The World the Civil War Made ed. by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur (review)

Historians of Reconstruction—a word that is pointedly missing from the title of this collection of essays that came out of a conference held in June 2013 at Pennsylvania State University—once saw the period as unified by the federal government’s attempt to extend citizenship rights in the South in response to emancipation. This superb collection, though, suggests that was only part of what was going on in “the period formerly known as Reconstruction” (p. 3). We can see the essays here, and the other work they connect to, as part of an ongoing rethinking of the temporal and spatial boundaries of Reconstruction in the last decade and a half that is central to the scholarship of Steven Hahn, Heather Cox Richardson, Ari Kelman, and others. Perhaps the key idea that Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur formulate in their introduction is the concept of the “Stockade State” (p. 6). By this phrase the editors mean that the federal government in the post–Civil War period had broad liberal ideas but little capacity to enforce them across the whole of the country. The federal government did a lot where it could, but it had little power to change things in the hinter-lands. Such limited capacity lays the foundation for the second point: while freedom was important, “illiberal forms of power [were] in fact the norm, not the exception, in the post–Civil War era” (p. 12). Violence was the starting point for everything, as work by Carole Emberton has emphasized. This emphasis on violence is what the period looks like after several years of taking Hahn’s notion of paramilitary politics seriously. A final point Masur and Downs make is that when we shift our focus a bit, we see many important continuities across the Civil War period, something several of the essays demonstrate. The essays in the collection engage with one another and with these key ideas better than in almost any other edited volume I have read.

Essays by Laura F. Edwards, Amy Dru Stanley, and Andrew Zimmerman focus on questions of law and political change. Edwards argues that governance is about keeping order, which is about more than just the state. Building on her long-standing focus on how law works at the local level, she argues that “Reconstruction-era policy changes drew local, state, and federal jurisdictions into a closer relationship, allowing legal principles operative at the local level to migrate and acquire new meanings at the state and federal levels” (p. 25). The 1875 Civil Rights Act, Stanley argues, should be seen as an important moment in the history of human rights worldwide, since it made the pursuit of pleasure in public part of the definition of what it meant to be fully free, based on the Thirteenth Amendment. Earlier definitions of freedom had focused only on economic and property rights. Zimmerman’s chapter puts the Civil War in the context of European socialism and makes a convincing case that the Civil War shaped how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought about the nature of revolutions. The war had such an impact on Marx and Engels because of the involvement of German radicals who fled the fallout of 1848 and settled in Missouri, taking a leading role in fighting slaveholders.

Another set of essays considers Indians and the West. Stacey L. Smith reminds us that the Thirteenth Amendment did not apply just to enslaved African Americans in the South. It was used, mostly unsuccessfully, to combat the problem of Indian peonage in New Mexico and, more successfully, as a foundation of the anti-coolie movement in California. The Ho-Chunk Indians of Wisconsin, Stephen Kantrowitz argues, used the ambiguities of “civilization” to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment protected their rights to due process, while trying to maintain...