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AGRICULTURE AND THE RISE OF THE REGULATORY STATE

success on its own terms—is more difficult to fathom. To make that argument, Summers draws a bright line between the abolition of slavery, which succeeded; and the attempt to establish “equal rights and democracy” (4), which most definitely did not. Yet that separation makes little sense when we consider that Republican lawmakers moved immediately, as the war ended, to protect the basic civil rights of Southern African Americans. Measures like the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment were hardly the province of a few marginalized radicals; they enjoyed broad support among Republicans who shared a conviction that emancipation must be accompanied by policies that allowed the U.S. government to help secure individual rights. How can we regard Reconstruction a success when the government ultimately proved unable to produce the very results its architects fought for? Summers is relatively unstinting in his descriptions of white Southerners’ violent attacks on black Southerners and white Unionists, but his argument that the Republicans’ program for the South was essentially conservative also makes it difficult to understand that behavior. Congress’s early measures supporting black men’s voting rights—the 1867 Reconstruction Acts—may have been constitutionally conservative, but their impact on the ground in the South was transformative. Suddenly, African Americans formed a voting block of critical importance in places where, just two years earlier, they had been held as chattel. If, as Summers argues, all the important currents in Republican policy were so moderate, then why did white Southerners meet black political organizing and Southern Republicanism with such violence? How can we comprehend the murder, assault, and terrorism to which white Southerners resorted without a fuller acknowledgment of the disturbing and perhaps even revolutionary potential of emancipation itself, of federally enforceable civil rights, and of black men’s enfranchisement? By framing his argument around conservatism and consolidation—and by giving scant attention to the impact of African Americans in political life —Summers leaves readers with a decidedly incomplete picture of the politics of Reconstruction.