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  • Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction
  • Andrew L. Slap
Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. By James K. Hogue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.)

James K. Hogue tackles an important and timely subject in his book on violence in New Orleans during Reconstruction. While concentrating on “reappraising the nature of violent politics of Reconstruction,” Hogue ambitiously has many other goals. For instance, he argues that “not coincidentally, this era of state government backed by federal military occupation preceded one of the longest periods of unbroken one-party dominance in American history” (8). Unfortunately, he offers no support for this hypothesis, with only a few pages on post-Reconstruction politics and nothing past 1900. This failure is unfortunately symptomatic of the entire work. Uncivil War is a traditional political history of Reconstruction in Louisiana that mostly uses government records and secondary sources to cover well-trod ground.

Given the title, surprisingly less than 10 percent of the book deals directly with the street battles. This limited treatment makes it impossible for Hogue to meet his goals of beginning “to rethink the meaning and nature of ‘battle’ itself” and “to reconceptualize both the fighting and the roles that different types of military forces played in its [Reconstruction] origins, development, and outcome” (4, 11). While finding sources for street battles can be hard, [End Page 209] Hogue does not employ all of the primary and secondary sources available. For instance, he visited the U.S. Military Academy Library but did not use its James Fornance Papers, which include the letters of an army lieutenant writing home about his participation in one of the book’s street battles. Hogue also never mentions several articles on the street battles, such as Donald E. Reynolds’s “The New Orleans Riot of 1866 Reconsidered,” Louisiana History 5 (Winter 1964): 5–27.

Most of Uncivil War covers the political events in between the street battles. A failure to engage the relevant historiography dooms Hogue’s efforts to reappraise Reconstruction politics. He regularly creates straw men, referring to the positions of “many historians” or “modern scholars” while offering few, and many times no, examples or citations (14, 45, 52, 59, 113, 125, 169). At one point he refers to the interpretations of “recent scholars” and cites two books published in 1967 and 1982 (183). Hogue’s major straw man is the New Political History (NPH), as he repeatedly argues that “historians have all too often mistakenly tried to make Reconstruction’s origins, development, and outcome fit a model of stable, competitive party politics, articulated by the study of political parties, interest groups, voter mobilization, and election returns” (7, 9, 186). First, Hogue only cites Michael Perman’s work to assert the NPH’s dominance, never mentioning scholars like Joel Silbey, Michael F. Holt, or Richard McCormick. Second, historians have been attacking the NPH for over a decade—in the late 1990s the Journal of American History sponsored two roundtables challenging its paradigms. Finally, Hogue ignores the work dealing with Reconstruction political history outside the NPH, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (2001).

Hogue regularly fails to mention prominent works that bear directly on his study. While repeatedly discussing Ulysses S. Grant during Reconstruction, he never uses Brooks D. Simpson’s Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (1991). Hogue spends several pages trying to place Louisiana’s Reconstruction political corruption in the broader context of nineteenth-century America without mentioning Mark W. Summer’s The Era of Good Stealings (1993). William L. Richter’s Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865–1870 (1987) would have provided a nice comparison with events in Louisiana.

Lack of a firm historiographical grounding leads to significant interpretive errors. For example, Hogue asserts that “white militia officers of northern origin tended to have demonstrated an ideological devotion to the radical [End Page 210] wing of the Republican Party . . . by their service with black...

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