Harper’s Weekly
An engraving depicting an agent of the Freedman’s Bureau as a peacemaker between blacks and whites after the Civil War.
William Grimes, The Bloody Shirt – Stephen Budiansky – Book Review – New York Times, Jan. 30, 2008
In April 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, putting an end to four years of savage internecine conflict and settling the issue of slavery forever. “The war is over,” Grant said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Not quite. As Stephen Budiansky reminds us in “The Bloody Shirt,” his impassioned account of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the war was won, but the peace, up for grabs, would be lost, done in by Southern intransigence and Northern apathy.“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war,” Albion Tourgée, a North Carolina state judge, said caustically in 1879. “The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” Just how the trick was done is Mr. Budiansky’s subject, as seen through the eyes of a handful of men dedicated to creating a just, biracial society in the South. If “Profiles in Courage” had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.
All but one, the brilliant Confederate general James Longstreet, are unknown today. Prince R. Rivers, a literate former slave, was a South Carolina legislator and a judge in a largely black town, Hamburg, a target of white wrath. Adelbert Ames, a Union war hero, served as governor of Mississippi until, after a campaign of violence and fraud, he was driven from office by impeachment in 1875.
Albert T. Morgan, a Union veteran who earned particular scorn by marrying a black woman, came to Mississippi to seek his fortune and stayed to serve as a state legislator and sheriff of Yazoo County. Lewis Merrill, an Army major, was sent to the South to put down violence by the Ku Klux Klan and the white rifle clubs engaged in a spreading insurgency.
All five men would fail. They would witness, as Ames put it, “the political death of the Negro.”
Mr. Budiansky, a military historian, does not inspire confidence at the outset. In a fierce prologue he reviews the sorry record of white resistance to Reconstruction, a campaign of terror that took the lives of more than 3,000 freedmen and their white allies, and heaps scorn on those who would invoke wounded Southern honor as a defense.
