AFTER LINCOLN

A new political history of Reconstruction.

Former New York Times reporter Langguth (Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War, 2010, etc.) has written three previous volumes in this series of character-driven histories, beginning with Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (1988), and this will be the final volume. There is a scene in the early pages of this history of the tumultuous period following the Civil War that makes clear just how much regional enmity remained after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner made some barbed comments about South Carolina during an abolitionist speech, and a congressman from that state came to Sumner’s office a few days later and beat him senseless with a wooden cane. Sumner took months to recover. During this period, the Union established voting rights and economic freedoms for freed slaves across the South, though such rights would be short-lived. The story begins at the end of the Civil War and moves forward through biographical sketches of Andrew Johnson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, William Henry Steward, Edwin Stanton, Horace Greeley and others. The author ends with a portrait of Jim Crow and the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Popular history has largely forgotten how progressive Reconstruction was—African-Americans were elected to many public offices in the South, had high voting rates and experienced economic opportunities unimaginable during the Civil War—and how “states’ rights” supporters slowly took those gains away during the Jim Crow era. The power of the Ku Klux Klan to strike fear was very real, no matter how foreign it seems today. This is a cogent, well-researched, well-told history of that important period.

Langguth shows rather than explains, and the result is a rich history of an understudied period of American history.