Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New American Nation Series) [Paperback]

Eric Foner (Author)

Book Description

Series: New American Nation Series | Publication Date: March 1989

Winner of the 1988 Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Bancroft Prize, The Parkman Prize, The Avery O. Craven Prize, and The TriIling Prize Nominated for the 1988 National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With the Confederacy's defeat, Reconstruction seemed like the dawn of a new era to blacks and progressive whites, but it was not to be. "This invaluable, definitive history re-creates the post-Civil War period as a pivotal drama in which ordinary people get equal billing with politicians and wheelers and dealers," praised PW .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous works on American history, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; and The Story of American Freedom. He has served as president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and has been named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 690 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (March 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006091453X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060914530
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,058,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. In his teaching and scholarship, Foner focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. His "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877," won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book prizes and remains the standard history of the period. In 2006 Foner received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. He is currently writing a book on Lincoln and slavery.

Customer Reviews

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93 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reconstruction Revisited, January 1, 2003

By 

James Ferguson (Vilnius, Lithuania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Paperback)

A major undertaking. Eric Foner and Leon Litwack (Been in the Storm so Long) have rescued Reconstruction from the dustbin of history. Each has offered a timely re-exploration into one of the most pivotal periods in American History. For Foner, Reconstruction represents the often forgotten conclusion to the Civil War, an attempt to address the social injustices that resulted from over two centuries of slavery. What is even more compelling about Foner's account is that he absorbs the early women's suffrage movement into this early battle for Civil Rights.

This remarkably well-researched book gives probably the most thorough examination of Reconstruction to date. Foner begins in 1863 with the emancipation proclamation, and carries the era through to 1877, when a fateful compromise was reached by Republicans and Democrats which led to the notorious period of Redemption, in which most of the gains during this period of time were nullified.

Foner covers a tremendous amount of ground. He has uncovered old court records and other valuable information, which demonstrate just how active a role Blacks had in Reconstruction. He notes the seminal work of W.E.B. DuBois (Black Reconstruction in America), which went largely ignored by the "Dunning School," which interpreted Reconstruction as an unmitigated failure in social improvement. Foner, like DuBois, notes how many beneficial social changes came as a result of Reconstruction such as public health, education and welfare. But the Redeemers could hardly stand to see Blacks in power, and fought tooth and nail to re-establish the old social order in the South, finally winning over the Grant administration, which pardoned the Southern states, and allowed them to regain the political ascendency, much to the chagrin of the Radical Republicans, who had been instrumental in shaping the Civil Rights legislation of this time.

This book presents so many revealing portraits. It is as much a social as it is a political history of Reconstruction. Of the many compelling stories was the attempt by Blacks to make a thriving concern of the former Jefferson Davis plantation. Despite the fact that Jefferson Davis' brother had ceded the plantation to the former slaves, the Mississippi courts eventually gave title to Davis' heirs. During this brief halcyon period, the freedmen had made a success of the plantation, never realized under the Davis administration. Foner offers this case, as well as many others, to demonstrate that the former slaves were fully committed to Reconstruction, and so this as the opportunity to gain the social and political ascendency they had long been denied.

One is left to wonder what it might have been like had callous Republicans like Rutherford B. Hayes not sold out Reconstruction, and allowed the process to continue through the late 19th century. Instead, the Redeemers nullified much of what had been gained, leading to the notorious era of Jim Crow.

79 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The standard for Reconstruction scholarship, August 22, 2000

By 

John A. Cusey (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New American Nation Series) (Paperback)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unconscionable chapter in American history, December 28, 2009

By 

J. Grattan "Ideas can move the world" (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Paperback)

It is a pleasant fiction held by many, even taught in high schools, that the Civil War was fought to free slaves and in fact did just that. Unfortunately, such a view is simplistic in the extreme. This book demolishes any such simplistic notions in its comprehensive examination of the incredible struggles of freedmen and their allies during the era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877, to achieve even a modicum of freedom, much of which had been yanked away by the end of the 19th century by the old Southern oligarchy. Despite the overall excellence of the book, the sheer volume of the information of this tumultuous time makes this book a challenging read. Economic, sociological, and political developments are examined from the intersecting parameters of individual states, multi-state farming regions, race, class, political parties, North vs. South, businessmen vs. farmers, etc.

One fact that this book makes evident is that Reconstruction was not one, well-thought program. In fact, Reconstruction lurched from one policy to the next, involving at various times the control of the Union army, the Freedman's Bureau, Presidential Reconstruction, Radical (Congressional) Reconstruction, policies of neglect, and finally Redemption. In addition, these multifarious programs and regimes of control were capriciously managed almost always to the detriment of freedmen, depending on the competencies and prejudices of administrators. Reconstruction, if nothing, is very complex - difficult to summarize.

The author details any number of pervasive factors that formed a backdrop to the entire period of Reconstruction. First, he notes a substantial divide between upcountry, small yeoman farmers and Blackbelt plantation owners. Many of those yeomen had Union sympathies, if not actually serving in the Union army, which resulted in harsh retribution at the hands of Confederates. After the War, they shared with freedmen a strong tendency, at least initially, to vote Republican and a vulnerability to the depredations of the crop-lien system. More significant was the utter unwillingness of Southern elites to give up total control over their former slaves. They wanted no part of Northern free-labor ideology. They induced Union army occupiers, as well as through Black codes, passed during President Johnson's version of Reconstruction, to make it illegal for a freedman to be unemployed, and in some cases, to live in towns, to not be under a year-long labor contract, to travel freely, etc. However, it was the reaction of both radical and moderate Republicans to this harsh regime that sought to virtually re-enslave that precipitated Radical Reconstruction. Congress overrode Presidential vetoes of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment and in the Reconstruction Act demanded that Southern states ratify that Amendment and legislate freedmen suffrage before being readmitted to the Union.

By far the most horrendous aspect of Reconstruction was the unmitigated violence perpetrated on freedmen by white Southerners. The violence organized under the Ku Klux Klan was so pervasive that Congress created special legislation to curtail it. But the Klan was only the tip of the iceberg. After the War, the violence was mostly to enforce the Black Codes; later, after the readmittance of the states, the ascendance of the Republican Party, and the election of hundreds of local and state freedmen, the violence was used to deter political participation. The Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, April, 1873, in which whites in support of the Democratic candidate in a disputed election killed at least 150 blacks, some waving white flags of surrender, is only the most egregious of countless acts of violence. It was this sort of intimidation that played a large role in more Southern states being "redeemed" each election cycle.

Of course, the North was an inextricable part of Reconstruction. Many so-called Radicals, led by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, wanted to confiscate rebel lands and redistribute them to freemen. As the author shows, some redistribution occurred, but often such takings were overruled and lands returned. Moderates wanted reconciliation and amnesty, partly to make the South a safe place for Northern investments, especially in railroad building. The Depression of 1873 abruptly ended inflated hopes that a new era of prosperity would raise all boats, including the fortunes of freedmen. But more important to the demise of Reconstruction than economic disruptions was a shift in Republican Party concerns from a principled opposition to slavery and the coercion of freedmen to a concern with electoral politics. Increasingly, it was held that freedmen must achieve civil and political equality on their own, regardless of the forces arrayed against them; and that the expanded, interventionist state necessary to fight the Civil War must be reduced. Less principled, it was suggested that Reconstruction had been a terrible mistake, wasted on people without the capacity to fully contribute to society. The backroom dealings that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in 1877, retaining Republican control, essentially ended Reconstruction, permitting Southern elites to reverse virtually all of the gains of the previous ten years - the re-imposition of slavery being the only exception. Even forms of Black Codes were reinitiated.

In the final analysis, the author contends that Reconstruction was a failure. It did not integrate freedmen into society. Despite legislation and several Constitutional amendments freedmen were, in practice, not able to exercise wide-ranging civil and political rights inherent in US citizenship. The author suggests that the failure reflects on the inadequacy of the national state, not its being too large as claimed. Yet, the status quo was changed. For a brief period, there was joint government involving blacks and some whites. It was the insistence of freedmen that led to the funding and establishment of public schools as well as community-based institutions including churches, fraternal organizations, and mutual-aid societies, many of which endured and sustained the black community during the dark era of Jim Crow, or the imposition of blatantly discriminatory laws.

Some reviewers have suggested that the author's alleged affinity for Marxist thought invalidates the book. In actuality, the book is very even-handed, very detailed, and sources well documented. The book, however, does not sugarcoat the egregious suppression of rights and the killing of thousands of freedmen for trying to exercise those rights. Furthermore, these reprehensible acts went on for one hundred years. This book is probably not widely read; it should be. No other book even attempts to be this thoroughgoing in describing and explaining Reconstruction. Sadly, this book is a window into the conceit of American moral superiority.