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

“No survey in the last two generations, or very likely, the next two, will surpass Eric Foner’s Reconstruction,” observes Mark Wahlgren Summers in his introduction to The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. Time will tell whether Summers is correct. Nonetheless, it is very difficult to imagine that a generation of scholars approaching the height of their careers never knew a time in which Foner’s magisterial volume did not exist. Upon its publication in 1988, Foner’s work became the essential synthetic treatment of Reconstruction for anyone who hoped to study the period with any degree of seriousness. And so it remains, even as it inches ever closer to its thirtieth birthday.

Mark Summers, then, does not revise Foner as much as he surveys decades of scholarship, takes a specific problem from Reconstruction, and builds it into a fine narrative of the period. Using as a backdrop the nation’s search for equilibrium between civil rights and reunion of the federalist republic after the Civil War, Summers concludes that, as a mechanism toward a strong, indissoluble nation based upon emancipation, Reconstruction was a success, albeit a costly one. In his reconsideration of Foner’s definition of Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution,” Summers repeats a question he found northern Republicans asking themselves with increasing urgency as the nation moved toward the mid-1870s: just how long could the federal government prop up Reconstruction governments that were under constant challenge, particularly during a time in which large standing armies were considered incompatible with representative government? Summers argues that Reconstruction could only go so far, noting that early on the moves that the federal government made to align states in the former Confederacy with Republican expectations were, indeed, quite remarkable for their day. In particular, the passage of the postwar amendments revealed a marked departure from the nation’s antebellum period.

They did not, however, obliterate state power. Summers argues that pushes toward social reform beyond African American civil rights contributed to the building of strong state governments and the continuation of federalism. Republican state governments took on causes from temperance to the right of women to own property, and the federal judiciary upheld the right of states to impose regulations upon businesses in instances including the famous decision of the Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases. In doing so, ironically, the judiciary also gave states increasing power to negotiate African American civil rights.

Eventually the states were able to rid themselves of intentional oversight on the part of the federal government, even as they paid lip service to the Reconstruction amendments and denied their desire to strip African Americans of civil rights. Summers’s final chapters provide a dismal though engaging analysis of the violence that eventually upended Republican governments in the South. In fact, Summers argues, Reconstruction governments in many southern states fell simply because opponents of Reconstruction had enough vigilante firepower to hold off state militias called by Republican governors— and eventually even federal challenges of force became problematic.

Summers’s coda exudes ambivalence, suggesting that relative to most people’s expectations during the Civil War, Reconstruction was “an unqualified success” (395). Emancipation and the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War guaranteed that the antebellum stronghold proslavery forces held on the federal government would never return, he argues. Even the most ardent former Confederates would admit that the Union was perpetual and that the nation was better for moving forward without slavery. The rise of the Lost Cause myth and the survival of some form of state rights, meanwhile, gave erstwhile Confederates and their progeny an outlet “to channel their Confederate nationalism into a less dangerous form, devotion to their state within an indissoluble Union, the more dear for keeping such reserves of power” (396). The recent rise of self-proclaimed “militias” in our day, the claims that citizens have the right to hold enough firepower...