- What Fresh Hell Is This?Revisiting Reconstruction
To paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, writers must love Reconstruction—they make so many of them. Once the poor stepchild of Civil War histories, Reconstruction studies have become something of a growth industry with popular accounts of massacres and injustices, promises unfulfilled, and possibilities denied. In the last decade, there have been at least two books about the Colfax massacre, several more about the months at the end of the war, a lively potboiler about the president's impeachment, and three studies of the "stolen election" [End Page 560] of 1876. A very clever, challenging monograph by Gregory P. Downs uses Reconstruction as the starting point for his discovery that emancipation and the desolating need bred by devastating war created a new kind of politics, one based on those with power dispensing personal favors: contracts, jobs, services—and this "patronalism," as Downs calls it, created constituencies that saw government as their likeliest hope and the men in power as their personal friends. By his alchemy, the begging letters that every politician, north and south, saw, before and after the war, turn into one of the proofs of a very different statism, fostered by a government endowed with new and burgeoning responsibilities. There are even two books about "the great task remaining before us," one of them with that very title and the other actually showing what it may be. New scholarship explores the feminine side of Reconstruction, traces it outside of the reconstructed states into Kentucky and the District of Columbia, follows it down to the crossroads, and chases it all the way through to century's end and beyond. No reviewer could do justice to the scholarship; this one will do as little justice as it possibly can.
Publishing markets love a ripping story, and for those who write with sales in mind, Reconstruction provides blood-and-thunder stories, free from the dangers of too many notes or too-complicated thought. That does not make them untrue. Some of them make terrific reads. All they need are antidotes or, perhaps, sedatives, to be administered with them to let...