West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (review)

The trend most apparent to scholars studying the era after the Civil War has been the broadening of the concept of Reconstruction. Traditionally defined as the twelve years after the Civil War when troops were stationed in the formerly rebellious southern states, Reconstruction has come to encompass a longer period during and after the war. Richard-son’s book not only expands the time period but also argues that the West was a crucial part of the rebuilding that was taking place in America. Richardson views Reconstruction as centered around citizenship and the role of the government in a period (1865 to 1900) crucial to forging the American state. Moreover, she believes that citizens then settled on essential notions about the role of government and the proper recipients of its aid. Her central question is, “How did nineteenth-century Americans justify the expansion of government activism and still retain their wholehearted belief in individualism?”(4)

To Richardson, the answer lies in a middle-class worldview in which government should aid deserving citizens but should not become the pawn of special interests. The West became the laboratory where the proper mix of individualism and government assistance was achieved. Ironically, this West, which actually depended heavily on governmental assistance, came to symbolize sturdy self-reliance to most Americans. Richardson gives a political and economic narrative of major events from the end of the Civil War through the McKinley administration.

Readers of Richardson’s two earlier books on the Civil War and Reconstruction who expect the same close analysis of newspapers and other writings to grace this one will find a different kind of book that works on a larger scale. Despite this broader sweep of time, Richardson wishes to inject a human note. Thus, she introduces the life stories of a variety of Americans into her grand narrative to enliven this unfolding of the large forces.

Some readers will question the composition of this middle class and the kinds of evidence that Richardson uses to construct its vision. Marxists and most other scholars with a social-science orientation are likely to want a definition of middle class that has an economic component. Richardson lets her group delimit itself: “Those who believed they could make it on their own saw themselves as part of the ‘great middle’ between rich monopolists and the lazy poor” (2). Elsewhere, she stresses that the members of this “new middle class” “were distinguished not by their income but by their determination to hold what they believed was an even handed government steady from the demands of those at the top as well as those at the bottom of society” (147). Crucial to this world-view was the belief that the government must necessarily protect American individualism, especially in the West. Such a definition of middle class allows her to include Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, and Wade Hampton, who in the antebellum period had been one of the largest slave owners in America.

Although Richardson lets this vision define class, her method of ascertaining this new middle-class ideology seems problematical. The biographical accounts that she employs to establish the views of the middle class in many cases depend on memoirs. The shortcoming of such writings is their tendency to reflect one period, generally at the end of life, rather than chronicle a changing outlook more often caught by letters or diaries.

Although Richardson has written a fast-paced, highly readable narrative that covers major political and economic events of the period, some scholars may question whether the middle class during Reconstruction can be comprehended adequately through the concept of individualism. They may also doubt whether Richardson’s methods and sources lend themselves to a convincing interpretation of the reconstruction of late-nineteenth-century America.