The Struggle for Equality: Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction ed. by Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, and Jennifer L. Webe (review)

The Declaration of Independence linked paradoxical ideas about equality with the future of the United States. Four score and five years later, the United States engaged in "a great Civil War," reflecting the regional and contradictory meanings of equality and who defined it. In a splendid Festschrift for James M. McPherson, who came of age during the civil rights movement in the 1950s, a continuation of this national debate, scholars—almost all former students—offer seventeen essays in tribute to his career. McPherson helped reintroduce the theme of racial equality into discussions of U.S. history, especially how the Civil War and the long era of Reconstruction that followed, settled, and failed to settle its meaning. McPherson's exemplary career began with The Struggle for Equality, whose title inspired this collection and reframed how historians viewed abolitionists; his second book, The Negro's Civil War, refocused the profession, then in the throes of Lost Cause constructions of the Civil War, on the centrality of African Americans as the vital actors and symbols of the meaning of equality during the Civil War era. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom now undergirds much of Civil War military, political, and social history. His recent works include important reappraisals of what motivated the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. This volume succeeds, first as a measure of McPherson's career.

But it does more. McPherson produced many PhDs and influenced other scholars who continue to advance his themes. The seventeen essays are grouped into three sections: "Sectional Conflict," "Civil War," and "The Long Reconstruction." Readers familiar with these scholars' works will find these essays more illustrative than pathbreaking. Case studies of the Society of Friends by Ryan Jordan, Gen. James Wadsworth by Judith Hunter, and Ambassador John Meredith Reid by Philip Katz illustrate how the nineteenth-century debates over race and equality could produce extreme contradictions. For the Quakers, abolitionism did not mean commitment to racial equality. Scions of wealth, Wadsworth and Reid found the Civil War years transformative. Wadsworth became an egalitarian abolitionist, while Reid lived out his days pining for an aristocratic society.

The Civil War section consists of five splendid studies. Joseph Glatthaar argues that the system of elected officers in the Army of Northern Virginia, for all its flaws, worked well enough and was the only system consistent with the political culture from which this army was drawn. Jennifer Weber shows how Union soldiers proved decisive in reelecting Lincoln both by the votes they cast themselves and by their clarion calls for pro-administration voting in their copious letters home. Ronald White's examination of Lincoln's letter to James C. Conkling, which Lincoln read as a speech to an Illinois audience in 1863, reveals a Lincoln determined to make emancipation meaningful, prophetically noting that black men were fighting for freedom while so many white men were fighting against freedom and equality. Bruce Dain's splendid essay on Lincoln and race shows a Lincoln whose views on equality were tempered by an awareness of deeply seated societal racism and a fatalistic understanding of the flaws in humanity. Catherine Clinton's previously published essay on the sexual politics of the Civil War examines three episodes—General Butler's General War Order No. 28, the Richmond Bread Riots, and the saga of the Roswell mill workers—to show how male authority used the image of women of ill-repute to regulate the behavior of the majority of white women.

The nine essays comprising the Long Reconstruction highlight the link between the Civil War and the ongoing debate about equality. Brian Greenberg's study of abolitionist Wendell Phillips examines his postbellum fight against plutocracy through advocating structures and policies to promote economic democracy. James K. Hogue, who updated...