The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era by Douglas R. Egerton (review)

There is something to applaud in this work. The author’s restatement of the core revisionist viewpoint, his attentiveness to the African American experience, and his emphasis on the violence that overthrew Reconstruction are things that some in the public sphere need to hear, yet again. The final chapter on recent debates over a proposed Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston makes that clear. The book’s subtitle offers a “brief, violent history,” and it delivers on it admirably. But emphatic interpretation combined with inattention to factual detail can complicate even a worthy goal.

Egerton’s book follows the modern, sympathetic interpretation of Reconstruction politics without the caveats scholars frequently make about “America’s most progressive era.” It resembles Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) in highlighting the freedpeople’s story, but without that work’s interpretive grounding in the evolution of the plantation system. So thoroughly immersed is Egerton in the prevailing viewpoint that one would expect an explicit discussion of what he hoped to add to Foner. Egerton does indicate that he disagrees with those who emphasize the weaknesses in Reconstruction governance, the divisions within the black community and the Republican coalition. “Too often the central question becomes why Reconstruction failed, as opposed to ended, which hints that the process itself was somehow flawed and contributed to its own passing,” Egerton writes (16).

The emphasis here is on the upbeat early years after emancipation, the laudable aspirations that inspired Radical Reconstruction, and the rampant racism and violence that would, in time, overthrow it. Not much attention goes to the variation in terrorist activity in different times and places, how it might have been mitigated or repressed. The stress is on the sheer fact of overwhelming terrorism: how black and white reformers “ultimately lost their fight because of white violence is the subject of this book” (21). Beyond this, there are interpretive themes throughout, on the interconnection between southern events and civil rights efforts in the North, especially on the black convention movement pressing for drastic change.

So far, well and good, or at least reasonable. The problem is that there is evidence of hasty preparation, or more inaccuracies than historians normally expect. Some are minor geographic lapses: Tuskegee University is not in Atlanta, but rather Tuskegee, Alabama (322). In the text, we are told that activist Octavius Catto attended “Allentown Academy in Allentown, Pennsylvania,” but a picture caption three pages later notes that the academy is in Allentown, New Jersey (169, 172).

The profusion of Allentowns might be brushed aside, especially in a caption, but more substantive issues recur. Bear with a little instructive detail. Egerton states: “Following the enactment of the Alabama [black] code, freedman William Warner overheard some blacks lamenting ‘that the democrats have succeeded, and that we are to be slaves again’” (183). He cites the Alabama Klan testimony, volume 1, page 357. The quotation adds some extra words, but that isn’t the problem, nor is the incorrect attribution to William Warner’s testimony, which does not exist. The phrase actually appears in the testimony of P. T. Sayre, and there is no reference there to a freedman William Warner, but rather to some unnamed Montgomery “gentleman,” apparently white, who heard the comment. A subsequent footnote citing William Warner’s testimony instead refers the reader to the testimony of U.S. senator Willard Warner, who was emphatically not a freedman (411).

This snarled evidence is peripheral to the substantive issue. The passage must refer either to the white boycott of the February 1868 election, or the Democratic victory of 1870; either way, it does not refer to the Black Codes of some years before. This confusion undermines the interpretive point the author makes about the Black Codes. Such imprecise chronology is evident elsewhere, and it is problematic in a...