Lincoln’s Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President. By Kathry Canavan. Photos, notes, index bibliography, 248 pp., 2018. University Press of Kentucky,
Lincoln’s assassination is haps the most studied and wri ten-about aspect of his life. wonders what new information can be uncovered in yet anoth book.
Send your bo CWN Book Review Editor, 3670 Falling Leaf Lane, Cum
In a relatively short volume author presents a unique take on various events leading up to the calamity, the event itself and t aftermath. The story unfolds in 25 chapters, each covering a par ticular aspect. An epilogue pres ents short biographies of major participants. At only 183 pages of text we get a broad overview rather than a typical micro-managed presentation. An ample bibliography gives readers good sources for further research. I found this to be a unique e in the plethora of Lincoln books It seemed to me to be targeting audience of novice students. It simple in style and the information is not cluttered with detai I must admit I did garner severa nuggets of information, particularly about the Peterson family. It does have appeal to the more seasoned student. Overall, I found this to be a
worthy effort—easy to read and full of information. I highly re ommend that you get a copy for a young student and put him or her on the path to discovering a defining moment in American history.
Joseph Truglio, of Manchester, N.J., is president of the Phil K Civil War Round Table.
Ideas of Citizenship Change in the Crucible of the Civil War The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America. By Erik Mathisen. Images, notes, bibliography, index, 240 pp., 2018. University
Who qualifies as a citizen? How is citizenship determined? Can one lose citizenship? If so, how does one get it back? How closely related are the ideas of loyalty and citizenship? The answers to these questions continu to evolve in American politics and society. However, few if any periods in American history had a greater impact on who is considered a citizen and what that means than the Civil War and
Reconstruction eras. Legally recognized citizenshi has presented obstacles to tradi tionally marginalized individual over the years. For example, at one period in American history only white property-owning males had citizenship status. And even then, elements of citizenship remained fuzzy as far as state-versus-nation loyalty and sovereignty. Obviously, citizenship has come to include many different groups of people in the years since the Civil War However, much of that change had its foundation in the crucib of the conflict.
In The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the
Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America, Erik Mathisen uses the Mississippi Valley as his geographical area of focus. That region is an excellent choi due to all of the change it experienced during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Although
to secede, there were pockets where loyalty to the United State remained strong, and it was home to individuals who were unwilling to claim allegiance to the newly formed Confederacy. This situation presented intrigu-
whether one’s greater loyalty was to the state of Mississippi or to the emerging Confederate nation. On the surface this may seem one
and the same, but various issues arose that hardened those lines and often made for difficult situ
tions for many. Mathisen explains that this era brought previously unavailable opportunities for African Americans to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. By fleeing their owners and entering Union lines, either to provide labor or enlist as soldiers when finally allowed to do so, they opened new doors toward citizenship. Blacks would ultimately use their loyalty during the Civil War as a leverage point in Reconstruction’s initial years The formerly enslaved, especially those who had fought in USCT regiments, demanded recognition as citizens as reward for their service and sacrifice. Those demands were realized in the form of Constitutional amendments (14th & 15th), which in turn bred resentment among former Confederates. One area that Mathisen could
have probed further is the idea of fluid allegiances and what those meant in terms of one’s citizenship. It would make for fascinating analysis to examine those areas of the Mississippi Valley that were initially under state and Confederate control but fell to Union occupation, and how residents’ loyalty followed prevailing authority. It would have been equally intriguing to examine how those who exercised a fluid allegiance duri
the war were later received in their home communities during Reconstruction. The Loyal Republic is a well-researched, thought-provok ing, and timely work that makes one reexamine preconceptions
Americans presently debating ho issues like immigration reform,
entitlement rights, voter regul tion and other citizenship-rela concerns, it is important to un
stand the history of citizenshi and how it has evolved over tim Joining other important works such as Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) and Paul Quigley’s Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (2011), The Loyal Republic is a significant addition to the growing list of scholarship on this topic.
Tim Talbott is the Director of Education, Interpretation, Visi Services, and Collections at Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil Wa Soldier in Petersburg, Va. He i currently researching the vario combination of elements that le to emancipation.
Reconstruction: A Concise History. By Allen C. Guelzo. Photos, notes, index, 180 pp., 201
For quite some time a brief, ba anced history of Reconstruction ha been needed—a short, judicious monograph that synthesizes previous scholarship to the satisfactio of objective historians, but also remains accessible to the educated general public. Although this is n that book, it will probably enjoy respectable sales—for it is indeed concise, as well as inexpensive and handsomely packaged. But, alas, this title will also no doub widely adopted as a college text, since it features scholarly trappi and (most important for university assignment) exceptionally correct political ideology. Guelzo’s book appears three decades after the publication of Eric Foner’s revisionist classic, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988). Like most revisionist Reconstruction historians since the late 1980s, Guelzo belongs to what may now be termed the Foner school of Reconstruction historiography— university scholars who have followed Foner’s lead in attempting to obliterate the Dunning school histories of the early 20th centur There is a pleasing symmetry to the idea of Dunning and Foner schools—both take their names from eminent Columbia University professors linked with Reconstruction history. And the Foner school (building on previous revisionist works) has now enjoyed a three-decade ascendancy. This period is comparable to the inaugural thirty-year span between William A. Dunning’s first major Reconstruction title in 1897 and
1927, by which year all of the Dunning scholars’ Southern State Studies had been published. In opposing the Dunningites, Guelzo and the other Fonerites
Leftward from Appomattox applaud Congressiona Reconstruction, celebrate Radicals of all sorts, display conspicuous hostility toward the conquered white South, and ensconce the freed slaves at the valorized center of their accounts. Unlike the Dunning school’s first three decades---which saw other interpretations published, as well as spirited attacks from various historians—the Foner school has received practically unanimous peer approval and has been imitated repeatedly. Nonetheless, as a 30th anniversary recapitulation of Foner school Reconstruction orthodoxy, Guelzo’s book seems malapropos, even beyond the lèse-majesté of competing directly with Foner’s 2015 abridgement of his school’s 1988 urtext. That opus, whatever else might be said of it, rested o monumental print and manuscript research at widespread repositories. In comparison, Guelzo uses only readily available printed pri mary sources and secondary works and makes no pretense of doing more. Such an approach works best when the author steeps himself in an abundance of such sources and displays his mastery of them. But there is often something of a dilettante’s view to Guelzo’s survey, a suggestion of sources glanced at hastily and sometimes read and quoted carelessly. And, despite its brevity, the book is neither tightly focused nor closel edited. Mistakes are frequent. For examples, in a sampling of erroneous references to Georgia alone, Guelzo has the Empire State reconstructed twice rather than its record three times and makes its scalawag Republican governor a carpetbagger (or, to use Guelzo’s euphemism, a “missionary of free labor”). One of the book’s many images of white-on-black atrocities (five appear on the dust jack alone) comes from an 1872 memoir of abolitionist-turned-planter Charles Stearns: a crude sketch of election-day skullduggery in Columbia County, where it happened (and showing accurately the county seat structures of the time) is wrongly ascribed to Taylo County, some 130 miles distant. Additionally, readers are told tha in Mitchell County “five cases of Henry rifles were used by local Democrats to attack a Republican rally in Camilla, killing nine”—a gross mischaracterization of the incident, as well as a misreading
of the source. But at least this source can be located through its endnote, unlike an 1867 letter wri ten by novelist and Georgia native Augusta Jane Evans, quoted for
displaying her “gendered disdain” for the free-labor North. Although his works principally proclaim Guelzo to be a diligent miner of the Lincoln Lode, he nonetheless cannot be charged with unfamiliarity with the period’s major sources; this book actually marks the third time Guelzo has published a brief history of Reconstruction. His earlier surveys appeared in two differently titled but textually similar 1995 and 2012 accounts of the Civil War and its aftermath. In both books the wa receives the lion’s share of coverage, but the briefer Reconstruction sections are suitably Fonerite. For the new book, the two earlier narra tives have been recast, although al three surveys feature one favored metaphor: the transformation of Revisionist arch-villain Andrew Johnson from the “Moses” of the freed people into their “Pharaoh.” In the freshest interpretation o his latest book, Guelzo imagines Reconstruction as a “bourgeois revolution,” a tentative and poorly developed concept that nonetheless imports into the book both class analysis and the vital word “revolution.” This coinage also allows the author to share his image of what the South’s post-Civil War period should have been: “a Unionapproved narrative of triumphant embourgeoisment.” Obviously, Guelzo concurs with Foner’s assertion that “Even more than most historical endeavors, writing the history of Reconstruction has always been a political task as well as a scholar one.” In fact, so conspicuously doe Guelzo belong to the left-leaning Foner school that many of David Donald’s comments regarding Foner’s 1988 book serve just as well for Guelzo’s 2018 offering. Both books “overidealize the black community” and are “so lacking in sympathy for all Southern whites that their problems receive none of the thoughtful analysis and sympathetic understanding . . . [given to issues that confronted blacks. Readers . . . will not understand t most ex-Confederates were not involved in the lynchings, terrorism, and Ku Klux Klan vigilantism . . . to which [the author] devotes so much attention. Instead, they lived hardscrabble lives, attempting to restore a region devastated by war.” Nonetheless, Guelzo occasionally declares his independence from Foner—he returns the beginning date of Reconstruction to 1865
from Foner’s 1863, and his narrative organization is more strictly chronological than Foner’s. But two chronological disruptions occur. First, legal and
constitutional issues receive thei own chapter late in the book, rath than being effectively integrated within the text, as in Guelzo’s tw earlier looks at Reconstruction. Second, the author unaccountably delays description of the South’s chaotic, devastated postbellum condition until his third chapter, covering March 1867-May 1868, and thereby delays giving context for white Southerners’ thoughts and actions during the two years after Appomattox. Moreover, where the conquered white South is concerned, Guelzo seems even more ruthless than others of the Foner school. To bring the South into acceptability, he toys with such ideas as implanting “a New England-style high type of culture” in the region, and of assuring Union loyalty by importing workers and voters from the North. But, in particular, Guelzo wishes on the region’s population a more stringent and prolonged period of military rule. Had the former Confederacy been kept longer under heavy heel, he argues, Reconstruction would not have been “overthrown, subverted, and betrayed.” Guelzo further contends that th victorious North’s unwise leniency toward the fallen Confederacy was repeated disastrously in later cen ries, when the United States faile
to impose “lengthy and expensive occupations” on Germany after th Great War and on Iraq after the Gulf Wars. With this comparison, Guelzo highlights his opinion of the defeated South’s wickedness. In the three decades between Foner’s and Guelzo’s books on Reconstruction, little has chang in the ruling academic left’s vi of America’s postbellum period. And there seems little reason to hope for a detached and responsi ble account of Reconstruction to emerge in the next thirty years— particularly since Guelzo’s pres tist, fully politicized study ha been issued by the world’s large university press.
William Harris Bragg, of Gray, Georgia, wrote the Introduction to a new (2017) edition of Reconstruction in Georgia by C. Mildred Thompson (one of Dunning’s students). His publications center on the U.S. Middl Period. Among them, De Renne (1999), traces a Savannah planter family through the Civil War and Reconstruction. “The Junius of Georgia Redemption: The ‘Nemesis’ Letters of Thomas M. Norwood” (Georgia Historical Quarterly, Spring 1993) deals wi the 1871 collapse of Radical rul Georgia.
Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship that Changed America (conclusion)
Book Review Editor’s note: our last month’s column, Gen Grant had been enticed by th Century Company of New York to publish his memoirs. Mark Twain then asked the general his own company to publish t book. Meanwhile, Grant’s thr cancer was worsening, even a he worked hours on end, ever day writing his recollection pick up the story here, in t of 1884, based upon Mark Per
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in uni Collection, Library of Congr
Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship that Changed America (New York, 2005).
Twain finally finis Huckleberry Finn in 1883, after nine years of off-and-on again writing. Disappointed with the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Twain decided to have Charley Webster publish hi new book. Twain gave Webster his manuscript, “with strict in structions,” as Perry writes, “ the book could be issued only after a large number of copies actually been sold.” Thus Twain was talking with Grant about th general’s memoirs when he was working hard to get his own boo published. After Twain left Grant’s New York City home on Nov. 20, Grant discussed the offer with Fred, Julia and Adam Badeau. He then wrote to a friend, Geor Childs, asking him to come to New York and assess the competing book offers. Childs soon decided that Twain had extended the better deal. “His condition now stable,” Perry explains, Grant was again able to write. He was at this point, in early Dec. 1884, abou
to finish drafting the first part his memoirs. Finally, after Twain offered a 20 percent royalty on book sales (well above Century’s ten percent offer), Grant declared, “Give the book to Twain.” Clemens enthusiastically predicted that the general’s royalties could eventu-
Grant and his family some money in the meantime, Twain set aside
ly unusual practice at the time,” Perry notes. The Century Company’s leaders accepted Grant’s decision without rancor, understanding that in the publishing business, in every business, it was all abo the money. Throughout late 1884, Grant tried to keep the actual state of his health from the press, even from his friends. When Cump Sherman paid a call to Grant’s home just before Christmas, he was more dismayed by signs of Grant’s financial distress than b evidence of his illness. In Janua ’85, Grant’s health showed slight improvement. “He now rose early each morning,” according to Perry, “wrapped himself in his shawl, and focused on writing his memoirs.” Dr. Douglas came to conclude that the general had resolved to tough it out—determined to finish writing his book before he died. Still, by the end of February 1885, the general had not signed a contract with the Webster Company. On Feb. 26, as he relates in Mark Twain’s Notebook, Twain visited the Grant home; “I was astonished to see how thin an weak he was.” In Mark Perry’s words, “Twain was disturbed by Grant’s wan appearance. The general looked exhausted and spoke with difficulty and barely above whisper.” At the end of his visit Twain was taken aside by Fred, the general’s son, who said that doctors believed that Grant had only a few weeks to live; “Twain was shocked.” Yet Fred assured him that his father was working hard daily. By this time, the fir planned volume of the memoirs was complete (taking Grant’s story from childhood through the Mexican War to Vicksburg), and the second was underway. Twain, writes Perry, was such “Grant-intoxicated man” that he had no doubt of his friend’s abil ty to finish the project. “Over t next months, as Grant faded, recovered, nearly slipped away, and then finally rallied, Twain never lost faith that his friend would win his last battle.” Grant’s determination stemmed in good measure from the awareness that he was writing a book whose sales would provide financially
Samuel Clemens, also known as Mar published in 1906. Frances Benjam photographer.
for Julia and his family. In the process he felt strengthened, eve envisioning the final appearance of the published memoirs: two volumes, each of about 450 printed pages. (In the set that I own, published in 1885 and 1886, Volume One has 584 pages; Two, with an index, is 647 pages long. Clemens aided Grant’s work in several ways. He instructed the Webster Company to finalize its contract and have it delivere to the Grant residence on 66th Street, where Grant finally signe it on February 27. Twain also supported the general’s decision to hire a stenographer, Noble Dawson, to take down Grant’s dictation and read it back to him At the same time, Twain was planning the marketing campaign for the memoirs. He was short of cash, so he took out a loan of
commissions to incentivize their activity. Eventually these sales agents, traveling door to door selling the book, would include a large number of Union veterans, who saw the work as one of homage to a great Northern war leader. “Twain was everywhere at once,” as Perry puts it, “insisti that he oversee every part of the operation, from reading the galleys to ordering the paper to ensuring that the book was properly printed, marketed, advertised, and sold.” But there was a very big issue
that Sam Clemens could not manage: his friend’s health. In ear January 1885, New York papers began reporting that Grant was ill, though they did not know th specifics. So many people in the city were now aware of the general’s malady that the Times cam out with an electrifying headlin on its front page on March 1: “GRANT IS DYING.” Within a day, reporters bunched outside the Grant home, craning to peer into windows. Some irreverently termed their vigil a “death watch.” Reporters from across the country soon arrived. Then there were the casual onlookers and curiosity seekers. Soon the N.Y.P.D. had to post constables outside the house to contain the crowd. Actually, however, Grant’s doctors believed that the general’s writing not only diverted h attention from pain but was, as Dr. Douglas told Julia, possibly enabling him to live longer. Jul disagreed, arguing that the work was weakening her husband and should be suspended. Grant settled the issue by telling eve one that he wanted to continue working. Former comrades made appointments to come by and pay respects; Grant entertained them as his health and work schedule allowed. Even the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnsto visited. Grant proved genuinely happy when he received a visit from John Logan, a Union division commander at Vicksburg;
