America’s Imagined Revolution (2024)

If someone took a poll of one hundred historians of the U.S. Civil War Era and asked them to describe Reconstruction in a short phrase, many would say “unfinished revolution.” This comes from the subtitle of Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988). Tomos Wallbank-Hughes, in contrast, wonders if incompletion is the best way to think about Reconstruction. After all, he observes, scholars frame the period as an unfinished revolution and then “struggle to understand American slave emancipation as a record of actually existing revolution” (2).

Wallbank-Hughes, currently Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, utilizes novels to “read Reconstruction less as a revolution unfinished than one complexly lived through, imagined, and narrated, making the case for the historical novel as a form that helps us to trace these uneven paths” (2). More specifically, he is interested in the historical novel of Reconstruction, by which he means “a recognizable and coherent—if short lived—aesthetic form that gives shape to Reconstruction as revolution by submitting the generic constructs of historical narratives” to questions such as how people narrate epochal change that also feels like retrenchment (12).

Wallbank-Hughes focuses on five writers—George Washington Cable, Albion W. Tourgée, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois—and some of their published and unpublished writings. He begins by analyzing Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880). Cable’s writing, he contends, is populated with “No Souths,” or “imaginative time-spaces that convey an anachronism irreducible to a historicist model of stalled progress” (29). These spaces, he asserts, are “not just allegories for (stalled) historical changes,” but are also allegories “about the way that immersion in a time and place shaped how it can be read and written” (29).

Wallbank-Hughes then examines Albion W. Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880) to consider the role of the state as a revolutionary agent. He also focuses on how Tourgée’s “treatment of sincerity—as a concept uniting organic and instrumental accounts of political power and social change—is expressed through, and rubs up against, an irony that resists easy political interpretation” (57).

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) help Wallbank-Hughes theorize Reconstruction’s revolutionary event: “the uncompensated abolition of slavery as human property” (26). Both novels, he asserts, “shape the contradictions involved in using racial embodiment to tell the time of Reconstruction’s revolutionary event into something like a period discourse” (87).

He concludes by discussing W. E. B. Du Bois’s unpublished novel, Scorn: A Romance (1905) and how Du Bois “developed and revised a peculiarly recursive and elliptical form of counterfactual narrative” between Scorn and Black Reconstruction (26). Wallbank-Hughes concludes that thinking about Reconstruction as the U.S.’s imagined revolution helps people rethink the idea of Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution.

America’s Imagined Revolution is a book for specialists, not general readers. For one, Wallbank-Hughes assumes his audience has a great deal of familiarity with the novels he analyzes. Some of them no doubt will, but many others will not. This book would have been strengthened if he had offered more discussion of the contents of the novels. Indeed, there are times that the discussion of the specific content in the novels is fragmentary and difficult to follow—which, in turn, weakens the author’s analysis.

In addition, Wallbank-Hughes makes some interesting arguments and observations, but it is fair to ask if his close reading of a small number of novels would have benefitted from a wider lens. He is correct that the novelists he studies worked through “the ambiguity that comes from thinking of Reconstruction as revolution” (12), and that they saw writing as an activist pursuit that “intervened in the history it narrated to continue something of Reconstruction’s work in the present” (14). However, the author might have spent more time on the following questions: How did these novelists fit into broader regional and national literary landscapes? How well was their work received? What did contemporaries think about their novels? Opinions clearly differed (A Fool’s Errand was a bestseller, and Scorn remained unpublished). Wallbank-Hughes might also have drawn from the tremendous literary outpouring during this period to offer more comparative analysis. How did shorter fiction and other novels speak, if at all, to the themes raised in this book—as well as to the author’s central concern with how other scholars understand Reconstruction

Finally, the question is worth asking, how much difference is there between Foner’s idea of an “unfinished revolution” and Wallbank-Hughes’s idea of Reconstruction as a revolution “complexly lived through, imagined, and narrated” (2)? Both see Reconstruction as a revolution. The phrase “unfinished revolution” captures something important about Reconstruction as a moment when the U.S. changed dramatically—a moment killed by massive resistance by ex-rebels, illogical Supreme Court decisions, and the general apathy of many northerners. The two ideas need not be mutually exclusive, in other words. Emancipation was revolutionary and Reconstruction was a complex, ultimately stymied revolution.

What scholars will think about Wallbank-Hughes’s argument remains to be seen, but the author has provided some intriguing material for them to consider as they continue to think about and study Reconstruction.

Evan C. Rothera teaches at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. He is the author or editor of two books on the U.S. Civil War Era.