Reviewed by: Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth D. Leonard Brooks D. Simpson (bio) Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xxiii, 365. $36.00 cloth; $27.99 ebook) Coming away from his first encounter with Benjamin F. Butler on April 1, 1864, Cyrus B. Comstock, an officer on Ulysses S. Grant's staff, concluded that Butler was "sharp, shrewd, able, without conscience or modesty—overbearing," adding, "A bad man to have against you in a criminal case." Many other people agreed with Comstock and many still do. For most students of the American Civil War, Butler remains caricatured more than understood. Credited with developing the initial U.S. military reaction to handling enslaved people who fled Confederate lines to seek protection and freedom, Butler was both praised and denigrated for his performance governing occupied New Orleans before his unremarkable role as commander of the Army of the James where he was relieved by Grant in January 1865. As a Republican congressman during Reconstruction, Butler proved determined and, some suspected, underhanded—as interested in building his base in Massachusetts politics as he was in supporting vigorous measures to protect the freedpeople in the South. Surely there was more to the man, although few people seemed interested in discovering what that might be. Biographies by Robert S. Holzman, Hans Trefousse, Richard S. West, and Dick Nolan fought to resurrect Butler's reputation, not always in persuasive fashion. At best they modified but did not radically alter his historical reputation, which tended to focus on his military service during the Civil War. Elizabeth Leonard takes a different tact, focusing on Butler's entire career, grounded in politics, while bringing his private life into clearer focus. The resulting portrait calls into question the cartoon-like renderings of Butler, demonstrating that he held fast to a determination to help the downtrodden and the underdog as he battled for women's rights and eventually for the [End Page 80] end of slavery and equality for African Americans. The later crusade came as something of a surprise for a prewar Democrat who once endorsed Jefferson Davis for president of the United States, but the experience of war and secession helped transform his views as he became known as an earnest Radical Republican. Later in life, Butler made his way back to the Democratic party, serving a term as governor of Massachusetts, continuing a career in which he was loved and hated, mocked and feared. The strength of Leonard's admittedly admiring account is in the attention paid to Butler's personal life and in her willingness to highlight his political principles, which pointed in an egalitarian direction. Although she illuminates the first two years of Butler's military service because of the ramifications in how he handled southerners, she is somewhat less interested in his tenure as an army commander in 1864–1865. Butler's correspondence, including incoming letters, often dominates the narrative. Butler's critics are given short shrift, even as Leonard recognizes that Butler was a divisive and controversial figure. To be sure, Butler's critics frequently derided him because of what he believed, but nevertheless there remained a cunning and calculating individual whose behavior merited Comstock's measured assessment. Some people, like Grant, were willing to deal with Butler out of political necessity but at times found the result distasteful. This avowedly sympathetic treatment of Butler gives readers reason to admire its subject, even as one wonders whether at least some of his critics were also onto something about him. Leonard's skill as a biographer and a historian serves both herself and Butler well as she escapes the extremes to which some revisionist treatments are subject. This fresh reappraisal more than answers the demand for one. [End Page 81] Brooks D. Simpson BROOKS D. SIMPSON is an ASU Foundation professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of several books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. (2013). Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society

This chapter recasts the military history of the Overland Campaign in ways that reveal the blurred boundaries between homefront and battlefront. The campaign, which took place in Virginia during spring 1864, began in the Wilderness and ended with Cold Harbor. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant directed major elements of the U.S. Army in operations against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The contours of the fighting and its importance were shaped by the constant interaction of free Whites and enslaved African American civilians, men and women, as well as by the national political context in which Lincoln ran for and ultimately won reelection. As part of the campaign’s design, U.S. soldiers invaded homesteads, destroyed the landscapes of towns and farms, looted and foraged what they needed while they destroyed any surplus, and otherwise terrorized civilians by their presence. When the campaign ended, Grant’s forces had pinned Lee against Richmond and Petersburg, eventually leading to the capture of the Confederate capital the following April.

Reviewed by: American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald C. White Brooks D. Simpson (bio) American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant. By Ronald C. White. (New York: Random House, 2016. Pp. 854 Cloth, $35.00; paper, $20.00.) For the last three decades, Ulysses S. Grant has been the beneficiary of a revisionist wave of scholarship that includes more than a few full-scale biographies. Scholars have burnished the favorable portrayals of Grant's generalship offered by J. F. C. Fuller and Bruce Catton while delivering telling blows at criticisms of his shortcomings as a president. One almost rolls one's eyes to hear of a publisher proclaiming the appearance of yet another effort to rescue Grant's reputation and rehabilitate his standing in the American pantheon of heroes as revolutionary, given what we have already seen appear in the wake of William S. McFeely's 1981 study. Those readers hoping for a revelation or even a substantial revisionist perspective may be disappointed. If anything, Grant has become a rather safe subject for biographers, who are increasingly recycling and synthesizing existing scholarship while finding it ever more difficult to break new ground and offer original insights. What Ronald C. White offers in American Ulysses is no mean feat: a book that brings together all this work in a solid, readable, single volume that easily displaces previous efforts by Geoffrey Perret and H. W. Brands and proves far more digestible than Jean Edward Smith's encyclopedic effort. He presents the story of Grant's pre–Civil War career in an engaging narrative, although at times the foreshadowing might strike the reader as a bit forced. He retells the story of Grant's rise during the Civil War without becoming distracted by details, moving the narrative along at a brisk pace. Although White judges Grant a "superb tactician" (287), it is fairer to say that Grant was a master of the operational art: his ability to move men into combat on the battlefield was often less than elegant. Then again, Civil War battles in themselves were often indecisive. It is what generals did with them in the context of larger operations that often defined [End Page 339] their significance. Like other biographers, White sees Grant's alliance with Lincoln as essential to Union victory, as the two men forged an unbeatable team. White handles Grant's postwar emergence as a political figure in Reconstruction and as an eventual Republican presidential candidate concisely; he concurs with the present tendency to think far better of Grant's presidential performance than was once the case. White credits Grant with good intentions that he failed to translate into successful policies, especially when it came to matters of race. While Grant's Reconstruction policy failed to frame an approach that successfully addressed both sectional reconciliation and the quest to achieve equality, justice, and opportunity for African Americans, his "Peace Policy" toward Native Americans advocated removal to reservations so that assimilation could take place, an approach that in the eyes of less favorably inclined observers might be termed cultural genocide. Eventually his policies floundered: the nation's centennial celebration was bracketed by the disaster at Little Big Horn and the Hamburg massacre. White also covers Grant's tour around the world, his failed bid to regain the presidency in 1880, his financial setbacks, and his gallant fight to beat death and provide for his family by composing his masterful memoirs. White's most visible effort at offering new insights concerns Grant's Methodist faith, most notably his association with John Heyl Vincent, a minister with whom he often crossed paths. Unfortunately, White is less successful at showing how Grant's Methodism influenced his life. Elsewhere White concludes that Grant was an introvert, although that should not come as much of a surprise to most people. Readers looking for an exploration of the role alcohol played in Grant's life will come away disappointed: White deemphasizes this familiar theme and gives short shift to several well-known tales of intoxication. Finally, he notes that while Grant was no fan of music, he enjoyed reading novels and attending plays, suggesting that he was not quite...

At a time when Americans debate the fate of refugees fleeing military conflict around the world, it is well to remember that during the Civil War, many civilians in the Confederacy sought refuge elsewhere in response to military operations. In his careful study Driven from Home, David Silkenat explores the many layers of refugee activity in North Carolina, where rich and poor, white and black, Confederate and Unionist, scrambled across the state in search of protection from danger or to seek opportunity and freedom. Appearing at a time when scholars make much of the relationship between battlefront and home front, this volume reminds us of just how chaotic and fluid the home front could be, as a war waged to preserve a particular social and economic order did much to disrupt it—yet another of the Civil War’s unintended consequences. As Silkenat reminds us, people began moving about even before the war commenced at Fort Sumter, which was followed by North Carolina’s decision to join the Confederacy. In 1862 Union military operations along the coast sparked massive population shifts within North Carolina. Slaveholders sought to remove their slaves westward toward the Piedmont, while many blacks flocked eastward to welcome the Yankee invaders as liberators. Refugees poured into the state from Virginia and South Carolina. The movement of slaves into areas occupied by southern Unionists and few slaves created more fissures among white southerners, while it proved difficult to house and feed the newcomers. Meanwhile, those blacks who ran to freedom often encountered reluctant liberators who were unprepared to provide for the needs and wants of the freedpeople. Nevertheless, blacks formed communities, complete with churches and schools: later in the conflict, black men enlisted in Union regiments to fight to preserve their freedom. White southern Unionists sought protection provided by bluecoat bayonets, and feared the consequences when those bayonets were withdrawn; most proved reluctant emancipationists. Finally, Silkenat reminds us that there was a substantial population of young white women whose parents sent them away to boarding schools for the duration of the conflict in the hope that they would be spared the impact of the conflict.

Mission ImpossibleReconstruction Policy Reconsidered Brooks D. Simpson (bio) A central theme of Reconstruction historiography is the consideration of Reconstruction policy as debated, adopted, and implemented at the federal level. Inherent in that exercise is the contemplation of whether policymakers, working within the limits of what was possible politically, could have pursued a different course that would have met the twin objectives of sectional reconciliation and the promotion of a new birth of freedom and opportunity for African Americans liberated during the course of the American Civil War. To do that, scholars have to wrestle with counterfactual scenarios, an exercise with which not all of them are comfortable. Yet historians are also ill at ease with the alternative conclusion that, given the circumstances, the end result was not only likely but also inevitable. Thus speculation about alternatives goes hand-in-hand with a critique of what happened, for how can one offer criticism of what was done unless one outlines an alternative that would have improved upon the historical result? A simple glance at Reconstruction historiography reveals that historians have always evaluated Reconstruction policy and policymakers according to what was possible, what was preferable, and what actually happened—at least according to the scholar in question. By now that tale has been told so often that one risks boring the reader in the retelling of the familiar trinity of Dunningites, revisionists, and post-revisionists, an exercise that blurs differences within each grouping to sharpen the contrast between them. To practitioners of the Dunning school, who prized sectional reconciliation, policies founded on the federal protection of black rights were doomed because they were built upon the shaky foundation of black capability and equality. Reconstruction was a misguided experiment that imperiled sectional reconciliation among American whites by engaging in irresponsible social engineering to elevate incapable former slaves to an ill-fated equal inclusion in the body politic. Republican efforts in the [End Page 85] 1860s to create state regimes where blacks voted and held office were exercises in futility and never should have been undertaken. Revisionists, who embraced the goal of black equality and opportunity, passionately disagreed. They deplored the failure of Reconstruction policy to achieve those laudable ends: they were far less concerned about sectional reconciliation. While few revisionist scholars questioned the objective of restoring civil governments, some believed it would have been far better for Congress to have confiscated planter land and redistributed it among the freedpeople to provide them with the economic foundations of freedom and opportunity. To such scholars, Reconstruction was an opportunity lost. And then there are the post-revisionists, a term very much associated with understandings of Reconstruction politics and policy. Post-revisionists tend to stress the inherent conservative tendencies in policymakers and political institutions and express skepticism that the goals of Reconstruction embraced by the revisionists were likely to be achieved under the circumstances. Nevertheless, as their name implies, post-revisionists are rarely understood apart from the revisionists they evaluate, who in turn continue to war against the pernicious impact of the Dunning school on public understandings of Reconstruction. Such a thumbnail description risks distorting the various ways scholars have addressed Reconstruction policy both as it was and as it might have been, rendering the whole exercise problematic. After all, one of the unfortunate consequences of any exercise in historiography is that it leads some scholars to forego reading the works of the people under discussion in favor of a brief characterization of their work. This is especially true when it comes to Reconstruction, for any exploration of Reconstruction history almost inevitably includes a treatment of Reconstruction historiography and memory, with various scholars announcing their intention to overturn long-held assumptions about the period that have shown an amazing durability in the minds of many Americans. It is also true that all too often studies of Reconstruction policy are as much about what could have happened as what did happen, with the road not taken weighing heavily on the minds of some scholars, while others ponder exactly what was possible alongside what happened. Over the last fifteen years historians have had cause to reflect anew on the possibilities and pitfalls of Reconstruction policy—under the...

Reviewed by: Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln by Jonathan W. White Brooks D. Simpson Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln. By Jonathan W. White. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Pp. [xviii], 275. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-5457-1.) In the dedication of Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, Jonathan W. White salutes his adviser, Mark Neely, “who taught me to challenge the reigning paradigms” (p. v). Like adviser, like student, for in this provocative volume White takes aim at what he claims passes for conventional wisdom about how soldiers in the Union army viewed emancipation and electoral politics, especially during the presidential contest of 1864. The result will spark discussion, and in some cases controversy. White reminds readers that emancipation was not overwhelmingly popular in the ranks of the Union army. Although debate continues over the racial attitudes of the boys in blue, White demonstrates that recent scholars emphasizing the army’s role in destroying slavery must accept that many of the liberators were reluctant ones. Soldiers who criticized administrative policy, especially emancipation measures, were often punished, making the line between dissent and disloyalty blurry. White’s book also shows that the story of Union soldiers voting overwhelmingly for Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 is not quite as simple as it once seemed. Many soldiers were skeptical about Lincoln’s administration and instead supported George B. McClellan, the president’s Democratic opponent. Many Democratic-leaning soldiers could not quite get over their disgust with the peace wing of their own party, while Union military victories proved decisive in swaying votes to Lincoln in other cases. However, Democrats in the Union army encountered obstacles to professing their party loyalty or expressing it at the ballot box. Doubtless White is correct that many Democratic soldiers may have addressed their qualms by declining to cast a ballot, making the army seem more Republican than it truly was. Occasionally White presses home a point that requires further research. Take his claim that only about 15 percent of the soldiers eligible for reenlistment from November 1863 to November 1864 actually reenlisted, a number that is far lower than the 50 percent often cited in the literature, notably by [End Page 184] James M. McPherson in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997). McPherson calculated 50 percent reenlistment by looking at the number of men whose three-year enlistments expired in 1864. But as White points out, looking only at three-year men obscures the total number of men who were eligible to reenlist during that period, especially men who had signed up on nine-month terms. White’s work does not invalidate McPherson’s claims, but it raises many questions about how reenlistment percentages are calculated. It is usually standard scholarly practice to question established orthodoxy. One must be careful, however, not to appear contrarian just to be contrarian. Democratic soldiers harbored reservations about Lincoln and recalled McClellan fondly: one would expect as much. However, if one is to speak of the entire army, one must take other bluecoats with Republican preferences into account. Moreover, anyone who studies the Army of the Potomac knows that many of its commanders were not Lincoln men. Yet the names of Winfield Scott Hancock, Gouverneur K. Warren, and John Sedgwick—all Democrats and corps commanders in that army at the beginning of the Overland campaign—do not appear in this book’s index. Why not? Why would they or their successors have tolerated such harassment of their men of the type White describes? White’s detailed discussion of the fate of legislation allowing soldiers to vote is insightful and informative; he reminds us that definitions of citizenship that encompassed the right to vote carried implications for the evolving support for black suffrage. His other findings will surely spark debate, and one welcomes his use of soldiers’ letters and journals, as well as his efforts at quantitative analysis. Not everyone will agree with all the arguments White presents, but it will behoove historians to take them...

Andrew Johnson's Civil War and Reconstruction. By Paul H. Bergeron. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. 300 pp. Since 1960, the reputation of Andrew Johnson's presidency has steadily eroded, a decline that is largely attributable to a revolution in Reconstruction scholarship. Although studies by James Sefton and Albert Castel gave Johnson his due in certain areas (Sefton, Andrew Johnson and the Uses of Constitutional Power [Little Brown, 1980]; Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson [University Press of Kansas, 1979]), the author of the only modern full-length biography, Hans Trefousse (Andrew Johnson: A Biography [W. W. Norton, 1997]), was far more critical of Johnson's Reconstruction policy. According to Paul H. Bergeron, who as editor oversaw the publication of the last eight of the sixteen volumes of The Papers of Andrew Johnson (University of Tennessee Press, 1967-2000), the Tennessean "has been vilified enough" (p. 6). He argues that one can make too much of Johnson's racism, given prevailing attitudes at the time. Moreover, simply to dismiss Johnson as a racist risks overlooking other considerations that shaped his performance as president, including his commitment to preserving executive power and defending his interpretation of the Constitution. Rather, Bergeron asserts, one must set his racism in the context of his other attitudes and attributes, positive and negative, to gain a better overall assessment of Lincoln's successor in the White House. Bergeron recounts Johnson's career during the 1860s, incorporating his experiences as a senator, military governor, and vice president, as well as his four years as chief executive. As military governor of Tennessee, Johnson's energetic exercise of authority reinforced an already defiant, combative, and, at times, inflexible approach to political life. His actions earned Lincoln's approval: the president offered no objection (and, perhaps, some private encouragement) to Johnson's being named his running mate in 1864. Nearly six weeks after an embarrassing debut as vice president highlighted by a rambling harangue, Johnson assumed the presidency, courtesy of an assassin's bullet. As president, Johnson embraced a reconciliationist approach toward the former Confederates. For all of his bombast about punishing traitors, he reserved his venom for a select few prominent leaders, while embarking upon a pardon policy that proved most liberal. Accepting the destruction of slavery, he had little interest in advancing the fortunes of the freedmen, bringing talk of widespread confiscation and redistribution of plantations to a dead halt. The only time he showed any interest in enfranchising blacks was to silence his critics by extending the right to vote to a handful of freedmen. …

Journal Article The Papers of Jefferson Davis Get access The Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 13: 1871–1879. Ed. by Lynda Lasswell Crist. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. xlviii, 714 pp. $125.00.) Brooks D. Simpson Brooks D. Simpson Arizona State UniversityTempe, Arizona brooks.simpson@asu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 3, December 2013, Pages 845–846, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jat433 Published: 01 December 2013

At a time when Americans are reflecting on the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, we would do well to remember that the end of that war did not bring peace or resolution. This volume's primary theme is the continuity between the war and Reconstruction: the latter period did much to define more precisely what was achieved by the former. Most of the essays address the theme of continuity from the local level; with one exception, they treat life in the former slave states, including those that did not secede. Several essays examine both the possibilities and limits of the changes wrought by the war. For example, Derek W. Frisby's examination of west Tennessee Unionists in the postwar period emphasizes the role of violence and coercion in shaping the politics of the region: Unionists struggled to gain recognition of compensation claims for wartime damages. In Alabama, as Margaret M. Storey shows, Unionists continued to battle their wartime foes during Reconstruction. Anne E. Marshall argues that white Kentuckians maintained a spirit of rebellion by resisting emancipation. Common to all three of these essays are analyses of attempts to restore politics as usual in environments where coercion trumped consent.