A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner

A Short History of Reconstruction Reviews

• 
  Caroline

  The first half is a dry and dense recital of the change in federal laws and early state constitutions that commenced Reconstruction. But the second half focuses on how racism, postwar economic events, and evolving concepts of the appropriate scope of government ended up reversing both the gains of Reconstruction in the South and the identity of the national Republican Party. It turned the party from the champion of abolition, free labor rights, and government as catalyst of development to the enforcer for Gilded Age magnates and advocate of small government. Just as bad, it abandoned black southerners to violence and poverty, and betrayed the Union dead by allowing antebellum leaders and policies to return.
  
  The information in the first half is important, just hard to get through. Foner outlines the variation in Southern attitudes and economic status by region and class, pointing out that many yeomen outside the plantation regions had opposed secession and been burdened with much of the Southern war expense due to unfair tax policy--they could possibly be enticed into a postwar coalition with blacks as the earliest efforts sought to replace planter hegemony. Commencing with the Emancipation Act in 1863, when in fact the Union Army occupied parts of the South and was figuring out how to install governing bodies, and then proceeding through Andrew Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction efforts, the first half focuses on how racism and the efforts to keep plantation labor under old-style control shaped the first years.
  
  However, there were enough Radical Republicans to be outraged at the weak changes in black rights and conditions. They derailed the Presidential initiative by almost impeaching Johnson and moving control over Reconstruction to Congress. Congress made it harder for antebellum and Confederate politicians to participate in government, and continued the meant-to-be-temporary Freedmans Bureau, which aided Southern blacks, particularly in setting up schools. During this period liberal new Southern state constitutions were enacted. Blacks entered into local, state and federal Southern political life, reunited families and created strong social organizations.
  
  The thing they didn’t succeed at was acquiring land. The federal government tried selling them seized property, but it later reversed the sales as power shifted and political alliances in the North decided that former plantation owners were needed in partnerships--give them their land back. Proposals to redistribute (seize and sell via long-term contracts) land to blacks to enable them to make a living and compensate them for former slave labor were debated. Those who argued this would keep the former slave from learning self-reliance won, abetted of course by those who saw a bad precedent. And white landowners agreed not to sell land to blacks. Blacks preferred to be small subsistence farmers, but wealthy whites in both North and South needed cotton, and they needed blacks to work it.
  
  What is interesting here, though, is how strongly these Republicans supported a strong federal government and activist policies and expenditures. This is a theme that was sourced in the Whig party (see What Hath God Wrought for an excellent history of antebellum attitudes toward the appropriate federal role and states rights, amidst wideranging coverage of technical, cultural, economic, and political US history from 1812-1845). And early in Reconstruction the Republicans allied with upland Southern yeoman, who wanted state funded schools and federal debt relief. But crop failures and the crushing tax burden brought on by Southern Reconstruction corruption soured the white yeoman enthusiasm for stronger central government and the taxes needed for services. Foner covers the rollback of state spending in Southern states that, along with the failure of hoped-for industrial development after the war, doomed the region to still-lingering economic backwaterdom.
  
  The second half does cover what Foner terms Reconstruction in the North, which some reviwers here object to. But this is essential to understanding why the Republicans abandoned Reconstruction in the South. In both parts of the country railroad construction led to massive corruption in government, but the difference was in the North and West the railroads actually got built and stimulated development. In the south, corruption started to support a Northern view of the Southern Reconstruction governments as inept as well as corrupt, based on both racial and class prejudices. In addition, immigration, the financial crisis of the 1870s, and growing labor unrest led to turmoil in both political parties.
  
  The Republicans, who had fought to ensure labor rights for the emancipated blacks in the South, suddenly discovered it to be ‘necessary’ to send in troops to quell strikers in Northern mines and steel mills. A new generation of Republicans espoused free markets and minimal government--suddenly the party was made up of middle and upper class merchants and bankers, appalled at the prospect of the voting power of Irish in the North, black in the South and Asians in the West. They stepped back and let local constraints on voting--violence, poll taxes, etc.--moot the 15th amendment.
  
  Bottom line: racism, the financial necessity of plantation cotton, weariness, and distance from the problem finally pulled the rug out from under Reconstruction. Foner outlines some permanent gains, but laments that it could have been so different. I think he does a very good job in a short book. I gained a deeper understanding of 1) what happened during Reconstruction and 2) how this crucial period shaped in the character of the Republican and Democratic parties that we still see today.
  
  Note: this is a condensation of his longer work on the topic, and lacks footnotes, although it has a long ‘suggested reading’ section. I am sure other scholars would alter his analysis in many places, and certainly would amend my short version, but unless you want to evaluate his conclusions by going to the source, this is good.
• 
  skein

  clear-cut, well-written, absolutely fucking appalling.
  
  here's the thing: my public school teachers politely glossed over that whole RECONSTRUCTION thing, subtitled "In Which White Politicians Decide To Continue The System Of Slavery, Albeit Informally". i suspect my teachers were not allowed to teach us about Reconstruction, in the same way they were not allowed to teach about the Holocaust, or the Vietnam War, or the US-run internment camps for Japanese citizens, or the various atrocities committed against the Native population, or ... anything that might cast the US in a less-than-shining light.
  
  we missed out on a lot of history in history class, is what i'm saying.
  
  so. for the past two hundred years or so, the South has deliberately worked to keep a nasty, racist culture in place. (the North has been deliberately complacent.)
  
  this is not okay.
  (understatement.)
  
  this is not a few individuals being jerks.
  this is a system of control.
  it is not acceptable.
  (understatement.)
  
  here is the story of the beginning, or rather one beginning, or rather the story of the choice to continue when there was a damn good opportunity to stop. the system had been dismantled and it was put back together again because people (white people. rich white people) decided there was more money to be made more fun in beating, raping, lynching, shooting, terrorizing, violence extraordinare and as ordinary as the sun rising
  -- than in complying with, you know, a standard moral code.
  
  this is not a handful of people. this is an entire country, most especially the persons in power, who decide that it's better for some to be enslaved and others raised above their deserts, than for everyone to be equal and free.
  
  this is wrong.
  (understatement.)
  
  (note: i was born and raised a Southerner. since you'll ask, my family came to America a few decades after formal slavery was abolished ... but i am white. i have always profited from a culture of white supremacy. owning human slaves is a symptom, not the sickness itself.)
• 
  Victor Davis

  Confusing, unclear, and scattered, not unlike
  The Guns of August. Every sentence in the book is an uncited statement of fact, with little in the way of a narrative or an analysis of any one set of facts. Thus, I am forced to discriminate between raw statements of fact and skewed statements of interpretation myself, while flying completely blind. Having said that, I did learn quite a lot. The book is dense with facts about the ten-year (or so) period after the Civil War that are not common knowledge. For all the rhetoric about the brutality Reconstruction wrought on the South, the only dubious action I read was the disenfranchisement of former confederate officers. Other than that, most of the perceived brutality can be chalked up to the social changes forced upon the vanquished that they obviously fought to resist, and can hardly be called "brutal" by modern standards.
  
  Although the book makes no overt reference to any kind of egregious stripping of Southern rights and values, I did begin to understand the fundamental connection between union victory and big government. One of the quests I have set out on with my Civil War reading list is to answer a question that has bugged me for a while: Why does moral conservatism go hand in hand with financial conservatism, and likewise liberal morality correspond to liberal spending? This book's hint of an answer lies in the nature of the Grant administration. Social equality must be enforced upon a society bent on clinging to the old hierarchy. The Departments of Education, Health, Commerce, the Freedman's Bureau, union army occupation, etc. all cost money. The victorious North could not just emancipate the slaves, they had to tax and borrow horribly in order to afford the apparatus of implementation. All that money promoted the graft and corruption that history remembers Grant for.
  
  Still, I am not convinced that the Civil War was fought over "the rise of centralized government" as the Lost Cause proponents claim. I'd have to read more books about the decades leading up to the war, of course. Rather, it sounds like a classic case of historical convenience, to take some of the obvious (and inevitable) evils of Reconstruction and claim them as the evils the South had sought to defeat from the outset. The greatest disappointment, reading from a modern perspective, is not how intrusive Reconstruction was, but how toothless and pathetic the abortive attempt turned out. What began as a noble mission, to eradicate slavery and enfranchise the freedmen, quickly degenerated into political infighting. How very American. One thing is certain: the postwar decades made us a modern United States, leaving the self-rule of farmers and artisans behind and ushering in the world of factories, corporations, railroads, and communications.
• 
  Teri

  This book is the abridged version of Eric Foner's
  Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877. This version is a concise review of the Reconstruction period from roughly 1863 through 1877. Foner looks at the political and social aspects of the period, covering the presidencies of Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and the beginning of the Hayes administration. Foner specifically reviews Reconstruction in five areas: the Black experience, the remodeling of Southern society as a whole, racial attitudes and relations, the expanded authority of the nation-state and national citizenship, and a look at how the North's economy and class structure affected Reconstruction. Although this is a shorter book than his unabridged version by about half the pages it still comes across as a thorough discussion of the era.
  
  This is a great read and very engaging. I'll read the bigger book at some point, but this one packs a punch for what it is.
• 
  Christine

  Really good. Really important read to understand the period after the Civil War.
• 
  Seth D Michaels

  A condensed version of Foner's definitive big scholarly work on the period, and only "short" by comparison to it; it's a very detailed look at the years after emancipation. Harshly critical of the "lost cause" historians who first defined Reconstruction, the book looks at the ultimately failed struggle to create equality in the post-Civil War South. It's depressing and incisive; it helps explain so much about everything that came after in U.S. political history. An important segment of history to understand, little-discussed because it's such a bummer; this is definitely a history text by a scholar but it's always interesting.
• 
  Matt Loten

  An abridged version of an earlier work, Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction is layered, engaging, and informative, particularly its opening chapters. Though the subject matter is, of course, both distressing and depressing, Foner weaves a nuanced narrative of Reconstruction America, beginning at the height of the Civil War and Lincoln's efforts to ensure victory for the ideals encapsulated in the Thirteenth Amendment, whilst simultaneously attempting to chart a political course which might reintegrate the South into the Union at war's end.
  
  The Reconstruction legacies of Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and Hayes are examined, yet the voices of black Americans - from slaves, to freedmen, to those who had been born to freedom - are given space to recount their own versions of an era which, despite it's bloody birth, offered so much hope of a more enlightened America, before political corruption, a shameful loss of nerve, and the resurgence of racist Democratic self-confidence undid a much of the good work of the early Reconstruction years.
  
  The first few chapters, spanning the later Lincoln years and the disappointing administration of his successor, Andrew Johnson, are particularly vivid and informative, painting a picture of America at a crossroads, and examining the poor decisions which ultimately ensured that Reconstruction, despite the lofty aims of many involved, was little more than a paper tiger: it existed only in constitutional amendments and toothless laws which rarely reflected reality.
  
  Although the latter chapters often focus more on the weak political wills (at least with regards Reconstruction) of Johnson, Grant, and Hayes, somewhat at the expense of the lived experience of black Americans, there nonetheless remains a great detail of worthwhile information on the prolonged and unnecessary death of the Reconstruction project. All told, A Short History of Reconstruction, in my opinion, remains a worthwhile primer on a difficult, to say the least, period of US history.
• 
  Jlo2756

  This was an excellent book. It is an abridged version of the authors book "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution." I realized I did not know much about Reconstruction, so I purchased this book in order to broaden my knowledge about it. And boy did I! My understanding and knowledge of Reconstruction has increased 10 fold.
  
  I learned much about the political and social situation of our country as it struggled to re-unite. I was especially appalled and horrified to read of the injustices, abuse, prejudice and terror the freed former slaves had to endure as they rightfully tried to claim their civil rights as American citizens. Frankly, I was disgusted. As a result, I can truly say that my opinions about social justice and racism in this country have been altered and my eyes have been opened to things in which I was previously ignorant.
  
  As far as politics go. I was sad to learn that there were as many snakes and lice in politics during Construction as there are today. As I read this book, I realized that this country has at least made SOME progress in social equality over the last 150 years. However, I also came to the conclusion that this can not be said about politics. There has been little or no progress in Politics or in those who claim to be politicians in the last 150 years. Politics can claim no high moral ground over racism.
  
  I highly recommend this book. It is an objective history of Reconstruction. You WILL learn something new if you read this book.
• 
  Prima Seadiva

  Audiobook, reader good.
  While I knew a little about the Reconstruction this book filled out my knowledge and my understanding of how its failure lead to instead of freedom and incorporation for African Americans into American society to years of further oppression and denial of rights. Also the impact of its failure on the entire country particularly the south, people and economy helped create and perpetuate the deep divisions in our society we still see today.
  Sadly the corruption, hypocrisy, scheming and self interest of the rich and those in power, at the expense of the public, at large has been and is still a large part of our political persona today.
  
• 
  Greg

  Good history but I find it hard to read because it is not told through stories but through facts and analysis. Only seem to be able to read 5 pages at a time before I drift off. Learned lots about why we are where we are today and how lots of the campaign "issues" about Obama harken back to reconstruction politics.
• 
  Micah

  Foner is GOAT
• 
  Paul

  In A Short History of Reconstruction, Eric Foner describes the hopes, challenges and obstacles that emerged as the leaders of the United States tried to rebuild the nation after the Civil War. Foner pulls from a wide variety of sources including newspaper articles, letters, speeches, legal records, and the proceedings of state and national legislatures. Foner’s work is organized chronologically and starts with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to demonstrate that “reconstruction was not only a specific time period, but also the beginning of an extended historical process: the adjustment of American society to the end of slavery.” (xvi) He argues that freedmen were not passive observers in reconstruction, but sought to negotiate their place in society as laborers and citizens.
  Reconstruction should be divided into three time periods. Presidential reconstruction (1863-66) was a characterized by lineate policies toward former confederate states. During this period, Andrew Johnson sought to reincorporate the South into the Union as quickly as possible, but failed to address the status of freedmen. Congressional and Radical Reconstruction (1866-1873) was characterized by legislation that was designed to modernize southern society and incorporate freedmen into southern politics and economy. During this period, states were reorganized based on political rights granted to individuals who could demonstrate that they had remained loyal to the union. Southern states increased spending on developing their infrastructure, especially railroads, and education. Schools were especially important to freedmen, who looked at education as their best chance for securing political rights. Many blacks served in state legislatures during this period. Redemption (1873-1877) was characterized by a reversal of many of the political rights and economic gains freedmen had made during Reconstruction. Blacks faced increasing discrimination as the antebellum Southern elite came to dominate Southern states, Southern governments curtailed the political rights of freedmen, and blacks found themselves increasingly bound to whites through a system of debt peonage based on share cropping.
  Foner’s book includes five main themes. First, Foner asserts that blacks were active participants in the reconstruction of the South “whose quest for individual autonomy did much to establish the era’s political and economic agenda.” (xv) Second, Foner traces the ways in which Southern society was remodeled and describes local variations of reconstruction in action. Third, Foner describes the evolution of racial attitudes during Reconstruction and demonstrates that many northerners and southerners were able to promote political rights for free blacks in spite of prevailing racist attitudes. Forth, Foner seeks to place Reconstruction within a context of national development. Reconstruction was accompanied by an expansion of Federal authority and a new commitment on behalf of the national government “to the ideal of national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all American regardless of race.” (xvi) This expansion met fierce opposition by some local leaders and groups such as the KKK. Finally, Foner describes how changes in the Northern economy impacted reconstruction. Northern industrialists wished to reestablish the South as a source of raw materials, especially cotton, but this conflicted with the desire of freedmen to be independent farmers. The depression that hit the nation in the late 1870s shifted focus away from Reconstruction and toward economic problems.
  Foner mentions a number of historians in his work. Scholarly study of the Reconstruction started in the early twentieth-century with William A. Dunning. He argued that southern states accepted defeat at the end of the war, wished to be reincorporated into the union quickly and were ready to grant freedmen justice. Johnson attempted to reconstruct the South using Lincoln’s model, but his efforts were thwarted by Republicans who whished to punish the South for the war and eliminated Southern governments, imposed black suffrage on the South, and supported corrupt governments and carpetbaggers that took advantage of the South. The main dissenter to the Dunning School was W. E. B. Dubois who “portrayed reconstruction as an idealistic effort to construct a democratic, interracial political order from the ashes of slavery.” (xiii) Nevertheless, the Dunning school dominated until the racial attitudes of Americans began to shift in the 1960s.
  The main point of the book is to establish freed blacks as agents in an effort to rebuild the South which would allow for black participation in government and black economic independence. For blacks, the right to vote and the ownership of land were the cornerstones of their own freedom. The black notion of free labor did not fit the northern notion of free labor as described by Bruce Levine in Half Slave, Half Free. Rather than participating in the market as individuals who contracted their labor to employers, freedmen wanted to live as independent farmers. This placed them at odds with northerners who wanted them to grow commodities rather than food. This also placed them at odds with southern whites, and some northerners, who wished to reestablish the plantation system. The system of sharecropping emerged as a compromise in that it gave southern whites a guaranteed source of labor and southern blacks the ability to control their day-to-day lives and labor.
  Foner asserts that the real miracle of Reconstruction is that its successes lasted as long as they did. Nevertheless, Foner argues that Reconstruction was a failure. His work raises the question of inevitability. Was Reconstruction doomed to failure? Would it have been possible for Americans to overcome the bitterness from the war and prevailing racial attitudes to grant blacks the rights of citizenship?
• 
  Alice Willard

  read this for history 2150 and it was not the worst thing I've ever read
• 
  AC

  Read part, skimmed part. Very solid.
• 
  C.E. G

  Fitting to finish this book on the 4th of July. I've been reading this slowly for a few months, as it's fairly dense.
  
  I think what's most eye-opening to me is the historiography of Reconstruction - starting with the Dunning school that perpetuated and inflated racist interpretations of Reconstruction's failure, to WEB DuBois's groundbreaking Black Reconstruction, to more recent revisionist histories including Foner's. If you search "Reconstruction South" on Twitter, you can see the damage that the Dunning school has done (I don't actually recommend this unless you want to be exposed to the uninformed inanity of Neo-Confederates).
  
  Will probably want to reread this again someday. I think for the first time it hit me how radical this was in terms of upending an entire economic and social system, and how delicate and guided the reconstruction needed to be. Unfortunately, due to politics and racism and changing economic circumstances in the North, the federal government ended up largely abandoning black southerners to the violent and self-interested white elites/masses. They started putting federal troops in to break up labor disputes in the North (gotta protect the wealthy!), while saying "states' rights" with regards to the South.
  
  Reparations are so long overdue.
• 
  Curtis Hunter

  Should be required reading in all middle-schools/high schools as well as in the US Congress. Details the failed attempt after the civil war to restore blacks to economic autonomy and equal citizenship. As W.E.B. Du Bois said, "...the slave went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." Throughout the south, blacks had been elected to many positions within the various state governments. White supremacists (KKK and other offshoots) used violence, murder, terror, and fraud to destroy the legitimate government and return political control to whites. A quote from the epilogue: " ... Reconstruction's demise and the emergence of blacks as disenfranchised dependent laborers accelerated racism's spread until by the early twentieth century it pervaded the nation's culture and politics. ... Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region ruled by a reactionary elite that continued to employ violence and fraud to stifle internal dissent."
• 
  Tom

  Considering that this book is an abridged version of "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution" I'm wondering now if I read the wrong book. It was tough to wade through this shortened version. The tragic story makes for frustrating and depressing reading, which is understandable from this view 150 years removed. But part of my frustration was due to the sketchy handling of details regarding establishing and administering of the reconstruction programs. I expected to learn something about objectives and strategies of programs such as the Freedmen's Bureau. The author offers an objective view of the period. I was hoping for some insight, some lessons learned, some positive outcomes.
• 
  Martin Jones

  I like it more for the information provided than for the writing style or organization. The ideas presented were muddled and disorganized, and near the end of the book diverged from the central theme altogether. Nevertheless, it was shocking to read about a topic that was bypassed and "whitewashed" altogether in any history of the USA that was ever presented to me as a child and teen in my public school education.
• 
  Cindy

  Short is more like very brief. I get why the teacher assigned it, because we had only 3 weeks to read it. But it's really kind of dry and short, and no where near as engaging as the book that covered the actual Civil War was.
• 
  Sean Chick

  A good abridgement of the classic. Still not surpassed.
• 
  John

  I gave up. He may be a terrific historian but I just don't like the way he writes. It's really boring.
• 
  Samuel

  Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 abridges his larger work while preserving its main themes of the time period (and process) known as Reconstruction: the centrality of the black experience, the transformation of Southern society and economy, the evolution of racial attitudes and relations, the emergence of a national state with expanded authority and new purposes, and the North’s economy and class structure at the time. By beginning his treatment of Reconstruction in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation (rather than in the postwar era), Foner emphasizes the themes of “grass-roots black activity and the newly empowered national state.” In many ways, Foner’s views on Reconstruction may be read as a continuation or follow-through on his argument in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men originally published in 1970; as the key uniting feature to Republican ideology before the war was free labor, so too was it central to Reconstruction. Focusing on the concluding years of the Civil War and American life in recovery thereafter, Foner furthers his argument of the importance of the Republican ideal of free labor as their party sought to transform the South (and all of America for that matter) into a society and economy that included former slaves as wage earners.
  
  Abolishing slavery had radical effects on the southern economy and society, but the seemingly simple idea of converting slaves into wage earners was not so simple in practice. The �“ambiguities of free labor” for former slaves took serious negotiations among the freedmen, Northern investors, former Southern slaveowners, and the federal government. Foner points out that whereas Northern investors imagined free labor to take the form of wage labor on plantations, freedmen took it to mean farming their own land and living independent of the marketplace. White planters had a completely different third imagining of what “free labor” for freedmen would look like: blacks working the land in exchange for food and board—a system virtually identical to slavery. As the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to facilitate the development of a new free labor system in the South, one of the federal agency’s directors in Mississippi observed in 1865 that “white public opinion could not ‘conceive of the negro having any rights at all.’” Fighting against racial antagonism and class conflict beyond their abilities to fully comprehend and address, the Freedmen’s Bureau helped to orchestrate the emergence of sharecropping in which black families signed contracts with landowners to work a portion of the land and keep a portion of their harvest for themselves. While this system of compromise appealed especially to black freedmen as an alternative to gang labor with heavy-handed white supervision, and to planters as a means of reducing the cost of supervision, sharing risks with tenants, and circumventing the shortage of cash and credit, sharecropping proved to be a disappointing compromise to all involved. Both sharecroppers and planters continued to view their relationship to one another and the land in strained ways due to conflicting, idealized views.
  
  Just as there were economic ambiguities of what the new Southern economy would look like, there were social ambiguities too. While the political alliance between white scalawags and black freedmen in 1867 was indeed a radical phenomenon given the fact that slavery was just years in the past, Foner is quick to clarify that this political arrangement was more of “a marriage of convenience.” Socially, the scalawags were resolved to remain separate from blacks, and for that matter, many blacks were equally content to build up communities independent of whites. These included the construction of all-black churches and schools; places where black communities exercised new degrees of self-government. While some Radical Republicans envisioned a more socially integrated society in the south, the reality tended toward the development of racially distinct parallel communities. However, despite Reconstruction’s failure in establishing an integrated society, Foner argues that Reconstruction “did establish a standard of equal citizenship and a recognition of blacks’ right to a share of state services that differed sharply from the heritage of slavery and Presidential Reconstruction, and from the state-imposed segregation that lay in the future.” Politics and government were the most integrated of institutions at this time; biracial government was functioning relatively effectively for a season during the 1870s.
  
  In addition to examine changes in black communities, Foner charts new developments in black familial structures. He contends that emancipation “strengthened patriarchy within the black family and consigned men and women to separate spheres.” As Jim Downs explains in his essay “The Other Side of Freedom,” this structural imposition of white American patriarchy began to be inscribed upon black families with Congress’ Second Confiscation Act beginning on July 17, 1862, which allowed male fugitive slaves to enter Union camps in exchange for their labor but excluded women from doing so. Downs explains the rational for this policy as defining women and children as dependents upon their husbands and/or fathers as was common in white American society at the time. These considerations reveal that the Republican ideology of free labor included a social assumption that women would depend financially upon their wage-earning husband and implicitly support him with unpaid domestic service. While sharecropping often did allow many black families—men and women—to continue working the land together, political policies taken by the federal government in this era reveal an attempt to inscribe patriarchy on black families for the first time as part of the free labor ideal.
  
  In some ways, Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction suffers from its breadth of ideas. It has a grand scale that explains many complexities surrounding Reconstruction. There are so many arguments that a sustaining, singular thesis is less than clear. Read amidst his framing historiographical accounts of Reconstruction that have a long tradition of white Southern bias, Foner’s overarching thesis concerning reconstruction might be summed up as “the end of Reconstruction came not because propertyless blacks succumbed to economic coercion, but because a tenacious black community, abandoned by the nation, fell victim to violence and fraud.” This statement, however, is buried in the middle of the book. While there is some discussion concerning this idea at the beginning and end of the book, the historiographical discussion obscures to some degree Foner’s new contributions offered in this history. In other words, when Foner situates that his thesis and themes are a continuation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ work in 1935 and revisionist histories of the 1960s, Foner’s original work and ideas become blurred with the these historians who have written about Reconstruction in similar ways.
  
  By comparison, Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War has a clear thesis that can readily be identified as a reconceptualization of the process and legacy of Reconstruction. Richardson clearly argues that during Reconstruction, the Liberal Republican ideology of individualism—embodied in rhetoric concerning the West—shaped a “middle class” worldview that endures into the present. While much of Richardson’s development in the book can be read as an intensification of Foner’s arguments that emphasize the fundamental role of Republican ideology concerning free labor, Richardson goes on to explain how this ideology adapted to what has commonly been referred to as the failure of Reconstruction. As Foner had emphasized the free labor platform for the 1860 presidential election, Richardson describes the 1868 election as a struggle for “the survival of the free labor system based on economic harmony for which the North had fought.” By the time of the presidential election of 1872, Richardson articulates that America was creating a middle ground that began to leave the sectional tensions between the North and South—economically and otherwise—in the past. By looking toward the West, which symbolized “economic opportunity, political purity, and social equality,” Americans from all sections of the nation began to embrace a middle-class ideology that wedded the northern free labor vision with the southern ideas of proper government. While Richardson does not engage as thoroughly and directly with a reconstruction historiography as Foner does, her argument is written in such a way that it establishes itself as a new idea.
  
  The inclusion of Richardson’s clear thesis here is not to wholly discredit Foner’s work. He offers a beautifully complex and rich synthesis of primary sources into a dialogue that reconstructs the overarching aims, trials, and failures of Reconstruction. But his historiographical chronicling of other authors lumps himself into a a group of modern scholars from which he does not adequately distinguish himself. In mentioning other historians who have written similarly minded scholarship, it is important to clearly distinguish one’s argument from that of others usually with a distinctive thesis statement. While someone well-versed in the historiography of Reconstruction could probably readily identify the specific contributions Foner is offering, the average reader is left in amazement of his proof but in question of his argument.
  
• 
  Rob Bauer

  Eric Foner is one of America's premier historians and knows more about this era of US history than almost any other living person. The number of prizes this book won attests to his superb knowledge of Reconstruction, so my review of this book is more a summary than a critique. Anyone who wants to understand the Reconstruction Era in US history needs to either read this book or the longer book that this is a condensed version of.
  
  The analysis offered by this book is comprehensive—economic, political, and social. Foner describes the attempts of the freedmen to acquire land immediately following the Civil War and the implications of the failure to do so in meaningful quantities. Foner identifies both micro- and macroeconomic factors for this in addition to racism and the violence that destroyed Republican organizations in the South and eroded Northern resolve to maintain and support those organizations.
  
  Important as it is, economic analysis is only part of the description of Reconstruction Foner offers. As a post-revisionist, he does not neglect the role that blacks played in this story. Though the legal and economic deck was stacked against them, especially after “Redemption,” the freedmen attempted to maximize their freedom of action within the constraints of post-emancipation society. When given a choice, they concentrated on food production instead of cotton, despite the greater economic value of cotton, because it was the “slave crop.” They also showed a strong aversion to the gang labor system of the plantations, again because it was associated with time spent in bondage, and used the economic leverage they achieved in the late 1860s to negotiate other systems of labor such as sharecropping.
  
  Foner also traces the political transformation of Reconstruction, from Presidential Reconstruction to Radical Reconstruction to its closing phases. One of his major themes is the attempt to define freedom and create a new system of relations in the South to replace slavery. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were part of this process. Foner also examines the meaning of the Northern ideology of free labor and the constant tension this created in a society that remained premised on racial inequality despite the three amendments to the Constitution.
  
  Another great strength of Foner’s book is that events in the South do not happen in isolation. He does not neglect the role of the North in the story of Reconstruction. The Panic of 1873 is a case in point. Not only did it hurt the economy of the whole nation, but when voters went to the polls for the 1874 elections, the Democrats gained the majority in the House for 1875. They thereby took control of Reconstruction, hastening its decline. The 1870s also saw the labor issue displace Reconstruction as the dominant problem in Northern politics, and this decreased emphasis on Reconstruction accelerated the demise of the freedman’s condition.
  
  Ultimately, Foner sees Reconstruction as a failure, and it’s hard for me to disagree. Despite their best efforts to make the most of their opportunities, blacks ultimately did not achieve political, social, or economic equality immediately following the Civil War. The racism and constant violence of Southern whites, combined with increasing political conservatism in the North as the Radicals lost political power in Congress in the 1870s, produced this outcome. At best, Reconstruction was a lost opportunity that laid a foundation for the future, but that future was a long time coming for African Americans in the South.