HISTORY REWRITTEN
Current, Richard N.
History Rewritten REUNION AND REACTION: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, by C. Vann Woodward. Little, Brown and Company. 263 pp. $4. Reviewed by Richard N. Current ONCE in a...
...A new North-South axis seemed to be in the making—a kind of reincarnation of the old Whig party...
...on him with Sous and unfair attacks...
...And he finally got them...
...The answer used to be this: because of a last-minute bargain (the "Wormley Agreement") by which Hayes' spokesmen promised that after his inauguration he would withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South, so as to give that section back to the Democrats...
...All this and "home rule" too...
...There was a bargain, all right, but that was not it...
...In other words, they wanted "internal improvements," with federal aid for the Texas and Pacific railroad project in particular...
...So, only a dozen years after the close of the Civil War, the stage seemed almost set for an encore...
...All were hailed by their ad-rates as struggles for democracy, human rights...
...A special electoral commission, consisting of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, voted eight to seven to give him the contested states...
...But Woodward's volume deserves the attention of others besides the writers—and readers—of school and college texts...
...Indeed, hotheads had been threatening to resist his inauguration by force, if necessary...
...But the essence of it, reunion with reaction, was achieved...
...Like all good history, it provides hints and clues for any thoughtful citizen trying to read between the lines of today's newspaper...
...All were urged on sd, though not so noisily, for less rerous and more "realistic" aims, ended with the friends of "real-in" on top...
...The more we know out our past military ventures, the is we have to hope from those of present and the future...
...What leading Southerners wanted was, above all, a share in the overflowing pork barrel from which they had been excluded...
...The subject is the settlement of the disputed election of 1876...
...Here one thought that occurs to this viewer...
...Of course, this realignment of parties fell through, for reasons which Woodward makes clear...
...Textbook authors may as well prepare, right now, to revise their next editions...
...Woodward now shows that the actual deal (the result of months of negotiation) was much more far-reaching, so much that it should be ranked as one of the great sectional compromises of American history...
...But the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives...
...It marked the "Thermidor" of what Charles A. Beard has called the Second American Revolution...
...Too bad this same manly sentiment has not also animated certain other historians, who have benefited by the work of ord only to turn...
...By 1876 these Southerners were coming to feel that they had more to gain from the Republicans than from the Democrats in the North, the Democrats having proved themselves N stingy about river-and-har-bor and railroad appropriations for the South...
...In the Compromise of 77, as Woodward points out, the ctors in the Civil War confirmed eir material gains at the expense their idealistic objectives...
...They could have thwarted Hayes and the Republicans by preventing a completion of the official count in Congress...
...Reviewed by Richard N. Current ONCE in a while a book appears which compels a thorough rewriting of some chapter of the American story...
...That ggests a pattern of events to be und in all the major wars of the nited States—the Revolution, the vil War, and the two World ars, not to mention the War with pain...
...Rutherford B. Hayes had to have all of them...
...They would also like to see one or two conservative Southerners in Hayes' cabinet...
...And many Republicans, as they looked southward, were beginning to think they had more in common with conservatives than with carpet-baggers...
...Why did the Democrats give in...
...Both the Democrats and the Republicans claimed the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, the three states still in the process of "reconstruction...
...Such a book is Reunion and Reaction, by C. Vann Woodward, professor of history at Johns Hopkins...
...Acknowledging a debt to Beard for the idea of the Civil War as a revolution, Woodward in his preface expresses the hope that "American historians will never permit honest differences of opinion over foreign policy to withhold from the late dean of the craft the honor that is justly due him...
...And not all the terms of the Compromise of 1877 were carried out...
...To get the Presidency, Samuel J. Tilden needed only one of those votes...
...Each reader will draw his own lections from Reunion and Re-tion, and it is the kind of book at makes a person reflect...
Vol. 15 • September 1951 • No. 9
