The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 [Book Review]

Clearly and crisply written, based on wide reading in manuscripts, newspapers, and secondary literature, Perman's new book is the first comprehensive synthesis, covering all the ex-Confederate states, of the extensive anti-"Dunning School" revisionist work on southern Reconstruction politics. To the racist and anti-Republican Dunningites, the era was as simple as black and white. The only divisions among Democrats were between the cautious and the heroic; among Republicans, between villains and fools. More objective recent historians, employing grayer tones, have highlighted important schisms within each party. Systematizing this previously inchoate interpretation, Perman's superb delineation of the logic of competing political strategies is the capstone of what seems likely to become the new orthodoxy- Reconstruction as the politics of factions.