The tragic era

Claude Bower's history of the Johnson administration, impeachment, Grant administration, and congressional reconstruction is a very entertaining tour through this troubled period of our national history. Bower's work is unabashedly partisan and takes the position, common at the time the book was written, of bitter opposition to the Radical Republicans who ruled Congress and imposed their own solution to the problem of what to do with South at the end of the war. Andrew Johnson is shown as the spiritual and policy heir to Lincoln, who had already by 1864 parted company with the Radicals on such issues as franchise and the legal status of conquered states. Bower's sympathies are clearly with Johnson and the South and some of his prose is by any standards quite racist when it comes to discussions of conditions in the states under reconstruction governments. This is a jarring and regrettable feature of this book, and one would like to think that if Bowers had occasion to write the book 50 years later than when he did, he would have modified his descriptions and his use of dialect.... Factually, the book is accurate enough if one-sided in the sources deployed. Reconstruction scholarship has advanced far in the last half century and a much more nuanced and complete picture has emerged of the Southern governments. What hasn't changed so much is the view of the remarkably courageous men like Fessenden, Trumbull, Grimes, Ross, Welles, etc. who braved the powerful currents of partisan animosities of the time to act on their consciences. Bowers excells when he limns the portraits of these politicians. One wishes he had limited himself to that project alone.