Thank you Harlequin Trade Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. No review was required as a condition for receiving the advance reading copy and no review was promised.
Mr. Book just finished America’s Deadliest Election, by Dana Bash. The book is about the Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1872 and the events of the following four years. Over those following years, we had the dispute over the infamous 1876 presidential election and the Supreme Court’s awful ruling that essentially ended Reconstitution and legalized segregation.
The first main character that we meet, and the most interesting one in the book, is Henry Clay Wadmoth, the Republican incumbent governor. According to the New York Times, “It is difficult to exaggerate the evils…he has brought on the state” while other newspapers described him as “a despot”, “a demagogue” and “a tyrant.”
Wadmoth was just 25 years old when he was elected. He was elected to his position despite already being indicted in Texas a few years earlier for embezzling $21,000, but the voters didn’t seem to care. His tenure as governor was as disastrous as it sounds like it would be. This is another good example of one of the most common themes in history: things that wouldn’t be believable in a TV series happen very frequently over the course of U.S. history.
The governor was a big believer that the law didn’t apply to him and more than a hundred years before Nixon occupied the White House and almost 150 years before Trump, was a believer that if the governor does it, it is not illegal. His administration even set up a specific office where anyone who wanted to give bribes could do it there.
The book provides a very good look at how the counting of the vote in the 1872 election showed the results were nothing more than a farce. Violence was rampant in Louisiana throughout Wadmoth’s tenure. In fairness to him, it started shortly before he took office, but there is no indication that he showed any interest in doing anything about it.
The author points out that the election of 1872 raised the issue of what happens when a significant chunk of the electorate doesn’t accept the result of an election. Unfortunately, that sounds very familiar to us. The Republican, William Pitt Kellogg, and the Fusionist-Democratic candidate, John McEnery both claimed victory. Eventually, after the federal government intervened, Kellogg was certified as the winner.
Meanwhile, during his time as lame duck governor, the legislature impeached Wadmoth, who was term limited to a single team. Under state law, the act of being impeached immediately resulted in his suspension from holding the office. I won’t spoil the outcome of how the case against him was resolved. There are some analogies I’d like to make, but that would end up giving things away.
Initially after the election, there were not only two governors purporting to be the correct one, but also two separate legislatures operating in Louisiana. And, I also need to mention that the elected judges and similar chaos existed there. As the author points out, McEnery and his legislature exerted no actual power, but as long as they had enough people who will follow them, they were a legitimate threat to the legitimate government.
Initially, after the competing gubernatorial inaugurations, it was a non violent situation. But, it was only a matter of time before that changed.
The tension eventually erupted in the Colfax massacre. That then led to the Supreme Court’s infamous ruling in the Cruikshank case, which effectively ended Reconstruction as well as having a devastating impact on the 14th Amendment—which lasts to this day—as well as bringing about the Jim Crow era. I just checked my records and, prior to this, Mr. Book had read three books on the Colfax massacre and that case. But, none of them came close to this one in going into such great detail about all of the events leading up to it. That is why none of them ended up even getting close to the grade that this one is getting.
Estimates on how many blacks were killed in the massacre range from 150 to several hundred. But, whatever the total was, it is regarded as the worst mass racial killing in United States history.
In 1876, in the Battle of Little Creek, that was a briefly successful insurrection in which Governor Kellogg’s government was overthrown. But, thanks to the Grant administration, Kellogg’s administration was reinstated.
Mr. Book gave this book an A+, which means it is immediately inducted into my Hall of Fame . Amazon, Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
One of the first things I did after finishing this book was to go place a preorder for the Audible edition. So, I will be able to once again enjoy this excellent book when that is released.
This review has been posted at this blog, NetGalley and Goodreads. It will also be posted at Amazon, as soon as the book is released to the public on September 3.
I originally read this book on May 22, 2024.
