The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America's Continuing Civil War (review)

Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller have edited several noteworthy anthologies on the Civil War era. These include Against the Tide: Women Reformers in American Society (1997), The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (1999), An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front (2002), and Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (2002). These collections gathered original work by younger and veteran scholars, addressed subjects that lacked modern monographs, and suggested avenues for new scholarship. In The Great Task Remaining Before Us, Cimbala and Miller simultaneously capture the pulse of a new historiography and introduce fresh and original research by a group of talented, younger scholars.

Like scholars of other periods in history, historians of the Civil War era increasingly are expanding traditional chronological periods of definition and interpretation. Seemingly every historical field now features a "long" time frame of narration and interpretation, thereby extending temporal and thematic borders and testing questions of continuity and context across time and place. G. Ward Hubbs mentions in his introduction that The Great Task Remaining Before Us identifies "a remarkable continuity from secession through the 1870s, especially in terms of violence, politics, benevolence, and social identity" (2). Cimbala and Miller contend that "the contours of the unfinished business of the war are more malleable and complicated than any single drawing" (xiv).

Aaron Astor argues that the wartime military enlistment of slaves in Missouri and Kentucky incensed white conservatives who mobilized to maintain white supremacy following emancipation. After the war's end "a veritable race war" erupted in these states, he explains, "wherein former white foes settled old accounts and turned their guns toward the newly emancipated black populace" (33). Focusing on postwar Kentucky, Anne E. Marshall concludes that ex-Confederates and former conservative Unionists joined forces in making "the politics of race common ground for white Kentuckians" and in fashioning a "rebel democracy" (58). Conservative postwar politics and Lost Cause cultural manifestations celebrating white supremacy and suppressing Union historical memory transformed Kentucky, at least metaphorically, into a state that "seceded" after Appomattox.

Derek W. Frisby documents how former Confederates in western Tennessee employed violent means to marginalize and depoliticize Unionists. Margaret M. Storey considers Reconstruction Alabama "the last front of the war," a front Republicans "ultimately lost" because of the federal government's unwillingness to protect Republicans and the Unionists' inability to marshal local support for radical goals (87). Carol Faulkner examines the continued postwar role of women as nurses, writers, freedpeople's teachers, and organizers in the freedmen's aid movement. Though in this work "women extended their sphere of influence," Faulkner says, they encountered "fierce resistance from reformers and government officials attempting to reassert sexual and racial hierarchies upset by the Civil War" (100).

Denise E. Wright emphasizes the continuity between Confederate state wartime relief and postwar aid programs the Freedmen's Bureau sponsored. Drawing upon detailed monthly reports assistant commissioners forwarded to bureau headquarters, Wright notes that in the years 1865 to 1868, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Georgia, respectively, distributed the greatest number of rations to poor whites. Justin A. Nystrom focuses on Louisiana's Afro-Creoles who "passed" during the postemancipation decades. Nystrom maintains that fair-skinned people of color who traversed the color line generally struggled with familial and social expectations and, accordingly, "redefined their self-identity to combat the perils of an uncertain future" (124).

Rod Andrew Jr. identifies elements of South Carolinian Wade Hampton III's wartime loss (he lost a brother and a son in the war) as contributing to his Lost Cause weltanschauung. "When Southerners spoke to each other in the language of mourning and commemoration," Andrew writes, "they were trying to find meaning and redemption for all they had lost. Even when they demanded that outsiders acknowledge Southern valor, they were often seeking vindication of their...