West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War

By Heather Cox Richardson
Illustrated, maps, notes, bibliography, index, 396 pp., 2007. Yale University Press, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040, $30 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Richard M. McMurry
Richard M. McMurry's latest book (edited) is An Uncompromising Secessionist: The Civil War of George Knox Miller, 8th (Wade's) Confederate Cavalry.

Review:
The Civil War era (1820-1900) is usually portrayed as North vs. South, industry vs. agriculture, state rights men vs. nationalists, high tariff supporters vs. low tariff men, or whites vs. blacks.

In this examination of the first four postwar decades Heather Richardson offers a different perspective as to the results of the conflict.

She seeks to incorporate the West and its role in that period and to show how the nation worked out the middle class ideology that became dominant in the 1890s and still, she argues, influences the country. Note her subtitle: "The Reconstruction of America (not the South) After the Civil War."

Richardson portrays the post-Civil War years largely as a struggle between two competing views of the American political economy.

On one side were those who believed that the harmonious free labor national economy would naturally benefit all who were willing to work and that all members of society would rise together if only the federal government would confine itself to protecting the natural order of things and pursued an even-handed approach to its activities. Richardson identified this view with the emerging middle class (the "mainstream vision").

Adherents of the middle class view found themselves differing with "special interest" groups - many created or greatly enlarged by the war - that wanted the government to act to benefit themselves. Among these separate groups were industrialists, blacks, factory workers, Indians, farmers, miners, immigrants and activists supporting women's rights. These people inhabited (or believed they inhabited) a nation in which the deck was stacked against them and in which the "system" prevented their prospering. They, therefore, had to look to the government for special help.

By century's end the former group, with a world view somewhat modified by contact with a partially romanticized West, was firmly in control of the country.

The book has several weaknesses. It needs, for example, some clear definitions of such terms as "middle class." I wonder if Richardson thinks that the United States was not a middle class country before 1861.

To what degree is Richardson's thesis affected (and afflicted) by the political and economic battles of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? To a great degree, methinks.

West from Appomattox does not deal with the war in any detail and even less does it cover military operations. Many figures from the war years, however, appear in "Richardson's story. Examples include Wade Hampton and Carl Schurz.

Readers who desire to ponder such large issues as the results of the war will find here something to think about. Those whose interests stop with the 1865 surrender of the Confederate armies can bypass this book.