Book Review

Canada and the United States

Despite what is implied by its subtitle, Richard Zuczek's book does not offer readers another overview of Reconstruction in the Palmetto State. Instead, it examines how South Carolina conservatives struggled to reclaim control of the state through fraud, intimidation, and political terrorism. Never mind the confiscation of plantations and the redistribution of that land to the freedmen that some historians hold forth as the basis for a far more satisfactory outcome to the problem of racial justice: the scale and scope of violence against blacks and their white allies in itself prevented the realization of whatever egalitarian promise there was in 1865. And, as Zuczek correctly observes, whatever chance existed of a more far-reaching upheaval in social and economic relations crumbled once Andrew Johnson set his mind to reestablishing the old order. Indeed, if we are to accept the implications of Zuczek's study, the effort to reestablish civil government was foolhardy, primarily because in many ways, white southerners were still at war, battling threats to white supremacy. The quest for independence was merely one means to that end. If South Carolina's conservatives could minimize the threat that emancipation posed to the old order, all had not been lost at Appomattox.

. . .