Book Review: Trial by Fire by Page Smith

Trial by Fire: A People's History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Page Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are three eras during which the future of the nation was at stake, in the 18th century it was the Revolution and in the 19th century it was Civil War. Trial by Fire: A People’s History of the Civil War and Reconstruction is the fifth volume of Page Smith’s A People’s History series from Fort Sumter to the election of 1876 as the nation is racked by four years of war to successfully save the Union and 11 years of Reconstruction that failed to bring the freedman truly within body politic short-term but creating a promissory note for the future.

This volume is by the nature of its emphasis in a particularly 15-year period of the nation’s history different from Smith’s previous volumes in terms of scope in military, political, and cultural elements. Over the nearly 1000 pages of text, Smith not only detailed the events of the war along the twists and turns of Reconstruction to correct the record of the period that the “Lost Cause” myth perpetuated about the period over the course of over half a century. Among the most important parts of the book was Smith’s concluding analysis of both the war and Reconstruction: when writing about the former Smith concluded that the South probably should have won given various factors at the beginning of the war but poor strategic decisions by the South allowed the North’s numbers and industrial capacity overwhelm it while the later was always doomed to fail due to Southern intransigence and the fact Northern opinion of blacks was negative Reconstruction needed to be attempted because the alternative would have been emphatically worse. While the overall product was very well written and very informative, Smith made a lot of head scratching mistakes that stood out because they were contradicted by the actual facts just paragraphs later which appears to be sloppy editing by someone because it was blatant that something happened between first draft manuscript and ready for publication proof that allowed these errors to creep in. The fact that I downgraded the rating an entire star compared to the previous volumes is an indication of how much it got my attention.

Trial by Fire is a culmination of events that Page Smith chronicled in his history of the United States as the two conflicting views of what the country clashed and its aftermath that created a more “national” though still incomplete vision of the country that would lead into it’s next chapter.

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