War After the War: A New History of Reconstruction

John Daly refers to the Reconstruction era as the Southern Civil War and convincingly argues the violence that encompassed the South upheld every aspect of what constitutes a civil war. Daly breaks the Southern Civil War into three distinct phases within the Reconstruction era. The Terror Phase immediately followed the Confederate surrender of 1865, the Guerrilla Phase, 1868-1872, with disguised violence and creation of the KKK and other extremist groups, and the Paramilitary Phase, 1873-1877, where Southern extremists openly inflicted violence without local, state, or federal prosecution. Daly highlights the fact that the tens of thousands of African Americans, Southern Unionists and Northern sympathizers which were tragically abused, murdered, and massacred have been neglected in Southern historical narratives, and he has exposed the dark realities of the Southern Civil War. With the supporting evidence Daly provides in The War after the War, Daly has a strong argument that the Southern Civil War didn’t end in 1877, but in the 1960’s with the Civil Rights movement. A great book for anyone interested in reading an honest history of what transpired in the South after the American Civil War.