Reconstruction

Eric Foner's essential work on the post-Civil War American South. I'm not a fan of alternate histories, but this book makes you ponder 'what could have been' if Reconstruction had been more successful. Much like the early days of the English revolution when "for a short time, ordinary people were freer from the authority of church and social superiors than they had ever been before, or were for a long time to be again", so former slaves briefly experienced unprecedented freedom and political power. (See Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down). Ex-slaves had made tremendous strides in political and to a lesser extent economic power, but the white North lost interest and called the troops home. Southern white elites reasserted their power with violence if necesssary. Jim Crow soon followed.

Based on 98 sets of private papers and more than fifty contemporary periodicals and newspapers, Eric Foner's Reconstruction is a superbly researched work of history. But this book is more than simply a synthesis that refutes the racist Dunning school interpretations. It is an invaluable and innovative work of history in its own right. First, Foner emphasizes the self-activity of the African-American community in its own right, as ex-slaves struggle to form their own churches, educate their children, revive their family life and mobilize themselves for political action. Second, Foner notes that racism cannot be seen as a diabolos de machina, dooming Reconstruction policies on the shoals of immutable prejudice, but as a complex phenomenon that, though very powerful, was also effected by other forces. Third, and perhaps most important, Foner explains the Reconstruction period as part of a transition towards capitalism. He is excellent on the implications and limitations of the Republican free labor policy, and on how African-Americans and white yeomanry tried to maintain their independence from the market and were ultimately sabatoged in this goal by the malevolence of the reconfigured and reconstitued Southern elite. For these passages alone, Foner has made an invaluable contribution to a Marxist interpretation of American history. One should not forget Foner's considerable skills of summarization and detail. One remembers such details as the fact that Andrew Johnson was so cheap and penny-pinching that he opposed aid to assist the victims of the Irish potato famine. One is struck repeatedly by the use of violence to defeat Reconstruction (300 African-Americans alone were murdered by vigilantes in the summer of 1874 in Mississippi). One is also struck by Foner's insight on many issues. When I first read this book thirteen years I was amazed to realize that white opposition to the Confederacy was not simply confined to West Virginia and border states like Tennessee, but also to the interior regions of Alabama and North Carolina. There is also Foner's portrait of Lincoln who, if less than heroic in this account, is redemmed by an open-mindedness and willingness to consider alternatives. Foner also refutes the vulgar Beardian view that the Republican Radicals were nothing more than an advance army for Northern Industrialists, though at the same time pointing out the limitations of their laissez faire ideology. As the best volume in the Harper and Row New American Nation series one should point out that Foner also goes into detail about the transformation of the North, the rise of industrial capitalism, of labor protest, of the fate of the women's suffrage movement, and the brutal conquest of the West. Foner is also acute on the difficulties between the black-white alliance in much of the South, which was not merely the result of white racism, but also the undermining of yeomary independence and the contradictions of Southern Republican

Eric Foner breaks no new ground with this book. The demolition of the traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as a period of unmitigated evil and injustice, where rapacious and corrupt Northerners joined with incompetent black Southerners to deny virtuous white Southerners of their rightful place in government, began as early as 1909; with a paper presented by WEB DuBois at Columbia University. The demolition was largely completed by Kenneth Stampp's 1965 book about Reconstruction, and it would be difficult to find a reputable scholar today who would disagree with the general premise of revisionist scholarship about Reconstruction: that while Reconstruction state governments and the Republican Congress were very much creatures of their time, they accomplished much that was good and noble, and that the criticisms of them by the Redeemers and their sympathizers in the academic community were frequently unjust and based on bald racial prejudice.Instead of breaking new ground, Foner's book does an admirable job consolidating the revisionist consensus. With his emphasis on the role that the former slaves themselves played in Reconstruction, he emphatically rejects the notion, sometimes present even in revisionist scholarship, that somehow whites... were the only agents in Reconstruction. Likewise, he presents a nuanced portrayal of the Republican coalition in Congress that enacted the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, the Reconstruction Acts, the Enforcement Acts, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871: they were not monolithic Radicals, nor were the Radicals among them monolithic in their goals and ideals. Finally, he does an admirable job of replacing Reconstruction in the social, economic, and global context that so many accounts have managed to remove it from.Foner's prose is lucid and engaging, and his book is well-researched... and well-organized aside from a couple of minor editorial lapses... It is more complete and more all-encompassing than any other single-volume book about Reconstruction that I know about, and it ought to be the starting point for anyone interested in the period. I can't recommend it highly enough.