"Reconstruction policy after the Civil War, observes Mark Wahlgren Summers, was shaped not simply by politics, principles, and prejudices. Also at work were fears - often unreasonable fears of renewed civil war and a widespread sense that four years of war had thrown the normal constitutional process so dangerously out of kilter that the republic itself remained in peril. In A Dangerous Stir, Summers illuminates the ways in which these fears and anxieties affected the politics of the immediate post-Civil War years."--Jacket.