Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS179 nouncing his ten-percent plan in 1863 committed himself to "accepting only state governments 'not inconsistent' with oaths recognizing the abolition of slavery" (p. 71). It is not at all certain that Lincoln in April 1865 "did not intend to recognize the rebel legislature" of Virginia (p. 98) . It is not true that "all but three of the unreconstructed states" had been restored to "normal relations with the Union" by 1868 or even by 1869 (pp. 315, 335). Thaddeus Stevens' letter to Charles Sumner (p. 160), accurately deciphered, reads "by our friends," not "by accident" (Stevens' handwriting is a code that Benedict has not quite cracked). Such errors are merely incidental. More serious are questions about the categories that Benedict imposes. For one thing, he makes a distinction between "political" and "legislative" radicals, a distinction impossible to sustain and one that confuses more than it clarifies. For another thing, he defines "radical" in such a way that the term does not fit all those to whom he applies it. "During the summer and fall of 1865 differences between radicals and nonradicals were sharply delineated," he maintains (p. 23). "The radicals insisted on the incorporation of black suffrage in any plan of Reconstruction. . . ." And he refers to Stevens as outstanding among the "consistent radicals" (pp. 26-27). The obvious fact, however, is that at that time Stevens did not insist on black suffrage. Was he, then, really a "centrist" or a "conservative" during that period? Or was he only acting as a "political" instead of a "legislative" radical? Perhaps the categorizing of Reconstruction congressmen, with exercises in roll-call analysis, has gone beyond the point of diminishing returns . It seems to assume a kind of latter-day Platonism—as if such a concept as "radical" had an objective existence and a more or less accurate reflection in certain human beings. Whether or not this is good metaphysics, one may wonder whether it advances historical understanding very much. Richard N. Current University of North Carolina at Greensboro Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877. By Joe Gray Taylor. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. Pp. xii, 552. $20.00.) No state in the South underwent a longer, more varied, or more turbulent period of Reconstruction than did Louisiana—and probably no state has been the subject of as many book-length histories of that period . Starting with the work of John Rose Ficklen, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana (through 1868), which was published posthumously in 1910, the work was taken up anew by Ella Lonn in 1918 in her Reconstruction in Louisiana after 1868 (she dismissed the Ficklen work as incomplete and a mere "draft"). Twenty years later, Willie Malvin Caskey published Secession and Restoration of Louisiana as 180CIVIL WAR HISTORY what he intended to be the first volume of a full-length study of both secession and all the various phases of Reconstruction. Unfortunately— since his study was the best published up to that time—Caskey did not live to complete his second volume. All these earlier studies were essentially political histories which covered Reconstruction in Louisiana under Lincoln, Johnson and/or Grant but which paid no attention to any of the social and economic currents which eddied through this period in American history. All were based exclusively on printed sources, mostly public documents and contemporary newspapers. And all were based on or influenced by the conservative racial philosophy of such historians as John Ford Rhodes, John W. Burgess, and William E. Dunning, whose approach Bernard Weisberger has labeled "operatic." Now comes Joe Gray Taylor's comprehensive and well-written Louisiana Reconstructed, which goes a long way in overcoming the faults of the earlier works while still preserving their virtues. He tells essentially the same political story—though with a markedly more tolerant view of the continuing history of corruption in Louisiana and an upbeat evaluation of the positive good accomplished in the state in spite of that corruption. But in addition to this, he devotes nearly 20 per cent of his book to those aspects of Reconstruction which Weisberger, in his landmark 1959 article on Reconstruction historiography, identified as essential to good revisionist historical writing; chapters on the economy of...