Equality and Expediency in the Reconstruction Era: A Review Essay

EQUALITY AND EXPEDIENCY IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA: A Review Essay Michael Les Benedict Over the past twenty years, older historical interpretations of the Reconstruction era have been completely transformed in a much discussed historiographical process.1 But the studies that have articulated the reassessment have concentrated almost completely on national politics and the development of congressional Reconstruction legislation to 1869. While this process of réévaluation has probably run its course, there is much remaining to be done in related areas. Historians have not reexamined post-1869 national Reconstruction activity and politics in light of the new insights into the preceding years. We need new studies of Reconstruction politics and reform in the southern states to complement recent work on Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia.2 Although the Republicans have been well studied, we have no scholarly assessment of how the Democratic party managed to survive the political disaster of its Civil War years.3 Despite studies of grassroots voting patterns, we still have not established the linkage between those patterns and the issues of the Reconstruction era, nor have we explained adequately the contradiction between endemic 1 For the best historiographies of Reconstruction, see Richard O. Curry, "The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877: A Critical Overview of Recent Trends and Interpretations," Civil War History, XX (Sept. 1974), 215-38, Harold M Hyman (ed), The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861-1870 (Indianapolis, 1967), xvii-lxviii; and Larry G. Kincaid, "Victims of Circumstance: An Interpretation of Changing Attitudes Toward Republican Policy Makers and Reconstruction ," Journal of American History, LVII (June, 1970), 48-66. 2Jerrell H. Shofner, Nor Is ¡t Over Yet: Florida in the Era of Reconstruction. 1863-1877 (Gainesville, FIa., 1973); Elizabeth Studley Nathans, l.osinr, the Peace: Georgia Republicans and Reconstruction, 1865-1871 (Baton Rouge, 1968); Joe Gray Taylor, lx>uisiana Reconstructed, ¡863-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1974); Jack I' Maddex, Jr., The Virginia Conservatives, ¡867-1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics (Chapel Hill, 1970). Joel Williamson's After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, ¡861-1877 (Chapel Hill, 1965). while concentrating on black life after the war, offers important insights into South Carolina Reconstruction . Thomas B. Alexander's Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (Nashville, Tenn., 1950) can no longer be called recent, but it is balanced and objective. 1 This void is beginning to be filled by Joel Silbey's A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, ¡860-1868 (N.Y., 1977). 322 northern racism and northern support for a political party whose greatest achievements promoted racial equality. Finally, we have not yet fully explored the tensions suggested by the work of Leonard Curry, Harold Hyman, George H. Miller and James Mohr between Republican commitment to protecting rights from governmental infringement and commitment to use governmental power to promote an environment conducive to moral and economic progress .4 The essays—all but one original—that James C. Mohr has secured for his Radical Republicans in the North5 help answer questions in most of these areas by investigating some of the least explored terrain of Reconstruction history—northern state politics. In his introduction, Mohr urges readers to attend especially to the themes that thread through all the essays—the manifestations of the race issue, the ubiquity of political factionalism, the growth of governmental activism during the Republican ascendancy immediately following the war, the importance of ethnocultural issues in politics, and the relationship between Republicans and economic interests. But readers must be disappointed that Mohr himself in his introduction offers no general conclusions or hypotheses based upon his contributors' essays. Even better, Mohr might have returned the essays with his own hypotheses after reading first drafts and asked the authors to rework them in terms of those hypotheses , confirming or denying them. Perhaps such a suggestion is Utopian, but the value of such a comparative venture—with each contributor attending to the same questions—is inestimable. Although Mohr refrained from such a rigorous course, he did succeed in persuading most of his contributors to attend at least minimally to his central themes, although the exceptions, the varying degrees of attention each author devoted to different subjects , and the uneven quality of the essays, make comparisons...