Book Review: Some complex situations arose in the aftermath of bloody war

CAPITOL MEN: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. By Phillip Dray. Houghton Mifflin. 480 pages. $30.

Reconstruction is conventionally dated from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1876, the year Northern troops were withdrawn from the South, leaving the Democratic Party in control. This remarkable study by Philip Dray continues the story into the early 20th century with a final chapter relating Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. Dray skillfully integrates black political leaders into the stirring, sometimes inspiring, often tragic events of the period.

He begins and ends his account with the story of Robert Smalls, a skilled slave who early in the Civil War boldly ran his master's cargo vessel past the Fort Sumter lookout to join the U.S. Navy. After several close calls raiding the Sea Islands, and a distinguished political career, including service in the South Carolina and U.S. legislatures, he retired full of honors to his home town of Beaufort, where he died in 1915.

Dray also considers the lives of two U.S. senators, Hiram Revels and Blanch K. Bruce; the colorful Pinckney Benton Stewart (P.B.S.) Pinchback, briefly the governor of Louisiana, and many other state and national legislators. George H. White of North Carolina, the last Reconstruction black to serve in the U.S. Congress, fought disenfranchisement and exposed the hypocrisy of Southern Democrats until his removal in 1901. The author also gives consideration to the lives and contributions of white Republican "carpetbaggers" from the North and "scalawags" from the South.

Constitutional amendments ending slavery and establishing blacks' civil rights and male suffrage, and the requirement that Southern states write new constitutions putting them into effect, sparked a wave of terror by the Ku Klux Klan. South Carolina's northern counties had a long history of "regional defiance," defense of "honor" and "individual bravado." "In the postwar South this line of thinking served to legitimatize all sorts of extra-legal mayhem, from shots fired under cover of night into sharecroppers' cabins, to cold-blooded assassination, race riots, and lynchings."

As Klan activities declined under pressure from Northern forces and public opinion, Southerners found group action a more effective way to resist. They would "foment some outrage or accusation against black or carpetbagger authorities, then create a physical confrontation." An anonymous mass of rioters could do more damage and demoralize more people than could the Klan. Mob actions in Mississippi included massacres of a few to more than a hundred blacks. President Ulysses S. Grant began to realize the futility of sending additional government troops to quell riots, and the appearance of black state militias inflamed Southerners who could not abide a formerly servile race keeping law and order. The Republican Mississippi governor, Adelbert Ames, a decorated Civil War general, could not win this war without government aid and finally was forced from office.

Louisiana is a case study in the complexities of Reconstruction politics. The state constitutional convention sparked a bloody riot that killed 46 blacks, with 60 seriously injured. At one time, two state governments existed, resulting in the "Colfax Massacre," which left anywhere from 60 to 200 blacks dead. P.B.S. Pinchback was conspicuous in the witches' brew of Louisiana politics. Of mixed race, like many other black politicians, he became a Union army officer, riverboat gambler and delegate to the state constitutional convention. In the byzantine political culture of Louisiana, Pinchback became a state senator, lieutenant governor and acting governor from Dec. 9, 1872 to Jan. 13, 1873, the first black governor in American history. The Louisiana legislature sent him to Washington as a senator, but after three years of complex infighting, the Senate rejected him by a vote of 32 to 29.

The trend clearly was in favor of Southern whites who were determined to have home rule. President Grant and other Republicans came to recognize the futility of attempting to secure political and social equality for blacks, and thus the compromise of 1876, stemming from a disputed election, placed the future of blacks in the hands of white Democrats. Gradually, by various means, Southern states disenfranchised and segregated black citizens.

Both Northern and Southern writers swayed public opinion by portraying Reconstruction as a misguided attempt to empower an ignorant and half-civilized race. Even the respected editor of The Nation wrote that the intelligence of Negroes was "slightly above the level of animals." Historians James Ford Rhodes and Claude C. Bowers wrote books depicting Reconstruction as a tragic mistake. A former black congressman, John Roy Lynch, was among the first to publish articles and books showing the egregious errors of these and other Southern apologists.

The author concentrates on the three Southern states that had the highest concentrations of blacks -- South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana -- and thus had more blacks in office. They clearly were on a level with, if not above, their white counterparts. The author lets the information speak for itself, making few overt value judgments. He does write in the introduction that Reconstruction was a failure. "Yet it is also a powerful story of idealism and moral conflict that belongs only to us and whose arc is as beautiful as it is tragic."

There are many books on Reconstruction, but none that weave black leaders so skillfully into the narrative. Who among them could have imagined a black president of the United States? It must still seem like a dream to many black Americans.

■ Howard Barnes is a professor of history at Winston-Salem State University.