The Tragic Era - The Revolution After Lincoln

By Claude G. Bowers

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reitell Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781446546888

Reviews for The Tragic Era - The Revolution After Lincoln

[herbthomas · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Tragic Era, by Claude W. Bowers, presents an impassioned criticism of the Reconstruction of the American South, 1865-1877. It is a hard read. Bowers writes in a florid 19th century style—even though he was writing in 1928 or 29. He refers to dozens of politicians, journalists, and other leaders of opinion by their last names only, even though, by 1929, most of them were no longer household names. Politicians jostle and personal enmities are evident. Chapters are full of ad hominem shots at advocates of Reconstruction, with no reasoned statement of Reconstruction’s purposes. The PBS series on Reconstruction, plus the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, prompted me to delve into The Tragic Era, to see how a counternarrative would stand up. The answer: badly on race, but better on the Republican Party becoming the party of big business. Bowers was self-taught, not a trained historian, and he was not shy about writing polemics. A longtime Democrat who served as FDR’s ambassador to Spain, Bowers advocated U.S. support for the Spanish republic against Nazi-backed Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. But in his history of Reconstruction America Bowers shows no signs of such liberal impulses. Bowers never expresses a moral objection to slavery, and he writes approvingly of “white supremacy” (439, 503). ”Freedom” for blacks, he writes, “meant idleness . . . promiscuity . . . venereal disease” (49). He heaps scorn on freedmen’s attempts to gain access to public accommodations and attend school with whites (201), and he catalogs officials in the reconstructed South by the color of their skin (448). Stereotypes repeated by Bowers include “those on the coast and rivers were little above the intellectual level of the mules they drove,” while a “more intelligent class” of blacks “with mechanical skills” sought to improve their lives outside of politics (358). Bowers never uses the term “The Lost Cause”, but he makes clear he would have favored the emergence of a “powerful white man’s party” (p. 277) of conservative Democrats and Republicans ruling the South after the Civil War. He believes that Lincoln would have been conciliatory toward Southern whites if he had lived, and claims that President Andrew Johnson tried to carry out Lincoln’s policy. Bowers is a supporter of Johnson personally and of Johnson’s view that Southern white farmers and tradesmen were victims of the planter aristocracy and the slaves. Blacks were thus the enemies of whites. It was unrealistic to give illiterate blacks the vote, and unjust to give whites’ land to blacks. A startling half-chapter on the Ku Klux Klan, pp. 306-312, ascribes naive motives to its founders, but gets straight to the alleged real issue: “It was not until the original Klan began to ride that white women felt some sense of security.” Bowers praises the ex-Confederate generals who tried to manage the Klan, describing Nathan Bedford Forrest as a “morally a superior man.” He claims though, that the old generals could not prevent “spurious organizations” from springing up “among men of the lower order bent on personal vengeance and violence,” and that soon anti-Klan forces were “indulging in outrages” of their own. Bowers writes of the women of Washington society, and the “dusky maidens” of South Carolina (pp. 350-353)—their clothes, their jewelry, the beauty of some of them, and their influence on men—with creepy enthusiasm and thoroughness. He has a sharp eye, though, for the Republicans’ entanglement with the banks and railroads, and the resulting corruption. He is eloquent in describing how “the rule of the industrialists had come with the war” (405). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Bowers describes how the House impeached more than one person only to have the Senate ignore the evidence, and the administration often gave Congress the back of its hand. A House committee found that James A. Garfield had perjured himself over a payoff “and was therefore innocent” (398). The sole congressman they punished was a Democrat, who, unlike the Republicans, had taken no bribe (402).Other instances of nothing new under the Sun: The Industrial League of Pennsylvania began “interrogating presidents of colleges as to the [economics] textbooks they used” (405). Henry Ward Beecher preached that “It is good to get rich” (408). The Panic and depression of 1873 ensued, with Grant starting his second term, a year after the Republicans had warned that the election of Greeley, the Democrat, “would disturb the unprecedented prosperity” (410). And a dodgy transfer of the Naval account was arranged by Grant’s brother Orvil (411). “The laws had been laxly enforced or utterly ignored in the interest of great financiers who had been generous with campaign funds and easy on private creditors of political distinction” (412).Workers hit by the depression demanded “suspension of Rent for three months” (412). “The press was beginning to treat poverty . . . as a crime to be handled with the mailed fist. . . . The entire police force of New York was kept on duty (416). And even, anticipating sagas like that of JonBenét Ramsey, “Charlie Ross, a child [age four], mysteriously disappeared, to furnish a topic for the gossips for sixty years.”