<i>Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor: James Webb Throckmorton</i>, and: <i>Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor</i> (review)

600,000 dead, cities in ruin, 4 million emancipated, southern violence on the rise. Their trauma was hardly imagined. The conclusions Summers draws are most troubling. Although he acknowledges that “Klan violence proved over and over, there were conspiracies afoot, murderous plots to overthrow freedom and to subvert state governments,” he blames Radical Republicans. By creating panics and using them to “stretch” the Constitution, Radicals become responsible for white southerners’ violent responses, what he calls the “toxic side eff ects” of Radical Reconstruction (271). Contrary to what David Blight tells us about postwar struggles over memory,2 Summers believes Confederate memorialization of the Lost Cause was benign. “Nostalgia was not a danger,” he writes (270). If Radical lawmakers went too far, so did freedpeople in their audacious demands for land, physical protection, and civil rights. From this perspective, Reconstruction was, indeed, much ado about nothing. While I am sure it was not Summers’s intention to reproduce a watereddown version of the “tragic era,” the reader is left with the sense that the last thirty years of historical work on Reconstruction has been for naught. carole emberton