Reconstruction Updated Edition: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

First, let me dispose of the negatives: there are quite a few editing mistakes in chopping up the sentence continuity when the pages are advanced, and the book is very long and detailed, maybe overly so. Despite these quibbles, it is a fascinating and wrenching story. Some of the events that stand out: the debate over black suffrage after emancipation and reconstruction (widely opposed), the disenfranchisement of former confederates and its effects, the inability to provide meaningful land ownership for former slaves, the post-war assaults on blacks by the Klan and other reactionary forces, and the ultimate reluctance to follow through on Reconstruction adequately. Slavery may have officially ended, but it was followed by exploitative labor peonage, discrimination and exclusion, the Poll tax and extreme poverty in an economically depressed region. Blacks were freer, but still miserable. At first, Reconstruction seemed to promise real change as former slaves were awarded some land (40 acres and a mule), they were able to vote and hold political office, and their voting power was enhanced by the exclusion of former confederates. Gradually, with rare exceptions, such as some educational advances, the sun set on the whole promising enterprise and almost all of these advances were eventually reversed. It's as if the northern victors got tired and finally concluded: Well, we defeated secession, we ended slavery in its most blatant form, we made a reasonable show of fixing things, we've done our duty, so now we can turn our attention to other things and go home. Eventually, the Klan and other demons of the old South arose to wreak vengeance on the powerless human symbols of their wartime humiliation and deprive them of their freedom and often their lives as reconstruction ended. The irresponsibility and negligence of the victors was appalling. Dragging people out of an alien foreign culture and enslaving them for cheap labor was callous and immoral, but so was not protecting and rehabilitating them adequately after they were emancipated. If the South was indeed part of the Union, then everyone must share in the blame and burdens of what slavery entailed and what effective reconstruction demanded. Ultimately, years later, blacks finally got the civil rights they should have received years ago, a process that was delayed by northern negligence. I like reading history because it always teaches things about human nature, its capabilities, characteristics and limitations. My thanks to the author for his thoroughness and skill in relating such a complex and vital part of our national drama.

I've been a junkie for some time for books documenting the depressing situation we find ourselves in in our society regarding our relationships with those who are not the old white males largely in charge of society. I'm talking about blacks; I'm talking about hispanics; I'm talking about LGBT; I'm talking about women. I'm speaking here as an old white male to give you some perspective where I'm coming from. Having just finished "Stamped from the Beginning" (also a great book), I decided to delve more deeply into reconstruction as a glimpse into our dysfunctional race relations concentrating on how we got here.I admit I'm only on page 9 of 612 but it's already obvious that this is a very readable and very informative book. And a shout out for footnotes on each page instead of in the back. YES! There should be a law requiring it.I will review the entire book when I'm done (at least several weeks) but if you are on the fence with this book, get off and start clicking. It's a good read.

I gradually read Eric Foner's comprehensive Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014) on Kindle over a period of several months. The first edition was published in 1988. It is not possible to capture adequately in this review the breadth of Foner's research and analysis. Suffice it to say that he covers probably every important political, social, and economic development, both in the North and the South, during the years 1863 through 1877. The present review focuses on some but not all of his themes.I was impressed by Foner's meticulous documentation of the factual developments he discusses. For the most part, Foner lets the facts speak for themselves. Although he has an analytical framework, his interpretation is informed more by historical facticity than by a preconceived ideological orientation. His extensive knowledge of the facts on the ground is remarkable. This work clearly represents a lifetime of study of these decades of American history.One thread that runs through this work is the influence of classical liberalism and its intellectual precursors on Reconstruction and beyond. I recently read C. B. Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, a book written by a Canadian professor that did not address American history. Macpherson focused on the seventeenth-century English philosophers and thinkers who formed, as it were, the intellectual basis of the later laissez-faire theories of Adam Smith and his contemporaries in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Macpherson demonstrated that these seventeenth-century thinkers (Thomas Hobbes, the Levellers, James Harrington, and John Locke) considered those who earned wages—as distinguished from self-employed artisans, business people, independent farmers, and great landholders—as almost subhuman creatures not entitled to participate in the electoral franchise. I might add that a residue of this way of thinking is the fact that the employer-employee relationship is still called the "master-servant" relationship in the employment law of many American states. This may also have something to do with Thomas Jefferson's famous preference for independent rural "yeomen" over denizens of cities.Fast-forward to the mid-nineteenth century. The Republican Party, of which Abraham Lincoln was the first president, originally opposed slavery and later supported civil and even political (electoral) rights for African Americans. The Republicans of that time brought us not only the elimination of legal slavery (the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution) but also citizenship, due process, and equal protection of the law (Fourteenth Amendment) for African Americans and other residents of the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment recognized that African American males could not be denied the right to vote on the basis of their race. But these developments were largely motivated, and limited, by classical liberal concepts. Thus, although most "Radical Republicans" of the Reconstruction era favored equal legal rights for African Americans, their willingness to use the federal government to help African Americans was mostly restricted to formal legal equality. In the face of the post-Civil War reign of terror of the Ku Klux Klan and its successors, Republican politicians came to tire of extraordinary federal governmental intervention to protect blacks and ensure that they would be treated equally before the law.In another iteration of classical liberalism, many former slaves wanted the federal government to break up the large plantations and redistribute the land among the freedmen. They thought, on the basis of both practical considerations and the dominant classical liberal thinking, that they could not really be free until they were liberated not only from slaveholders but also from employers (often, their former masters). The Republican Party as a whole was not willing to go this far. Instead, the party, under the titular leadership of President Ulysses Grant, descended into a complicated morass of political corruption. Some of the former Radical Republicans came to believe that such corruption was a result of the overinvolvement of the federal government in Reconstruction as well as crony capitalism in the form of governmental subsidization of railroads and other "capitalistic" enterprises, not to mention protective tariffs. Leading political, economic, and social figures even advocated a return to property qualifications for the franchise. They saw the extension of the vote to nonpropertied classes—including but not limited to the freedmen—as having led to the pervasive corruption that characterized the late 1860s and 1870s. They also felt that the political leadership of the "best men" (in their view, the large plantation owners in the South and the industrialists in the North) would be impossible as long as the franchise was not restricted to voters with substantial assets.Then came the Panic of 1873 and ensuring depression—the worst economic downturn that the nation experienced before the 1929 crash. By this time, thanks in part to governmental favors, large corporate enterprises were beginning to dominate entire industries, and a permanent wage-earning class was established, often peopled by immigrants. These developments inaugurated an extended period in which laborers demanded certain legal protections (the eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, the right to unionize, and so forth) that the dominant industrialists considered communistic. The first of many "Red Scares" occurred at this time, motivated in part by news of the Marxian Paris Commune of 1871.Accordingly, industrialization during and after the Civil War—caused not only by natural economic forces but also by deliberate Republican policies of special governmental favors to railroads and industry—became for the first time a permanent fixture in the American political economy. Along with industrialization came the political conflicts that characterized later decades of American political history.The present review can only touch on a few of the many themes that Eric Foner elaborates in his groundbreaking book on Reconstruction. The work is breathtaking in its scope and in its dexterous handling of a multitude of factual developments during the Reconstruction era. Every serious student of American history should read it.

Well written, if not a bit dry. My only negative comment is that the author covers in two sentences in the epilogue what should have been more clearly covered in the body of the book: the reasons for reconstruction’s failure.

10

No exciting thesis or strong arguments made in this book. Centre left politically, not too biased.

Foner's book is undoubtedly the best look at the Reconstruction period from its roots in the Civil War to its unfortunate destruction in the 1870s. The activities, hopes, and legislators of the black south are placed at the centre of his story. This makes for some emotional reading, as we see how their initial high hopes were eventually crushed by hostile forces. It is easy to make the reductionist claim that Reconstruction was nothing but a doomed failure, and that its white patrons were never too committed. Foner challenges this take. He uses examples from across southern states to show that black political and civic equality indeed rose during Reconstruction, reaching a level that was never reached again until after the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Blacks finally received the opportunity to build schools, become literate, and fight for their worker rights as sharecroppers. Reconstruction produced the South's first real public education systems. Blacks openly challenged abusive employer practices, like the leasing of convict labour or the use of rigged contracts. The federal Freedmen's Bureau restrained its own activity due to its 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' ideology of meritocratic labour, but it was still loved by blacks for its school systems and legal services that protected civil equality. Poor whites often benefited from these policies. Unfortunately, this early progress failed to continue due to economic downturns and a lack of external investment. Changes in crop prices and the reluctance of northerners/immigrants to move South hurt development. Tax increases often proved unpopular with whites of all backgrounds. Within the Southern Republican parties, there were divisions that hampered growth. Northern 'carpetbaggers' wanted swift economic reforms and growth, southern white Republicans disliked taxes and desired debt relief, and blacks wishes to focus on expanding state services. Economic and social equality ended up stagnating- no state made real progress on this front, with blacks failing to progress from low-income occupations and social separation.But political rights were nevertheless enormously valued- black voter turnout surged in every part of the south. For the first time there were black sheriffs, police officers, and state/local officials with real power. The white planter elite was sidelined from leadership positions. Most of the Reconstruction-era South managed to resist KKK/Democrat violence to elect Ulysses Grant in 1868 and 1872.Perhaps Foner's most important contribution is debunking the Dunning School' view of the failings of Reconstruction. Reconstruction did not end due to blacks' incompetence or venality. Black politicians were the clear junior partners in Reconstruction, except perhaps for a brief period in ~1870s Louisiana and South Carolina. Rather, white elites from both parties had the lion's share of responsibility. Reconstruction governments' corruption largely involved white-run railroads and a mostly-white political leadership, both Democrat and Republican. This corruption was also no worse than that seen in the North or West at this time, where political machines and businesses worked hand-in-glove. Corruption played a smaller role than white southerners' rage at 'illegitimate' 'Africanised' rule. Apart from some areas inhabited by working-class white 'Scallywag Republicans', the white South largely supported the supremacist Democrat party. Democrats feigned moderation at times, but their extensive use of the KKK to terrorise blacks and Scallywags revealed the truth. The planter elite managed to 'redeem' the South one state at a time, employing the twin tactics of violence and white solidarity propaganda. Republican state governments were overthrown in blatant coups or through intimidation. Southern Whigs had thrown their support behind the Democrats from the start. After 'Redemption', even a few disaffected Scallywag leaders joined the reestablished Democrat elite.Foner seals his claim for the greatest Reconstruction historian by outlining in detail the Northern Republicans' betrayal of the black south. Without this betrayal, the 'redemption' could not have succeeded throughout the South. Despite dispatching federal troops to stem KKK violence during his first term, President Grant meekly acquiesced to the growing voices in his party who favoured reconciliation with the South and the planter elite. These Republicans were often fuelled by class anxiety over growing labour agitation in the North. Working-class movements and unions spiked after the 1873 economic crisis, which halted the North's Whiggish transformation into an expanding economic powerhouse. Soon the majority of Republicans, including multiple abolitionists, took up the mantra that black Americans were incapable of progress and Reconstruction must end. Their commitment to an activist central state collapsed. The 1876 election compromise that ended the last standing Reconstruction governments was seen as almost inevitable at the time. White northern elites, especially the business community, abandoned their most loyal constituents. They focused instead on stopping union mobilisation, while also dabbling with imperial expansionism, anti-'communism', anti-Chinese sentiment, and temperance movements. The voices of the last remaining Radical Republicans were drowned out. Charles Sumner died while trying to pass a civil rights bill, while the anti-racist pro-labour Wendell Philipps and Benjamin Butler were marginalised. The Radical ideology itself, which once controlled the party and had helped begin Reconstruction by overruling the pro-reconciliation Andrew Johnson, died out. Johnson, who advocated white supremacy and a white yeomen-planter alliance to rule a readmitted south, got his wish in the end. The resurgence of an elitist caste system was euphemised as an exercise of states' rights and self-government.But the fact that Reconstruction lasted for years shouldn't be forgotten. The ascension of blacks to Congress and Lt. Governor positions was historic. One comes away thinking that Lincoln-like leadership and political will from white elites could have prolonged the 'Forgotten Revolution'. Unfortunately, it would take another 90 years for such a state of affairs to happen again

Eric Froner provides a comprehensive, fascinating, and compelling review on post civil war America. Reconstruction explains how a great opportunity to rebalance Southern society by providing political and economic opportunities failed. The book demolishes a commonly held view that the post civil war imposed governments were totally inept and corrupt. I was surprised to learn how few blacks did secure federal and state representation. I was surprised to learn how by and large those blacks that did make it into government appear to have acted reasonably and were no more guilty of corruption than their white counterparts. I was frankly astonished to learn about various massacres of blacks seeking to retain their voting rights as Reconstruction ended. Such mass shooting and assassinations appear to just never been recorded in the history books. I was further surprised how the "occupation" of the South was another myth: that the Union army occupying the south never exceeded 20,000 men - and had been reduced to almost a token force of 6,000 by the mid 1870.s,, The book concludes how the Republican support for equality became replaced by the desire to redeploy the army to control the labour unrest related to the depression of 1872. The result: 100 years of inequality, oppression, and "fake history" the legacy of which continues to this day.

It's surprisingly hard to find a comprehensive book on Reconstruction - especially compared to the multitude of books on the Civil War itself. It's a deeply sad story of ideals turned into reality (the Radical Republican Congress of 1877-8) but then allowed to fail once an economic crisis appeared, key influencers died, and a disputed election needed resolving. It reads like proper history, not just narrative, although I occasionally experienced chronological confusion as a result. Strongly recommended.