Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First BlackCongressmen
Reconstruction was a time of idealism and sweeping change, as the victorious Union created citizenship rights for the freed slaves and granted the vote to black men. Sixteen black Southerners, elected to the U.S. Congress, arrived in Washington to advocate reforms such as public education, equal rights, land distribution, and the suppression of the Ku Klux Klan.But these men faced astounding odds. They were belittled as corrupt and inadequate by their white political opponents, who used legislative trickery, libel, bribery, and the brutal intimidation of their constituents to rob them of their base of support. Despite their status as congressmen, they were made to endure the worst humiliations of racial prejudice. And they have been largely forgotten—often neglected or maligned by standard histories of the period.
In this beautifully written book, Philip Dray reclaims their story. Drawing on archival documents, contemporary news accounts, and congressional records, he shows how the efforts of black Americans revealed their political perceptiveness and readiness to serve as voters, citizens, and elected officials.
We meet men like the war hero Robert Smalls of South Carolina (who had stolen a Confederate vessel and delivered it to the Union navy), Robert Brown Elliott (who bested the former vice president of the Confederacy in a stormy debate on the House floor), and the distinguished former slave Blanche K. Bruce (who was said to possess "the manners of a Chesterfield"). As Dray demonstrates, these men were eloquent, creative, and often effective representatives who, as support for Reconstruction faded, were undone by the forces of Southern reaction and Northern indifference.
In a grand narrative that traces the promising yet tragic arc of Reconstruction, Dray follows these black representatives' struggles, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the onset of Jim Crow, as they fought for social justice and helped realize the promise of a new nation.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With this densely textured history of Reconstruction, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown) moves the first black congressmen—including Robert Brown Elliott, P.B.S. Pinchback and Hiram Revels—from the margins of American history and places their careers in an integrated context that includes not only the challenging world in which they lived [but] the stories of the men and women of both races whose actions affected their role. Particularly illuminating on local political history, Dray is equally attentive to broader issues (e.g., the rift between women's rights advocates and civil rights activists). Events frequently treated as separate African-American issues (e.g., the collapse of the Freedman's Bank, the legal entrenchment of separate but equal) are examined in the fuller milieu of contemporary history. The author asserts, [I]t is difficult to imagine another period in America's past as complex as Reconstruction, or one that has been more controversial in the telling. Dray's triumph is to have crafted a lucid and balanced narrative, thoroughly researched and well-documented to satisfy the scholarly, while consistently fascinating and fully accessible for the casual reader. (Sept.)
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Review
"Absorbing … Dray devotes the majority of his pages to a significant minority: some of the first African Americans ever to serve in Congress. A few, such as Robert Smalls and Blanche K. Bruce, have been the subject of recent, thorough biographies. Others, such as Robert Brown Elliott and John Roy Lynch, emerge here as fascinating figures deserving full-length studies." (The Washington Post )
"Pulitzer finalist Philip Dray's Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen is a history of an often overlooked chapter. The stories of men like Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first black senator, are all the more powerful from some 140 years before Barack Obama began his presidential quest." —The Washingtonian
About the Author
Philip Dray is the author of several books, including Stealing God's Thunder and At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Customer Reviews
Long Overdue!
This is the first history, to the best of my knowledge which addresses the careers of the first African American congressmen who attempted to fulfill the notion of post civil war democracy and equality as embodied by the 13th 14th and 15th Amendments. It is a study that is long overdue.
Paul Lawrence Dunbar once observed that "some men are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them and others lived through the Reconstruction." (He might have added the so-called Redeemer period as well when whites disenfranchised African American citizens as well). What this book demonstrates is the exceptional nature of all of the men who represented their constituencies in the South after the Civil War until they were denied representation for nearly 80 years.
This book chronicles many exceptional individuals, but perhaps my favorite is Robert Smalls. Again and again I kept asking "why have I not heard of him before?" Smalls was a war hero, who delivered the steamboat "Planter" to Union hands. Smalls managed to desegregate Philadelphia street car lines and served many years, until he was gerrymandered out of congress by whites who refused to permit African Americans the right to vote, no matter how many ways it took to undermine the law, constitution, and fundamental documents like the Declaration of Independence.
Just as there are heroic seekers after freedom like Smalls, Blanche K. Bruce, Robert Brown Elliot, P.B.S. Pinchback, Hiram Revels, Alonzo Ransier, John Roy Lynch, there are also villain who people this remarkable book. Many of white Republican figures who sought to create a more equal post-Civil War south tended to fold their tents and decamp for more hospitable parts of the country when they encountered resistance (in this way they reflected the national Republican Party, increasingly less vigilant after 1876). However, it would not be a misstatement to award Ben Tillman, an unapologetic racists as the most disagreeable and evil figure in this narrative. Through his efforts, African Americans lost all political power and the United States was a poorer place.
This is a wonderful book and aside from acquainting the reader with remarkable and overlooked characters from American history, it also serves to destroy the myths of the Reconstruction created by Claude Bowers and James Ford Rhodes in their mean-spirited histories. At last justice is done!
Thought you knew about Reconstruction?
History fans, if you thought you knew much of what there was to know about Reconstruction-read this. It'll send you running back to the woodshed...er..library.
This book goes in to great detail about the men that made Reconstruction in major states such as Mississippi, and South Carolina, and Louisiana, where Blacks were in the majority of the population. Think the Civil Rights movement started with Rosa Parks and Dr. King? As early as the 1870s, Robert Elliott and Rev. Richard "Daddy" Cain were fighting for equal accomodation. Learn of the nation's First Black Governor-Pinckney Pinchback-who served in Louisiana in 1873! We all know of a certain Black Senator who electrified the nation with an amazing speech on race relations and national unity, right? Guess what-Hiram Revels of Mississippi did this over 130 years before a certain presidential candidtate of Kenyan and Kansan heritage.
The book is filled with excellent detail as Philip Dray has painstakingly gone through newspapers, perosnla papers, and testimonies of that era in a readable and enjoyable fashion.
Books like this are why I've always said that libraries and bookstores are the best sources for information outside of the school houses. Learn and enjoy!
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