Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis Laura E. Free Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. Reconstructing America. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 326. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9816-7; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9815-0.) The essays in Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later explore how post–Civil War freedom was defined, navigated, resisted, and ultimately remembered. Carefully documenting how local contingencies shaped diverse experiences of Reconstruction and defined how it was [End Page 784] imagined and disseminated, the essays effectively engage the rich complexity of the Reconstruction period. Bruce E. Baker's article opens the collection by asserting that Reconstruction history offers rich fodder for the modern political imagination and—despite its tragedies—hope for future transformations. After this opening reflection, the essays are thematically organized. The first "cluster" emphasizes Reconstruction's gains, excavating moments of triumph that Black southerners wrought for themselves (p. 8). Michael W. Fitzgerald's study demonstrates that some African Americans in western Alabama were, for a short period, able to take up arms, and successfully defended themselves against white supremacists. Samuel Watts's essay shows that during the early years of Reconstruction, a fair number of Black men gained communal authority as police officers in New Orleans and Charleston. Another critical success, Hilary N. Green argues, came in Mobile, where Black and creole of color Alabamians defined public education as a right of citizenship and so forged cross-class community alliances to create free public education systems in the state despite whites' resistance. The second cluster of articles illuminates how white southerners used existing institutions to maintain white supremacy. Shannon M. Smith demonstrates that in Kentucky, the conservative legislature granted African Americans the right to testify in court solely to remove civil rights cases from federal control, enabling state courts to legitimate extralegal violence. Felicity Turner's work also focuses on the legal system, showing that an intersection of medical and legal racism in infanticide cases prevented Black women from successfully wielding insanity pleas for their defense. The third thematic cluster of essays examines "racial disparity in relation to postwar consequences of loyalty or disloyalty to the Union" (p. 10). Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. argues that institutional racism in the Union army combined with the challenges of finding stable postwar work left many Black veterans in the North socially and financially worse off than they were before the war. Turning to politics, Brian K. Fennessy details how more moderate ex-Confederates, when they regained their political rights, returned power to pre-war elites and ultimately seized control of southern governments. The next cluster of articles views Reconstruction through a global lens. Don H. Doyle's essay posits that the United States' successful defense of republican government and emancipation resulted in the departure of France and Russia from the Americas, encouraged Canadian consolidation, and inspired an antislavery revolution in Cuba. In Brazil, Sergio Pinto-Handler argues, abolitionists used an idealized vision of Reconstruction's successes to argue that emancipation would result in a technologically advanced, yeoman farmer–based society with a popularly elected government. However, the more insidious global export, as Adam H. Domby's essay shows, was the "historical racism" of the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction, which was used worldwide to sustain colonial regimes, apartheid advocates, and "scientific" racists (p. 233). The final two essays take on the question of historical memory. Matthew E. Stanley's piece explores how nineteenth-century Black intellectuals used the memory of Black men's Union army military service to support their ideological [End Page 785] and political claims. Ethan J. Kytle's piece examines the history and memory of an 1865 Charleston banquet that Charlestonians in 2015 embraced as a symbol of multiracial harmony. He finds no evidence that the original banquet ever took place, locating the story's origins in hearsay shaped by white southerners' exaggerated fears of social equality in the immediate wake of emancipation. The articles in this collection illustrate how a...

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