Book Review Essay: After War and Emancipation, an Irrepressible Conflict

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• Book Review EssayAfter War and Emancipation, an Irrepressible Conflict
• Brian Kelly (bio)

Professional historians who might benefit from a dose of humility about the earth-moving potential of our vocation need do no more than contemplate the gap between the outpouring of groundbreaking scholarship on war and emancipation over the past half century and its faint register in popular understanding. From the command bunkers of those directing the "war on woke," Americans face increasingly strident and well-resourced efforts to restore a neo-Confederate reading of the past that resurrects the worst of the Dunning school, albeit with more unconcealed malice and less scholarly credibility. Such attempts should serve as an important wakeup call, sounding the alarm against complacency. But the breach between scholarly discourse and popular understanding long predates this recent skirmishing, and a focus on maneuvering at the margins of the culture wars can obscure the extent to which the liberal sensibility dominating the American academy has itself contributed to confusion and disarray.

How many undergraduates emerge at the far end of their American history surveys or advanced courses on Civil War and Reconstruction concluding that nothing had changed, or that the essence of slavery continued unabated into the late nineteenth century under an all-conquering white supremacy? In academic writing, the ardor and sense of open possibility that drove a surge of new scholarship inspired by social movements associated with the New Left and struggles for Black liberation dissipated some years back, overtaken by the more cynical sensibility animating the antiwar turn in Civil War scholarship.¹ Even popular, [End Page 117] ostensibly radical representations of the period aimed at excavating the connections between post-Reconstruction brutality and the modern-day carceral state for the Black Lives Matter generation—as in the hugely popular Netflix documentary 13th—seem to posit a direct line between the outcome of the war and the practical reenslavement of Black Southerners, with a strong sense of the inevitability of Reconstruction's unraveling. The restoration of white home rule in the postwar South—with all its attendant violence and oppression—was the only likely settlement, it can often appear. If the neoliberalist mantra "There is no alternative" continues to underpin the paralysis of our present conjuncture, the academy in all its shades seems to have projected this back in time to insist that there never was any alternative.

Remarkably, the retreat from any sense of alternative possibility is often executed with the presumed endorsement of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 remains the touchstone for so much writing on the period. Scholars have absorbed his argument selectively, however, in ways that embrace ancillary elements—Du Bois's forceful demolition of the bias underpinning Dunning, for example—but downplay or dismiss as superfluous the innovative core of his approach. Peter Hudson has observed that Black Reconstruction "is invoked but not read, cited but not mined, and noted but not engaged"—a paradox he identifies in new writing on the relationship between slavery and the origins of capitalism, but that is perhaps even more evident in scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction.²

Two key elements of Du Bois's framework are largely missing from recent historical writing. In his cogent, incisive rendering of the timeline of emancipation, Du Bois wrote that "the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." Debate over how the slaves went free—their key role in transforming a war for Union into a war of emancipation—has figured prominently in one of the most prolific historiographical controversies of the past half century, sometimes taking the form of a reappraisal of Lincoln's standing as the Great Emancipator.³ Here, the debt to Du Bois's conceptual innovation [End Page 118] in illuminating the "slaves' general strike" as a framework for gauging the parameters of Black agency is obvious. At the other end of the trajectory, there has been a proliferation of work on white Southerners' return to power after 1876, and on the range of strategic responses to this among the formerly enslaved and their descendants during an age Leon Litwack regarded as...