Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, the vast majority of Black people were not armed. Is it war if one side is not organized for the purpose and is not fighting back? It is convincing that a Southern civil war evolved, but if there was a [End Page 587] shift from a one-sided terror campaign to civil war after Black men gained political power in 1868, that timing needs further exploration. John Patrick Daly does not mince words in this short and easily read book. He boldly calls on all Americans to discard false narratives of Reconstruction that remain dominant in popular understanding and to memorialize the true heroes of the period, the Black and White southerners who gave their lives fighting the losing battle to establish a biracial democracy in the South. After reading this book, it will be hard for anyone to maintain the traditional textbook view of Reconstruction. Lorien Foote Texas A&M University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association