Reconstructions

Both of these books understand Reconstruction not as a period that ended at noon on 4 March 1877, after a commission had resolved an electoral college mess and cut a deal enabling the swearing-in of Rutherford B. Hayes as president, but as an ongoing battle over race and rights that would reach into the next century. The 1877 date was cemented in place by Dunning School historiography, though William Dunning also proposed two subsequent periods when Reconstruction was undone: one ending in 1890, when blacks’ political equality was still “recognized in law, though not in fact”; and a second, stretching into the next century, when political equality existed neither in law, nor in fact (Dunning 445). Now it is common practice to reckon with Reconstruction as a continuum from circa 1863 to 1913. In 1965, when Rayford W. Logan’s The Betrayal of the Negro revisited the argument of his classic 1954 study, The Negro in American Life and Thought, he pushed Reconstruction’s end into Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, by which point most Americans considered segregation a permanent fixture in US life. In Race and Reunion (2001), David Blight uses July 1913 to symbolize Reconstruction’s end because that’s when aging Union and Confederate veterans remembered the Gettysburg battle by camping side-by-side on the fields. Steven Hahn’s A Nation Without Borders (2016) adopts that longer duration with little comment. Brook Thomas’s answer is to compromise, parsing a “period” of Reconstruction (1863–1877) within a long Reconstruction “era.” Carolyn L. Karcher’s study of Albion W. Tourgée’s civil rights activism, writings, and Sisyphean efforts on behalf of a “‘color blind’ justice” presumes a long Reconstruction era, with Tourgée in the vanguard.

Historian C. Vann Woodward understood Reconstruction as the “moral core of [US] national history” for it tested whether, and how, white Americans would square their lives with a multiracial democracy whose essential truths were set forth in the Declaration and the Constitution (52). On those constitutional truths, beginning on the day he enlisted in the army, Tourgée staked his entire career. On the same grounds, the writers that Thomas studies grappled with each other in a Battle of the Books outlasting even Tourgée’s 40-year career. The system of slavery whose vast damages they battled over was mentioned nowhere in the founding documents, though ghosted into the Constitution by the three-fifths clause (for enumerating slaves in the decennial census). Neither was US white supremacy—that pseudoknowledge justifying the political economies of slavery and segregation, as well as Indian removal and extermination, anti-Chinese pogroms, and race war in Cuba and the Philippines—spelled out in the nation’s founding scriptures. It was, however, woven through the entire body of long Reconstruction-era writings that Karcher and Thomas study. The ideal of constitutional equality, and the bloody realities of white supremacy—that is the crux both of these books reckon with.

Karcher’s deeply researched, powerfully written 1994 literary biography of Lydia Maria Child, The First Woman in the Republic, recovered a novelist tireless in support of abolition, Indigenous rights, and women’s suffrage, while sharply criticizing US expansionism after the Mexican-American War, then the weak-kneed meliorism that triumphed after the Civil War. Her study of Tourgée’s multifaceted civil rights work takes up where the Child book left off: late in the decade of Congressional (or Radical) Reconstruction. During the war Tourgée had suffered two serious wounds—at the First Battle of Bull Run and at Perryville—each time rejoining his regiment. After Appomattox he returned to his family home in Ohio, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and was later appointed to the federal bench as a circuit court judge based in Greensboro, North Carolina. The circuit he rode included some of the most virulently white supremacist real estate in the former Confederacy, especially the Klan stronghold of Alamance County. Probably that aspect of the job required as much or more resolve as battle once did. During his years as a judge, would-be assassins threatened him constantly.

Joel Chandler Harris wrote that...