The Tragic Era, by Claude Bowers: Opinions?

Horace Porter

First Sergeant
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Apr 4, 2009
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Absoltely Nowhere Now, MA
It's my understanding that Claude Bowers's The Tragic Era (1928) is a popular rendering of what some call "the Dunning School" of Reconstruction. My understanding is that the interpretations offered by adherents of this interpretation have been largely discredited by research dating all the way back to the 1960s (and even longer if one includes WEB DuBois' Black Reconstruction [1935]).

So it puzzled me that within the last year historian Phil Leigh offered the following assessment of the book in a review on Amazon.com:

This is an essential book to understanding the corruption of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era.

First, contrary to Sesquicentennial-era Reconstruction narratives, the book is as much about the general political corruption of the period in the North as in the South. Examples that have nothing to do with the South include (1) Credit Mobilier, (2) Belknap's bribery, (3) Babcock's Whisky Ring, and other political scandals of the Grant administration and era. One example is James G. Blaine's role in railroad finance corruption.

Second, the book cogently organizes facts unfair to the South that modern Reconstruction propagandists like Blight, McPherson, and Foner, ignore. For example, the federal cotton tax after the Civil War raised almost three times as much revenue as was "invested" in the Freedman's Bureau during the Bureau's entire existence, yet Foner, Blight, and McPherson characterize the Bureau as an eleemosynary organization promoted by morally superior Yankees. Nowhere do Foner, Blight, or McPherson clarify that the Yankees didn't pay a dime for the Bureau and required the impoverished South to pay for it.

Third, unlike the bigoted Blight, McPherson, and Foner, Bowers gives both sides of the Reconstruction story. For example, Blight, Foner, and McPherson consistently characterize the federal occupation soldiers as necessary to insure "honest" elections. But anyone would have to be as gullible as the gate keepers of Troy to believe that elections could possibly be honest when polling places were held captive under the glitter of bayonets from an army whose mission was to insure the election of candidates compatible with the interests of the controlling (Republican) party in Washington. White Southerners were arbitrarily turned away from the polls in order to insure the desired Radical Republican election results.

What's going on here? Who's read the book, and what do you make of it? Thank you.
 
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