Booknotes: Joshua Hill of Madison

New Arrival:

• Joshua Hill of Madison: Civil War Unionist and Georgia's First Republican Senator, 1812-1891 by Bradley R. Rice (Mercer UP, 2025).

Befitting his status as "Georgia's most prominent wartime Unionist," Joshua Hill finally has his first full biography in Bradley Rice's Joshua Hill of Madison: Civil War Unionist and Georgia's First Republican Senator, 1812-1891. He had a long career as a lawyer and politician. From the description: Hill "served in the United States House of Representatives prior to the Civil War and strongly opposed secession. During the War he ran for governor as the so-called peace candidate and later met with William T. Sherman in peace negotiations that failed." During Sherman's March to the Sea, Hill's ironclad Unionist credentials are credited with saving his hometown of Madison from general destruction.

Hill's political presence as a Deep South moderate Republican continued after the war. More from the description: "During Reconstruction, Hill supported Republican President Ulysses S. Grant and endorsed black suffrage, yet he clashed with the Radical wing of his party. As a result of a compromise between Democrats and moderate Republicans, Hill became the state's first Republican member of the U.S. Senate." Nevertheless, Hill was swept out of his seat by the Democratic resurgence of the "Redemption" period. "After two years Confederate General John B. Gordon replaced him in 1873. Hill remained a Republican senior statesman until his death in 1891, and Georgia did not send another Republican to the Senate until 1980."

The central focus of Rice's study is on Hill's political career. Glancing through the table contents, it appears that the first half of the book's approximately 400 pages of narrative is devoted to the prewar and Civil War periods and the second half to Reconstruction and beyond. This biography constitutes "a long overdue account of the life and times of the man who was, as his gravestone reads, 'a staunch southern friend of the Union.'"