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The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era
By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and thirteen years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists had thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked the United States' most progressive moment prior to the civil rights movement.
Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.
Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published November 19, 2013
48 people are currently reading
1224 people want to read
About the author
Douglas R. Egerton
26 books11 followersA specialist in the history of late 18th and early 19th-century America, Douglas Egerton is Professor of History at Le Moyne College.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
July 26, 2019
This is an accounting of the efforts made for full emancipation of slaves during and after the United States Civil War (1861-65). The author outlines the participation of black troops from both the north and south in the Civil War. When slaves became liberated, they aided and joined the northern armies.
It was paramount that these newly liberated slaves be given land to cultivate. The U.S., more so the south, was a largely agrarian society at that time, and the newly liberated slaves had the requisite skills for agriculture. Many plantations, where they had worked under horrendous conditions for no salary, had been evacuated by the rich landowners. This land could have been given as compensation to the newly freed slaves for their long years of exploitation. Overall this was not done.
After the conclusion of the war many black and white northerners journeyed south to aid the newly liberated slaves – this is known as the era of reconstruction. Schools (some of which were integrated) were established. In the south, prior to 1865, there was no public education. New government laws were made to provide for integration and civil rights for all. There were still thousands of northern troops in the south to enforce this. And they were needed as the remnants of Confederate forces banded together to fight back. There were thousands of targeted killings of black and white people who were trying to establish equality between the races.
Andrew Johnson, who succeeded the assassinated President Lincoln, was a reactionary who wanted segregation and stymied every bill and law passed by Congress to aid reconstruction. In that era the Republicans were progressive (Lincoln being a Republican) and the Democrats rabidly segregationist.
Eventually, by the 1870’s, the northern populace was tired of supporting troops in the south. This gave advantages to the pro-confederate vigilante forces to continue to perpetuate violence and stop black people from voting so that Democrats could be elected. By 1900 much of the legislation passed during reconstruction was either mute (not-enforced) and over-turned by Jim Crow laws for states rights.
Reconstruction would have to start all over again. This book provides much historical insight into the racial divide in the United States – and why that divide continues to this day.
It was paramount that these newly liberated slaves be given land to cultivate. The U.S., more so the south, was a largely agrarian society at that time, and the newly liberated slaves had the requisite skills for agriculture. Many plantations, where they had worked under horrendous conditions for no salary, had been evacuated by the rich landowners. This land could have been given as compensation to the newly freed slaves for their long years of exploitation. Overall this was not done.
After the conclusion of the war many black and white northerners journeyed south to aid the newly liberated slaves – this is known as the era of reconstruction. Schools (some of which were integrated) were established. In the south, prior to 1865, there was no public education. New government laws were made to provide for integration and civil rights for all. There were still thousands of northern troops in the south to enforce this. And they were needed as the remnants of Confederate forces banded together to fight back. There were thousands of targeted killings of black and white people who were trying to establish equality between the races.
Andrew Johnson, who succeeded the assassinated President Lincoln, was a reactionary who wanted segregation and stymied every bill and law passed by Congress to aid reconstruction. In that era the Republicans were progressive (Lincoln being a Republican) and the Democrats rabidly segregationist.
Eventually, by the 1870’s, the northern populace was tired of supporting troops in the south. This gave advantages to the pro-confederate vigilante forces to continue to perpetuate violence and stop black people from voting so that Democrats could be elected. By 1900 much of the legislation passed during reconstruction was either mute (not-enforced) and over-turned by Jim Crow laws for states rights.
Reconstruction would have to start all over again. This book provides much historical insight into the racial divide in the United States – and why that divide continues to this day.
May 31, 2014
Where I got the book: my local library.
My own writing interests are increasingly leading me to explore the post-Civil War period in America. What I thought I knew about the decade or so after the War was, I will freely admit, based mostly on good old Gone With The Wind, book and movie. I do have the excuse that I wasn’t born or brought up in the States, but let’s face it, Reconstruction doesn’t seem to be a period of American history that most Americans know a lot about. Most people’s awareness of nineteenth-century America seems to jump straight from the Civil War into somewhere around the Gilded Age years of the late 1880s and onward, and when my kids were doing history at school here in Illinois, they seemed to mostly learn about the War of Independence and the Civil War, then hopped to the Civil Rights activism of the 50s and 60s.
My confused inner narrative therefore went something like this. Slavery was bad, so the nice white abolitionists of the North tried to make the South free their slaves. The South didn’t like the idea, so they started a war, and then the white people of the South suffered terribly for a while because they lost. The slaves were free! Hooray! And then not a whole lot else happened for a long while, and black and white people got along fine…Wait. What about that segregation thing? Well, that was bad, but people used to be a lot more prejudiced than they are now. And then somebody thought up the idea of civil rights, and black people held peaceful demonstrations only Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and that made everyone feel guilty, and because we’re much more progressive and modern than the nineteenth century, we’re all equal now and that’s the way it should be.
Are you grinding your teeth yet? If you’re an American reading this, that last paragraph probably offended you in some respect, but I’m trying to be honest here. When I began visiting the States back in the mid-80s, I was struck by the degree of separateness between Americans of different complexions, which didn’t sit well with my received ideas of America as a land of equality, freedom and opportunity. I remember a British acquaintance, a black woman married to a white man, telling me how much more prejudice she encountered in Chicagoland compared to London (she eventually couldn’t live with it and they went back home). It took me several more years to become aware of the scars that lay across American society with respect to race—I put it down to the lingering effects of slavery and/or segregation, and still couldn’t really understand the link between the two.
Until I began reading the history books. And The Wars of Reconstruction was a most enlightening addition to my reading repertoire. Its narrative begins before the Civil War, and stretches into the early twentieth century with an epilogue that touches on some more recent developments. It’s not an exhaustive study of the Reconstruction period by any means—if that’s what you’re looking for, a more general history might be a good place to start. I began reading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction a while ago (I’ll take it up again soon, I promise) which has far more information about the political and economic aspects of the period, and Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois is on my list as a necessary corrective to Foner’s white version.
What The Wars of Reconstruction attempts to do, I think, is to correct the above erroneous impressions held by people like me. Its narrative goes something like this:
Black people played more of a role in the Civil War than most of us realize. Black soldiers held important positions in the military structure, while illiterate former slaves took full advantage of the opportunities afforded by the military to educate themselves. The army turned out to be a great starting point for future civil rights activists, professional men and politicians.
After the war was over, things were really progressive for a while despite opposition from President Andrew Johnson. Black men held high office at the local, state and even federal level. They were highly instrumental in reforms that made public schooling available to children of all races in the South, and also helped both former slaves and poorer whites buy land. There was a Civil Rights act, and suffrage was extended to former slaves in many states. Black people were vehement in defending their new rights, and quite ready to sue whites who didn’t want to respect them. This forced integration in various areas such as transportation.
White opposition was fierce, and got progressively fiercer as the federal troops enforcing black rights in the South were gradually siphoned off to deal with the Indian wars in the West. The spectrum of opposition ranged from political action to intimidation and outright violence, especially when it came to preventing black people from voting. Black activists were the most targeted group. And white people—well, they just started looking in the other direction, because things were getting nasty and you can only support the losing side for so long.
Reconstruction officially ended in the 1870s, and black civil rights were progressively eroded by white opposition as the century advanced. By the early 1900s, pretty much all the advances that had been made were reversed, and it would be decades before the civil rights movement reorganized itself, helped by changing public attitudes.
Well into the twentieth century, the history of Reconstruction was rewritten in book and film to downgrade the role of black people. Yeah, we’re back to Gone With The Wind, the movie version of which appeared a year after Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction. Guess which version white people liked best?
The Wars of Reconstruction is a white academic’s attempt to challenge our received ideas of the post-Civil War period, in a way that’s footnotey enough for the historians but easily lively enough for the general reader. I suspect that this topic’s always going to be a matter of competing narratives rather than an agreed view of history, but this non-historian’s delighted that a new broadside has been fired in the war about the wars of Reconstruction. You guys—Americans, I mean—need to talk all this stuff out. I think there’s a great deal of popular interest in the history of civil rights, and more receptiveness than there ever has been toward a non-white-centric narrative of history. This is a book whose time may have come.
My own writing interests are increasingly leading me to explore the post-Civil War period in America. What I thought I knew about the decade or so after the War was, I will freely admit, based mostly on good old Gone With The Wind, book and movie. I do have the excuse that I wasn’t born or brought up in the States, but let’s face it, Reconstruction doesn’t seem to be a period of American history that most Americans know a lot about. Most people’s awareness of nineteenth-century America seems to jump straight from the Civil War into somewhere around the Gilded Age years of the late 1880s and onward, and when my kids were doing history at school here in Illinois, they seemed to mostly learn about the War of Independence and the Civil War, then hopped to the Civil Rights activism of the 50s and 60s.
My confused inner narrative therefore went something like this. Slavery was bad, so the nice white abolitionists of the North tried to make the South free their slaves. The South didn’t like the idea, so they started a war, and then the white people of the South suffered terribly for a while because they lost. The slaves were free! Hooray! And then not a whole lot else happened for a long while, and black and white people got along fine…Wait. What about that segregation thing? Well, that was bad, but people used to be a lot more prejudiced than they are now. And then somebody thought up the idea of civil rights, and black people held peaceful demonstrations only Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and that made everyone feel guilty, and because we’re much more progressive and modern than the nineteenth century, we’re all equal now and that’s the way it should be.
Are you grinding your teeth yet? If you’re an American reading this, that last paragraph probably offended you in some respect, but I’m trying to be honest here. When I began visiting the States back in the mid-80s, I was struck by the degree of separateness between Americans of different complexions, which didn’t sit well with my received ideas of America as a land of equality, freedom and opportunity. I remember a British acquaintance, a black woman married to a white man, telling me how much more prejudice she encountered in Chicagoland compared to London (she eventually couldn’t live with it and they went back home). It took me several more years to become aware of the scars that lay across American society with respect to race—I put it down to the lingering effects of slavery and/or segregation, and still couldn’t really understand the link between the two.
Until I began reading the history books. And The Wars of Reconstruction was a most enlightening addition to my reading repertoire. Its narrative begins before the Civil War, and stretches into the early twentieth century with an epilogue that touches on some more recent developments. It’s not an exhaustive study of the Reconstruction period by any means—if that’s what you’re looking for, a more general history might be a good place to start. I began reading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction a while ago (I’ll take it up again soon, I promise) which has far more information about the political and economic aspects of the period, and Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois is on my list as a necessary corrective to Foner’s white version.
What The Wars of Reconstruction attempts to do, I think, is to correct the above erroneous impressions held by people like me. Its narrative goes something like this:
Black people played more of a role in the Civil War than most of us realize. Black soldiers held important positions in the military structure, while illiterate former slaves took full advantage of the opportunities afforded by the military to educate themselves. The army turned out to be a great starting point for future civil rights activists, professional men and politicians.
After the war was over, things were really progressive for a while despite opposition from President Andrew Johnson. Black men held high office at the local, state and even federal level. They were highly instrumental in reforms that made public schooling available to children of all races in the South, and also helped both former slaves and poorer whites buy land. There was a Civil Rights act, and suffrage was extended to former slaves in many states. Black people were vehement in defending their new rights, and quite ready to sue whites who didn’t want to respect them. This forced integration in various areas such as transportation.
White opposition was fierce, and got progressively fiercer as the federal troops enforcing black rights in the South were gradually siphoned off to deal with the Indian wars in the West. The spectrum of opposition ranged from political action to intimidation and outright violence, especially when it came to preventing black people from voting. Black activists were the most targeted group. And white people—well, they just started looking in the other direction, because things were getting nasty and you can only support the losing side for so long.
Reconstruction officially ended in the 1870s, and black civil rights were progressively eroded by white opposition as the century advanced. By the early 1900s, pretty much all the advances that had been made were reversed, and it would be decades before the civil rights movement reorganized itself, helped by changing public attitudes.
Well into the twentieth century, the history of Reconstruction was rewritten in book and film to downgrade the role of black people. Yeah, we’re back to Gone With The Wind, the movie version of which appeared a year after Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction. Guess which version white people liked best?
The Wars of Reconstruction is a white academic’s attempt to challenge our received ideas of the post-Civil War period, in a way that’s footnotey enough for the historians but easily lively enough for the general reader. I suspect that this topic’s always going to be a matter of competing narratives rather than an agreed view of history, but this non-historian’s delighted that a new broadside has been fired in the war about the wars of Reconstruction. You guys—Americans, I mean—need to talk all this stuff out. I think there’s a great deal of popular interest in the history of civil rights, and more receptiveness than there ever has been toward a non-white-centric narrative of history. This is a book whose time may have come.
July 25, 2024
A New History Of Reconstruction
The Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War remains one of the most controversial periods of American history. At one time, the predominant view was the Reconstruction was a tragic blunder forced upon a defeated, prostrate South by a vengeful Congress. Over the years, this understanding of Reconstruction has gradually given way as historians have emphasized Reconstruction as a way of implementing the purposes for which the Civil War was fought by protecting the economic and civil rights of the Freedpeople.
In his new book, "The Wars of Reconstruction: the Brief, Violent history of America's Most Progressive Era" (2014, Douglas Egerton strongly interprets Reconstruction in accordance with the second view. A Professor of History at Le Moyne College, Egerton has written widely on African American history in the Revolutionary, pre-Civil War, and Civil War eras. In addition to differences of interpretation, Reconstruction is a difficult subject to master due to its breadth and complexity: understanding Reconstruction requires consideration of Federal action, state and local governmental action, and the activities of many individuals over the Reconstructed South.
This book does not have the character of nuance. Egerton advances his interpretation forcefully and strongly. This is not necessarily a flaw in a historical study, particularly in a study that counters a view that still has a wide following among lay people and probably among some scholars. Edgerton's book is meticulous, full of factual detail, and well documented in his extensive references. (Unfortunately, the book lacks a bibliography). The problem with the book is less in the strong interpretation it takes and more in the manner of presentation. In the early chapters, the book is dry, repetitive and unfocused. Egerton wants to explain the important role African American soldiers played in the Civil War as a backdrop to the Reconstruction Era. This is a sensible approach, but the book comes dangerously close to losing focus as Egerton offers a long series of specific anecdotal stories and incidents that seem both disorganized and disjointed. Patience is required to wade through the opening chapters of the book.
The flow of the book improves markedly following Appomattox and the assassination of Lincoln. Egerton discusses Andrew Johnson and his leniency towards the South and its leaders, the Freedman's Bureau and early land reform and educational efforts, the Reconstructionist Congress and its clashes with Johnson, and, increasingly, the violence and destruction in the South which led to the end of Reconstruction. As the book progresses, Egerton gives increasing emphasis to the local history as unrepentant Confederates tried to defeat Reconstruction with violence. Egerton argues that Reconstruction, with its unhappy end, accomplished a great deal in education and civil rights, and had a lasting positive impact.
Egerton gives a great deal of attention to land reform. A major issue, then and today, was whether the large plantations which slaveholders had fled upon the approach of the Union armies should have been divided into small farms and made available to the Freedpeople and other Union soldiers. The prevailing view at the time, even among those advocating for strong measures, was that this course would have been confiscatory. Measures of this scope probably would have few adherents even today. The unwillingness to change patterns of land ownership in the South probably had a great impact on the extent to which the Reconstruction which followed could have been successful especially in the short range.
Egerton emphasizes the violence in the South particularly as it involved voting rights throughout the South, with attention to massacres in Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and elsewhere. He also emphasizes the courage, even-handedness, and in many instances high educational attainments of the African Americans who took leadership positions in Reconstruction. The book offers short biographies of notable leaders who will be unfamiliar to most readers. Egerton also argues that the Northerners who came South to help implement Reconstruction were, for the most part, not the corrupt opportunists of some stereotypes. Rather they tended to be idealistic and educated and seriously committed to advancing the civil rights of the Freedpeople.
In the latter chapters of the book, Egerton offers a historiography of Reconstruction by showing how interpretation has shifted both in scholarship and in popular representations, such as the films "The Birth of a Nation", "Gone with the Wind", and Disney's "Song of the South". He describes the pioneering work of historians such as W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin which has been built upon by subsequent historians. This discussion is valuable for many reasons, both in showing the development of Egerton's own interpretation and in raising issues about the nature of historical inquiry. Are the different interpretations largely reflections of the predispositions at different times of their proponents? Are the studies hopelessly relativistic? My view is that they are not relativistic in the sense that continued study and development of interpretations gradually brings a fuller and improving understanding of "what actually happened" without ever reaching finality. There is a great deal to be learned from Egerton. By the same token, in reading this book, I did not have the sense of getting the "full" conclusive story. History and historical study develops with time and develops as the understanding of people develops.
Egerton has written a provocative, thoughtful book for readers wishing to understand Reconstruction and its history.
Robin Friedman
The Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War remains one of the most controversial periods of American history. At one time, the predominant view was the Reconstruction was a tragic blunder forced upon a defeated, prostrate South by a vengeful Congress. Over the years, this understanding of Reconstruction has gradually given way as historians have emphasized Reconstruction as a way of implementing the purposes for which the Civil War was fought by protecting the economic and civil rights of the Freedpeople.
In his new book, "The Wars of Reconstruction: the Brief, Violent history of America's Most Progressive Era" (2014, Douglas Egerton strongly interprets Reconstruction in accordance with the second view. A Professor of History at Le Moyne College, Egerton has written widely on African American history in the Revolutionary, pre-Civil War, and Civil War eras. In addition to differences of interpretation, Reconstruction is a difficult subject to master due to its breadth and complexity: understanding Reconstruction requires consideration of Federal action, state and local governmental action, and the activities of many individuals over the Reconstructed South.
This book does not have the character of nuance. Egerton advances his interpretation forcefully and strongly. This is not necessarily a flaw in a historical study, particularly in a study that counters a view that still has a wide following among lay people and probably among some scholars. Edgerton's book is meticulous, full of factual detail, and well documented in his extensive references. (Unfortunately, the book lacks a bibliography). The problem with the book is less in the strong interpretation it takes and more in the manner of presentation. In the early chapters, the book is dry, repetitive and unfocused. Egerton wants to explain the important role African American soldiers played in the Civil War as a backdrop to the Reconstruction Era. This is a sensible approach, but the book comes dangerously close to losing focus as Egerton offers a long series of specific anecdotal stories and incidents that seem both disorganized and disjointed. Patience is required to wade through the opening chapters of the book.
The flow of the book improves markedly following Appomattox and the assassination of Lincoln. Egerton discusses Andrew Johnson and his leniency towards the South and its leaders, the Freedman's Bureau and early land reform and educational efforts, the Reconstructionist Congress and its clashes with Johnson, and, increasingly, the violence and destruction in the South which led to the end of Reconstruction. As the book progresses, Egerton gives increasing emphasis to the local history as unrepentant Confederates tried to defeat Reconstruction with violence. Egerton argues that Reconstruction, with its unhappy end, accomplished a great deal in education and civil rights, and had a lasting positive impact.
Egerton gives a great deal of attention to land reform. A major issue, then and today, was whether the large plantations which slaveholders had fled upon the approach of the Union armies should have been divided into small farms and made available to the Freedpeople and other Union soldiers. The prevailing view at the time, even among those advocating for strong measures, was that this course would have been confiscatory. Measures of this scope probably would have few adherents even today. The unwillingness to change patterns of land ownership in the South probably had a great impact on the extent to which the Reconstruction which followed could have been successful especially in the short range.
Egerton emphasizes the violence in the South particularly as it involved voting rights throughout the South, with attention to massacres in Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and elsewhere. He also emphasizes the courage, even-handedness, and in many instances high educational attainments of the African Americans who took leadership positions in Reconstruction. The book offers short biographies of notable leaders who will be unfamiliar to most readers. Egerton also argues that the Northerners who came South to help implement Reconstruction were, for the most part, not the corrupt opportunists of some stereotypes. Rather they tended to be idealistic and educated and seriously committed to advancing the civil rights of the Freedpeople.
In the latter chapters of the book, Egerton offers a historiography of Reconstruction by showing how interpretation has shifted both in scholarship and in popular representations, such as the films "The Birth of a Nation", "Gone with the Wind", and Disney's "Song of the South". He describes the pioneering work of historians such as W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin which has been built upon by subsequent historians. This discussion is valuable for many reasons, both in showing the development of Egerton's own interpretation and in raising issues about the nature of historical inquiry. Are the different interpretations largely reflections of the predispositions at different times of their proponents? Are the studies hopelessly relativistic? My view is that they are not relativistic in the sense that continued study and development of interpretations gradually brings a fuller and improving understanding of "what actually happened" without ever reaching finality. There is a great deal to be learned from Egerton. By the same token, in reading this book, I did not have the sense of getting the "full" conclusive story. History and historical study develops with time and develops as the understanding of people develops.
Egerton has written a provocative, thoughtful book for readers wishing to understand Reconstruction and its history.
Robin Friedman
February 23, 2014
Most of Egerton's history of Reconstruction will be familiar to scholars who are well versed in the subject (namely those who have read work by Du Bois, Foner, etc.). However, one of his real contributions is making this period more accessible to lay audiences by using the histories of lesser known individuals like Hugh Lennox Bond, Ocavtius Catto, an enslaved girl named Dolly, and William Dennis to open a window onto different people's experiences of Reconstruction. Another intervention is Egerton's decision to not simply end his book when the period of Reconstruction ended but to devote a chapter to exploring the wars over Reconstruction memory from the end of the period to the present day.
June 14, 2015
As a Southerner educated in North Carolina schools growing up, the Civil War (or, as I tease my Northern friends, the War of Northern Aggression) was a noble, doomed cause for the South (it was not, as I was already reading about on my own time) and Reconstruction and its carpetbaggers were damnable. And that's about all we heard in school about Reconstruction.
Therefore, when I saw this book, I wanted to get a better handle on Reconstruction from a reality aspect, not a Southern one.
This book is an eye-opener and I highly recommend it. I must have slept through the class on why Andrew Johnson was impeached (I didn't - it was just ignored), but reading this book certainly made me think Greenville, TN folks should probably not tout this native son as highly as they do. To say he was an obstructionist is putting it mildly. Read the book.
Reconstruction should have worked and could have worked had Johnson not been in collusion with Southern white supremacists (which was the majority of the Southern upper class, who had the money and the power and the influence to reincarnate slavery in another form after the war) and literally did whatever he wanted in spite of Congress and federal law.
This book tells the stories of the wars that ensued because of the Johnson-white supremacists alliance and why after a few years of real progress, the "new" South looked a whole lot like the "old" South, but was in reality even worse.
Therefore, when I saw this book, I wanted to get a better handle on Reconstruction from a reality aspect, not a Southern one.
This book is an eye-opener and I highly recommend it. I must have slept through the class on why Andrew Johnson was impeached (I didn't - it was just ignored), but reading this book certainly made me think Greenville, TN folks should probably not tout this native son as highly as they do. To say he was an obstructionist is putting it mildly. Read the book.
Reconstruction should have worked and could have worked had Johnson not been in collusion with Southern white supremacists (which was the majority of the Southern upper class, who had the money and the power and the influence to reincarnate slavery in another form after the war) and literally did whatever he wanted in spite of Congress and federal law.
This book tells the stories of the wars that ensued because of the Johnson-white supremacists alliance and why after a few years of real progress, the "new" South looked a whole lot like the "old" South, but was in reality even worse.
September 17, 2017
I came upon this book at a library sale and put it in my pile of to-read books, not knowing when I would get to it. While moving recently, I noticed it and had to remind myself when I bought it. I picked it up and began to browse through it. I am glad I did. I have read Foner's book, which is the standard for Reconstruction and a few lesser books on the era and have thought that we need more scholarship on it. This book is a welcome addition.
The book is well-documented and well-written. I would recommend it for an academic but particularly for the public in general. Too many Americans either know nothing of Reconstruction or remember a few of the Lost Cause myths about the darkest period in our history; how opportunist Northerners flocked South to take advantage of the poor blacks and swindle the whites who were brutalized and had their way of life destroyed. Of course, that is not the case. Moreover, as the author proves, blacks, tired of enslavement, were more than ready to step forward and finally enjoy the freedom and opportunity that America was supposed to be about. President Andrew Johnson, one of the most racist and ignorant presidents we have ever had, threw away the opportunity to carry out Reconstruction in a way that would have benefitted the freedmen and the country at large and might have saved us from much of the violence that took place over the next hundred years.
Once Johnson had re-instated the full citizenship of the overwhelming majority of Confederates or traitors, they began to undo the work of the war. Congress took his power away when Radical Republicans had had enough and for a brief period, life for the newly freed people improved, even as Democrats fought hand and fist to prevent it.
Perhaps, above all, the book is a call to people to deal with history, honestly and in a forthright manner. As Egerton put it, "We study history...not as a quaint exercise in antiquarianism, but to understand the present. History, properly understood, is a series of meandering roads that all converge on the modern day. If we consciously ignore unpleasant parts of that journey, or seek to redraw that map, so that the country's first era of progressive reform, instead resembles a tragic era of corruption and bad government, then we fail to understand the contemporary world."
The book is well-documented and well-written. I would recommend it for an academic but particularly for the public in general. Too many Americans either know nothing of Reconstruction or remember a few of the Lost Cause myths about the darkest period in our history; how opportunist Northerners flocked South to take advantage of the poor blacks and swindle the whites who were brutalized and had their way of life destroyed. Of course, that is not the case. Moreover, as the author proves, blacks, tired of enslavement, were more than ready to step forward and finally enjoy the freedom and opportunity that America was supposed to be about. President Andrew Johnson, one of the most racist and ignorant presidents we have ever had, threw away the opportunity to carry out Reconstruction in a way that would have benefitted the freedmen and the country at large and might have saved us from much of the violence that took place over the next hundred years.
Once Johnson had re-instated the full citizenship of the overwhelming majority of Confederates or traitors, they began to undo the work of the war. Congress took his power away when Radical Republicans had had enough and for a brief period, life for the newly freed people improved, even as Democrats fought hand and fist to prevent it.
Perhaps, above all, the book is a call to people to deal with history, honestly and in a forthright manner. As Egerton put it, "We study history...not as a quaint exercise in antiquarianism, but to understand the present. History, properly understood, is a series of meandering roads that all converge on the modern day. If we consciously ignore unpleasant parts of that journey, or seek to redraw that map, so that the country's first era of progressive reform, instead resembles a tragic era of corruption and bad government, then we fail to understand the contemporary world."
October 3, 2016
Fascinating history of a movement diverted through violence and political corruption. A good companion to this book (and a much more succinct narrative) is "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by C. Van Woodward. Many people have been duped by a revisionist history of Reconstruction and I'm happy there are so many books like this recently to set the record straight. History not understood can create bad policymaking.
August 25, 2014
A fascinating read about post civil war legal battles and states attempts to undo the constitutional rights granted to slaves.
March 26, 2018
Review of: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton
by Stan Prager (3-26-18)
One of the sessions that I sat in on when I attended the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting in D.C. in January 2018 was entitled “The Struggle to Commemorate Reconstruction in National Parks,” which featured former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, as well as a number of noted historians. Panelists observed that while there are more than seventy NPS parks focused on the Civil War, there were none that explored the war’s critical aftermath until January 2017 when—in one of his final acts before leaving office—President Obama issued a proclamation that designated a site in Beaufort County, S.C. as the first National Park Service unit dedicated to the story of Reconstruction.
Perhaps no period in American history has been so utterly erased or misremembered as the Reconstruction era, that decade after the Civil War when the federal government sought to ensure that millions of African Americans, most of them former slaves, could enjoy basic civil and political rights. Just as “Lost Cause” mythology long disguised the centrality of slavery as the cause for the Civil War, supplanted by a false narrative of States’ Rights, so too did it invent a fiction of an occupied postwar south given to dangerous excess, exploited by rapacious northern “carpetbaggers,” in league with venal local “scalawags,” and hapless illiterate blacks manipulated to do their bidding and trample the rights of their former masters. That all of this is nonsense has made it a no less tenacious feature of American popular memory.
The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton, is a welcome addition to recent scholarship that has put the appropriate lie to these false narratives while recovering the often-heroic stories of African Americans and their white allies seeking to advance the cause of freedman against the frequent violence and brutality meted out by ex-Confederates seeking to reassert white supremacy. In the tradition of Eric Foner, whose magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfished Revolution 1863-1877, was among the first to expose the falsity of long-accepted interpretation, Egerton—professor of history at LeMoyne College—has crafted a well-written treatment of a pivotal era that has long languished from lack of attention and yet remains so critical to our understanding of how race continues to impact the American experience.
As a child growing up during the lunch counter boycotts and back-of-the-bus banishments of the Civil Rights era, with scenes splashed across my television set of unarmed marchers beaten by police and beset upon by dogs and water cannon, I had no idea that Alabama—where Governor George Wallace proclaimed, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," and a church bombing by white supremacists took the lives of four young children—had sent former slave Benjamin S. Turner to Congress in the 1870s. Nor did I know that Mississippi, infamous for the 1964 abduction and murder of civil rights workers, once had no less than two black United States Senators. How was that possible? What had happened? Egerton’s fine book is an excellent one-volume survey of a dramatic time of enormous hope for African Americans that proved to be all too brief, ultimately postponing efforts at equality for another century.
Reconstruction—which meant different things to different audiences at the time—was fraught with failure from the very beginning. Perhaps it only really had any kind of chance during the scant five days between Grant’s generous terms to Lee at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination. Lincoln, whose second term was only weeks old at his death, had been vague about postwar Reconstruction. It only seemed apparent that he favored easy terms for readmitting the states of the former Confederacy to the Union, and that he had concerns about the just treatment of the recently enslaved. But the great man was gone, and in his place was Andrew Johnson, a coarse, ex-slaveholder and Unionist Democrat from Tennessee added to the ’64 ticket to bolster Lincoln’s chances for re-election. At first, there was some concern that the new President—a rough fellow who despised plantation elites—would be too hard on the defeated south, but it soon became clear that the racist Johnson reserved most of his hatred for freed blacks and for their white “Radical Republican” allies in Congress who sought to sponsor civil equality and voting rights for African Americans. From the outset, Johnson would have none of that, blocking programs designed to educate and assist freedmen, granting blanket pardons to ex-Confederate military and political leaders, drawing down troop levels in the occupied south, and reassigning northern military commanders who were too aggressive in protecting blacks from rising southern vigilantism. Congress and the accidental President made war upon each other, and Johnson was narrowly acquitted in impeachment proceedings, but the real losers were blacks struggling to make their way in a new world where they were no longer property yet, typically lacking skills and education, faced daunting obstacles for basic survival.
In the immediate aftermath of the war there may have been an opportunity for long-term positive change, even if perhaps social equality for blacks might remain out of reach. At first, the conquered south seemed to follow Lee’s example, accepting defeat and seeking reconciliation. The “Spirit of Appomattox” kindled an optimism on both sides that was nearly extinguished with Lincoln’s death but yet still held promise, as the south seemed willing to accept whatever postwar terms the north might impose. But this moment was forever snuffed out by Johnson’s decisive embrace of ex-Confederates and palpable scorn for black aspirations.
Eggers underscores a vital point often overlooked by scholars of the era when he looks to how representation re-empowered states of the former Confederacy. The famous Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 that led to ratification of the U.S. Constitution was to mean that millions of blacks held as chattel property nevertheless counted as three-fifths of a person, which granted the antebellum south disproportionate political power in Congress for its free, white population. The 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to all, ironically increased the political power of white southerners exponentially, if only they could terrorize the black population—newly enfranchised by the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment—from exercising the right to vote. Paramilitary “White Leagues” and the Ku Klux Klan proved to be effective forces on the one hand, along with Johnson and emboldened Democrats on the other, so that readmitted former Confederate states and pardoned rebels could combine legal and extra-legal tactics to put control of these states in the hands of the very elites who led the rebellion! For example, in a remarkable turn of events, Alexander Stephens, former Vice President of the Confederate States of America, had a political rebirth as Congressman from Georgia in 1873, serving incongruously alongside blacks from other states that had once been part of the CSA. Stephens and his successors would well outlast their African American counterparts.
Optimism was rekindled when Ulysses S. Grant—a moderate of Lincoln’s ilk who was a friend of African Americans—was elected President in 1868, but much damage had already been done and Grant was no match for competing entrenched interests on all sides. Bogged down by corruption, scandal and his own gullibility, the great general proved to be a mediocre Chief Executive. And there were other forces at work that were beyond his control. Massive demilitarization followed the Civil War, and Indian wars in the west further diminished federal forces stretched thin in a south that was rapidly reasserting itself. Meanwhile, the north had grown weary of the conflict and of blacks clamoring for political rights, economic upsets proved more tangible to the postwar population, and a reconciliation that promised the nation an opportunity to move on beckoned with greater appeal than the interests of faraway ex-slaves. They were free now; what more do they want from us? The result was the mass murder of thousands of blacks in the south, as well as many of their white allies, as ex-Confederates enforced “Redemption”—the seizure of political power from northern Reconstruction forces that prevailed for a century after, and still endures in pockets of the south today. The contested election of 1876 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and withdrew federal forces from the south, effectively ending Reconstruction. The controversial Confederate monuments adorning too many public squares in the south today represent a commemoration of that moment—of Redemption and the near permanent debasement of African Americans to second-class citizenship—rather than the ostensible memorial of Civil War soldiers falsely proclaimed by southern partisans.
While it may seem that all was lost, in this outstanding history Eggers reminds us that there were accomplishments. Abolitionists and the like-minded flocked to the south after the war to teach blacks to read and write, and indeed great strides were made. African Americans, often against impossible odds, learned skills that forged new generations of artisans and shopkeepers. While “sharecropping” turned multitudes of blacks into serfs that were perhaps only a new brand of slave, they never stopped hoping—if not for themselves, then for their children—that one day a promised equality would become a true reality. Eggers can also be praised for bringing the nuance and complexity requisite to modern historical scholarship to bear as he does not fail to explore the often overlooked entrenched racism of the north, where few states granted voting rights to blacks prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, and which spawned its own brand of strong resistance to social equality that also sometimes dealt violence and death to its proponents.
One of the benefits of academic conferences is the opportunity to harvest books. I picked up The Wars of Reconstruction from a publisher’s table as the AHA annual meeting wound down, and cracked the spine on train ride home. Rarely have I found a work of history both so compelling and so relevant to its own time and to our own. I highly recommend it.
Review of: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton https://regarp.com/2018/03/26/review-...
by Stan Prager (3-26-18)
One of the sessions that I sat in on when I attended the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting in D.C. in January 2018 was entitled “The Struggle to Commemorate Reconstruction in National Parks,” which featured former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, as well as a number of noted historians. Panelists observed that while there are more than seventy NPS parks focused on the Civil War, there were none that explored the war’s critical aftermath until January 2017 when—in one of his final acts before leaving office—President Obama issued a proclamation that designated a site in Beaufort County, S.C. as the first National Park Service unit dedicated to the story of Reconstruction.
Perhaps no period in American history has been so utterly erased or misremembered as the Reconstruction era, that decade after the Civil War when the federal government sought to ensure that millions of African Americans, most of them former slaves, could enjoy basic civil and political rights. Just as “Lost Cause” mythology long disguised the centrality of slavery as the cause for the Civil War, supplanted by a false narrative of States’ Rights, so too did it invent a fiction of an occupied postwar south given to dangerous excess, exploited by rapacious northern “carpetbaggers,” in league with venal local “scalawags,” and hapless illiterate blacks manipulated to do their bidding and trample the rights of their former masters. That all of this is nonsense has made it a no less tenacious feature of American popular memory.
The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton, is a welcome addition to recent scholarship that has put the appropriate lie to these false narratives while recovering the often-heroic stories of African Americans and their white allies seeking to advance the cause of freedman against the frequent violence and brutality meted out by ex-Confederates seeking to reassert white supremacy. In the tradition of Eric Foner, whose magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfished Revolution 1863-1877, was among the first to expose the falsity of long-accepted interpretation, Egerton—professor of history at LeMoyne College—has crafted a well-written treatment of a pivotal era that has long languished from lack of attention and yet remains so critical to our understanding of how race continues to impact the American experience.
As a child growing up during the lunch counter boycotts and back-of-the-bus banishments of the Civil Rights era, with scenes splashed across my television set of unarmed marchers beaten by police and beset upon by dogs and water cannon, I had no idea that Alabama—where Governor George Wallace proclaimed, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," and a church bombing by white supremacists took the lives of four young children—had sent former slave Benjamin S. Turner to Congress in the 1870s. Nor did I know that Mississippi, infamous for the 1964 abduction and murder of civil rights workers, once had no less than two black United States Senators. How was that possible? What had happened? Egerton’s fine book is an excellent one-volume survey of a dramatic time of enormous hope for African Americans that proved to be all too brief, ultimately postponing efforts at equality for another century.
Reconstruction—which meant different things to different audiences at the time—was fraught with failure from the very beginning. Perhaps it only really had any kind of chance during the scant five days between Grant’s generous terms to Lee at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination. Lincoln, whose second term was only weeks old at his death, had been vague about postwar Reconstruction. It only seemed apparent that he favored easy terms for readmitting the states of the former Confederacy to the Union, and that he had concerns about the just treatment of the recently enslaved. But the great man was gone, and in his place was Andrew Johnson, a coarse, ex-slaveholder and Unionist Democrat from Tennessee added to the ’64 ticket to bolster Lincoln’s chances for re-election. At first, there was some concern that the new President—a rough fellow who despised plantation elites—would be too hard on the defeated south, but it soon became clear that the racist Johnson reserved most of his hatred for freed blacks and for their white “Radical Republican” allies in Congress who sought to sponsor civil equality and voting rights for African Americans. From the outset, Johnson would have none of that, blocking programs designed to educate and assist freedmen, granting blanket pardons to ex-Confederate military and political leaders, drawing down troop levels in the occupied south, and reassigning northern military commanders who were too aggressive in protecting blacks from rising southern vigilantism. Congress and the accidental President made war upon each other, and Johnson was narrowly acquitted in impeachment proceedings, but the real losers were blacks struggling to make their way in a new world where they were no longer property yet, typically lacking skills and education, faced daunting obstacles for basic survival.
In the immediate aftermath of the war there may have been an opportunity for long-term positive change, even if perhaps social equality for blacks might remain out of reach. At first, the conquered south seemed to follow Lee’s example, accepting defeat and seeking reconciliation. The “Spirit of Appomattox” kindled an optimism on both sides that was nearly extinguished with Lincoln’s death but yet still held promise, as the south seemed willing to accept whatever postwar terms the north might impose. But this moment was forever snuffed out by Johnson’s decisive embrace of ex-Confederates and palpable scorn for black aspirations.
Eggers underscores a vital point often overlooked by scholars of the era when he looks to how representation re-empowered states of the former Confederacy. The famous Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 that led to ratification of the U.S. Constitution was to mean that millions of blacks held as chattel property nevertheless counted as three-fifths of a person, which granted the antebellum south disproportionate political power in Congress for its free, white population. The 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to all, ironically increased the political power of white southerners exponentially, if only they could terrorize the black population—newly enfranchised by the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment—from exercising the right to vote. Paramilitary “White Leagues” and the Ku Klux Klan proved to be effective forces on the one hand, along with Johnson and emboldened Democrats on the other, so that readmitted former Confederate states and pardoned rebels could combine legal and extra-legal tactics to put control of these states in the hands of the very elites who led the rebellion! For example, in a remarkable turn of events, Alexander Stephens, former Vice President of the Confederate States of America, had a political rebirth as Congressman from Georgia in 1873, serving incongruously alongside blacks from other states that had once been part of the CSA. Stephens and his successors would well outlast their African American counterparts.
Optimism was rekindled when Ulysses S. Grant—a moderate of Lincoln’s ilk who was a friend of African Americans—was elected President in 1868, but much damage had already been done and Grant was no match for competing entrenched interests on all sides. Bogged down by corruption, scandal and his own gullibility, the great general proved to be a mediocre Chief Executive. And there were other forces at work that were beyond his control. Massive demilitarization followed the Civil War, and Indian wars in the west further diminished federal forces stretched thin in a south that was rapidly reasserting itself. Meanwhile, the north had grown weary of the conflict and of blacks clamoring for political rights, economic upsets proved more tangible to the postwar population, and a reconciliation that promised the nation an opportunity to move on beckoned with greater appeal than the interests of faraway ex-slaves. They were free now; what more do they want from us? The result was the mass murder of thousands of blacks in the south, as well as many of their white allies, as ex-Confederates enforced “Redemption”—the seizure of political power from northern Reconstruction forces that prevailed for a century after, and still endures in pockets of the south today. The contested election of 1876 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and withdrew federal forces from the south, effectively ending Reconstruction. The controversial Confederate monuments adorning too many public squares in the south today represent a commemoration of that moment—of Redemption and the near permanent debasement of African Americans to second-class citizenship—rather than the ostensible memorial of Civil War soldiers falsely proclaimed by southern partisans.
While it may seem that all was lost, in this outstanding history Eggers reminds us that there were accomplishments. Abolitionists and the like-minded flocked to the south after the war to teach blacks to read and write, and indeed great strides were made. African Americans, often against impossible odds, learned skills that forged new generations of artisans and shopkeepers. While “sharecropping” turned multitudes of blacks into serfs that were perhaps only a new brand of slave, they never stopped hoping—if not for themselves, then for their children—that one day a promised equality would become a true reality. Eggers can also be praised for bringing the nuance and complexity requisite to modern historical scholarship to bear as he does not fail to explore the often overlooked entrenched racism of the north, where few states granted voting rights to blacks prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, and which spawned its own brand of strong resistance to social equality that also sometimes dealt violence and death to its proponents.
One of the benefits of academic conferences is the opportunity to harvest books. I picked up The Wars of Reconstruction from a publisher’s table as the AHA annual meeting wound down, and cracked the spine on train ride home. Rarely have I found a work of history both so compelling and so relevant to its own time and to our own. I highly recommend it.
Review of: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton https://regarp.com/2018/03/26/review-...
October 17, 2014
Douglas Egerton’s “The Wars of Reconstruction” is a retelling of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era that focuses on the experiences, trials, triumphs and reversals of the emancipated blacks who Reconstruction was envisioned to protect. As a history of the principal events of Reconstruction Egerton’s work is serviceable, but only just; yet to anyone knowledgeable about those events there is little that is new here. What is interesting, however, is Egerton’s attempt to tell the story from the perspective of the then-recently emancipated blacks. This perspective infuses the old stories with a sense of purpose and urgency that traditional Reconstruction histories lack. What develops is a story of people desperate to emerge from bondage and equip themselves with the tools and strategies necessary to survive as free Americans, and the degree of hostility, violence and, ultimately, apathy and betrayal they encountered along the way.
More than anything else, the book makes clear the litany of missed chances and squandered opportunities that, had they been exploited, could have made a profound difference in the trajectory of American history and American civil rights. As I read, I found myself wishing that I had a time machine with which I could go back and influence the selection Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election, or beg President Grant to increase the number of Federal troops stationed in the South, or influence the funding of the Freedman’s Bureau, or destroyed the Compromise of 1876…..or anything, I guess, that would have helped to entrench the institutions (schools, black voter participation, defense of civil rights, fundamental protection of citizens from vigilante terrorists) that could have given post-war black Americans the time and peace they needed to entrench themselves as unobstructed equals in the American polity.
The book was good and I’m glad I read it. With this being said, however, I cannot say that it altered my thinking about the period in any material respect, except, perhaps, to gain a deeper understanding for the obstacles and regimes of reconstituted oppression the black reformers faced as they set about to build new lives as well as an appreciation for the fact that Jim Crow was not inevitable, and could have been averted had the country retained its will to complete what it started with the war.
More than anything else, the book makes clear the litany of missed chances and squandered opportunities that, had they been exploited, could have made a profound difference in the trajectory of American history and American civil rights. As I read, I found myself wishing that I had a time machine with which I could go back and influence the selection Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election, or beg President Grant to increase the number of Federal troops stationed in the South, or influence the funding of the Freedman’s Bureau, or destroyed the Compromise of 1876…..or anything, I guess, that would have helped to entrench the institutions (schools, black voter participation, defense of civil rights, fundamental protection of citizens from vigilante terrorists) that could have given post-war black Americans the time and peace they needed to entrench themselves as unobstructed equals in the American polity.
The book was good and I’m glad I read it. With this being said, however, I cannot say that it altered my thinking about the period in any material respect, except, perhaps, to gain a deeper understanding for the obstacles and regimes of reconstituted oppression the black reformers faced as they set about to build new lives as well as an appreciation for the fact that Jim Crow was not inevitable, and could have been averted had the country retained its will to complete what it started with the war.
September 24, 2017
I've been wanting to read up on Reconstruction lately, and this is the first of a couple or few books that I'll probably read over the next several months. Douglas Egerton's purpose in writing this seems to be to provide a counterpoint or corrective to the former-Confederate narrative of Reconstruction which tells the tale of jackbooted federal soldiers, murderous and raping freedmen, and of an innocent South which only seceded to uphold states' rights. Egerton's counter-narrative succeeds in this admirably, but can often read like trying to get a sip of water from a firehose.
Egerton packs his narrative with anecdotes and instances to substantiate his claims, and the reader finds himself jumping back and forth in time between different people in different locales, often within a single paragraph. This gives a somewhat impressionistic picture of the Reconstruction era, and this forces the reader back a little to see Reconstruction in a broader context of the history of slavery and civil rights in the U.S., rather than as an epilogue to the Civil War.
The final two chapters follow the formation of the Confederate narrative from the period after Reconstruction through the struggle for civil rights and includes a discussion of public statuary and the double standards we still maintain between publicly honoring slaveholders and freedmen. These chapters were written in a more linear narrative style, and capped the book off amazingly, bringing together the dense narrative of the main body of the book.
Egerton packs his narrative with anecdotes and instances to substantiate his claims, and the reader finds himself jumping back and forth in time between different people in different locales, often within a single paragraph. This gives a somewhat impressionistic picture of the Reconstruction era, and this forces the reader back a little to see Reconstruction in a broader context of the history of slavery and civil rights in the U.S., rather than as an epilogue to the Civil War.
The final two chapters follow the formation of the Confederate narrative from the period after Reconstruction through the struggle for civil rights and includes a discussion of public statuary and the double standards we still maintain between publicly honoring slaveholders and freedmen. These chapters were written in a more linear narrative style, and capped the book off amazingly, bringing together the dense narrative of the main body of the book.
December 11, 2016
Douglas R. Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era spans from the years prior to the outbreak of Civil War until 2007. While the “Epilogue” addresses current events the book primarily deals with the 1860s through the early 1900s in the Southern and Mid-Atlantic states to discuss how Reconstruction ended. He believes that the discussion of Reconstruction too often turns to “why Reconstruction failed as opposed to ended.” He claims that this indicates that the process of Reconstruction was flawed and that it was doomed to failure. Egerton views Reconstruction as a continuation of the Civil War due to the violent tactics that overturned the policies of Reconstruction. Egerton constructs his narrative from the viewpoint of the freemen of the North and South and the men freed by the Emancipation Proclamation who agitated for change rather than from the perspective of lawmakers and politicians.
Egerton looks for the roots of failure in the origins of Reconstruction, because, he argues, it was not doomed to failure from the start. He argues that there was a brief window for success that closed forever when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Egerton contends that Reconstruction ended because it was overthrown by “guerilla partisans” who fought for slavery during the war and refused to accept the surrender of their generals. This violence was directed towards newly freed slaves, freemen, and Northerners who participated in the government. Concurrent with this argument about the outcome of Reconstruction we have Egerton’s other argument; the era of Reconstruction was the most progressive period in the history of the United States.
To tell this story Egerton delves into primary sources to implement a narrative that attracts the reader. He uses newspapers, correspondence, and a wealthy of secondary sources to bring his chosen characters to life. Without frequent quotations from the letters between Frederick Douglass and his sons Charles and Lewis and others the story would not have been complete. These sources are also necessary when one considers the fact that Egerton’s narrative focuses on those struggling and sometimes dying to attain political and social equality his argument would be significantly impacted if the primary source material was not present.
The Wars of Reconstruction certainly adds to the discussion through the extension of the time period of Reconstruction. There is no universally accepted end date for Reconstruction and in his epilogue Egerton suggests that questions of social and political equality still have not been settled in 2007. This drives home the influence that historic problems and issues have on the present day. His work is also significant because Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the government officials who affect change, however, Egerton focuses on those who did not hold significant power, but still agitated for the change that they wanted to see. In this aspect, Egerton’s volume is reminiscent of W.E.B. DuBois’ work.
Despite its strengths parts of the book come off as hyperbolic. He claims that the Republicans in Washington, D.C. were “forced” to “elevate the conflict into a revolutionary struggle that challenged racism in all sections of the republic.” To say that the Civil War challenged racism in “all” areas of the republic may be to overplay the importance of the Civil War when it comes to the alteration of governmental policy and to assert that the Civil War and Reconstruction brought about equality for Native Americans and Asian Americans. There is also a lack of consideration for the greater context. He criticizes the removal of troops from the South for the Indian Wars without mentioning the Reconstruction policies west of the Mississippi. Egerton attempts to draw his readers in through the style and format to the book, and this is successful. He uses the stories of individuals for this end, but this is less effective. Many people are introduced with personal details, but they are often dead by the end of the chapter — if not by the end of the sentence. There are some activists that Egerton follows through to the end. This allows readers to become familiar and attached, which strengthens the narrative.
Egerton looks for the roots of failure in the origins of Reconstruction, because, he argues, it was not doomed to failure from the start. He argues that there was a brief window for success that closed forever when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Egerton contends that Reconstruction ended because it was overthrown by “guerilla partisans” who fought for slavery during the war and refused to accept the surrender of their generals. This violence was directed towards newly freed slaves, freemen, and Northerners who participated in the government. Concurrent with this argument about the outcome of Reconstruction we have Egerton’s other argument; the era of Reconstruction was the most progressive period in the history of the United States.
To tell this story Egerton delves into primary sources to implement a narrative that attracts the reader. He uses newspapers, correspondence, and a wealthy of secondary sources to bring his chosen characters to life. Without frequent quotations from the letters between Frederick Douglass and his sons Charles and Lewis and others the story would not have been complete. These sources are also necessary when one considers the fact that Egerton’s narrative focuses on those struggling and sometimes dying to attain political and social equality his argument would be significantly impacted if the primary source material was not present.
The Wars of Reconstruction certainly adds to the discussion through the extension of the time period of Reconstruction. There is no universally accepted end date for Reconstruction and in his epilogue Egerton suggests that questions of social and political equality still have not been settled in 2007. This drives home the influence that historic problems and issues have on the present day. His work is also significant because Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the government officials who affect change, however, Egerton focuses on those who did not hold significant power, but still agitated for the change that they wanted to see. In this aspect, Egerton’s volume is reminiscent of W.E.B. DuBois’ work.
Despite its strengths parts of the book come off as hyperbolic. He claims that the Republicans in Washington, D.C. were “forced” to “elevate the conflict into a revolutionary struggle that challenged racism in all sections of the republic.” To say that the Civil War challenged racism in “all” areas of the republic may be to overplay the importance of the Civil War when it comes to the alteration of governmental policy and to assert that the Civil War and Reconstruction brought about equality for Native Americans and Asian Americans. There is also a lack of consideration for the greater context. He criticizes the removal of troops from the South for the Indian Wars without mentioning the Reconstruction policies west of the Mississippi. Egerton attempts to draw his readers in through the style and format to the book, and this is successful. He uses the stories of individuals for this end, but this is less effective. Many people are introduced with personal details, but they are often dead by the end of the chapter — if not by the end of the sentence. There are some activists that Egerton follows through to the end. This allows readers to become familiar and attached, which strengthens the narrative.
February 25, 2017
Due to retrograde narratives such as “Gone With the Wind” we have been led to believe that Southerners were a conquered people in occupied territory. Indeed, this might have been the case had staunch abolitionist senator Thaddeus Stevens and other radical Republicans had had their way. The author believes, however, that most southern men returning home from the war were prepared to accept any and all of Lincoln’s terms and just get on with life and rebuilding. The tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination was not that he was the only person who could have done the job of Reconstruction, but that Andrew Johnson was completely unequipped and unwilling to do that job. The author relates a story in which Johnson expresses the widely held view to Frederick Douglas that plantation slaves felt superiority and contempt for the struggles of poor whites (of which Johnson was born), even going so far as trying to get Frederick Douglas to admit he had felt such contempt, which Douglas denied. From the beginning of his presidency, he signaled to the planter class that he would require little from them, and they became emboldened to regain their political might.
For Johnson, emancipation was basically the end of the subject, not the beginning of a process of leveling the playing field through redistribution of land, wealth and privilege through governmental intervention. Many federal programs, in fact, were designed to help both the freed blacks and the poor whites in an attempt to address the social imbalances of the antebellum economy. White children could also attend Freemen’s schools, which would have allowed them to pursue news and other information without relying upon upper class whites, so they were therefore discouraged from attending by the planter class. Administrators from the Freedmen’s Bureau often wrote to Washington of the absolute wretchedness of the poor whites, who sometimes created a greater drain on federal aid than the freed blacks. But “democratic movements can be halted by violence” the author says, and it was not only blacks who were targeted but any white person who attempted to help the advancement of people previously at the bottom of the social ladder.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was also charged with reconstituting families, which was made difficult by trying to locate people with different owners, the assumption of necessary surnames after emancipation, and the prior lack of laws governing marriage and custody. Freed slaves knew the value of hard work after lives of uncompensated labor and were willing to put all their efforts into working land that they owned with the intention of passing it on to the next generation. The sharecropping system took hold as it offered some limited opportunity for advancement while maintaining the hierarchy of the rural south. Landowners marveled at the incentive for labor in this system, where previously the only incentive was to avoid the whip. It is tantalizing to think what this country could have become had the plantations been confiscated and redistributed, breaking the monopoly of labor that strangled the blacks and poor whites. Johnson, however, negated acts of Congress by allowing southerners to reclaim their estates by pledging allegiance to the Union and paying their taxes, thereby condoning the brand of Southern belligerence prevalent before the war to continue, eventually developing into domestic terror. It is easy to see why voters would see Ulysses S. Grant as the candidate needed to address this growing imbalance, marrying military might with executive powers. In the years following Grant’s presidency, it became the judiciary branch that was called upon to uphold provisions of the legislation passed during Reconstruction, which it often failed to do.
Victims of the Ku Klux Klan usually knew who their perpetrators were, based on their voices and horses. Many Klansmen had fought in the Confederate Army and fell into their old ranks behind their captains. In the backcountry where good land was scarce, white farmers who had not owned slaves took the opportunity to join forces with planters to align labor and resource control in their favor. In the months preceding any election, they might be a spate of murders to intimidate Republicans and blacks, and to influence the swing vote, poor whites, to come to the side which was regaining its might, the Democrats. Republicans and blacks were turned away from the polls by armed men. This was not done solely by the KKK, but also the White League, Knights of the White Camelia, and other militia who called themselves ‘rifle clubs’. Yet when freedmen practices military drills or attempted to be prepared for attack, they were painted as lawless and insurrectionary.
Today, many southerners still believe that Reconstruction was radical and undemocratic, when in actuality it was the first period in American history in which men (still no women yet) of all demographics were permitted and encouraged to vote. During the war, many Unionists documented that the runaway and emancipated slaves had political savvy and were well-informed. These were men who had left their families in bondage in order to fight, and probably die, for the freedom of all. Gathered together in regiments, these men managed to become literate and educated during their little downtime, thus preparing themselves for lives as citizens. On the Atlantic Sea Islands, many were taken over by freed blacks who set up their own governments and civil institutions. By 1868 black men constituted a majority of voters in South Carolina and Mississippi. After the 1872 elections, blacks (who had mostly been property just ten years earlier) held more elected positions in the South than they did in 1990. The South had managed to hold a disproportionate power in congress through the three-fifths clause, and while southern whites briefly lost this grip, they regained a similar influence once they figured out how to deny blacks the vote, while still counting them in the population when it came time to apportion House seats.
Reconstruction is considered to have ended definitively in 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South, but the withdrawal had been happening gradually already, with troops being clustered mainly in urban areas. Black activism was also concentrated in urban areas, due to both the presence of protective troops and the ever-increasing black urban population. The lack of troops in the countryside accounted for the easy ascent of the KKK and disenfranchisement of rural blacks which would eventually become the southern norm by the 1890s. Reconstruction did not fail on its own, but collapsed due to the unending aggressions and interventions of people who had fought for slavery during the war.
I read this book at an unfortunate time – the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency. The title of the book led me to believe it would be a story of uplift in the face of enormous challenges. But no, that’s not what the real sweep of this story is about. Instead, the author spends a good deal of time on Andrew Johnson. Viewed through the lens of Donald Trump’s executive orders and the horrible people he is cozy with, I can see how a president, no matter how unpopular or how many people oppose him, can, through the privilege of his office, set a tone counter to the other two branches of government and set the tone for this nation which continues to this day. Johnson was a slave-holder (though as a wealthy city-dweller, he could easily have afforded efficient paid help) and a self-made man, possessing a narcissism born of aspirational struggle and eventual accomplishment, with little sympathy for those below him and feelings of simpatico for his betters (the planter class). Johnson actually advocated for the states to sort through suffrage (and many other issues) on their own, even though the South’s claims to states’ rights were what started the Civil War in the first place. At one point, Johnson was issuing over a hundred pardons daily to the southern elite, whom he felt had suffered enough and needed to get back to their business. In doing so, Johnson undermined the Freedmen’s Bureau standing as a symbol of government power, assuring the white elite that they had the executive’s understanding. Nobody who had supported the Union was ever entirely safe in the South when it became clear they had no defender in the White House, giving rise to aggression intended to keep the social strata in place. Johnson also withheld advertising patronage from newspapers that did not support his intentions for Reconstruction. He was looked upon as a disgrace to the nation for not wanting to support laws passed by Congress. Sound familiar?
For Johnson, emancipation was basically the end of the subject, not the beginning of a process of leveling the playing field through redistribution of land, wealth and privilege through governmental intervention. Many federal programs, in fact, were designed to help both the freed blacks and the poor whites in an attempt to address the social imbalances of the antebellum economy. White children could also attend Freemen’s schools, which would have allowed them to pursue news and other information without relying upon upper class whites, so they were therefore discouraged from attending by the planter class. Administrators from the Freedmen’s Bureau often wrote to Washington of the absolute wretchedness of the poor whites, who sometimes created a greater drain on federal aid than the freed blacks. But “democratic movements can be halted by violence” the author says, and it was not only blacks who were targeted but any white person who attempted to help the advancement of people previously at the bottom of the social ladder.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was also charged with reconstituting families, which was made difficult by trying to locate people with different owners, the assumption of necessary surnames after emancipation, and the prior lack of laws governing marriage and custody. Freed slaves knew the value of hard work after lives of uncompensated labor and were willing to put all their efforts into working land that they owned with the intention of passing it on to the next generation. The sharecropping system took hold as it offered some limited opportunity for advancement while maintaining the hierarchy of the rural south. Landowners marveled at the incentive for labor in this system, where previously the only incentive was to avoid the whip. It is tantalizing to think what this country could have become had the plantations been confiscated and redistributed, breaking the monopoly of labor that strangled the blacks and poor whites. Johnson, however, negated acts of Congress by allowing southerners to reclaim their estates by pledging allegiance to the Union and paying their taxes, thereby condoning the brand of Southern belligerence prevalent before the war to continue, eventually developing into domestic terror. It is easy to see why voters would see Ulysses S. Grant as the candidate needed to address this growing imbalance, marrying military might with executive powers. In the years following Grant’s presidency, it became the judiciary branch that was called upon to uphold provisions of the legislation passed during Reconstruction, which it often failed to do.
Victims of the Ku Klux Klan usually knew who their perpetrators were, based on their voices and horses. Many Klansmen had fought in the Confederate Army and fell into their old ranks behind their captains. In the backcountry where good land was scarce, white farmers who had not owned slaves took the opportunity to join forces with planters to align labor and resource control in their favor. In the months preceding any election, they might be a spate of murders to intimidate Republicans and blacks, and to influence the swing vote, poor whites, to come to the side which was regaining its might, the Democrats. Republicans and blacks were turned away from the polls by armed men. This was not done solely by the KKK, but also the White League, Knights of the White Camelia, and other militia who called themselves ‘rifle clubs’. Yet when freedmen practices military drills or attempted to be prepared for attack, they were painted as lawless and insurrectionary.
Today, many southerners still believe that Reconstruction was radical and undemocratic, when in actuality it was the first period in American history in which men (still no women yet) of all demographics were permitted and encouraged to vote. During the war, many Unionists documented that the runaway and emancipated slaves had political savvy and were well-informed. These were men who had left their families in bondage in order to fight, and probably die, for the freedom of all. Gathered together in regiments, these men managed to become literate and educated during their little downtime, thus preparing themselves for lives as citizens. On the Atlantic Sea Islands, many were taken over by freed blacks who set up their own governments and civil institutions. By 1868 black men constituted a majority of voters in South Carolina and Mississippi. After the 1872 elections, blacks (who had mostly been property just ten years earlier) held more elected positions in the South than they did in 1990. The South had managed to hold a disproportionate power in congress through the three-fifths clause, and while southern whites briefly lost this grip, they regained a similar influence once they figured out how to deny blacks the vote, while still counting them in the population when it came time to apportion House seats.
Reconstruction is considered to have ended definitively in 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South, but the withdrawal had been happening gradually already, with troops being clustered mainly in urban areas. Black activism was also concentrated in urban areas, due to both the presence of protective troops and the ever-increasing black urban population. The lack of troops in the countryside accounted for the easy ascent of the KKK and disenfranchisement of rural blacks which would eventually become the southern norm by the 1890s. Reconstruction did not fail on its own, but collapsed due to the unending aggressions and interventions of people who had fought for slavery during the war.
I read this book at an unfortunate time – the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency. The title of the book led me to believe it would be a story of uplift in the face of enormous challenges. But no, that’s not what the real sweep of this story is about. Instead, the author spends a good deal of time on Andrew Johnson. Viewed through the lens of Donald Trump’s executive orders and the horrible people he is cozy with, I can see how a president, no matter how unpopular or how many people oppose him, can, through the privilege of his office, set a tone counter to the other two branches of government and set the tone for this nation which continues to this day. Johnson was a slave-holder (though as a wealthy city-dweller, he could easily have afforded efficient paid help) and a self-made man, possessing a narcissism born of aspirational struggle and eventual accomplishment, with little sympathy for those below him and feelings of simpatico for his betters (the planter class). Johnson actually advocated for the states to sort through suffrage (and many other issues) on their own, even though the South’s claims to states’ rights were what started the Civil War in the first place. At one point, Johnson was issuing over a hundred pardons daily to the southern elite, whom he felt had suffered enough and needed to get back to their business. In doing so, Johnson undermined the Freedmen’s Bureau standing as a symbol of government power, assuring the white elite that they had the executive’s understanding. Nobody who had supported the Union was ever entirely safe in the South when it became clear they had no defender in the White House, giving rise to aggression intended to keep the social strata in place. Johnson also withheld advertising patronage from newspapers that did not support his intentions for Reconstruction. He was looked upon as a disgrace to the nation for not wanting to support laws passed by Congress. Sound familiar?
August 11, 2014
The subtitle of Douglas Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction is The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era clearly states the theme of the book. While Eric Foner’s Reconstruction remains the standard comprehensive study of the period Egerton successfully presents his focused argument in an informative and very interesting book.
It was noted in the afterword of the commemorative edition of C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow and more recently in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow that Martin Luther King referred to Woodward’s 1955 book as the Bible of the civil rights movement. While there was some rather unequal cooperation between the races prior to the codification of the Jim Crow Laws, works such as The Wars of Reconstruction offer a needed corrective to Woodward’s sanitized history and Alexander’s mediocre history.
The Wars of Reconstruction is well worth a read.
It was noted in the afterword of the commemorative edition of C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow and more recently in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow that Martin Luther King referred to Woodward’s 1955 book as the Bible of the civil rights movement. While there was some rather unequal cooperation between the races prior to the codification of the Jim Crow Laws, works such as The Wars of Reconstruction offer a needed corrective to Woodward’s sanitized history and Alexander’s mediocre history.
The Wars of Reconstruction is well worth a read.
March 30, 2015
Recently I read an essay in the Minneapolis paper that lionizes Lincoln but dismisses Reconstruction as an era of corruption, chicanery, and ineptitude. That's just one example of why Reconstruction needs rehabilitation, and this book does a thorough, readable, and democratic job of telling the true story of Reconstruction as a period where continued guerrilla warfare by Southerns partisans committed multiple atrocities to overcome the remarkable advances of Southern African-Americans. It would have been nice, however, to have a bit more context of period history and culture. Additionally, while the author admirably adds the voices of literally hundreds of the people who lived the history of the day, sometimes he bogs down in the abundance of short, exemplary stories. Overall, though, this is an excellent work of history and a needed correction to common misconception about a turning point in American history.
January 22, 2022
I thought I had a good understanding of U.S. history, but reading about the Reconstruction period has been an eye opener. Egerton appropriately frames this period as a continuation of the Civil War, in which white southerners adopted new tactics in their fight to maintain their oppressive system against blacks. This understanding of the nature of the conflict was widely held at the time. One thing this book does well is highlight the positives of this time period -- the heroism, the successful efforts of the freed people to educate themselves. I had no idea that the majority of northern whites who came south to teach in schools for freed slaves were devout evangelical Christians. The chapter on the schools is worth the whole book. There's also a good description of how a false, racist narrative of the Reconstruction period came to dominate popular fiction and Hollywood.
February 20, 2014
This book was dense, but not in an enjoyable way. There were a lot of names and people thrown at you (who would end up dead by the end of the sentence) of no lasting importance, and there were a lot of important details that were not separated from the chaff. This book had VERY interesting points to make but as the reader, you really had to work to find them.
To be fair, his interperation of the reason that reconstruction failed was interesting, and a way that I would like to see explored more- this book might be worth the extra effort of reading.
To be fair, his interperation of the reason that reconstruction failed was interesting, and a way that I would like to see explored more- this book might be worth the extra effort of reading.
February 2, 2021
A necessary read for a full understanding of race and politics in America. This book creates a foundation for so many of the issues of race that currently haunt our democracy from voter disenfranchisement to revisionist histories of the civil war. A full understand of race American cannot be gleaned without understanding the reconstruction era and this book goes along way to achieving that goal.
August 19, 2022
Superb introduction to the period whose ramifications continue to affect our American lives today. Each chapter is meticulously documented, and Egerton provides many pages of end notes and bibliography. His reading on the topic is deep, thorough and broad, and I look forward to trailing behind him.
What I loved most about the book is that it is dispassionate, accurate history that pulls no punches. Egerton makes the case that Reconstruction, even with the intervention of Andrew Johnson instead of Lincoln as its driving force, managed to initially succeed. White Southerners were not happy that black Southerners had been placed on equal footing, but Egerton cites many cases that indicate 1) the planter caste knew the war was lost and 2) were grudgingly prepared to accept United States terms and laws. Lincoln's departure allowed Johnson to vitiate reforms that might have become cultural habits of toleration, Grant withdrew the federal troops that might have enforced them, and Hayes achieved election by catering to the white power structure (despite his own views).
The sheer amount of white-on-black massacres that took place before Hayes ended Reconstruction is --- not was, IS --- astounding. Black Southerners were left unguarded in rural areas, and were lynched, burned alive, tortured and psychologically browbeaten in an effort to prevent them from exercising political equality or acquiring land and/or wealth. The destruction of wealth in particular meant that unlike other immigrant groups, black Americans were prevented from passing it on to descendants. This left them at a more or less permanent disadvantage for the next 150 years. There is no truly effective way to deal with this other than reparations. We cannot eradicate racism, and we seem at present to be enduring a period that normalizes it. Thanks, Trump.
Highly recommended.
What I loved most about the book is that it is dispassionate, accurate history that pulls no punches. Egerton makes the case that Reconstruction, even with the intervention of Andrew Johnson instead of Lincoln as its driving force, managed to initially succeed. White Southerners were not happy that black Southerners had been placed on equal footing, but Egerton cites many cases that indicate 1) the planter caste knew the war was lost and 2) were grudgingly prepared to accept United States terms and laws. Lincoln's departure allowed Johnson to vitiate reforms that might have become cultural habits of toleration, Grant withdrew the federal troops that might have enforced them, and Hayes achieved election by catering to the white power structure (despite his own views).
The sheer amount of white-on-black massacres that took place before Hayes ended Reconstruction is --- not was, IS --- astounding. Black Southerners were left unguarded in rural areas, and were lynched, burned alive, tortured and psychologically browbeaten in an effort to prevent them from exercising political equality or acquiring land and/or wealth. The destruction of wealth in particular meant that unlike other immigrant groups, black Americans were prevented from passing it on to descendants. This left them at a more or less permanent disadvantage for the next 150 years. There is no truly effective way to deal with this other than reparations. We cannot eradicate racism, and we seem at present to be enduring a period that normalizes it. Thanks, Trump.
Highly recommended.
October 14, 2021
What I find so disturbing about Egerton's review of the period of reconstruction following the Civil War, is that we're still fighting the same bigotry and racist bullshit that was so out in the open during reconstruction. The only difference today is that it's more sophisticated and not as blatant - but the goal is the same. The white supremacists have not gone away, they walk among us, just as determined now as they were in 1865 to subjugate the black race to a permanent lower class of citizenship. This is what Trump has revealed. He didn't create it but he certainly has enhanced it. There is no shame and no conscience in today's racist. They think just because they don't use the "N word" or they're not lynching black people that somehow their political opinions have validity. What an utter crock of shit. You see what's going on with voting rights in the former confederate states and other republican controlled states. We're still fighting the Civil War and Egerton's book illustrates it brilliantly.
October 12, 2017
Outstanding account of a period of US history for which I (& I'll bet many others) had nearly complete ignorance. Brings us back to the period that could have & should have caused a much better trajectory in US political life. Freed slaves sought the vote, education, the means to establish themselves economically, &, maybe most of all, protection from revenge seeking, reactionary southern whites & instead, all they got was Jim Crow & a revised form of slavery. While there was no shortages of heroes, on the ground in the South as well as in Congress, the overall story is tragic. Much of the blame can be laid at the door of Andrew Johnson, a man who never should have risen to high office. Much of the dysfunction we see today either has a parallel or can be directly traced to the failures of Reconstruction. This is a very important book.
January 13, 2018
Essential American history. This book chronicles the most progressive era in American history, and shows the many ways that these reforms were introduced, resisted, and ultimately defeated by bigotry, terrorism, political opposition, and the gradual rewriting history in the popular imagination.
It's not an uplifting book, but I find it an indispensable sobering reminder of the need for activism. If Reconstruction could be defeated, even with everything on its side (the law, President Grant, both houses of Congress, three constitutional amendments, legions of activists, basic human decency and the moral high ground, et cetera et cetera), then really any fight for the soul of a nation can be lost, no matter how good the cause.
So stay woke✊
It's not an uplifting book, but I find it an indispensable sobering reminder of the need for activism. If Reconstruction could be defeated, even with everything on its side (the law, President Grant, both houses of Congress, three constitutional amendments, legions of activists, basic human decency and the moral high ground, et cetera et cetera), then really any fight for the soul of a nation can be lost, no matter how good the cause.
So stay woke✊
November 29, 2017
An important book. Feels more granular in its exploration of the political and paramilitary struggles of Reconstruction than Foner's still crucial book--where Foner (in my recollection--it's been some years since I read it) often focuses on Washington, Egerton spends a lot of time with black and white Republican activists at the state and local level in the South. It's pretty telling when he introduces a black soldier in an early chapter, with an aside to note that he'd eventually be lynched.
September 21, 2017
Looking at the immediate aftermath of the Civil War in the South lays to rest the idea that there was anything honorable about the South's ideology in that time. The Civil War was about slavery, period. And the South's resistance to Reconstruction was about keeping black people in a position as similar to slavery as possible, period.
April 5, 2025
It is a very interesting read that provides an look into the Reconstruction era and the accomplishments black activists and their white allies achieved in spite of the violence they faced. The author argues it wasn't that Reconstruction failed, but rather it was white violence and moderate Republican leniency that caused its abrupt end. Overall, I enjoyed the read.
July 17, 2017
Decent enough history of an important period, but from an interpretive standpoint I am not sure what this volume brings that has not already been far more incisively described in its predecessors, most notably, W.E.B. DuBois' "Black Reconstruction in America".
September 23, 2018
The weakest book I've read on Reconstruction, Egerton's focus on domestic terrorism provides an incomplete picture of the period, but one most other books neglect to highlight. I think I would've liked it more if I'd read Foner or Du Bois first.
July 23, 2019
A must-read definitive history of Reconstruction, ideal for teachers or those who want the overall picture. Certainly other texts out there that will cover what Egerton does with more detail in particular areas, but this is an excellent text to start from or to be informed.
October 3, 2019
A simply outstanding history and a good companion to Eric Foner's work on Reconstruction. In our current political climate, understanding this era is necessary to understand why the behaviors exhibited by the conservative right exist. Egerton has done a magnificent job.
May 20, 2017
I have met the author and heard him speak a couple of times. I enjoyed this book more than The Year of Meteors.
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