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.
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By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army—over one fifth of the nation’s adult male black population under age forty-five.Highlighted by 423 Kindle readers- A second purpose of this study is to trace the ways in which Southern society as a whole was remodeled, and to do so without neglecting the local variations in different parts of the South.Highlighted by 380 Kindle readers
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Top reviews from other countries
D_S
The best analysis of Reconstruction, and still relevant today
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2020stephen lewis
A compelling and balanced insight on how the opporutnity to create a fair and normal society was lost
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 30, 2017Mr Joel A Williams
Proper history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2019