Hardly the product of big bangs, scholarship typically emanates from intelligent design. This insight is especially apropos for the publication currently under review. On the heels of sesquicentennial celebrations of the Civil War’s virtual ending – the 1865 surrender of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia to Union forces at Appomattox Court House – Orville Vernon Burton and J. Brent Morris have expertly curated a collection of essays to coincide with another historical anniversary: the Reconstruction era that has garnered far less public attention to date, not to mention considerable popular misunderstanding since the late nineteenth century. Whether the symbolic 1877 collapse of the Republican Party’s southern rebuilding project forms an actual commemorative launching point, Reconstruction Beyond 150 amply demonstrates why the postbellum United States presently comprises one of the most fertile fields of scholarly inquiry.
Encompassing fourteen essays, each ranging in length from eleven to twenty-seven pages, the book’s contents collectively plumb Reconstruction’s nature, impact, legacy, and ongoing relevance. By creatively engaging older and prevailing historiographical issues, they also deftly suggest new ways of thinking and writing about the post-Civil War United States. Preceding the main components are the editors’ introduction and a foreword by Eric Foner. Whereas the latter concisely traces major Reconstruction-era political developments, the former not only outlines the principal features of the individual compositions but hints at another anniversary unofficially underlying the publication – the 1988 appearance of Foner’s famous monograph, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. This book’s subtitle, Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom, thus pertains not solely to the historical consequences of a bloody sectional conflict that had eradicated chattel slavery in the United States. It also addresses historiographical considerations that Foner’s powerful, thirty-five-year-old synthetic work had neither fully addressed nor anticipated. The editors point out that, rather than permanently towering over postbellum studies as some initial reviewers once posited, Foner’s monograph has served as a foundational text. In subtle and distinctive ways, the “cutting-edge” essays in Reconstruction Beyond 150 expand on and venture past that modern-day classic (3).
In the first essay, “‘They Loved but Did Not Agree’: African American Women Divorcees in Post-Civil War Virginia,” Arlisha Norwood reorients a broader freedom-seeking narrative. Instead of examining how formerly enslaved people sought to establish marriages legally or to restore the families that enslavement had broken apart, Norwood spotlights how Black women utilized the judicial system during the Civil War and Reconstruction in order to exit from undesirable relationships and refashion their lives. In the final essay, “Killing Calvin Crozier: Honor, Myth, and Military Occupation after Appomattox,” Lawrence T. McDonnell also deploys a state-level approach, but differently. “White lies matter,” McDonnell provocatively announces at the outset, whereupon he microhistorically probes the execution and posthumous fate of a paroled Rebel soldier in 1865 South Carolina (264). The Lost Cause and Neo-Confederate mythmaking that ensued shed insight on Black Reconstruction’s death as well as its popular defamation as a racially tragic period (for white southerners). In between these two compositions are twelve more highly stimulating pieces.
The second and third essays, by Mark Elliott and A. James Fuller, respectively, concentrate on leading Grand Old Party politicos: the Bay Stater Charles Sumner and the Hoosier Oliver P. Morton. Elliott explores the ways that Sumner’s remarkable postwar nationalism involved a radical commitment to human rights and their global realization through a personalized understanding of American exceptionalism. Fuller, in contrast, highlights how a generally forgotten Morton genuinely constituted the last Radical Republican standing in Congress by 1877. The fourth, fifth, and ninth essays, by Nicolas Barreyre, Peter Wallenstein, and David Moltke-Hansen, respectively, grapple with perennial interpretive questions regarding what Reconstruction was, when it ended, and what it meant. Barreyre situates the post-Civil War United States within the history of capitalism, scanning how the political rebuilding of the Southland corresponded with interventionist governmental policies that economically transformed an entire country. Before doing so, he briefly confronts how late nineteenth-century Americans comprehended the word “reconstruction,” something that Moltke-Hansen closely interrogates across a longer duration. By focusing on several southern white luminaries – from William Gilmore Simms to George Washington Cable – he charts the ways that his subjects mentally processed changing prewar and postwar realities wherein Reconstruction’s definitional value had shifted from re-creating a previous order to creating an altogether new one. Wallenstein, by comparison, problematizes not the historical meaning of a term but rather historians’ chronological conceptualizations, stressing that Reconstruction’s ostensible 1877 termination does not comport with a more complex story of persisting Black electoral participation and public officeholding in parts of the South to and through the 1890s.
The other contributions similarly extend the Reconstruction era’s temporal, spatial, and conceptual boundaries. In the sixth essay, Mari N. Crabtree eschews an isolated perspective on post-1877 racial lynching and analyzes it instead within a longer history of ritualistic violence against Black people in the South and alongside contemporaneous acts of colonial violence against Native peoples in the West. The seventh essay revolves wholly around a western axis, as Troy D. Smith ponders Reconstruction’s repercussions for previously Confederate States of America (CSA)-aligned tribal governments in Indian Territory. The eighth essay further enlarges the postbellum orbit, as Don H. Doyle considers the transatlantic effects of the Civil War, especially in England. Lastly, the tenth through thirteenth essays follow intellectual and cultural trajectories: Krista Kinslow contemplates how Civil War memory and Reconstruction politics were inflected and reflected at the Centennial Exposition of 1876; J. Mills Thornton ruminates on Mark Twain’s conflicted fictional musings of the 1880s in order to assess the postbellum possibilities and limitations of southern reengineering efforts; Garry Bertholf and Marina Bilbija reflect on their experiences teaching W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) in an English literature classroom; and Peter Eisenstadt surveys the ways that Howard Thurman, as an eminent Black theologian and lifelong student of African American history, influenced three different historians of color during the Second Reconstruction: Lerone Bennett Jr., Vincent Harding, and Nathan I. Huggins.
A compact review, of course, cannot adequately convey the many interesting assertions and important findings that the fourteen essays individually make. Nor can it significantly delve into the fascinating thematic connections among them or weigh in on the various research potentialities that they present. Without a doubt, Reconstruction Beyond 150 provides abundant food for thought. I will certainly return to it again and again.
