The World the War Made: The "Disturbing Tendencies" of the Civil War and the New Map of Reconstruction

In 1877, as the Great Strike raged through the nation's cities, Southern Redeemers overthrew Republican governments, and the U.S. Army battled Western Indians, Cincinnati editor Murat Halstead diagnosed a common cause behind the distant maladies. "We have had a great war which disorganized and changed us more than we apprehended while about it," Halstead editorialized. "When the armies were disbanded and marched home, there were senses in which the war was not over. We still in many ways experience its disturbing tendencies." To restore order, Halstead believed, the United States must become a Nation with a capital N—not by practicing cultural reconciliation, but by centralizing power over all peripheries, southern, western, and urban. The crises of 1876-77 did not toll the end of those problems the war made but the flowering of them.¹

For a long time, however, the history of the postwar period divided neatly at those crisis years of 1876-77. The withdrawal of a small number of troops from less than a handful of Southern states in early 1877 signaled the end of Reconstruction. The Great Strike of 1877 heralded the opening of a new era, the Gilded Age. National concerns shifted from emancipation to reconciliation, from section to nation, from race to class, from countryside to city, from policymakers to moguls.

Increasingly, though, that periodization of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age has lost its analytic utility. The Gilded Age itself has seemed to shrink, as scholars dragged key transformations of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s toward the Progressive Era or to longer, separated stories of immigration, ethnicity, and race. What remained for the Gilded Age were well-known but also hard-to-follow stories of politics and the economy.² If the Gilded Age dissolved into the Progressive Era on one end, its conceptual unity has also been challenged at the other, as scholars increasingly redefined Reconstruction through labor conflict.

Elliott West's Great Indian War, Heather Cox Richardson's Wounded Knee, and Michael Bellesiles' 1877 each reconsider the Civil War's impact by exploring the broader problems of remaking the nation. Despite their differences in methodology, analysis, and success, the works are part of a larger effort to see national Reconstruction as a long period defined by the reconfiguration of legitimate violence, by the extension of federal control over contested western and southern territories, and by the complicated ways different groups responded to the extension of federal citizenship.

The most ambitious and most successful of the works is Elliott West's Great Indian War. This sneaky masterpiece deftly tells the story of the Nez Perce War of 1877. Mostly known for the legend of Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce War was full of ironies. Because of their relative geographical isolation, the Nez Perce had been allies of the United States government since the Lewis and Clark expedition, welcoming missionaries and agents. When postwar settlers and agents pressed the Nez Perce to settle on defined reservations, however, the tribe divided. After a small band of younger men attacked nearby whites, the Nez Perce not only won small skirmishes but outmaneuvered the military for nearly 1,500 miles in a mad trek toward Canada. Upon capture, they were at first imprisoned, then shipped to reservations far from their homeland. Although Joseph was not particularly prominent, he emerged through sympathetic newspaper coverage as the emblem of the proud, defeated Indian, a western counterpoint to Confederate General Robert E. Lee; and he and the tribe manipulated this image to their benefit in later years.

With remarkably few breaks, West ties this story to...