The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers (review)

Over twenty-five years ago, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution focused on the egalitarian struggles of freed people in the South. His work became the dominant Reconstruction narrative, and subsequently impacted a generation of histories of the postwar South. It sometimes seems that such an influential work will never be supplanted; then a new history like Mark Wahlgren Summers’s The Ordeal of the Reunion reminds readers that perspectives and interpretations of the past do change. Summers does not dispute Reconstruction’s failure to secure racial equality, but he echoes Gary Gallagher’s central point in his 2012 book, The Union War. As Gallagher stressed that the Civil War was about saving the Union (and slavery was a casualty of that salvation), Summers argues that “the chief end of Reconstruction was to bring the nation back together” (396). In Summers’s evaluation of Reconstruction’s goals, Reconstruction was not as a failed revolution but a “a lasting and unappreciated success” (4).

“History remembers the radical few, who spoke to what proved to be America’s future,” Summers wrote, “it forgets the conservative many, whose influence and power would confine how far any movement toward equal rights had a chance to go” (10). Throughout the book, Summers reiterates that few postwar Americans wanted a social revolution, but merely a restored republic. Americans’ conservative strain at this time helps to explain much about the period, including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan; President Andrew Johnson’s pardoning of former Confederates; the presidential election of “a man above politics,” Ulysses S. Grant (152); and the collapse of Republican governments across a “Solid South.” One of the most vivid examples that Summers uses to show how unpopular radical sentiment was in postwar America is in the person of Horace Greeley. The author demonstrates how Greeley, an early advocate for emancipation and civil rights for freedman, simultaneously earned the Liberal Republican and Democratic nominations for president in 1868. These strange bedfellows would seemingly have little to unite them, but Greeley’s reconciliatory slogan, “Let us clasp hands over the bloody chasm,” triumphed over all other political, social, and economic policy considerations (312).

A substantial innovation of Ordeal of the Reunion is the author’s ability to weave some seemingly disparate episodes of American history into his history of Reconstruction. Postwar American foreign policy (or the lack thereof) and the American West would seem to have little to do with Reconstruction, but Summers’s analysis demonstrates how they were related. America rode unbridled Manifest Destiny throughout the early nineteenth century. Why then did American expansion dramatically slow after the war? Even the United States’ major postwar acquisition, Alaska, received the lampooned epithet “Seward’s Icebox.” Summers explains several reasons for the halt of American expansion, including financial reasons, and ultimately concludes that “Foreign affairs could not be separated from the tensions arising from Reconstruction itself, and the fears [including race] that Reconstruction stirred shaped the way Americans saw foreign adventuring” (220). In the Trans–Mississippi West, Summers found “revealing similarities” to Southern Reconstruction (199). Some of those similarities included military governance, immigration into the region, agricultural economies, infrastructure investment, and racial tensions between whites and American Indians and between whites and Chinese immigrants.

Ordeal of the Reunion is a keen addition to the volumes in the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. In the popular mind, the Civil War ended in 1865 with either Appomattox or Lincoln’s assassination. Yet, this volume is a reminder that there is more to the story, if not of an unfinished revolution, then an impending restoration of the Union. Summers masterfully narrates this story of violence, greed, and grace. Although to be clear, the book is mainly a political history of diverse political factions, and for those seeking foci on race or labor, Summers directs readers elsewhere not only in...