CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

By HAL BRIDGES

National observance of the centennial of the Civil War has stimulated a phenomenal public interest in this eventful period of American history, and historians have responded with increasing numbers of books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. This creates a problem in sheer quantity of reading matter for those of us who would like to keep abreast of changing historical interpretations in this field. However, by selecting some of the more important and useful monographs, biographies, and general histories that have been published since 1950, and seeing how they relate to fundamental issues, we may be able to obtain a good grasp of the new knowledge.

(We assume here that serious students of the period will know the earlier great studies of historians such as Allan Nevins, William B. Hesseltine, Roy F. Nichols, David M. Potter, Dwight L. Dumont, George Fort Milton, Howard K. Beale and others who often established fundamental interpretations upon which other and later historians build or from which they depart.)

One fundamental issue is what caused the war? What tore the nation apart in 1861? Those interested in the broad sweep of historical debate on this point will find it in Thomas J. Pressly's provocative survey, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, which is itself a bold interpretation, and one that has not escaped charges of oversimplification. An important key to the debate is slavery. Some of the earliest interpreters held that slavery was the ultimate cause of the war; Northern historians, especially, wrote about the "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery. Southern historians on the other hand have tended to devote space to proving that slavery was not as important a factor as constitutional or economic issues.

The economic interpretation of the Civil War came to full bloom in 1927 with the publication of The Rise of American Civilization by Charles and Mary Beard. This widely used textbook described the Civil War as essentially an economic conflict during which Northern businessmen won control of the national government from Southern planters. Slavery, argued the Beards, was only a surface issue. Their hypothesis dominated historical writing in the economic-minded thirties, and has remainded influential down to the present day.

Of late, however, the wheel shows signs of turning full cycle. Scholars today are once more devoting much attention to the slavery controversy, either implicitly recognizing its importance or openly naming it the main factor in the coming of the war.

The Civil War was "a war over slavery and the future position of the Negro race in North America," declares Allan Nevins in The Emergence of Lincoln. This study is a continuation of the ten-volume survey of American life from the Mexican War through Reconstruction that Nevins has undertaken under the over-all title, The Ordeal of the Union. The first four volumes carry the story through the inauguration of Lincoln. The next two, The Improvised War, 1861–1862 and War Becomes Revolution, move events through the spring of 1863 and advance Nevins' thesis that the fires of war forged the modern, industrial United States, while the South underwent its own revolution, the loss of slavery. Each volume brims with interesting and useful information, much of it freshly drawn from the manuscripts, and the history as a whole—a comprehensive, detailed, well-organized and exceptionally readable narrative which expertly relates political and military events to the social, economic, and intellectual background of the times—is best described as a masterwork by a major historian. In stressing the moral issue of slavery as the ultimate cause of the war, Nevins has taken an interpretive position similar to that of James Ford Rhodes, whose History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 Nevins' work is now supplanting.

Two monographs that demonstrate the importance of the slavery issue in a single key state are South Carolina Goes to War, 1861–1865, by Charles Cauthen, and Nationalism and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1852–1860, by Harold S. Schultz. Both authors show how the security of slave property was of paramount concern to state political leaders, and how, when these leaders became convinced that the anti-slavery party would rule in Washington, they prepared South Carolinians for secession and led them out of the union.

Another monograph which deals, perforce, with the slavery issue is James C. Malin's The Nebraska Question, 1852–1854. Malin, a historian noted for hewing his own independent path through the facts, copes with the long-standing controversy about Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act by adducing fresh evidence to show that Douglas' chief motive in forcing the Act through Congress was the statesmanlike one of opening the West to railroads. Like George Fort Milton, Douglas most distinguished biographer, Malin portrays the Little Giant as a political realist who saw that slavery could not expand into the Western territories and that therefore the whole question of such expansion was a false political issue. He blames pro-slavery fanatics for pressuring Douglas into inserting in the Act the specific repeal of the Missouri Compromise that infuriated Northerners and revived the sectional conflict.

This emphasis upon the irrational, emotional aspects of the sectional struggle is a leading theme in the work of Avery O. Craven. It can be found, as part of a full and discerning analysis of the complex ideas and events that led to war, in his Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861, Volume VI in the outstanding cooperative series, A History of the South, edited by Wendell Holmes Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter. Craven suggests that Southern nationalism and pro-slavery fanaticism grew in response to attacks upon the South by Northern antislavery extremists. In this volume and also in a later book, Civil War in the Making, 1815–1860, he sees rising emotionalism, North and South, over the slavery issue as an important factor in the breakdown of the democratic process and the ultimate failure of compromise.

Implicit in such analysis is the question of whether the war could have been avoided, and not many years ago historians were prone to debate this at length. Today, however, Craven and others tend to take the pragmatic position that the old irrepressible-depressible argument is simply irresolvable. Kenneth M. Stampp in his useful study, And the War Came, calmly eschews the debate over inevitability and contents himself with a penetrating analysis of Northern public opinion as reflected mainly through contemporary newspaper editorials. The picture that emerges is not especially flattering to national leaders either North or South; all take on the appearance of self-seeking politicians. Even Lincoln, Stampp indicates, was guided not so much at this time by lofty principle as by public opinion. As for the slavery issue, Stampp names it along with "other economic differences" as an important cause of the hostilities that began in 1861.

Perhaps all this concern with slavery among students of the sectional controversy stems in part from the increased prominence of the Negro in American life as a result of current efforts to end racial segregation in the United States. The Negro is no longer the nation's "invisible Nan," and as he forces political leaders to take note of him he also draws the attention of historians. At least this may help explain the historians increased concern with slavery as a cause of the Civil War and also their renewed interest in it as a social institution.

Important among the recent institutional studies of slavery is Kenneth M. Stampp's The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. The book places Stampp in sharp opposition to Ulrich B. Phillips, whose authoritative work American Negro Slavery appeared in 1918. Phillips regarded slavery as a pretty good way of life for both master and man. Stampp views it as a moral wrong and a Southern tragedy, an institution productive of much suffering for the slave and little good for anyone. Phillips has long been criticized as being too sympathetic toward slavery. Stampp has been accused of going to the opposite extreme. But no one interested in the subject should overlook the great amount of fresh material on every aspect of slavery that fills the somber pages of The Peculiar Institution.

Outstanding among local studies of slavery is James Benson Sellers' Slavery in Alabama. Like so many other historians in this field Sellers has had to rely too much upon the records of the larger plantations, for the very good reason that owners of only one slave or a few often kept no records; yet he has managed to produce a balanced monograph which takes account of the many complexities and contradictions of slavery, with its strange mixture of benevolence and brutality, and he gives much useful information on topics sometimes neglected by historians, such as overseers and runaways.

Gilbert Hobbs Barnes's The Antislavery Impulse, published in 1933, remains a strong influence on the historical interpretation of the antislavery movement. Barnes held that the Western antislavery men led by Theodore Dwight Weld were considerably more important to the movement than Easterners like William Lloyd Garrison. The more recent biography, Theodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom, by Benjamin P. Thomas, upholds this thesis as does also another biography of an associate of Weld, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist, by Betty Fladeland. Still other reformers who have hitherto been obscure are highlighted by Hermann R. Muelder in Fighters for Freedom: The History of Anti Slavery-Activities of Men and Women Associated with Knox College. So the numbers of the Westerners increase, but before one dismisses Garrison as an insignificant fanatic he should read Ralph Korngold's treatment of him as a humanitarian social reformer in Two Friends of Man. The other friend in the book is Wendell Phillips. Finally, for a broad, sympathetic view of the whole movement and new information on a number of little-known figures, consult The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830–1860, by Louis Filler.

One of the most famous and influential of antislavery men, Charles Sumner, has suffered biographical neglect for half a century, but is now receiving full critical attention from David Donald. In Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, the first volume of a projected two-volume study, Donald reveals, as he did in his biography of Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon, surpassing skill at probing into the mysteries of human personality. Calmly and judiciously, with a fullness of research and analysis that helps the reader understand if not approve Sumner's actions, he exhibits the psychological tensions in this famous man's life: his loveless childhood, his fear of women, his compulsion for making and then destroying intense friendships, and his rationalization of political shifts into high principle. On the weight of the evidence, supplemented by opinion that he has obtained from present-day medical specialists, he concludes that Sumner contracted an aggravated form of blood poisoning (septicemia) from the head wounds that Preston Brooks inflicted on him during the sensational caning in the Senate chamber, and that his extraordinarily slow recovery from the physical effects of the assault was not shamming, but what specialists today classify as "post-traumatic syndrome." It seems unlikely that any scholar, in the foreseeable future, will write more definitively about either the psychological or the political problems of Sumner's pre-war career.

Closely associated with antislavery, but tending more and more to dominate the war years, is the towering historical figure of Lincoln. Three recent books tell us much about him before he entered the White House. Donald W. Riddle's Congressman Abraham Lincoln is an essentially negative view, in which the author finds Lincoln playing politics with the Mexican War and antislavery instead of acting from principle. More favorable is John J. Duff's A. Lincoln, Prairie Lawyer, a penetrating study, by a lawyer, of Lincoln's multitudinous legal activities, including the run-of-the mill as well as the famous cases, from 1837 to 1860. In Duff's opinion, the great statesman was first a great lawyer, one who was not a profound legal scholar and not above specious argument, on occasion, but who was basically honest, prodigiously industrious, and markedly versatile and able—a "lawyer's lawyer," the acknowledged leader, in the end, of the accomplished Illinois bar. The third book, Lincoln's Manager: David Davis, by Willard L. King, utilizes Lincoln letters and other materials from the Davis papers to show Davis as a more important Lincoln confidant than has heretofore been realized, and to present a fresh interpretation of Davis' role in getting his friend the Republican presidential nomination in 1860.

On the war years, the authority is James G. Randall, who died while working on the fourth and last volume of a major study, Lincoln the President, which has been ably completed by Richard N. Current. As much as any other one writer, Randall helped to rescue Lincoln from the myth makers and romanticizers and restore the flesh and blood President. In doing this he has sometimes witten adverse criticism. As early as 1926 he showed in his Con­stitutional Problems under Lincoln—still the definitive study of the subject, and recently republished in a revised edition—that under the stress of the war emergency Lincoln countenanced certain limited suspensions of civil liberties, such as the privilege of habeas corpus, and trial by jury, that perhaps he might better have protected. In the first volumes of Lincoln the President, he suggested that Lincoln may have been playing timid politics in refusing to reiterate publically his moderate antislavery views during the secession crisis that followed his election to the presidency in 1860. On the other hand, Randall rejected the old accusation that Lincoln deliberately maneuvered the South into firing on Fort Sumter in order to unite the North in war against the Confederacy and showed how tenuous is the evidence on which this charge rests.

The third volume of Randall's great work takes up the constitutional problems dealt with in the earlier monograph, and also provides the reader much fascinating insight into Lincoln's mind, personality, and character. Using to some extent new evidence he discovered, Randall portrays this "strange quaint great man" as an increasingly selfless expert in human relations, whose working rule amid the explosive frictions of his high once became "quarrel not at all."

Volume four covers the last sixteen months of Lincoln's presidential career, omitting the familiar story of the assassination. In these topically organized chapters Randall considers Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction, and Current completes the work with a solid exposition of such subjects as opposition to Lincoln from the Radical Republicans, the election of 1864, and the Thirteenth Amendment.

Considered as a whole, Lincoln the President is not in the strict sense of the term a new interpretation. What Randall says has in the main already been revealed. But in concentrating not upon Lincoln's whole life but upon the presidency with its many problems of transcendent importance, Randall outlined for himself a field of study in which he could present such a wealth of discerning and well-organized detail that the total effect is one of newness. As David M. Potter has written, Randall has recreated "the Lincoln of mundane greatness." It is an achievement that will not soon be surpassed.

Among the Lincoln legends that have been scotched by his­torians are the ones that tell how he grieved over the death of his only love, Ann Rutledge, how he once jilted Mary Todd at the church door, and how she later married him for spite and made their married life into a constant torment for poor Abraham. Yarns like these, consisting of varying mixtures of half-truth and fiction, were spread abroad after Lincoln's death by his former law partner, William Herndon, and were once widely believed. But modern scholars like Randall, Paul Angle, and David Donald have now thoroughly exposed Herndon as an amateur psychoanalyst and myth-maker who often twisted the truth in order to provide spicy entertainment for his readers and auditors and to vent a personal spite against Mary Lincoln. Drawing upon the work of her husband and others as well as her own research, Ruth Painter Randall has published Mary Lincoln: Biography of A Marriage, which convincingly sums up the evidence that the Lincolns were a loving and happily married couple. If anything, Mrs. Randall may go a bit too far in, minimizing the unhappy aspects, such as the distressing increase of Mary Lincoln's mental instability in the trying war years. Another book by Mrs. Randall, Lincoln's Sons, rounds out the picture of this famous American family, and in the process provides so much perceptive description of Lincoln as father and husband in the White House that it adds a new dimension to Lincoln the President.

David Donald, a former student of Randall's, has thought deeply about Lincoln and the Civil War, and some of the provocative fruits of this thinking can be found in a collection of his essays entitled Lincoln Reconsidered. Perhaps the most interesting, and most controversial, of his interpretations is the argument that the Radicals in the Republican party were not a consistent and cohesive faction, and that the leading historian of Lincoln and the Radicals, T. Harry Williams, has exaggerated the differences between them.

Williams himself has recently set forth a controversial thesis on Lincoln. In Lincoln and His Generals he maintains that Lincoln ably directed Union military strategy, and that contrary to Grant's memoirs this direction did not end when Grant became general-in-chief. Indeed, Grant's final objective, to destroy Lee's army rather than to capture Richmond, appears under Williams' analysis to be essentially Lincolnian. Not all historians by any means agree with this argument, nor with Williams' contention that the modern system of army command developed under Lincoln. To some extent it is all a question of how terms are interpreted, of how the evidence is emphasized and argued. But though the present situation is fluid, it is safe to predict that a campaigner of Williams historical skill will not be easily vanquished.

New only in the sense that it compresses the best Lincoln scholarship into one readable volume, but important because of that accomplishment, is Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, by Benjamin P. Thomas. It supersedes Lord Charnwood's life of Lincoln as the standard brief work. Another one-volume biography of merit is Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years, a condensation of his great multi-volume study, revised in keeping with new research; and still another is Reinhard H. Luthin's big, detailed book, The Real Abraham Lincoln, which contains very useful bibliographical backnotes.

In sharp contrast to Lincoln, the leader of the other nation in the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, has fared poorly at the hands of historians. The full-scale, objective biography of him is yet to come. Historians used to say of him, in effect, "Well, of course he wasn't a genius like Lincoln, but all things considered he was probably the ablest national leader available to the Confederacy." Now even this faint praise is being withdrawn. Gilbert E. Govan and James W. Livingood have done a biography of General Joseph E. Johnston, A Different Valor, in which Davis emerges as a second protagonist. He is anything but impressive. Using evidence that cannot easily be brushed aside, the authors depict a petty, vindictive president who seems less concerned with winning the war than with smiting his personal enemy, Johnston.

That Davis was indeed too quarrelsome for the good of his nation is also the conclusion of Bell Irvin Wiley in The Road to Appomattox, an admirably objective analysis of factors that led to the defeat of the Confederacy. Wiley regards Davis as honest, courageous, and devoted to the South, but feels that his numerous personal faults as President outweighed his virtues. Probably all Civil War historians would agree, however, that the full evidence on Davis remains to be assessed.

Quantitatively, military history currently overshadows every other historical approach to the Civil War. This in itself is a new trend, a marked change from the twenties and thirties, when Charles and Mary Beard could remark how unimportant the actual fighting was, and how the grass soon covered the Civil War battlefields. Here again we see the impact of the present upon historical fashion. We live today in a military age, and military histories in various forms are appearing in such numbers that only a fraction of them can be mentioned here. Nothing yet excels the monumental Southern military history of Douglas Southall Freeman, but from the Northern point of view Kenneth P. Williams, army office and mathematician turned historian, has produced five volumes on the campaigns of the Union armies under the title Lincoln Finds A General. Death has ended this fruitful study; volume five, extending through the battle of Chickamauga, is a posthumous publication. Impressive in its scope and detail, Williams work has won high praise from some critics. Others have pointed out that Williams rides his personal biases hard—he despises General George B. McClellan as much as he idolizes Grant, the general in the title—and tends to ignore manuscript evidence that corrects the Official Records, which he loved to comb minutely. What can be said categorically of his volumes is that they provide the student of Civil War battles with a mine of accurately marshaled facts and keen observations.

From a different viewpoint, Bruce Catton has written the history of the Army of the Potomac in a series of separate books, Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg, and the Pulitzer prize-winning A Stillness at Appomattox. This is descriptive rather than critical military history, but Catton's facts are generally accurate, his style forceful and artistic, and his ability to convey the sight, sound, and excitement of battle unexcelled. His volumes are enriched by his use of colorful detail drawn from regimental histories.

A brief summary of some of the more important military biographies would include on the Confederate side the previously mentioned life of Johnston by Govan and Livingood, T. Harry Williams' P. G. T. Beauregard, which also sheds light on Davis enmities and the many weaknesses of the Confederate high command, and two studies by Frank E. Vandiver, Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance, and Mighty Stonewall. Vandiver's life of Gorgas presents much valuable information on the Confederate ordnance bureau that Gorgas headed; the life of Stonewall Jackson provides illuminating material on Jackson's pre-Civil War career that is not to be found in G. F. R. Henderson's biography or in Freeman. Not a full biography but a study, essentially, of a controversial military career is Lee's Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill, by Hal Bridges, which challenges Freeman's views of Hill and his battles, and offers fresh fact and interpretation on Lee, Longstreet, Jefferson Davis, Jackson, and other Confederate leaders.

On the Northern side, a number of volumes afford new perspective on Grant and his subordinates. Lloyd Lewis, before his untimely death, began a biographical trilogy with Captain Sam Grant, which reached the outbreak of the Civil War; and Bruce Catton, in Grant Moves South, has ably carried the project through the great Vicksburg campaign. Another author, Clarence Edward Macartney, has taken a skeptical look at tradition and utilized solid research to make fresh appraisals of well-known figures in Grant and His Generals. In contrast, L. Van Loan Naisawald breaks new ground, and gives us long-needed information on perhaps the most effective arm used by Grant, McClellan, and other Union commanders, with his Grape and Canister: The Story of the Field Artillery of the Army of the Potomac, 1861–1865.

Moving out of the combat zone to activities behind the lines, we find historians busily filling in long-standing gaps in the social and economic record. For example, until 1952 we knew relatively little about the wartime railroads, but since that year three different books on this subject have appeared: Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War 1861–1865; Robert C. Black, III, The Railroads of the Confederacy; and George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of the Railroads in the Civil War. Weber and Black show how the war affected the railroads, North and South; Turner is more concerned with how the railroads affected the war on both sides. Thus the three studies supplement one another about as much as they overlap, and taken together greatly augment our knowledge of this long-neglected subject.

Two books have recently been devoted to the journalists who described the war for Northern newspaper readers. Bernard A. Weisberger's very readable Reporters for the Union advances the thesis that the battlefield was a journalistic training ground for Union reporters and that despite their many prejudices and failings they became professionals during the war. J. Cutler Andrews' The North Reports the Civil War presents on this same topic more detailed and precise information, such as a useful list of some three hundred reporters with their pen names and the newspapers that employed them.

Newspapers also receive much attention, though from a quite different point of view, in The Copperheads in the Middle West, by Frank L. Klement. The author undertakes extensive analysis of press opinion in this troubled region (while not overlooking other contemporary sources), and concludes that old political enmities inspired unwarranted charges of treason against Democrats. These accusations, he believes, have misled historians and caused them to exaggerate the danger to the Union posed by midwestern Copperheadism.

Much broader in scope, and even more productive of light in dark corners, is Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years, by Robin W. Winks. This thoroughly researched study shows how much danger of war existed between the Union and British North America, and how closely the "undefended" international border was actually patrolled. The Canadians, Winks demonstrates, entertained strong feelings of fear and hostility not all of them illogical, by any means against the North, and did not, as the old myth has it, enlist by the thousands in the Union army.

While Winks has uncovered a neglected Civil War subject, Canada, Wilfred Buck Yearns has done much the same with—of all things, at this late date—The Confederate Congress. His book is a painstaking and highly informative account of congressional debates and legislation with regard to such knotty problems as conscription, martial law, foreign affairs, and war finance. He finds that in general the congress was hardworking and devoted to duty, that it originated few major policies, that it may have "meddled too much with those of the administration," and that its uncertain course between initial cooperation with President Davis and increasing opposition to him, as war discontents and difficulties piled up, helped impair its public reputation.

Sound social histories of various aspects of the armed forces are becoming numerous. Bell Irvin Wiley, in The Life of Billy Yank, does for the Union soldier what he earlier did for Johnny Reb; he takes the fighting man out of battle and shows how he amused himself in camp, how he dressed, what he ate, and in general what kind of composite individual he was. Ella Lonn, in Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy, has done as solid a monograph as her well-known study of foreigners in the Confederacy, published some twenty years ago. She concludes that there were more than half a million foreign-born enlistments in the Union army alone. Two other social histories give the Negro soldier his due. The Negro in the Civil War, by Benjamin Quarles, calls attention to the Negro labor battalions as well as the Negro fighting men, and punches fresh holes in the legend of the slaves' indifference to the Northern cause and loyalty to their masters. The Sable Arm, by Dudley Taylor Cornish, concentrates on the Negro troops in the Union army, some 123,000 of them in July 1865, twelve per cent of the total enrollment. Cornish traces the steps by which colored men, in the face of Northern racial prejudice, were brought into the army, and after sifting the evidence in the Official Records concludes that Negro soldiers compared favorably with whites in training and combat, an achievement that won the Negro veteran considerable respect in the North after the Civil War.

Another American minority group, which numbered only about 150,000 in 1860, is the subject of Bertram Wallace Korn's scholarly American Jewry and the Civil War. The author describes how American Jews united in pressuring Congress and President Lincoln into allowing Jewish chaplains in the army and curbing Grant's anti-Semitism. His freshest contribution, perhaps, is his portrayal of the rise of Judaeophobia in both North and South as the Jew became a popular scapegoat for the suffering occasioned by the later years of the war.

Anyone who has gained the impression from diaries and memoirs that army surgery in the sixties was simply a horrible, unsanitary hacking off of arms and legs should read George Worthington Adams' Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War. Adams follows the progress of the Union Medical Bureau from near chaos to a later wartime efficiency that excited the admiration of European observers. Bureau doctors, before Lister's discoveries, learned that cleanliness kept down disease. More than an army medical history despite its compressed brevity, this illuminating book reveals a great deal about the general medical practices of the times. The companion study is Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service, by H. H. Cunningham, a full and penetrating account of virtually every aspect of its subject the personnel, the administrative organization, the causes and types of disease suffered by the soldiers, the medical supplies and methods that were used, etc. Like Adams, Cunningham finds more scientific knowledge and sanitation in the doctors' efforts than has generally been supposed. Further light on the problem of medical supplies in the Confederacy, as a result of the blockade, is shed by Mary Elizabeth Massey's Ersatz in the Confederacy, a neatly defined monograph that brims with information about wartime makeshifts in food, clothing, and other daily necessities.

Social history is a strong point of the most comprehensive study of the South during the war, E. Merton Coulter's The Confederate States of America, 1861–1865, volume VII in the History of the South series. Coulter confines military events to one chapter, and though he does not slight the political and diplomatic story, he devotes ample space to the discussion of such topics as manufactures, newspapers, and religion. An exceptionally good classified bibliography completes this useful synthesis.

Reconstruction histories are steadily increasing in number, but the time has long since passed when embattled writers in each of the Southern states felt the need of producing monographs that would rescue the conquered South from false Northern history. Today's student of Reconstruction, no matter where his sectional sympathies may lie, is likely to be more interested in sound facts and hypotheses than in special pleading. Even Reconstruction studies that relate to present-day controversial issues like racial segregation are more often than not characterized by temperate judgment and a relative lack of sectional bias.

Such a work is Joseph B. James's The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. As the title indicates, James is mainly concerned with tracing the evolution of the amendment and deducing the ideas and attitudes of the men who sponsored it; therefore the book contains relatively little on the complex ratification question. As to the motives of the sponsors, James believes that they did not foresee the future connection between their amendment and segregation; he also, like others before him, finds little evidence to sustain the old "conspiracy theory" that clever lawyers consciously framed the amendment to make it a shield for corporate privilege.

Another treatment of the legal issues of this area, and an exceptionally able one, is Pardon and Amnesty Under Lincoln and Johnson by Jonathan Truman Dorris. Here for the first time a modern scholar makes a thorough examination of the vexing problems involved in deciding just what offense Southerners had committed when they gave allegiance to the Confederacy instead of to the United States, and clearly traces the tortuous evolution of the federal pardon and amnesty policies. He shows how Congress, which at first was under the sway of vindictives like Thaddeus Stevens, became more lenient in granting clemency as time went on. The United States Supreme Court, which appears rather feeble in some Reconstruction history, stands out in this work as the protector of the power of the President against congressional efforts to curtail presidential amnesty.

Teachers who have been required to take loyalty oaths in this modern Cold War period of conformity will be especially interested in Harold Melvin Hyman's Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Jests During the Civil War and Reconstruction. As now, so then: significant numbers of Americans had to produce evidence of loyalty on demand. During the Civil War, Hyman points out, there was little tolerance in the North for the dissenter, and after the war had ended congressional Radicals demanded that Southern leaders prove they had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy. The instruments of such proof were the loyalty oaths established by various acts of Congress. That they were ineffective and merely excluded honorable men from government is the author's conclusion, which seems amply justified by the evidence. Although he wisely refrains from drawing strained parallels with the present, the lesson his study holds for today's lawmakers is obvious.

Perhaps the most interesting of all approaches to the legal basis of Reconstruction is through the successive efforts of Lincoln to achieve it by executive, as opposed to congressional, action. In a thought-provoking monograph, Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction, William B. Hesseltine examines these efforts, points out that all of them failed, and suggests that the President, at the time of his assassination, probably had no plan. That he did have one which would have "healed the nation's wounds with love and forgiveness" if he had lived is a myth, writes Hesseltine. Yet if Lincoln failed in his attempts to reconstruct the South he "had still reconstructed the nation" by subordinating the states to its power.

With Lincoln's passing, Andrew Johnson was left to face the Radicals under the command of Thaddeus Stevens. Fawn Brodie, in Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, has supplemented Richard N. Current's earlier biography of the terrible congressman by giving us a fuller account of his early life, with emphasis upon its psychological aspects, while Eric L. McKitrick, in Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, has issued a full-blown challenge to established interpretations of Johnson's presidential leadership. Lincoln's successor, declares McKitrick, was indeed honest and honorable, as historians long ago proved, but he was also an outsider in national party politics, a tactless, fiercely class-conscious and self-conscious political maverick who blundered away his opportunities to further the reconciliation of North and South. Thus far, critics have both praised and condemned McKitrick's sweeping revisions of Reconstruction history, but all seem to agree that he has vigorously reopened an important subject.

Revisionist history is also presented in Robert P. Sharkey's Money, Class, and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Recon­struction. On the basis of a detailed re-examination of the topics listed in his title, the author concludes that while the Beards economic interpretation of this historical era is valid in broad outline, it needs refinement. He argues that the Beards, and after them Howard K. Beale and Louis M. Hacker, made conceptual monoliths of such words as "capitalists," and "Radicals," though actually each term embraces divergent interests—for example, bankers as opposed to manufacturers, and "sound-money" as opposed to "soft-money" Radicals. By drawing such distinctions, Sharkey arrives at a number of significant revisions in the Beardian theory of the "Second American Revolution."

One of the most brilliant monographs in the field of Reconstruction history has advanced a new interpretation of the way in which Rutherford B. Hayes stepped into the Presidency after the heated election of 1876 had ended and a pro-Republican Electoral Commission had awarded him all disputed electoral votes, thus shutting the Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden out of the White House despite his popular majority. According to the traditional story, the threat of a Democratic filibuster in early February, 1877, to block the final counting of the votes in Congress was ended by a conference held between friends of Hayes and Southern political leaders in Washington's Wormley Hotel. The Hayes spokesmen were supposed to have promised the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in return for Democratic support in seating Hayes. But according to the evidence set forth in C. Vann Woodward's Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, the actual events were not so simple. The Wormley conference, Woodward demonstrates, had nothing to do with the compromise. Weeks earlier, negotiations leading to the final agreement had been initiated by spokesmen for Hayes, Northern railroad lobbyists, and Southern Democratic leaders who had formerly been Whigs. The Southerners threw their support to Hayes after receiving promises of federal aid for internal improvements in the South, including assistance to the Texas and Pacific Railroad. The irony of it all was that after Hayes had been seated the Republicans went back on their promises of economic aid. So runs Wood-ward's interpretation. Some details of his analysis of the part played by Southern votes in Congress have been challenged, but in all likelihood the main outlines of his account will prove to be definitive.

After reading Woodward's book one should look into John F. Stover's The Railroads of the South, 1865–1900: A Study in Finance and Control. Here is the story of how northern financiers progressively took over railroads in the postwar South until by 1900 they controlled perhaps as much as ninety per cent of Southern railway mileage. And for Northern influence of a different kind, consult Mary R. Dearing's Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G. A. R. It explains, among other things, how the Grand Army of the Republic "Generally All Republicans" in popular parlance—strove to keep the war spirit alive and to censor textbooks that showed evidence of leniency toward the South.

If the new national prominence of the Negro has led to an increase in Civil War studies that deal with him, this may also help explain why books about the Negro during Reconstruction are multiplying. Three in particular are noteworthy: The Negro Freed­man, by Henderson H. Donald; A History of the Freedman's Bureau, by George R. Bentley; and Negro Militia and Reconstruction, by Otis A. Singletary. Donald, using an objective sociological approach, studies the life conditions of the Negro during the three decades following emancipation. After examining such things as the Negro's reaction to freedom, his working and spending habits, family life, etc., he concludes that the former slaves in time made successful adjustments to free society except for being shut out of politics by the whites. Bentley's history of the chief federal agency for bringing about this social adjustment makes good use of the unpublished records of the Freedman's Bureau and of the O. O. Howard manuscripts. His conclusion, based upon a careful weighing of the role of the Bureau in Reconstruction, is that it definitely helped the Negro to gain in wealth, education, and political influence, but its methods angered Southern whites and intensified racial prejudice among them. Singletary's incisive little monograph also deals with racial conflict, showing how the Negro militia originated, how it was organized and operated in Southern states, and how Southern white Conservatives reacted violently to its political use by the Radicals.

Before the history of Reconstruction in the South can be fully written, a number of mature biographies of individual carpetbaggers are needed. Such a biography is Jonathan Daniels' Prince of Carpetbaggers, a life of General Milton S. Littlefield, the handsome scoundrel who was infamous in North Carolina and Florida for his manipulations of legislatures and railroad bonds. In recounting these exploits, Daniels emphasizes that most of Littlefield's associates were native Southerners, like his chief associate, the Virginia-born North Carolinian, George W. Swepson.

After Reconstruction—what? C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, volume IX—in A History of the South, overlaps the Reconstruction period and carries the story onward. Outstanding among the volumes in this series, as valuable for the errors it sweeps away as for the fresh information it presents, it serves as a reminder that Reconstruction did not really end abruptly in 1877 as historians sometimes assume for convenience, but gradually faded away and merged the Old South and the Reconstructed South into the New South, which may not have been so new after all.

In conclusion a few generalizations might be pertinent, though they must of course be tentative because it is still too early to see the new Civil War and Reconstruction history in proper perspective.

1. With regard to the causes of the war, historians today are no nearer complete agreement than they have been in the past. As the focus of their research broadens and its methods and sources multiply, the evidence they must deal with seems to become ever more complex, defying the easy, all-satisfying explanation. To say this is simply to point to the limits of historical analysis. Just as the writer of history should constantly keep in mind the humbling thought that he can never know the whole truth, that indeed he does well to arrive at even a small part of it, so should the reader and teacher of history always remember that no one book, and certainly no one textbook, gives more than a partial answer to the simple yet profound question, "Why did this big event happen the way it did?"

2. Time has not entirely erased sectional bias from historical discussion of the coming of the war. Emotions that flamed into national fratricide a century ago seem to glow and occasionally sizzle a bit in dignified academic paragraphs composed about slavery. On this subject and its close associate, antislavery, views that might be called pro-Northern on the one hand and pro-Southern on the other continue to appear. Historians after all are human beings with human sympathies. Some marvelous mechanical brain, in this technological age, may some day grind out a completely objective study of why and how the war came about but whether this product would have much meaning is a question upon which it is interesting to reflect.

3. Strikingly evident in the recent Civil War history is the historians' perennial fascination with Lincoln. If he is no longer a demigod, if the scholars have brought him firmly to earth, he is nevertheless emerging as so many-sided in his excellencies and so bafflingly mysterious in his failings that he appears like a Jefferson or a Franklin to stand larger than life. In part this may be illusion the tall man may have been elevated to some extent simply by the mountains of books beneath his feet but scholarship of the quality of the recent Lincolnian volumes cannot be wholly sustained by littleness falsely magnified. There is greatness in Abraham Lincoln, so much of it that historians need never again speculate, as they once did, on whether the Lincoln theme can be exhausted. It cannot. It is here to stay.

4. On the Confederate side of the war the great man is not a statesman but a general, a good, gray general with kindly eyes, and if anything has remained virtually unchanged under the recent barrage of Civil War books it is the legend of the utterly selfless Robert E. Lee. Enlarged to awesome proportions in Douglas Southall Freeman's seven magisterial volumes, R. E. Lee and Lee's Lieutenants, this legend marches durably onward from one generation to another. Hal Bridges has offered evidence against the legend in his book on D. H. Hill, and believes that a fruitful biographical field might be opened not by would-be debunkers but by scholars who would probe deeply and critically into the motives and character of the truly great but perhaps, like Lincoln, very humanly great—R. E. Lee.

5. Although biography has tended to dominate Civil War military history, a trend may be developing toward administrative and organizational studies like Naisawald's history of artillery. Much important detail of this nature remains to be filled in, but already the proliferation of good books has altered the story of the war more than a little. The full impact of all the new investigations will not be revealed until some historian of the training and talent of a G. F. R. Henderson provides us with a broad and thoroughgoing synthesis.

6. Contrasting with the abundance of books in the military field is the paucity of contributions in diplomatic history. The diplomats receive thorough treatment in Winks's volume on Canada and the United States, but other full-scale studies comparable to such earlier works as Ephraim D. Adams' Great Britain and the American Civil War and Frank L. Towsley's King Cotton Diplomacy are seemingly still in the future.

7. Social history, as distinct from old-fashioned political history, is taking up more and more space in the textbooks these days. It is therefore hardly surprising to find strong emphasis upon social history in the more specialized works on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Writers of general studies in this field pay much attention to developments in religion, education, philosophy and literature, business and industry. Writers of monographs devote entire books to social themes, such as race relations. Rare indeed is the book that deals with politics and nothing else; present-day historians tend to analyze political events within the matrix of the socio-economic background.

8. A heightened interest in the Negro which may be traceable in part to the current segregation controversy is characteristic of the new history. Studies of the Negro in the Civil War era were available long before the fifties, but not much had been done on his contributions to the Northern war effort. This gap in the record is now being filled. A major remaining area of research is the Negro's role in Reconstruction, and no doubt we shall soon have books that will attempt to reappraise, with greater objectivity than heretofore, this important and relatively neglected subject.

9. Although the more recent books on the Civil War and Reconstruction owe much to earlier ones, the history of the fifties and after seems to be accumulating noteworthy stores of fresh facts and hypotheses, as evidenced by such contributions as Woodward's reappraisal of the compromise of 1877, Dorris' pathbreaking study of pardon and amnesty, and Klement's investigation of the Copper-heads. As yet no sweeping new thesis like the economic interpretation of the war popularized by Charles and Mary Beard has been advanced, but it may be not far in the future. Since there is now so much opportunity for broad synthesis not only of military writings but also of the newer publications in the entire Civil War and Reconstruction field, it seems reasonable to suppose that more historians will attempt synthesis and in the process advance new unifying ideas.

10. The recent history can be characterized as generally sound, informative, and useful. It is based on high standards of research, and on the whole it is well written. The dull, sleep-inducing monograph still makes an occasional appearance, but there seems to be a growing awareness that history should be readable. This trend, which happily seems to extend at present through all American historical writing, will doubtless be welcomed by teachers who would like to see their students read more history.

11. As the output of good Civil War history increases, so does the production of inferior works of a historical nature. The writers of quickie history are quite aware of the current popular interest in the Civil War, and they are capitalizing on it. One sometimes hears the prediction that by the time the centennial years have passed everyone from the student in the classroom to the general reader will be so sated with sectional conflict, with slavery and secession and Bull Run and Gettysburg, that an immense national yawn will greet any author who tries to write about this period of American history. However, not necessarily so. Appreciators of good books on the Civil War can take comfort in reflecting that superficial history has not in the past killed American interest in the failure and triumph of Union and probably will not do so now, even with the aid of television. In all likelihood the reading public will continue to be interested in the fundamentally significant issues of the Civil War era, serious historians will publish more good books on the period, and teachers year after year will find fresh, absorbing lessons for their students in the great problems faced by Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and not quite solved by them, nor by us.

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