The history of Reconstruction was so dramatic and volatile that historians have often characterized it as revolutionary. First the abolition of slavery expropriated private property worth at least three billion dollars from some of the nation's wealthiest residents. Next came a struggle within the United States government over the revolution's direction, a process that generated three new constitutional amendments and a pledge to protect the civil rights and citizenship of former slaves. African Americans were at the vanguard of a newly democratic vision of the nation. And then came the forces of counterrevolution, as white Southerners worked to turn back the clock through violence and terror. Given this history, it is no wonder W.E.B. Du Bois famously called Reconstruction a “splendid failure.”
In The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction, Mark Wahlgren Summers sets out to tell an entirely different story: one that emphasizes conservatism, caution, and limited goals. Summers begins by suggesting that historians' interest in the revolutionary and democratic possibilities of Reconstruction—and thus their emphasis on its failure—has been ahistorical. “Most white Americans” of the Civil War era, he posits, wanted nothing to do with dramatic change. Emerging from a devastating armed conflict, their preeminent purpose in this period of consolidation was “making sure that the main goals of the war would be fulfilled” (4). Namely, they wanted to ensure that the nation was permanently reunified and that slavery was forever abolished. Since they achieved both those ends, Summers argues, we should construe Reconstruction as a success—a costly one, to be sure, but a success nonetheless.
Across sixteen chapters, Summers provides a complex and multifaceted history that attempts to take stock of American political life between roughly 1865 and 1877 without placing undue emphasis on what he considers radical people or ideas. The period is notoriously difficult to corral, and Ordeal of the Reunion deserves praise for tackling a range of issues including not just Republican politics but Democrats, economic development, political corruption, westward expansion, foreign policy, social reform, the disfranchisement of ex-Confederates, and white Southerners' violence. Much of Summers's evidence comes from contemporary newspapers, a source he has long used to good effect. His appreciation of nineteenth-century American English is clear in his twinkling use of such terms as “bindle stiffs” and “wastrels.”
Notwithstanding its breadth, the book is at heart a history of Reconstruction, as the subtitle declares, and Summers devotes more time to the ex-Confederacy and federal policy toward it than to any other topic. Following on the well-regarded work of Michael Les Benedict, he argues that Republicans' commitment to protecting the rights of freedpeople was constrained from the start by their respect for the Constitution's federalist order and by their fear of despotism—whether in the form of a too-powerful army or a usurping executive.
Although Summers argues that Reconstruction should be considered a success, he also goes out of his way to explain what historians have considered the great failure of Reconstruction—the U.S. government's inability or unwillingness to protect the newly promised rights of Southern African Americans. According to Summers, the causes were myriad. Strong currents of retrenchment ran through both Democratic and Republican politics in the postwar years; many Americans wanted to cut government spending, including making significant reductions to the army, the only institution capable of protecting the basic rights of freedpeople. The growing significance of the trans-Mississippi West was also a factor. A feeling that so many sacrifices had already been borne—and so much treasure expended—led toward a “peace policy” on the Great Plains, but not before the military conquest of Native Americans was virtually complete. The expansion of white settlement into the West brought new issues to the fore in national politics, and western Republicans in turn helped tilt the party away from its southern commitments. The same conservative, war-weary sensibility, Summers argues, frustrated the expansionist designs of men such as William Seward, who found Congress reluctant to approve various proposals to annex new territory.
If the period was in some way defined by conservative impulses, however, Summers shows that it was also characterized by great innovation. Many Americans energetically pursued new projects and envisioned new roles for government. Social reformers, at state and national levels, pushed for more government regulation of economic activity and of individual behavior. Capitalists lobbied for government support in the form of land grants and other investments. Summers, author of several books on political corruption, describes with verve many of the schemes, bubbles, and rings that made the era's politics so notorious. The problem, in Summers' words, was “a government taking on new functions and a crowd of economic interests scrambling for a place at the feast” (192). Revelations of corruption and self-enrichment by politicians, he argues, diminished the public's trust in the ruling party and in government itself and thus further undermined support for Reconstruction policies.
Summers's argument that racism alone does not explain the failure to protect Southern African Americans' rights is persuasive and echoes the work of many other scholars, including those writing in the Du Boisian tradition. But Summers's larger claim—that Reconstruction was a success on its own terms—is more difficult to fathom. To make that argument, Summers draws a bright line between the abolition of slavery, which succeeded; and the attempt to establish “equal rights and democracy” (4), which most definitely did not. Yet that separation makes little sense when we consider that Republican lawmakers moved immediately, as the war ended, to protect the basic civil rights of Southern African Americans. Measures like the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment were hardly the province of a few marginalized radicals; they enjoyed broad support among Republicans who shared a conviction that emancipation must be accompanied by policies that allowed the U.S. government to help secure individual rights. How can we regard Reconstruction a success when the government ultimately proved unable to produce the very results its architects fought for?
Summers is relatively unstinting in his descriptions of white Southerners' violent attacks on black Southerners and white Unionists, but his argument that the Republicans' program for the South was essentially conservative also makes it difficult to understand that behavior. Congress's early measures supporting black men's voting rights—the 1867 Reconstruction Acts—may have been constitutionally conservative, but their impact on the ground in the South was transformative. Suddenly, African Americans formed a voting block of critical importance in places where, just two years earlier, they had been held as chattel. If, as Summers argues, all the important currents in Republican policy were so moderate, then why did white Southerners meet black political organizing and Southern Republicanism with such violence? How can we comprehend the murder, assault, and terrorism to which white Southerners resorted without a fuller acknowledgment of the disturbing and perhaps even revolutionary potential of emancipation itself, of federally enforceable civil rights, and of black men's enfranchisement? By framing his argument around conservatism and consolidation—and by giving scant attention to the impact of African Americans in political life—Summers leaves readers with a decidedly incomplete picture of the politics of Reconstruction.
