Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/692

 682 Reviews of Books the period of Reconstruction which could be commended.' For trust- worthy material concerning it one had to go to the documents and other original sources, to memoirs and biographies, and to monographs which deal, as a rule, only with individual states. Mr. Rhodes's account of these years suffers — as any narrative of the period must — from the necessity he is under, more and more fre- quently as he goes on, to turn aside from his main theme to topics and episodes that have little or no connection with it. The new volumes suffer, too, by comparison with their more recent predecessors, for the want of a great central personality like Lincoln's. To some readers, no doubt, it will seem that they also suffer because their main theme is not so interesting as the war. But it is, at least, a less hackneyed theme ; and one feels, moreover, that Mr. Rhodes is more at home in dealing with such political episodes and problems as he here encounters than he ever was in the military parts of his narrative. He is at his best when investigating and judging causes and men; not when he confronts the stirring scenes and occasions which a historian of a more artistic bent would welcome as opportunities. His solution of the peculiarly difficult problem of order presented by his period is the simplest. Substantially, he follows the chronological order of events. He will, it is true, pursue a comparatively brief epi- sode to its end, even though he must turn back for the beginning of the next, or to take up the broken thread of the main narrative. But he does not hesitate to break that thread. If, therefore, one would follow the course of Reconstruction uninterruptedly, one must skip certain chapters and considerable portions of others. Mr. Rhodes has very positive views of his own about Reconstruc- tion, and nowhere else in his entire work does he speak his mind more freely ; not even when, in an earlier volume, he weighs and finds want- ing all the South's apologies for " the cause ". When he has followed the Reconstruction Acts of March, 1867, through the two houses of Congress, he declares (VI. 23) : " No law so unjust in its policy, so direful in its results had passed the American Congress since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854." Nor does he spare the chief authors of the policy. " Stevens's declarations [concerning Southern outrages] are entitled", we are told (VI. 24), "to no credence. He hated the South and desired to crystallize his feeling of hatred into legislation." " Ostensibly in the interest of freedom ", his policy was, in truth, " an attack on civilization" (VI. 35). Sumner, whose claim to the author- ship of the provision for negro suffrage Mr. Rhodes concedes, is ac- quitted of vindictiveness, but convicted of egregious unwisdom in ne- glecting the central factor in the problem. On the vital question of race, he would have done well, Mr. Rhodes points out, to consult one of his most intimate friends; for as early as 1863 Alexander Agassiz, ' I do not think Professor W. A. Dunning's work, in " The American Nation " series, has yet seen the light. To that volume scholars interested in Reconstruc- tion look forward with high expectations.