Among the major political figures of the Reconstruction era, Lyman Trumbull tends to get short shrift. Less flamboyant than Charles Sumner, less pugnacious than Thaddeus Stevens, and less statesmanlike than John Bingham, Trumbull tends to fade unjustifiably into the shadows. A scion of two prominent New England families, the Trumbulls and the Mathers, Trumbull settled in Illinois, where he practiced law while climbing through the state’s Democratic Party establishment. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1854 as a critic of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and its “popular sovereignty” approach to the extension of slavery, Trumbull joined the Republican Party in 1857 and allied himself with another rising Illinois Republican, Abraham Lincoln. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1861 until he left the Senate in 1873, Trumbull was at the center of many of the critical legislative and constitutional developments of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The arc of Trumbull’s senatorial career is something of an enigma. As a committed abolitionist, he was a strong supporter of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. He sponsored two of the key building blocks of Congressional Reconstruction—the Freedman’s Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1866—which both passed over President Andrew Johnson’s vetoes and served as important pillars of the attempt to reconstitute federal authority to enforce democratic rights and advance racial equality in the postwar South. If Trumbull’s career had ended in 1867, he would rightly be regarded as one of the heroes of Reconstruction.
In 1868, however, Trumbull was one of 10 Republican senators who voted to find Johnson not guilty in his impeachment trial; Johnson was acquitted by a single vote. Over the rest of his term in the Senate, Trumbull grew increasingly skeptical of Reconstruction. During the Grant administration, he went on to oppose several key enactments that aimed to empower the federal government to enforce civil rights and to take on white supremacist paramilitary violence by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Trumbull broke with the Republican Party mainstream in 1872, when he joined the breakaway Liberal Republicans, who supported the Democratic nominee Horace Greeley on a fusion ticket and called for the dismantling of Reconstruction and the restoration of autonomous government in the southern states.
Given this puzzling trajectory, Trumbull’s career seems ripe for reconsideration. How and why did he travel this curious path, and what can his political and ideological meanderings tell us about this critical but ultimately doomed experiment in American democratization? In this book, Paul Rego admirably resurrects Trumbull and effectively puts his career and thought in the context of the turbulent and rapidly shifting political and constitutional currents of his era. As Rego’s title suggests, many scholars have identified the Civil War and Reconstruction as a “second founding,” in which a series of constitutional amendments and other legislative measures and institutional developments substantially reordered the foundations of American governance. The Constitution of 1787 set up a constrained democracy and took at best a skeptical view of broad claims to political equality. The “second founding,” by contrast, was built on the promise of equal citizenship across the color line and rooted in the democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the initial founding that Lincoln had invoked at Gettysburg. Trumbull’s contribution to this “second founding” has been underappreciated, and Rego’s work of reconstructing his role in both its articulation and the often-byzantine legislative politics that brought it to life is a valuable contribution.
But the realization of the second founding’s promise proved elusive. The federal government’s enforcement commitment wavered in the face of increasingly violent white supremacist reaction, and ultimately the federal military occupation of the South ended. The Supreme Court hollowed out the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments, diluting their force and neutering them as instruments of racial equality. The promise of a new political economy in the South gave way to new means of labor repression for Black workers, and the rise of a new color line helped turn back the Populist challenge and stifled the development of a cross-racial working-class coalition. By the turn of the twentieth century, the South was well on its way toward the authoritarianism of the Jim Crow era that seemed to utterly negate the democratizing promise of the second founding.
Rego’s analysis is particularly illuminating about Trumbull’s role in this transformation as well. He carefully parses the way Trumbull articulated his constitutional principles as he and his congressional colleagues worked through the complex politics of the 1860s and 1870s. Building his argument on careful and judicious readings of congressional debates, private papers, and other sources, Rego finds a measure of consistency in Trumbull’s words and actions: fidelity to the founders’ vision of a federal republic; a vigorous but ultimately limited national government; and carefully constrained emergency power that could meet crises without overriding state prerogatives or dictating the terms of local governance. Trumbull’s adherence to these values during his time in the Senate in many ways prefigured the constitutional and political denouement of the Reconstruction experiment.
Rego’s analysis of Trumbull’s political and ideological arc deftly captures the political complexities and controversies of the Reconstruction era, and particularly the confrontation over the necessity for the U.S. government to conjure a broad spectrum of forceful federal power—legislative, administrative, military, and legal—in order to advance Reconstruction as a democratizing project. Reconstruction was at least partially successful because the national state embraced its aims; it set standards for equal citizenship, and it deployed a range of coercive tools to try to enforce those standards against the recalcitrant local agents of white supremacy. In Rego’s largely persuasive account, Trumbull is emblematic of the conflict over this new constitutional vision, and Reconstruction’s ultimate failure is an echo of his own failure (along with others) to grapple with the limitations of his constitutional temporizing in the face of resurgent authoritarianism in the South.
The book’s analysis would benefit from a bit more engagement with the historiography of Reconstruction as a way of locating Trumbull’s role in the larger story of American political development. Trumbull’s career serves as a stark reminder that Reconstruction’s demise came about because of political failure among its northern supporters rather than because of its inherent flaws. Black Americans in the South played an active part in forging their own path to citizenship, only to be thwarted by resurgent white violence and the failure of northern political nerve. To what extent does responsibility for the country’s inability to successfully reshape the South’s political economy and build democratic institutions in the region rest on the shoulders of politicians like Trumbull who might have pushed Reconstruction forward but chose instead to back away?
Questions such as these are, of course, unanswerable. But by shedding new light on Trumbull’s role in this important story, Rego makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of constitutional transformation, democratization, and backsliding in this crucial period of American political development.
