Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction (review)

"Marshall Twitchell was no saint," Ted Tunnell confesses near the end of his biography of the Vermont carpetbagger who earned his fame in Reconstruction Louisiana politics (257). Neither did Twitchell fit the carpetbagger mold, cast by historian William Dunning and his followers nearly a century ago, which held that these men were "archetypical villains, lowbred northern adventurers who descended like vultures on the conquered South" (1-2). Although modern scholarship has long since rejected the "hoary stereotype" of the venal carpetbagger, most Americans have "managed to overlook the revisionist historiographical watershed of the 1960s" (2). Thus Tunnell offers this biography, the first full-length study of Marshall Twitchell, in part to counter popular perceptions of the carpetbagger legacy.

Tunnell's larger project, however, involves his effort to resuscitate Twitchell from the footnotes of history. Twitchell's "is one of the great stories of Reconstruction," Tunnell argues, and it serves to remind us of the "Other South," the South of dissenters. Men like Twitchell, Tunnell contends, "explored new trails over rugged historical terrain. The history of the South," he continues, "would be less marred by tragedy of those trails had been followed" (5). Edge of the Sword, then, suggests that the institutionalization of racial apartheid in the postbellum South was not necessarily a foregone conclusion.

Tunnell finds much in Twitchell's life story to support his contention that the Vermont carpetbagger was part of the "Other South." Born in 1840 to Congregationalists, Marshall Twitchell inhaled the Yankee ethos "with the crisp morning air of the hills" (19). Twitchell joined the elite Vermont Brigade in 1861, imbued with a sense of sacred duty and honor. The Vermont Brigade, which saw action in most of the major battles in the Virginia theater, earned a reputation as one of the finest units in the Army of the Potomac, "renowned for hard fighting, hard marching, and roughneck conduct" (29). By the last months of 1863 Twitchell and his comrades had survived "pestilence, bullets, bad food, mud marches, and incompetent generals," and still Twitchell reenlisted to finish the war (71). His reenlistment bespoke of Twitchell's character, according to Tunnell. Moreover, by the time Twitchell reenlisted, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had already transformed the war for the Union into a battle for freedom. Twitchell, Tunnell implies, understood that transformation. In 1864, frustrated by internal disputes within his company, Twitchell applied for a commission in the United States Colored Troops. He served with the USCT until the defeat of the Confederacy, when he applied for a position as an agent in the Freedman's Bureau, having "some notion of helping the freedmen" (92).

Twitchell's postwar career, first as a Freedman's Bureau agent in Louisiana and later as a Republican politician, also earns him a place in the South of dissenters, according to Tunnell. Twitchell's alliance with the newly freed slaves, fellow carpetbaggers, family members whom he moved to the state from Vermont and placed in positions of power, and Jewish merchants had piqued the ire of local whites, the new political outsiders. To be sure, Twitchell sacrificed a great deal during his tenure in Louisiana: the White League murdered his brother and three brothers-in-law in its protracted and violent battle to "redeem" the state from "black Republican rule." Twitchell himself lost both of his arms in a failed assassination attempt. By the end of his political career in Louisiana, Twitchell had lost all of his land, either through court action or through sales to pay off hefty legal fees. And although Twitchell "was never truly a famous man," Tunnell argues at the end of his biography that Twitchell nonetheless "achieved epic stature through suffering" (306).

Tunnell would have done better to place Twitchell's "ordeal" in its larger historical...