By Stephen Budiansky Illustrated. 322 pages. Viking. $27.95.
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.
“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war,” Albion Tourgée, a North Carolina state judge, said caustically in 1879. “The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” Just how the trick was done is Mr. Budiansky’s subject, as seen through the eyes of a handful of men dedicated to creating a just, biracial society in the South. 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. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.
All but one, the brilliant Confederate general James Longstreet, are unknown today. Prince R. Rivers, a literate former slave, was a South Carolina legislator and a judge in a largely black town, Hamburg, a target of white wrath. Adelbert Ames, a Union war hero, served as governor of Mississippi until, after a campaign of violence and fraud, he was driven from office by impeachment in 1875.
Albert T. Morgan, a Union veteran who earned particular scorn by marrying a black woman, came to Mississippi to seek his fortune and stayed to serve as a state legislator and sheriff of Yazoo County. Lewis Merrill, an Army major, was sent to the South to put down violence by the Ku Klux Klan and the white rifle clubs engaged in a spreading insurgency.
All five men would fail. They would witness, as Ames put it, “the political death of the Negro.”
Mr. Budiansky, a military historian, does not inspire confidence at the outset. In a fierce prologue he reviews the sorry record of white resistance to Reconstruction, a campaign of terror that took the lives of more than 3,000 freedmen and their white allies, and heaps scorn on those who would invoke wounded Southern honor as a defense.
He swears allegiance to the truth, “a sly and scared animal skulking through thickets of deception.” Our collective memory of Reconstruction, he argues, is weighted with “stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes and low scalawags” lifted straight from “Gone With the Wind.”
Really? With enormous gusto Mr. Budiansky blasts away with both barrels at this straw man, who surely expired a generation ago. He might have taken a lesson from Major Merrill, a man described as “very indignant at wrong, and yet master of his indignation.”
Once he gets down to cases, however, vivid particulars assert themselves. 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.
They used every weapon at their disposal. Newspapers poured vitriol on Republican Party officials. Supposedly upstanding citizens aided and abetted insurgents who burned black schoolhouses, incited riots, assassinated public officials and beat and whipped blacks who tried to take part in civil society.
Resistance should not have come as a surprise. Mr. Budiansky ingeniously sets the stage for his narrative by describing the dispatches of John Richard Dennett, a correspondent for The Nation, who toured the South immediately after the war and found a people unrepentant and unprepared to admit anything except that the North had prevailed by force of arms. Sullen resentment quickly matured into open rebellion.
For the most part, Mr. Budiansky lets the appalling facts, and the words of the participants, speak for themselves. (“Coons in the canebreaks, have taken a hundred scalps,” the mayor of Vicksburg, Miss., telegraphed to a lawyer after one violent episode.) This is wise strategy, since he has a fondness for phrases like “the sick, sweet taste of blood” and a tendency to breathlessness.
General Longstreet, reviled for arguing that Southerners should accept defeat and its consequences, faced down an armed insurrection in New Orleans and lost. Ames, who tried to bring good government to Mississippi, looked on helplessly as the wildfire of rebellion spread over the state, just as Merrill did in Louisiana, victimized by lassitude in Washington.
“The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” a weary Grant told his attorney general in 1875.
Albert Morgan, after a coup had ousted him from the sheriff’s office in Yazoo City, threw in the towel. Meanwhile, in Hamburg, S.C., furious white citizens finally rebelled against black officialdom. Provoked by a black constable sitting in an office chair and “fanning himself very offensively,” a local warlord by the name of Matthew C. Butler unleashed his followers, who set the town ablaze and murdered as many of the members of the black militia as they could hunt down.
That was the end of Reconstruction in Hamburg. In a poignant conclusion to the affair, Mr. Budiansky follows Prince Rivers, the town’s trial justice, to Aiken, S.C., where he found employment in the last years of his life.
“He was working for a local hotel, driving a coach; sitting as erect as a statue, said the people who saw him,” Mr. Budiansky writes. “It was the same job he had performed in slavery.”
__________________ "In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one." Abraham Lincoln - August 18, 1864 Speech to the 164th Ohio Regiment
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
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