Retreat From Reconstruction, 1869-1879 [Book Review]

Abstract

A do7cn years of thorough research into manuscripts and newspapers, a clear and colorful, sometimes brilliant (if not always careful) writing style, and a message in tune with the current pessimistic popular dogma that government is, by its nature, incapable of solving important societal problems guarantees this book a large and respectful scholarly audience. Charging that historians who have sought to revise William A. Dunning's harsh racist portrait of Reconstruction have exaggerated the era's idealism and its accomplishments partly because they concentrated too much on the 1860s, Gillette details what he terms a "postrevisionist" picture by focusing on the 1870s. Confident he can gauge the most subtle shifts in public opinion and the most complex election outcomes without any statistical analysis of election returns and, of course, without any public opinion polls; zealously, without a trace of a misgiving, judging the morals and tactics of every important politician and group of politicians; continually contradicting the accounts of other historians without directly confronting their arguments or data; satisfied to array only what he asserts is "a representative selection" (p. 441) of his evidence to buttress his points, Gillette has written a book which is at once methodologically and substantively deeply conservative.

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