Bluecoats & Tar Heels:
I’m not sure if there are really ivory towers at the University of Kentucky, but the publisher of this book must live in a figurative one if it thinks that readers won’t be upset by its $50 cost. The $50 price is not imprinted anywhere on the book, meaning readers buying at a book store may be shocked when the cash register displays their final bill. Have publishing costs really climbed so dramatically since 2008 when Joseph T. Glatthaar’s General Lee’s Army at 600 pages cost $35? The huge price tag may hurt this book’s sales, which is a shame, because the subject is well covered by Bradley, who is the staff historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington. Bradley, who first garnered attention in 1995 with his exhaustive book on the battle of Bentonville, N.C., This Astounding Close, has dug through a number of sources for this book. The notes and bibliography section is 79 pages. He shows that North Carolina’s Reconstruction experience was pretty rough on freedmen, occupying soldiers and state government officials who learned that commanding generals and federal bureaucrats were not always that interested in hearing about local problems controlling the former Confederate state. Bradley covers in detail the usual suspects, the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered and intimidated freedmen during the postwar period. He also introduces to readers the Lowrys, a still legendary family of Lumbee Indians operating around Lumberton, N.C., who robbed and raided their white pro-Confederate neighbors while sometimes hiding escaped Union soldiers. North Carolinians, likely the primary readers, may be surprised at how many familiar Civil War names like Meade, Sickles, Miles, even Henry Hunt, the former commander of the Union artillery, played a role in the postwar occupation and administration of the state. Bradley accuses Meade of intentionally downplaying Klan violence in the state and refusing to send additional Union troops to quell the violence as part of his effort to convince his own superiors that Reconstruction was going smoothly. We also learn that a minor general, Thomas Ruger, was the key administrator in the state. Ruger was a practical man who eventually transferred black occupying troops when he became convinced they were hindering white acceptance of Reconstruction rule. The book does not lack much, but I would have liked to have seen more accounts from citizens as to why they lashed out at freedmen and occupying forces. It focuses on the administration of Reconstruction, and the Klan violence resisting it, but not so much on the feelings of the citizens who lived under it. Reviewer: Clint Johnson’s latest book is Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
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Illustrated, maps, end notes, bibliography, appendix, index, 370 pp., 2009. The University Press of Kentucky, 663 South Limestone St., Lexington, KY 40508, $50 plus shipping.