Jonathan Yardley

THE BLOODY SHIRT

Terror After Appomattox

By Stephen Budiansky

Viking. 322 pp. $27.95

The decade-long period known as Reconstruction, which began shortly after the Civil War and ended with the presidential election of 1876, probably has been subjected to more misinterpretation, misunderstanding and outright factual distortion than any other time in American history. For a variety of reasons, including white Southern mythologizing and national indifference to the desperate situation of the former slaves, beginning in the late 19th century fictions about Reconstruction gained not merely wide popular acceptance but also the endorsement of many prominent historians, who gave them legitimacy and staying power.

These fictions presented the white South not as instigator, perpetuator and defender of black slavery, but as the victim of politically motivated mistreatment by "carpetbaggers" and other outsiders dispatched by Radical Republicans in Washington to wreak vengeance on the South. By contrast with the rapacious industrial North, the South was portrayed as -- in the words of one historian -- "a garden for the cultivation of all that was grand in oratory, true in science, sublime and beautiful in poetry and sentiment, and enlightened and profound in law and statesmanship." Slavery metamorphosed from a "peculiar" institution into a benevolent one, and it was argued that only the South could hope to help the former slaves because "the Southern white man is the only man on earth who understands the Negro character." If only the North had left the South to settle its own problem, the fictions contended, everything would have been fine. If Reconstruction failed, the fault lay solely with the North.

I remember all too well being force-fed this poppycock in the late 1950s at the University of North Carolina by a distinguished old professor who so ardently embraced the anti-Reconstruction argument that he might as well have been waving the bloody shirt, a time-honored phrase employed by political demagogues to accuse their opponents of association with violence. As Stephen Budiansky notes at the outset of this book, "the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of bloodstained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands" was just that -- a fiction -- but it gained wide currency in the white South during Reconstruction as a metaphor for what was seen as the cruelty, cowardice and hypocrisy of the Northern conquerors. Obviously, there was no such thing as a monolithic "white South," and opinion on these matters was scarcely unanimous, but "distorted memories of Reconstruction" were more the rule than the exception, even among many white Southerners who were more open to sectional reconciliation than were the diehards.

In the past quarter-century the pendulum has finally begun to swing away from fiction to historical fact, as scholarship of the Civil War-era South has become as interested in the former slaves as in the defeated masters. Precisely what moved Budiansky to pitch in his two cents' worth is unclear, as his previous books have been about military history, espionage and natural history, but the tone of The Bloody Shirt suggests that a principal motive was sheer outrage over "the palliative stereotypes, the exculpatory myths, and the outright bald-faced lies that still characterize far too much of what passes for common knowledge" of Reconstruction. He makes no claim to having written "a complete history" of the era, only to telling "the stories of a few of the people who lived through that chapter."

Interestingly, his list of references makes no mention of Redemption, by Nicholas Lemann, which was published a year and a half ago and covers some of the same ground as does The Bloody Shirt. Both are works of popular history that seek to correct the balance with regard to Reconstruction, and a central character in both is Adelbert Ames, who served with much distinction as Mississippi's Reconstruction governor and U.S. senator. Both books are written with considerable passion, but Lemann does the better job of keeping it in check. Too often Budiansky lapses into vitriol or sarcasm when he discusses the violence to which some white Southerners subjected Northerners and blacks as well as the remarkable self-pity to which these same Southerners were susceptible. One may share Budiansky's contempt for these people, as by and large I do, but still feel that what is put forward as a work of history could use a good dose of dispassion.

Budiansky tells the stories of five people, though many secondary characters enter the narrative. One is Ames, the former Union officer who was sent South in Reconstruction and eventually became an unflinching advocate of black rights, saying that "I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty towards a class of American citizens, whose only crime consists in their color." Another is Prince Rivers, a former slave of intelligence and integrity who had managed to become remarkably well educated. In the early years of the war, he escaped from his owner and joined the Union army, rising to become "both color sergeant and provost sergeant" of the First South Carolina Volunteers, "the first colored regiment in the United States Army." During Reconstruction he became the leading figure in Hamburg, a predominantly black South Carolina village.

The third figure is Albert Morgan, who went to Mississippi from Wisconsin in the fall of 1865 "to seek his fortune" but ended up caught in the racial turmoil sweeping through the state; he fell in love with and married "a light-skinned colored woman" named Carolyn Highgate, and for a time was prominent in and about Yazoo City, but eventually he was driven away by the many enemies he made among local whites. The fourth person is Lewis Merrill, an honest and punctilious Army major who in 1871 was sent to Yorkville, in the heart of South Carolina's Ku Klux Klan country. He had heard "tales of shadowy bands whipping and beating leading Republicans in strange nighttime ceremonies, of schoolhouses set ablaze, Republican officeholders forced to resign on threat of death, entire towns seized by a thousand disguised men taking up position in eerie silence and stringing up a dozen Negroes who had dared to enlist in the state militia," and when he asked a fellow officer if all this was true, he was told: "When you get to South Carolina you will find that the half has not been told you."

Finally, there is James Longstreet, the former general of the Confederacy, a native of South Carolina who fought at Robert E. Lee's side at Gettysburg and "had been faithful, diligent, obstinate, and brilliant, far and away Lee's ablest corps commander." After the war he moved to New Orleans and became successful in business but was less successful in winning the hearts of his fellow whites because he insisted on speaking out with the "plain honest convictions of a soldier." Invited by a local newspaper to express his views on Reconstruction, he decried the prevailing sentiment that "we cannot do wrong, and that Northerners cannot do right," and said:

"The surrender of the Confederate armies in 1865 involved: 1. The surrender of the claim to the right of succession. 2. The surrender of the former political relations of the Negro. 3. The surrender of the Southern Confederacy. These issues expired upon the fields last occupied by the Confederate armies. There they should have been buried. The soldier prefers to have the sod that receives him when he falls cover his remains. The political questions of the war should have been buried upon the fields that marked their end."

For this apostasy Longstreet, formerly accorded heroic stature throughout the white South, was vilified. His business dried up, and he became a pariah, all for the sin of trying to persuade his fellow whites to face the facts rather than retreat into fantasy and self-delusion.

That's where they went, though, and they stayed there for a long time. The climax of The Bloody Shirt is a massacre of blacks that took place in Hamburg, the little South Carolina town where Prince Rivers had risen to such prominence, in July 1876, when marauding whites murdered blacks at will, leaving the place swimming in blood. Their leader was a thuggish young man named Ben Tillman, who readily acknowledged that "the purpose of our visit to Hamburg was to strike terror," and who wholly succeeded. Later he became known as "Pitchfork Ben," and as such achieved election as governor and then U.S. senator, a political career that lasted four full decades and may well have been the most contemptible in American history.

Tillman was the logical culmination of the white response to the end of the Civil War, as were Theodore G. Bilbo and James K. Vardaman in Mississippi and the other, lesser demagogues who exploited the fears and resentments of Southern whites. The real story of Reconstruction is not what the North did to the South, but what the South did to itself. *

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.