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Review
| Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2nd edition. by Michael Perman. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2003. 169 pages. $13.95, paper.
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| Michael Perman, professor of humanities at the University of Illinois-Chicago, has updated his earlier 1987 work on Reconstruction. An Oxford don, Perman recently completed an appointment as the John Adams Distinguished Professor in American History in the Netherlands. His unique background is helpful in bringing fresh perspectives to the historiography of the Reconstruction era. |
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The book is part of The American History Series under the editorship of John Hope Franklin, long the dean of African-American historians (and a specialist in the Reconstruction period), and A.S. Eisenstadt of Brooklyn College. The careful editing and the updates inserted by Perman make this volume particularly useful for readers of The History Teacher. The revised volume, enhanced by the addition of a new thirteen-page section entitled "The Impact of Emancipation," and enriched by discussions of recent Reconstruction historiography, adds to the usefulness of the book for all those interested in this most troubling of eras in the nation's history. |
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The volume opens with a historiographical essay, beginning with the Dunning or "tragic decade" school at Columbia, and ending with the revisionists and post-revisionists of the present. The thesis of the work is that far too many of the works on the period have rehashed whether Reconstruction succeeded or failed, and who should bear the blame if it is deemed a failure. Perman depicts the present climate in Reconstruction scholarship as not revisionist or post-revisionist, but rather "a maturation or rounding out" (p. 4). He views the undertaking of Emancipation and the Reconstruction that followed as a mammoth undertaking that "would have been remarkable—whatever the criteria for determining success" (p. 5). The work logically divides into four sections pertaining to the shaping of emancipation, followed by the planning, implementing, and ending of the reconstruction process. |
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The author does not view the practice of sharecropping that grew out of emancipation as a negative transition from slavery to freedom; rather, he views it as "middle ground—half a loaf, in effect—between the ownership of the land for which the freedman had hoped, and what they knew their employers wanted, namely a controllable labor force" (p. 33). As to the planning, implementing, and ending of Reconstruction, the Radicals Republicans were never as dominating a force in the Republican Party as previously thought. The Radicals often lost votes designed to reform the defeated Confederate states. The Congressional Republicans, though possessors of super majorities in both houses, were not "tightly organized units, but loosely coordinated factions, with some shifting back and forth between them on particular issues" (p. 57). The impeachment of Johnson, and the subsequent Senate trial, kept the embattled president preoccupied enough for the Radicals to enact a large portion of their agenda. By the end of the period, the Republicans had failed because the South lacked the needed capital to finance the Republicans goals, and "the Republicans themselves never achieved the organizational cohesion and electoral viability necessary to implement them" (p. 102). Republicans in the South did try to reform the politics of the region and implement civil rights laws, but in their attempts to "achieve legitimacy and white acceptance," wrote Perman, "every step they took to protect their organization and their predominately black supporters served only to confirm their ineligibility" (p. 106). In the end, Reconstruction came to a premature halt, not because, as the election of 1876 revealed, that the Republican Party was concerned about the South returning to the Democratic fold, but "the South was surrendered to keep the North out of Democratic hands" (p. 141). If Reconstruction failed, it was, as the author persuasively reasoned, "because the Republican policies were internally contradictory" (p. 143). |
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In summation, Perman has added a worthy revised volume to the vast historiography of the period. His covers old ground in a fresh and readable way, without sounding preachy or condescending, and gives a thoughtfully reasoned analysis of the period. Secondary teachers and community college instructors will benefit from his balanced and thoughtful analysis, concise historiographical essay, and ample critical bibliography. |
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| Columbus State Community College |
James S. Baugess |
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