Journalist and military historian Budiansky (Her Majesty's Spymaster) pulls no punches in this hard-hitting examination of the most sordid aspects of Reconstruction in the South from 1865 to 1876. The “brutal war of terrorist violence” that he surveys certainly has not escaped the history books. But this worthy effort goes a long way toward highlighting the most venal aspects of how, in the 10 years after the Civil War, the white Southern power structure managed to erect the Jim Crow laws that for nearly a century legalized many aspects of racial discrimination. Budiansky also highlights “men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision” who confronted the establishment: Pennsylvania-born U.S. Army major Lewis Merrill, who fought the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina; Prince Rivers, a former slave and Union army Colored Troop sergeant who became a state legislator and trial judge in South Carolina; and Maine-born Adelbert Ames, a Union general who served as Mississippi's provisional military governor. Budiansky brings the unpleasant details of the era alive in a smoothly written narrative.
“
$27.95
Viking hardcover
336 pp.
8-page photo insert
ISBN 978-0-670-01840-6
Available January 28, 2008
Writing in a crisp, engaging style, Budiansky presents his readers with a sequence of episodes from the careers of his protagonists, creating an impressionistic portrait of the life and death of the fledgling civilian governments. The result reads like a finely crafted novel.…The times have never been more propitious for a book that endeavors to explain…how it was that the United States “could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.”
— Publishers Weekly, September 10, 2007
”
“
”
— Joseph Pierro, Civil War Times, April 2008
In April 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, putting an end to four years of savage internecine conflict and settling the issue of slavery forever. “The war is over,” Grant said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Not quite. As Stephen Budiansky reminds us in “The Bloody Shirt,” his impassioned account of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the war was won, but the peace, up for grabs, would be lost, done in by Southern intransigence and Northern apathy.…If “Profiles in Courage” had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives.
Drawing heavily on the letters and dispatches of his main figures, as well as newspaper excerpts directly inserted into the text in a manner that recalls the documentaries of Ken Burns, he plunges the reader into the chaos of Reconstruction and the terrifying guerrilla war waged by embittered Southerners desperate to assert white supremacy.
“
“
Though not a comprehensive history of Reconstruction, Budiansky’s treatment of the period illustrates with force how the South ultimately defeated the North politically. He achieves the effect by relaying the experiences of several people who served or supported Reconstruction governments and conjuring the atmosphere of intimidation against Reconstruction with quotations from Southern newspapers. Also
quoting reports about disorder filed by two federal army officers, Lewis Merrill and Adelbert Ames, Budiansky conveys in detail the opposition and local insurrections that officials of Reconstruction regularly confronted: Merrill investigated the Ku Klux Klan, while Ames, as governor of Mississippi, faced recurrent white mob violence against Northerners and blacks. The spectacle of the whites’ anti-black campaigns comes most grimly into focus in Budiansky’s account of an 1876 massacre of blacks in a South Carolina town, until then run by an ex-slave named Prince Rivers. He survived, but the robbery of his rights stokes Budiansky’s intense historical indignation about the overthrow of Reconstruction. Notable for espionage histories, the versatile author extends his range with this passionate history of the Civil War’s
aftermath.
”
— Gilbert Taylor, Booklist, November 15, 2007
“
”
— William Grimes, New York Times, January 30, 2008
Mr. Budiansky is effective in showing the sheer depth and virulence of white supremacy in the South. He also captures the nature of the "distorted memories" of Reconstruction in the national narrative that lasted so long in America — making a "victim of the bully and a bully of the victim." In popular memory we are still crawling out of the dark legend of the benighted South, "oppressed" by "Negro rule" during Reconstruction. Mr. Budiansky also rises to some eloquence in his ending by showing how Hamburg, S.C., vanished even from maps after white men with shotguns massacred local blacks, destroying interracial politics and democracy along with them. "Men die, and towns die," he writes, "and cruelest of all memories die."
Today, no one is murdered at our voting polls. But this book and the story it tells should keep us vigilant at protecting our political rights, rendered sacred in the blood of Reconstruction, and beyond.
— David W. Blight, The New York Sun, January 30, 2008
”
