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

The old quip that the Confederacy died of states’ rights seems to have a new counterpart—that Reconstruction died of republicanism. Mark Summers’s The Ordeal of the Reunion is one of the latest works to explore white northerners’ discomfort with the “anti-republican” nature of Reconstruction—especially the disfranchisement of large numbers of southern whites and the quite limited military occupation of parts of the South after 1867. But Summers is equally interested in exploring how contemporaries perceived the vagaries of postwar politics—political and business corruption, the conquest of Indians in the West, the evolution of political parties, reform movements—as part and parcel of the world the war had made, for good and for ill. He seeks to explain why “so many Americans had mixed feelings about the extraordinary uses of government power in peacetime, and how far the Reconstruction process itself added to the very reasonable feeling that something had gone badly wrong somewhere” (5).

Summers asks us not to measure Reconstruction’s achievements through the eyes of Wendell Phillips or Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionists, for whom the postwar period was a failure. Likewise, he warns that our own perspective, 150 years on, is inadequate to appreciate what the majority of white northerners would have listed as the goals of Reconstruction in 1865: “to bring the nation back together and this time for good, to banish the prospect of future war, to break the power of the former slave states to menace or overawe the majority, to end slavery and give that freedom more than a nominal meaning—and all this without sacrificing the basic political framework that had made the Union special, where, under a national government supreme in matters of national import, the states would keep a wide array of powers and responsibilities exclusive to themselves” (396). According to that yardstick, Reconstruction was a success.

This approach has its merits, and Summers’s chronological narrative covers considerable geographical and topical ground to bring the worldview of the broad Northern middle to life. The book is dense with details—many rich and interesting, others less effective—but certain sections are particularly successful. One such is the chapter titled “Conquered Provinces,” in which Summers shows the ways the federal government exercised almost unfettered power against resisting Indians in the trans-Mississippi West at the same moment it leaned toward restraint in acting against former rebels in the South. Here, Summers also deftly demonstrates why this level of control of the West, with the government’s astonishing ability to exploit the region’s wealth and resources and settle loyal whites in new territories, made dominating the South politically increasingly less important to many Republicans. “Every new state admitted in the West had a better than even chance of going Republican, and the territories, settled as rapidly as they were by nonsoutherners, promised that prospect further out of reach” (203). The South, both as a place of business and political power, grew less and less important to party success because of the conquest of the West.

Summers is also apt in his discussion of the failure of imagination that plagued moderate Republicans, whom he describes as not “out to betray Reconstruction” in 1868–69, when they made common cause with former Confederates in the South. Instead, they aimed to “shore it up, emphasizing its inclusiveness as well as its commitment to full legal equality” (159). Summers of course acknowledges that this was “fantasy,” but he is careful to show how the fantasy was constructed, and why moderates had such faith in their conciliatory project (167).

Summers claims to be relatively disinterested in exploring the “forces of racism and class privilege, both undeniable, in undermining the North’s commitment to equal rights”—these have been treated well, he explains, and moreover, they may be overshadowing our complete understanding of what happened (5). But the story...