Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado (review)

248CIVIL WAR HISTORY African American freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also saw the Fifteenth Amendment as a mechanism for combating the influence of the Democratic party in national politics and eliminating political corruption. Between 1870 and 1873, Congress passed legislation giving the federal government the power to enforce theAmendment and to suppress antisuffrage violence. Protection of black suffrage continued into the 1 880s and provided the Republican party with a power base solid enough to guarantee its success in state and national elections and its control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. As national support for protecting the rights ofAfrican Americans waned in the 1 870s and 1 880s, factions within the Republican party found it increasingly difficult to agree on policies that could unify the party on this issue and to negotiate from a position of strength with their rivals. Wang argues that the party's policies were always the result of internal compromises that, although creating a working basis for the operation of the party, failed to eliminate factionalism within the party. It was the breakdown of consensus politics that led the party to abandon suffrage as the central focus of its political agenda; and the decline in the party's commitment accounted, in part, for the eventual disfranchisement of southern blacks. The Trial ofDemocracy is extensively researched and well written. Wang utilizes published and unpublished government documents as well as diaries, letters, and personal papers to synthesize the debate between Republican liberals , conservatives, and moderates and their opponents over the suffrage and enforcement issues. However, because Wang centers his work in the national political arena, women, African Americans, and immigrants remain on the periphery of the action. There is little sense of the human drama at work in the Reconstruction South as recently enfranchised freedmen and their disfranchised former owners struggled to determine their political roles in the New South. The value of Wang's work, however, lies in its depiction of a political party struggling to hold together diverse factions and to develop a coherent consensus on a critical issue of national politics in the late nineteenth century. He takes the suffrage debates beyond the dynamic of racial politics to the issues of constitutional interpretation of states' rights and the proper role offederal authority in the election process. This book is a valuable addition to resources on American political history in the late nineteenth century. Beverly Greene Bond University of Memphis Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado. By Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi, 190. $34.95.) In an introduction the authors explain that most popular writers have described Cullen Baker from a Dunning school view as an ex-Confederate Robin Hood BOOK REVIEWS249 figure who opposed Reconstruction changes in Northeast Texas and Southwest Arkansas. Popular writers of western history or novels have portrayed Baker as the first fast-draw frontier gunfighter. Generally such writings relied primarily on oral recollections and folklore. In recent years historians have researched the documents of the period to offer more critical assessments of Baker as a bandit or guerrilla. This volume represents a detailed effort to compare folklore and fact in a search for the elusive reality of Baker's life. Baker came fromTennessee toTexas with his family, which owned no slaves. Feuds and vigilante violence existed in EastTexas, although the impact on Baker remains vague. Folklore suggests an inclination toward fighting and drinking in his youth, which led to mental instability from a blow to the head. Despite marriage in 1854, he committed assaults and murders, fleeing to relatives in Central Arkansas and later back to Texas. During the Civil War he joined and apparently deserted the Confederate army and remarried. Folklore suggests he worked briefly for the Union army, acted as a guerrilla, and began to hate and kill African Americans late in the war. After the war and the death of Baker's second wife, her sister rejected him in favor of schoolteacher Thomas Orr. Baker attacked Orr and began to engage in theft and murder of other Anglos. In 1 867 he gathered an outlaw band that fluctuated in...