Capitol Men

By Philip Dray, Capitol Men is an informative and generally well-written book, but it's not quite what one may expect. I thought I was going to read a group biography of the men who, during reconstruction, were elected to congress from formerly Confederate states despite being black, which was a condition back then which wasn't much better than being enslaved. This book is not that, instead it is a history of the period, with periodic drop-ins on these men. The subtitle really sums it up: "The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressman."

After the civil war, when the Federal government basically occupied the former Confederacy, the Republican party was in control, and those states that had a majority black population: South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, managed to elect black men to high office, including both houses of congress (later Florida and North Carolina would do so as well). This was something of a blip in history, though, as after the last congressmen of this period left office (in 1901), it would be seventy-two years before another black would be elected in a Southern state. These early pioneers of black suffrage are largely forgotten today, and Dray's book is an admirable attempt to resurrect them. However, he almost instantly loses focus and they drift to the periphery. In some chapters they are hardly mentioned.

Dray starts off with the lively adventure of Robert Smalls, who during the war managed to appropriate a Confederate ship and sail it to the Union, where he turned it over and gained his freedom. But the book bogs down in extraneous details, such as the menu during Grant's second inaugural, and the subject of the title becomes lost. When the book focuses on them, it's very good, but otherwise it's just a recitation of reconstruction history that will be familiar to anyone versed in the topic.

I would have liked to know more about men such as P.B.S. Pinchback, who was the first black governor of any state (there have only been two since); Robert Brown Elliott, who bested former Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens in a debate; and Blanche Bruce, who may have been the best of them all in terms of intellect and legislative skill. Aside from certain events, such as Elliott's speech, and Pinchback racing back to Louisiana in an attempt to seize control of the government while he was lieutenant governor, the book doesn't do them justice. I would have appreciated an appendix that at least lists them all and when they served. Dray says there were sixteen, but I'm not sure all were mentioned.

I also found wanting a better understanding of how these men got elected in the first place, but I think that may be how incredible it all seems now. Just five years after the end of the war, Hiram Revels of Mississippi took his seat in Washington. I would imagine it seems like a fantasy at this point because of what happened thereafter. Southern whites did everything, not short of murder, to disenfranchise blacks and put them back in their place, and they succeeded in doing so for another one-hundred years. This period saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, audacious voter fraud, and ingenious methods of preventing blacks from voting (topped by the "understanding" clause, which required a prospective voter to read and interpret a portion of the state constitution, judged by the poll worker, which wasn't outlawed until the Voting Rights Act of 1965).

Dray also covers "exodusting," a mass migration of blacks out of the South, where they were treated so horribly, westward, to places like Kansas. Amazingly, Southern whites did not like this, because even after the end of slavery, the economy still relied heavily on the labor of blacks. The symbiosis of the Southern white and African Americans was the stuff of Freudian analysis.

If this book does anything, may it encourage further reading about these men, who are unfairly forgotten.