Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio (review)

284CIVIL WAR HISTORY American nationalism expanded in the 1890s in response to major changes in society, he does not say so directly, leaving the reader not fully convinced. For all that, this challenging work offers new insight to the lasting consequences of the Civil War and the nature of Gilded Age society. Jerry Cooper University of Missouri-St. Louis Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio. By Robert D. Sawrey. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Pp. 194. $30.00.) Dubious Victory examines the effect of public opinion on the political process —and vice versa—in one important Northern state, Ohio. Sawrey asks the key question: What was it that Northerners wanted in the way of Reconstruction ? His answers demonstrate that historians who lament the failure of Reconstruction to secure substantive constitutional rights, or to provide economic security in the form of land, are guilty of imposing their own values on an era where they simply do not fit. What the voters of Ohio wanted, Sawrey finds, in an analysis that closely follows the path established by C. Vann Woodward in "Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy," was a secure peace. Ohioans never intended to disturb white supremacy in the South. When Southern intransigence impelled the national Congress toward establishing political rights for the freedmen in the South, Ohio voters refused to countenance such a revolution at home. Hoping to bring a quick finish to Reconstruction, Ohioans endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, which "almost exactly mirrored their Reconstruction demands" (61). This "moderate compromise measure" granted citizenship to blacks, provided for their basic civil rights, and guaranteed equal protection ofthe laws, all without granting them the franchise "northerners would not tolerate," especially at home. Sawrey's analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment is curiously silent on the historical debate surrounding the intent of the framers. He seems not to have pondered exactly which rights inhered in national citizenship or what changes, if any, the amendment was intended to effect in federal-state relations . His uncritical assertion that "radical Republican congressmen had failed to force their ideas into the amendment" (65) leaves the reader to wonder if he is aware that other historians have discerned a potential constitutional revolution in the amendment. And if Ohio voters perceived the Fourteenth Amendment to be as benign as Sawrey suggests, it seems strange indeed that Ohio was one of three Northern states that attempted to rescind their initial ratification of the amendment. When the South's refusal to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment moved the national Congress to impose black suffrage in the Southern states, Ohio Republicans —recognizing the hypocrisy involved in a policy for the South that they did not recognize at home—attempted to enfranchise the state's small book reviews 285 black population. Voters quickly registered their determination to keep Ohio a white man's country. They defeated the amendment soundly in 1867 and elected a Democratic majority to both houses of the state legislature. Licking their wounds, Republicans reconsidered their priorities in light of their constituents ' desires. Thus they carefully avoided the question of black suffrage in the state platform of 1868 and endorsed a national platform that endorsed black suffrage in the South whUe leaving the issue in the loyal states to be decided at home. Continuing his account through the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment , Sawrey provides tremendous insight into the limitations Northern voters forced on Reconstruction policy. Newspaper accounts and private papers of politically active Ohioans demonstrate unequivocally that Ohioans were totally uninterested in fostering genuine social or political revolution in the South. With the Fifteenth Amendment in place to enable the freedmen to work out their own political salvation, Ohio voters retreated from Reconstruction long before the national Congress made it a rout. One wishes, nevertheless, that Sawrey's brief account did not end so abruptly in 1869. Reconstruction was not over simply because Ohioans desired it so. The escalation of violence following the election of 1868 introduced the problem of how to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments— not to mention the question of what those provisions actually meant. Some analysis of public opinion regarding federal enforcement procedures in the South would make the book...