The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era
By Douglas Egerton, Bloomsbury Press 2013, $30
With the Civil War sesquicentennial nearing its conclusion, attention will soon turn to Reconstruction. Depending on your point of view, the commemoration will either be quite brief (after all, President Andrew Johnson declared Reconstruction complete in December 1865) or extend to 2027 and beyond.
The Wars of Reconstruction is the first of what will likely be a succession of new books on the postbellum years. Douglas Egerton argues that Reconstruction should be viewed as a period of progressive reform that saw many achievements, but ended all too suddenly and too soon. Black and white activists pressed for public schools, challenged segregated transportation and fought for democratic political rights. “Reconstruction neither failed nor ended in all parts of the republic,” Egerton insists, but the opportunity to achieve true and lasting reform faded quickly.
Egerton’s villains are the usual suspects: vigilantes, conservative white Southerners and Andrew Johnson. “By turning his back on Lincoln’s later policies,” Egerton argues, “Johnson allowed the vocal, determined minority to regain power.” While this view underestimates congressional power in the equation of postwar politics (and overstates Lincoln’s radicalism) The Wars of Reconstruction provides a vivid and unsettling portrait of how violence was used in many areas to defeat reform.
Take, for example, the story of Tunis Campbell, just one of several stirring portraits of somewhat obscure figures Egerton provides. Born in New Jersey, Campbell worked as a hotel steward and preached against slavery. During the war, he volunteered at Port Royal, S.C., and later supervised land claims for the Freedmen’s Bureau in parts of Georgia. After the war, he rose to become a justice of the peace and state senator in Georgia. He pressed for reforms including abolition of imprisonment for debt and rights to equal education. But Democrats regained power by 1871. Campbell’s house was burned, someone tried to poison him, and eventually he found himself sentenced to a chain gang for having ordered a white man jailed.
The progressive alliance Egerton examines, of which Campbell was part, didn’t last. It fell victim to determined opposition and violent resistance, to waning commitment among some of the activists, to the too-rapid demobilization of soldiers stationed in the former Confederacy, and to economic realities ushered in by the Panic of 1873 that made the struggles of freedmen a diminishing concern.
But all was not for naught. Egerton reminds us that in ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the writing of new state constitutions, and in the remarkable gains in education made by the freedmen (“black literacy increased four hundred percent in the thirty-five years after Appomattox”), the reformers won some lasting victories in a struggle that, contrary to Johnson’s premature declaration, continues to this day.
Originally published in the March 2014 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
