In volume five of his eight-volume history of the United States, Smith covers the Civil War and Reconstruction. I found it much less rewarding than his other volumes, particularly when he was writing on the war. His accounts of the battles were sketchy, and in several places inaccurate. Chronologies were confused, which made it almost impossible to understand.

The second half of the book was better. I found it informative, but something about Smith’s method bores me at times. He makes a point, then quotes a contemporary account that makes the same point. He does this with almost every paragraph. Some of the personal accounts are very interesting and add valuable information. Others are just redundant. The method also introduces a great number of characters which are very difficult to keep track of.

As for Reconstruction itself, Smith says it was doomed to failure because of the intransigence of the Southern Whites, but it was still worth the effort because it proved that Blacks were not inferior as a race — although a vast majority of people refused to accept the proof. There were members of every race that succumbed to the temptations of life and others who rose above them and did good. Reconstruction also established that the national government had power over the states above and beyond the simple fact of preventing secession. (Although this power has, in many ways, been greatly expanded and abused, in my opinion.)

Having said all that, his method does give a feel for what people were thinking and what their motivations were, so in a way, the total is more rewarding than the sum of its parts. Perhaps I would have given this volume a higher rating if I could have read it at a more consistent pace. I’d read two pages here and four pages there.

Some bits and pieces:

• Near the end of the war, one Southerner wailed, “Failure will compel us to drink the bitter cup of humiliation even to the dregs of having the history of our struggle written by New-England historians.” Try to imagine a worse fate than that.
• New Word — diapason “a burst of sound.” “Sherman’s men, marching through Georgia, sounded out a kind of wild music of cries and chants. Commenced by one regiment, they would be taken up by brigades and corps until a vast diapason of sound rose from the tide of marching men.” Although, if diapason means “a burst of sound,” then this quote literally means, “a vast burst of sound of sound.”
• Dwight L. Moody reference: “Moody was famous for his missionary work among the poor and unchurched of the city. Macrae accompanied him to one of the mission schools that Moody had founded. He had, he wrote, ‘rarely beheld such a scene of high-pressure evangelization. It made me think irresistibly,’ he added, ‘of those breathing steamboats on the Mississippi, that must either go fast or burst. … Moody declared: ‘I look on this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, Moody, save all you can.’”
• Smith’s conclusion: “I have argued that the framing and ratification of the Federal Constitution took place by the narrowest of margins at the last moment when the Classical-Christian Consciousness had sufficient confidence and authority to create such a document. The emancipation of all Americans, black and white, from the incubus of slavery took place by perhaps an even narrower margin. It was never the will of a clear majority of the American people that the slaves of the South should be free, not to mention equal. So while it is true that the blacks of the South were in a sense abandoned, to put the matter that way obscures the achievements of those responsible for freeing them and fighting for their rights with great skill and resourcefulness through the most troubled and chaotic decade of our history. It was probably the case that those rights could never be fully realized until a new consciousness had formed in white Americans in regard to the rights of ‘other’ Americans and until black Americans gained sufficient confidence in their own powers to assert their rights as American citizens — and, it must be said parenthetically, until our sense of nationhood was stronger than our obsession with states’ rights. … Finally, it must be said, most emphatically, that one of the main reasons Congressional Reconstruction lasted as long as it did was the enormous prestige of the man responsible for administering it. Of the approximately ten years that the Era of Reconstruction lasted, Ulysses S. Grant was president for eight.” This may be the only positive thing I’ve ever read about Grant as president.