---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 9:19 AM Subject: H-Net Review [H-CivWar]: Summers on Suri, 'Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy' To: <[email protected]> Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Jeremi Suri. Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. New York PublicAffairs, 2022. 320 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5417-5854-4. Reviewed by Mark W. Summers (University of Kentucky) Published on H-CivWar (March, 2024) Commissioned by Niels Eichhorn "Theodore," a Speaker of the House once told the impetuously righteous Theodore Roosevelt, "if there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments."[1] Readers of Jeremi Suri's _Civil War by Other Means_ may feel the same way about this last in a long parade of popular polemics about how white racism, terrorism, and weak-willed national leaders defeated the postwar promise of a juster social order. Deservedly, the usual suspects stand in the dock, some cruel, some craven, and the usual heroes bask in the glow of approval, with Radical Republicans as prophets scorned, and as far as any resistance on their own part is concerned, freedpeople barely noticed. The account is written with verve. The events make incandescent drama--as they have done in all the other accounts. Those who know absolutely nothing about the period and who do not care whether Suri has got his facts right will appreciate a good read. Suri earned his chair for Leadership in Global Affairs by his prolific output of books dealing with near-current events; but as a novelist put it, the past is a foreign country.[2] A distant past needs more than a whirlwind tour, heavily reliant on secondary sources with an icing of primary documents, usually sifted from websites like _Slate _magazine. Manuscript collections, newspapers, congressional hearings, the records of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the hideous details of the dozen or so volumes of the Ku Klux Klan testimony plunged into in depth might tell something more than the obvious: that between the obstructionism of Andrew Johnson and the violence erupting down South and public indifference building up North, Reconstruction faltered and then perished. Indeed, those sources have told that story, and with much more convincing depth in books like Fergus M. Bordewich's _Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction _(2023). Just because an answer is simple does not make it untrue. As president, Johnson did indeed put every hobble he could in the way of any national policy that might have made freedom more than an empty word south of the Ohio River. Credit is due to Republicans, many of whom, as Suri notes, came reluctantly to policies either to enfranchise freedmen or to protect their newly acknowledged rights. The Klan whipped, intimidated, raped, and killed; the White League paramilitaries made a mockery of free elections. The blood of unarmed men slaughtered at Colfax and Hamburg cried out for the government protection that came too late, too briefly, or not at all. Still, one wonders at the heavy concentration on what white terrorists and federal authorities did. Black people sprinkle the account as victims, and little more. The accomplishments of Republican state governments, their very reason to deserve a longer life, go as unsaid. So, too, with the very impressive achievements of a freed people in creating communities, raising churches, and doing their best to get a fair recompense for their labor. It is as if the work of Eric Foner and so many other scholars of the struggle in the cotton and rice fields, the efforts of the African Methodist Church, and the activism of labor movements both North and South had gone unwritten. As an exposure aimed at a mass market, _Civil War by Other Means_ ranks high. Scholars, on the other hand, will puzzle at how a book can assume that up to the Civil War, Republicans only cared about slavery for northern white workers' sake, as if there were no moral component. Only to Suri did Abraham Lincoln's call for banning slavery's spread into new territories give him a "notoriety," when that had been the standard party line since its formation. The Kansas-Nebraska Act might as well not have existed, for all the attention it gets, and readers will marvel to learn that the Democratic Party seceded. Only if one assumes, as the author seems to, that saving the Union was a minor or unworthy goal can one contend, as he does, that Johnson was bent on reversing "the Republican victory in the Civil War" (p. 121). Constitutional scholars will wonder, indeed, at the allegation that the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee a right to marry, to work, or to own property. Chroniclers of Louisiana Reconstruction will puzzle that the 1866 New Orleans riot targeted "African American reformers," and those familiar with the Johnson impeachment will cavil at the implication of rank bias in "a highly partisan Republican" presiding over the trial: if anything, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase's fairness roused charges that he was pettifogging to help the president escape conviction (p. 257). Benjamin Wade's defeat for governor of Ohio in 1867 will amaze political junkies, who had no idea that he was running, while economic historians will puzzle at the claim that northern "business leaders" clamored for an inflated currency after the Panic of 1873, with farmers shouting for free silver. As for the contention that civil service reformers were led by James G. Blaine or that James A. Garfield was killed "over the question of who should be included in America's democracy," Gilded Age historians will be left spluttering, as will scholars of the Progressive Era, who would be shocked to hear that Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom" was simply "an idealistic cover for giving local segregationists more say and rejecting federal action to stop lynching or voter suppression" (pp. 257, 261). Let it not be said that Suri only rounds up the usual suspects! At the book's conclusion, he offers lessons in why Reconstruction failed. Partisan gerrymandering gave the Redeemers a free hand to annul the black vote. Instead of permitting vice presidents to succeed recently elected presidents, as happened with Lincoln, a whole new election should be called. The disputed 1876 election proves "that our democracy needs to eliminate the electoral college and create a system of national rules for all elections, ensuring that only the candidates with the most votes win" (p. 266). The country went wrong in not passing a constitutional amendment "guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote" (p. 263). All these, the author warns ominously, are a must, to prevent a new civil war. Historians will rub their eyes at such a cart hitched to so wild a horse as Reconstruction. Does anyone really think that a presidential election, held months after the Civil War's close, would have led to a more just solution--unless the former Confederate states were denied any say in it? Can we even be sure that Johnson would not have won it, since until late in the year, most Republicans assumed that he stood on their side, and even the radicals kept their suspicions on the tightest of leashes? How would 1876 have ended better, with popular votes alone counting? For it was Samuel J. Tilden and his white-lining Democratic friends, not Republicans, who had the majority. As for that proposed constitutional amendment, who imagines that if proposed in 1869, it would have outlasted a snowflake on a hot griddle? The votes simply were not there. Critics will wonder how far Suri has been using his prescription for today's problems to dose the ailments of a very different time. Are those "red caps" of a certain presidential candidate's supporters really "born of older white hoods" (p. 263)? Academics may not agree with David M. Kennedy's blurb on the back, declaring that no scholar has written about the years after the Civil War "with more brio, passion and outrage"--has he forgotten Claude G. Bowers's _The Tragic Era__: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929)_ or W. E. B. Du Bois's infinitely better researched _Black Reconstruction (1935)_?--but they will wonder: combined with such slapdash storytelling, is a "blisteringly good read" enough? Casual readers may get their first glimpse of what has been told again and again. But _Civil War by Other Means_ is to professional histories what junk food is to a healthy repast. Notes [1]. William A. Robinson, _Thomas B. Reed, Parliamentarian_ (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1930), 147. [2]. Leslie P. Hartley, _The Go-Between _(New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2002), 17. Citation: Mark W. Summers. Review of Suri, Jeremi, _Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy_. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. March, 2024. 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