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Five Best: These works capture the hope and turmoil of the post-Civil War period By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY
1. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877
By Kenneth M. Stampp
Knopf, 1965
For the better part of a century few American historians questioned the standard picture of Reconstruction as a dark chapter of corrupt and oppressive misrule, when radical Republicans seeking partisan advantage and personal plunder wreaked terrible vengeance on a prostrate South. Kenneth M. Stampp was one of the first historians to take on these myths in a comprehensive fashion, and 43 years later his book remains fresh and startling. In New York City alone, he notes, “the thefts of public funds by white Tammany Democrats surpassed the total thefts in all the southern states combined.” The new Southern state constitutions — reviled by the white old guard as the work of Northern “outcasts,” “ignorant and depraved negroes,” and “renegade” Southern whites — were in fact models of progressive reform, advancing the rights of women, establishing public education and ending the monopoly on power by wealthy landowners. (In South Carolina, voters got to cast ballots for governor and president for the first time.) And far from suffering oppression, the defeated South was treated with a mildness unprecedented for instigators of unsuccessful rebellions throughout history. No Confederate officeholder or soldier was ever charged with treason; almost none even lost property except for emancipated slaves; and within a few years former Confederate leaders were back serving as state governors, U.S. senators and congressmen, and cabinet officials.
2. The South As It Is, 1865-1866
By John Richard Dennett
Viking, 1965
In June 1865, just two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, John Richard Dennett, a young Harvard graduate, boarded a steamer in New York City for Richmond and began an eight-month journey through the Southern states. In Dennett’s letters, printed each week in the Nation magazine, the mood of the defeated Confederacy emerges in a series of remarkable portraits — blacks and whites, apprehensive Unionists and defiant secessionists, dirt-poor farmers and still wealthy plantation owners. Dennett’s vivid reports, which were collected and published on the centenary of the war’s conclusion, are shaded by cinematically evocative descriptions of the often bleak landscapes he traversed and an ever-present drumbeat of violence and menace. With a prescience that the following years would only confirm, Dennett saw that the ex-Confederates considered themselves overpowered but undefeated, sorry for nothing but their ill success and determined to keep the freedmen in a condition as close to slavery as possible. “Let the black man vote,” a Virginia merchant warned him, “and the Southern people will have to be kept down by a standing army.”
3. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers
By Richard Nelson Current
Oxford, 1988
“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. The way in which they have reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” So said Albion Tourgée in 1879, ruefully looking back on his courageous, but ultimately futile, fight as a judge in North Carolina battling the Ku Klux Klan and seeking justice for the freedmen. Tourgée, an Ohioan, is one of 10 notable Northerners who settled in the South after the war and whose experiences are described in “Those Terrible Carpetbaggers.” The intercuts between subjects in this big, sprawling, jumbly book can be hard to follow, but Richard Nelson Current — a pioneering historian who devoted a lifetime to re-examining the myths of Reconstruction — makes up for that shortcoming by offering a richness of detail and human dimension missing from the stereotypes of rapacious carpetbaggers. Current tells the story of Reconstruction through the eyes of those who believed in what they were doing and expected to succeed; it says much about the way the history of this era was so dominated by Reconstruction’s foes that this still seems like a novel approach.
4. Yazoo
By Albert T. Morgan
1884
One of the men whose struggles Richard Nelson Current chronicled was Albert T. Morgan, a Union veteran who settled in Yazoo, Miss., and thought that he would make a living as a cotton grower and lumber-mill operator. “Although at that time I was only a beginner in the study of the customs and laws of Yazoo,” Morgan wrote in an account of that time, “I was fully aware of the fact that it has always been unlawful to teach a negro to read and write.” The Northerner was cordially welcomed into local white society — until he started a school for the children of the freedmen who worked his land and until he began counseling young black women in his employ to stop letting themselves be kept as concubines by the town’s “respectable” white men. Then all hell broke loose. Things became a hundred times worse when Morgan was elected sheriff with the support of the local blacks and married a “colored” woman. In the tumultuous election of 1875 armed whites forcibly seized power and lynched a half-dozen black leaders; Morgan barely escaped with his life. His memoir is naïve and wise, beautiful and tragic, innocent and bitter — an amazing tale of a man a century ahead of his time.
5. Reconstruction
By Eric Foner
Harper & Row, 1988
“Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship,” Eric Foner writes early in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.” “From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development.” If there is a scrap of paper from the Reconstruction era that Mr. Foner, a history professor at Columbia University, hasn’t personally looked at, it would be hard to imagine. This beautifully written book is jaw-droppingly comprehensive, weaving countless telling details into its discussion of all the political, economic and social complexities of the era.
Mr. Budiansky is the author of “The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox,” which has just been published by Viking.
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