The Reconstruction Presidents (review)

BOOK REVIEWS1 85 graphical sketches of the pioneer sisters involved in the early history of the order in Vicksburg, who nursed the Confederate wounded (and sometimes Federal troops as well) at a number of different hospitals in Mississippi and Alabama during the Civil War. There is also a sketch of the "abrasive" Fr. Francis Xavier Leray, chaplain and protector of the sisters. Much of the material in the "Register" is institutional history, recording the founding of the academy and convent, building projects, numbers of pupils in the schools, numbers at First Communion, new sisters taking vows, fund raising , and so on. But Sister Ignatius also wrote about the sisters' nursing work among the Confederates and in hospitals during the yellow fever epidemic of 1 878, one ofthe greatAmerican disasters. Her words reveal the sisters' courage, their dedication to service among the sick and wounded, their Confederate sympathies and distress at the "Yankee" occupation oftheir convent, and other wartime incidents. There was less material on yellow fever than the book's title suggests, but several pages make clear the Sisters' work in hospitals, and their own losses to the disease and the many deaths among priests and other religious orders. They had firsthand experience with "shot-gun quarantine," which kept them from entering one community, and on one occasion a young man smuggled several sisters and a priest across quarantine lines into Jackson. While mainly of interest for the history of women religious and southern Catholicism, this work does illuminate the wartime service of the Sisters of Mercy (and priests) on the Confederate side. Jo Ann Carrigan University of Nebraska, Omaha The Reconstruction Presidents. By Brooks D. Simpson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Pp. xi, 276. $35.00.) In Reconstruction: The Ending ofthe Civil War, a 1969 revisionist study, Avery Craven sought to explain why reconstruction as a social revolution failed, and to do so without assessing blame. Why were the problems offreedom and equality not solved but left for later generations to face? He concluded that "realities had been ignored in a mad plunge for perfection for which poor, stumbling, bleeding mankind was as yet unprepared." He added, "Reconstruction failed not because perfection is not to be desired, but because it has a price" (305). Three decades later, Brooks Simpson, in a very different sort of book, also reminds us of the importance of "realities" that constrained the freedom of action of historic figures. From Abraham Lincoln's wartime efforts through the misunderstood policies of Rutherford B. Hayes, Simpson focuses on the presidency as an institution. He examines each president's decision-making process in the context of national politics. Simpson's desire to understand each president in the context of his own times leads him to criticize recent scholarship when it proceeds from moral judgments l86CIVIL war history determined largely by present values. Such accounts do not facilitate understanding why events followed the course they did. Simpson's chief complaint is the current overemphasis on each president's personal views on race, to the exclusion or minimizing of such other factors as northern public opinion, northern impatience that reconstruction diverted attention from other things, presidential efforts to court southern whites, a strong American commitment to Federalism and civil government, and the preservation of the Union. Simpson seeks to rescue Lincoln from historians who try to decide what he would have done had he lived, an approach that amounts to conscripting Lincoln on behalf of programs of the historians' creation. Lincoln, he observes, used the presidential war power as a constitutional basis for policies that met as well as possible the political needs of a frequently changing situation. Andrew Johnson's "virulent racism was an essential component of his view of the world," says Simpson, but no more important than his confrontational political style and his Jacksonian view of government (230). Simpson sees Johnson as a partially successful obstructionist whose aggressiveness focused congressional attention on himself rather than upon building a foundation for reconstruction in the South. Simpson denies that Johnson sought to preserve executive independence, because his own actions endangered presidential power and because impeachment weakened the executive for years. This view contrasts with other modern studies that...