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Book Reviews
Failed Promise: The Constitutional and Political Limits of Reconstruction
| BENEDICT, MICHAEL LES. Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. xiii + 314 pp. Introduction, notes, index. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8232-2553-8; $26.00 (paper), ISBN 0-8232-2554-5.
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Michael Les Benedict, professor of history emeritus at Ohio State University, enjoys wide recognition as a leading scholar of the Reconstruction era. A past president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, he is a specialist in constitutional, legal, and political history. He established his credentials more than thirty years ago with the seminal works The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1973) and A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974). He has published numerous important articles. In the present volume, he offers revised versions of ten of the most influential of these works. |
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Observers generally place Benedict among the historians of Reconstruction whom Eric Foner describes as postrevisionists. These scholars not only reject the condemnatory Dunning School interpretation dominant during the early to mid-twentieth century; they also believe that the anti-Dunning revisionists, writing during the civil rights era, went too far in emphasizing the idealism and accomplishments of Republican Reconstruction. Benedict has been a leading exponent of the idea that Republicans' enduring commitment to federalism and other essentially conservative ideals circumscribed what they were willing and able to do to secure African Americans' rights in the postwar South. This notion pervades many of the articles reprinted in this volume, but Benedict is not content merely to let his previous arguments stand. He has carefully updated each of these pieces, refining his assertions where new findings so dictate. In revisiting these issues, he has read widely and deeply in the historical literature, and taken altogether, the notes to the chapters represent a detailed and immensely useful survey of Reconstruction historiography. |
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A brief review cannot do justice to the complex and nuanced arguments Benedict offers in these varied chapters. The first, "Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction," furnishes the title and sets the tone for the volume as a whole. Benedict argues that Republicans' commitment to federalism dictated their conservative approach to their Reconstruction program and ensured its eventual failure. From their initial justification of remedial action in the South by the "grasp-of-war" theory to their negative framing of the Fifteenth Amendment, Republicans resisted an unwarranted expansion of federal government power and instead clung to traditional ideas of state-centered responsibility for the protection of citizens' rights. Seen in this light, the Republicans' supposed abandonment of Reconstruction later in the 1870s was less a betrayal of earlier ideals of liberty and republicanism than a consequence of their narrow constitutional ideals in the formative years of the program. A later chapter recounts how Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase's growing moderation on Reconstruction mirrored these restrictive notions of federalism and made Chase a viable contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. |
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In "The Rout of Radicalism: Republicans and the Elections of 1867," Benedict argues that GOP defeats in several key states that year added a fear of political rejection in the North to the constitutional scruples that drove Republicans' conservative conception of southern issues. Similarly, in a study of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, Benedict sees political considerations in what he argues was congressional Republicans' hesitance to mount an impeachment effort. They finally did so after it became clear that Johnson was abusing executive power in a determined effort to foil Congress's Reconstruction policy. Benedict's catalog of Johnson's abuses makes clear that the validity of the Republicans' case rested on much more than the president's removal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. |
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