The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York During Reconstruction (review)

82CIVIL WAR HISTORY friends of the contrabands warned them not to expect "charity." Freedom meant hard, faithful work and self-reliance. The sight of unemployed , "vagrant" contrabands horrified conservative army officers, radical Treasury agents, and humanitarian missionaries alike. The bitter War-Treasury Department struggle for control of freedmen's affairs involved details, Gerteis rightly concludes, not basic principles. Although Gerteis may underestimate the amount of social and psychological freedom the blacks achieved in spite of paternalistic and repressive federal policies, he convincingly documents the freedmen's continuing economic dependence. The real "rehearsal for Reconstruction " foreordained "the postwar emergence of tenantry and sharecropping as the principal forms of black agricultural labor in the South" (p. 154). For most Southern blacks Reconstruction failed before it began . Cam Walker College of William and Mary The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York During Reconstruction . By James C. Mohr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973; Pp. xv, 300. $12.50). Reconstruction was not a political program whose study can be limited to the South. Indeed, circumstances of its causes, course, and consequences were the result of the convergence of state interests, sectional pressures, and national politics. Events in the North were of great importance because no federal initiative could be undertaken and sustained in the former rebel states unless there was both interest and support for such efforts in the loyal states, as well as continued Republican control of the federal government. Thus, analysis of northern attitudes and actions helps to uncover the wellsprings of Republican motivation and the roots of political behavior which determined to a great extent national Reconstruction policy. With increasing realization of the need to know more about politics outside the South during Reconstruction, several studies in recent years have investigated political action and attitude in the North and Borderland. Now a significant trailblazing addition by Professor James C. Mohr tells the story of the politics of reform in New York during the early postwar period. In this fine and fascinating study, both clearly written and soundly organized, Professor Mohr argues that the North, as well as the South, was reconstructed in the postwar years under Republican hegemony. He states that the New York Republicans attempted a "reconstruction at home," to achieve genuine reform in state government as well as to undermine the Democratic city machines. Emphasizing a union of civic progress with responsible power, which provided the cutting edge to accomplish reform, he sketches with vigorous, controlled strokes the course of the reformist program to cope with urbanization and indus- BOOK REVIEWS83 trialization, and its political dynamics in New York between 1865 and 1867. He analyzes fire protection, public health, labor and housing standards, educational and franchise reform, gives attention to the creation of paid professional metropolitan departments of fire and health in New York City and Brooklyn, the eight-hour day law, tenement house codes, creation of Cornell University, expansion of state teacher colleges , free elementary schooling, and the abortive effort to enfranchise blacks. He contends that white racist opposition to enfranchisement of blacks broke up the political coalition and stymied its program by discrediting reform and defeating reformers who had chosen to promote this issue vigorously, this brought a change in Republican fortunes which underscores the importance of the offyear state elections of 1867. In this connection, he also maintains that political conditions in New York support the idea that the primary objective of the Fifteenth Amendment was the enfranchisement of northern blacks through federal rather than state means in order to circumvent strong local opposition . The merits of the book are many: it provides a searching assessment of internal reform in one important state as well as a mastery of previous work on state reform; the study is constructed on a solid foundation of research and advances a clear interpretation; his is a concern with intrastate political change combined with realistic analysis of the legislative process, in which he endeavors to draw parallels and discern relationships between state developments and national politics; in all, the work is a substantial and significant supplement to the postwar history of New York by Homer Stebbins, adding new information and a fresh viewpoint on the special subjects treated by Professor Mohr...