The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers (review)

Early in The Ordeal of the Reunion, Summers challenges Reconstruction historians to speak less to “our time” and more to “their time” by placing “the Reconstruction of the Union,” not the search for “black civil rights,” at the center of the story (3). Summers does not cast his book primarily as a “Reconstruction of Southern Society with a particular emphasis on Southern Race Relations” but as a national “search for security” to ensure that the Union would be “held together forever” (3—4).

At the outset, the book seems poised to challenge both the old Dunning School and its critics—from DuBois to Foner—all of whom place the struggle to redefine labor, race, and democracy in the South at the center of the story.¹ Although a few post-revisionist historians like Benedict and Cox emphasized the centrality of securing the Union, most scholars have taken for granted that Reconstruction was shaped by the role of ex-slaves in a new United States, with powerful implications for labor, agricultural production, constitutional powers, and racial thinking.² This seems a propitious time for a new synthesis, given Gary Gallagher’s strenuous efforts to define the Civil War as an effort to save the Union, not to end slavery, in The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).

But Summers, to his credit, resists reductionist arguments. Even as he claims that most Northern whites cared much more deeply about restoring the Union than about creating a new society in the South, he also takes great pains to show why white Southerners’ behavior made it impossible for Northerners to separate reconciliation from their ongoing worries about national security that in turn led them to defend black civil rights. Rather than an argument about the primacy of Union, the book becomes a survey of the political history of Reconstruction, emphasizing the importance of national and state capitals rather than land and labor. Summers’ eyes are almost always on people with the power to make decisions that affect life on the ground. But his heart is—as it has long been—with the phrase makers, especially the ink-stained wretches of the newspaper trade. Although Summers may have a fine eye for lovely and outrageous quotations, he at times utilizes them as both analysis and evidence, especially when discussing his pet subject of corruption.

For readers of this journal, the book does not particularly engage in interdisciplinary history, although Summers consults a wide range of sources, including literary ones. He masterfully describes economic and political conditions, but he does not particularly draw upon research in those fields. However, readers interested in Reconstruction will find Summers’ book to be a rollicking, deeply researched overview. It is unlikely, as Summers admits, that it will displace Foner’s massive Reconstruction, which remains a landmark in the field, but it offers a mostly clear and always colorful guide to the politics of the era.