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When the War Was Over

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This book focuses on a neglected chapter of reconstrution, the period of "presidential recontruction" which preceded "congressional" or "radical recontruction." Carter gives a detailed picture based almost entirely on primary sources of the south immediately after the civil war and the hosts of dilemmas that confront both the region and the nation as a whole. In the process, Carter gives the most sympathetic picture of southern conservatives who lead reconstruction efforts since the school of Dunning, perhaps since Dunning himself. In contrast to the characterization of them being unreconstructed rebels, Carter illustrates that while many of them were confederates, most were reluctant confederates who either opposed secession until after the election of Lincoln or until their states seceded. (Contrary to unionist myth making at the time, the bulk of white southerners were not "straight-sect" unionists, oppressed by a miniscule "slavocracy." After war's end there was just not enough of them to reestablish elected government.)

Indeed this book it almost a companion piece to Croft's RELUCTANT CONFEDERATES, as most of these "conservatives" were old whigs and constitutional unionist, just as Croft's subjects, who were conscious of the south's backwardness before the war and dreamed of south with manufacturing, infrastructure, diversified agriculture, and public education. To all advocates of the "failure of southern leadership" to explain everything that's gone wrong with the region since antebellum, Carter makes a compelling case, that these were the best, most far sighted men the south could have chosen.

But in Carter's book, this is almost to damn them with faint praise for as a group they are blinkered by notions of negro inequality, "the sanctity of debt", and a positive horror of confiscation. As the south refuses to be suitably "penitent" for their past sins of slavery and secession as well as enacting "black codes" that, at best, make freedmen "wards of the state" and less than truly free, the north becomes more open-ended in their demands for re-admission to the union. Carter's "old whigs" end up being overcome, as "reasonable, moderate" men often do, by inexorable events, losing support in the south *and* the north.

Along the way Carter illustrates the collapse of social order, familiar to any observer of South Africa after aparthied or Russia after communism, interracial conflict, especially fears of an black insurrection to confiscate land, the debate over "wartime debts," strangely pertinent today with the issue of "third world debt," not to mention the difficult (and not wholly successful) transition from slave labor to free labor, which ultimately results in the tenant/sharecropping system. In sum this book presents what Barabara Tuchman would call "a distant mirror", not with contemporary U.S. but the *world* at the turn of the millenium.

Carter writes excellently and as mentioned above depends heavily on primary materials. This does however bias the books perceptions toward the perceptions of conservatives, the "mobs" of white southerns demanding debt relief or the unionist who rather liked the idea of confiscation of plantation lands, have little or no voice in the debate. (They left little in the way of personal letters or published opinion, and even less that found its way into a university collection.) Hence in his conclusion, Carter glumly writes that while their were options "not all things were possible." Without a doubt, but by seeing things through elite southerners eyes, Carter seems to limit the range of possibilities to what was acceptable to *them.*

Perhaps, political theorists and historians expect too much from leaders. Perhaps at this time the wisest course was one, unthinkable to the old "whigs" but endorsed by a nameless north GA farmer after reconstruction. "We could've tuk the land. Split it. Gi'n some to the [freedmen], 'n' some to me 'n' t'other union fellers." (Quoted in McMath's AMERICAN POPULISM)

A program of debt relief, land re-distribution (to whites and blacks alike), public education, and federal investment in infrastructure (like that promised by the Hayes administration as part of the compromise of 1877, but never enacted) would have gone a long way to both "binding up the wounds" *and* guaranteeing equal rights for african americans. But that's hindsight speaking...