The Ordeal of the Reunion
A New History of Reconstruction
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently emancipated for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. In The Ordeal of the Reunion, Mark Wahlgren Summers goes beyond this vitally important question, focusing on Reconstruction’s need to form an enduring Union without sacrificing the framework of federalism and republican democracy. Assessing the era nationally, Summers emphasizes the variety of conservative strains that confined the scope of change, highlights the war’s impact and its aftermath, and brings the West and foreign policy into an integrated narrative. In sum, this book offers a fresh explanation for Reconstruction’s demise and a case for its essential successes as well as its great failures. Indeed, this book demonstrates the extent to which the victors’ aims in 1865 were met — and at what cost.
Summers depicts not just a heroic, tragic moment with equal rights advanced and then betrayed but a time of achievement and consolidation, in which nationhood and emancipation were placed beyond repeal and the groundwork was laid for a stronger, if not better, America to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The triumph of the Union Army and the freeing of the slaves after the Civil War are always complicated by the realities of Reconstruction, particularly the failure to protect freed African Americans and the eventual implementation of Jim Crow laws. University of Kentucky historian Summers (A Dangerous Stir) argues that although Reconstruction was a failure for former slaves, it was successful in propping up and reintroducing the federal system into the former Confederate states. His account is a reminder of how difficult this process was, noting how Southern constitutional delegates "did not welcome slavery's end," nor did they, like many others in the post-bellum South, "regret secession." Summers effectively captures the turmoil and frustrations of the era: the strange 1874 battle between candidates for Governor of Arkansas, the rise of white supremacist groups such as the "redeemers" and "White Leagues," and voter intimidation that successfully forced African Americans out of a meaningful role in government. He also shows how economic woes affected Reconstruction's prospects. An arrangement that preserved the Union but damned many to suffering, Summers demonstrates it best when discussing meetings of Union and Confederate veterans: "Reconciliation they welcomed on their own terms." Illus.
