Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen
Author: Philip Dray
An award-winning historian offers a sweeping new look at the tragic era of Reconstruction.
In this grand and compelling new history of Reconstruction, Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray shines a light on a little known group of men: the nation's first black members of Congress. These men played a critical role in pushing for much-needed reforms in the wake of a traumatic civil war, including public education for all children, equal rights, and protection from Klan violence. But they have been either neglected or maligned by most historians -- their "glorious failure" chalked up to corruption and "ill-preparedness."
In this beautifully written, magnificently researched book, Dray
overturns that thinking. He draws on archival documents, newspaper
coverage, and congressional records to show that men like P.B.S.
Pinchback of Louisiana (who started out as a riverboat gambler), South
Carolina's Robert Smalls (who hijacked a Confederate steamer and
delivered it to Union troops), and Robert Brown Elliott (who bested
the former vice president of the Confederacy in a stormy debate on the
House floor) were eloquent, creative, and often quite effective -- they were
simply overwhelmed by the brutal forces of reaction. Covering the fraught
period between the Emancipation Proclamation and Jim Crow, Dray
reclaims the reputations of men who, though flawed, led a valiant struggle
for social justice.
The New York Times - David S. Reynolds
Dray casts fresh light on the positive aspects of Reconstruction and powerfully dramatizes its negative side. His well-researched book is both exhilarating and disturbing. It offers a collective biography of several black congressmen in the South during Reconstruction who bravely took a public stance against racial prejudice. But it also shows that these politicians were stymied by a rising culture of white supremacy and home rule in the South.
Publishers Weekly
With this densely textured history of Reconstruction, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown) moves the first black congressmen-including Robert Brown Elliott, P.B.S. Pinchback and Hiram Revels-from the margins of American history and places their careers in an integrated context that includes not only "the challenging world in which they lived [but] the stories of the men and women of both races whose actions affected their role." Particularly illuminating on local political history, Dray is equally attentive to broader issues (e.g., the "rift between women's rights advocates and civil rights activists"). Events frequently treated as separate African-American issues (e.g., the collapse of the Freedman's Bank, the legal entrenchment of "separate but equal") are examined in the fuller milieu of contemporary history. The author asserts, "[I]t is difficult to imagine another period in America's past as complex as Reconstruction, or one that has been more controversial in the telling." Dray's triumph is to have crafted a lucid and balanced narrative, thoroughly researched and well-documented to satisfy the scholarly, while consistently fascinating and fully accessible for the casual reader. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Thomas J. Davis - Library Journal
In 1870, Rep. Joseph H. Rainey (1832-87) of South Carolina entered the U.S. Congress as its first black member. In 1901, Rep. George H. White (1852-1918) of North Carolina left Congress as the 20th black to serve. Focusing on these 20 men, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America) fleshes out the circumstances in which these early black congressmen lived and worked. He portrays these men as confident, courageous, eminently decent, exceptional individuals who advanced public education and other reforms for social justice. Casting Reconstruction's efforts as crucial to mid-20th century civil rights successes, Dray emphasizes parallels between the periods. His sourcing of quotations shows his considerable research, but this is not so much a scholar's book as one for general readers. Dray's compelling narrative offers sharper focus and argument than Maurine Christopher's Black Americans in Congress or former Rep. William L. Clay's Just Permanent Interests: Black Americans in Congress, 1870-1991. Dray develops a poignant story of racial hope-and resentment-and of America's ultimately reneging on its promises to blacks. For collections on the U.S. Congress, civil rights, Reconstruction, and black politics or politicians.
Kirkus Reviews
Impeccably written study of the brief post-Civil War period in which African-Americans were admitted to Congress-with the door subsequently closed to them for the next century. From a white Southern loyalist's point of view, writes Dray (Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, 2005, etc.), military defeat was bad enough, let alone what a Union sympathizer called "the elevation of the free negro to equal political power." The first to be so elevated, at the local and then national level, were a fascinating lot. Some of them, such as South Carolinian Robert Smalls, had engaged in acts of resistance during the secession and courted death for their crimes of sedition; others were of mixed race and comparatively well educated, such as the Mississippian reformer John Roy Lynch, "distinguished in appearance, possessing an innate gentlemanly reserve"; others were freed slaves with few advantages aside from a willingness to take on the job. None were the illiterate sock puppets of anti-Reconstructionist myth. Bringing them into power was a complex and daunting task, opposed by many in both the North and the South. In that light, Dray writes sympathetically but critically of Andrew Johnson, the Unionist Southerner, "a stubborn loner never adept at conciliatory politics," under whose watch Reconstruction disintegrated. The denouement of Dray's story is dispiriting. It finds Smalls, that great hero, ordered to sit in a segregated Jim Crow train cabin, a "dirty coach with cigar stubs on the floor and broken windows," and the other freshmen congressmen not much better treated. The humiliation of Smalls took place in South Carolina in 1904. But then, asDray notes, the same had happened to him in Philadelphia during the war-racism was not the exclusive domain of the South. A welcome addition to the literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, and important for students of the civil-rights movement and its origins.
Table of Contents:
1 Boat Thief 1
2 A New Kind of Nation 23
3 Daddy Cain 40
4 "The Whirligig of Time" 59
5 Kukluxery 77
6 Pinch 102
7 The Colfax Massacre 135
8 Capstone of the Reconstructed Republic 151
9 Divided Time 180
10 The Eternal Fitness of Things 211
11 Black Thursday 229
12 A Dual House 258
13 Exodusting 273
14 A Rope of Sand 300
15 "The Negroes' Farewell" 333
Epilogue 352
Acknowledgments 377
Notes 380
Bibliography 421
Index 438
See also: My Grandfathers Son or Prince and Other Writings
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Author: Harriet A Jacobs
Not only one of the last of over one hundred slave narratives published separately before the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is also one of the few existing narratives written by a woman. It offers a unique perspective on the complex plight of the black woman as slave and as writer. In a story that merges the conventions of the slave narrative with the techniques of the sentimental novel, Harriet Jacobs describes her efforts to fight off the advances of her master, her eventual liaison with another white man (the father of two of her children), and her ultimately successful struggle for freedom. Jacobs' account of her experiences, and her search for her own voice, prefigure the literary and ideological concerns of generations of African-American women writers to come.
Library Journal
Published in 1861, this was one of the first personal narratives by a slave and one of the few written by a woman. Jacobs (1813-97) was a slave in North Carolina and suffered terribly, along with her family, at the hands of a ruthless owner. She made several failed attempts to escape before successfully making her way North, though it took years of hiding and slow progress. Eventually, she was reunited with her children. For all biography and history collections. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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