Authors: Eric Foner, Richard B. Morris (Introduction), Henry Steele Commager
ISBN-13: 9780060937164, ISBN-10: 0060937165
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: February 2002
Edition: ILLUSTRATED
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous works on American history, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; and The Story of American Freedom. He has served as president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and has been named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities.
This "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans black and white responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.
Abbreviations Used in Footnotes | xiii | |
Editors' Introduction | xv | |
Preface | xvii | |
1. | The World the War Made | 1 |
The Coming of Emancipation | 1 | |
The Inner Civil War | 11 | |
The North's Transformation | 18 | |
2. | Rehearsals for Reconstruction | 35 |
Dilemmas of Wartime Reconstruction | 35 | |
Land and Labor During the Civil War | 50 | |
The Politics of Emancipation and the End of the War | 60 | |
3. | The Meaning of Freedom | 77 |
From Slavery to Freedom | 78 | |
Building the Black Community | 88 | |
The Economics of Freedom | 102 | |
Origins of Black Politics | 110 | |
Violence and Everyday Life | 119 | |
4. | Ambiguities of Free Labor | 124 |
Masters Without Slaves | 128 | |
The "Misrepresented Bureau" | 142 | |
The Freedmen's Bureau, Land, and Labor | 153 | |
Beginnings of Economic Reconstruction | 170 | |
5. | The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction | 176 |
Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction | 176 | |
Launching the South's New Governments | 185 | |
The Anatomy of Presidential Reconstruction | 198 | |
The North's Response | 216 | |
6. | The Making of Radical Reconstruction | 228 |
The Radical Republicans | 228 | |
Origins of Civil Rights | 239 | |
The Fourteenth Amendment | 251 | |
The Campaign of 1866 | 261 | |
The Coming of Black Suffrage | 271 | |
7. | Blueprints for a Republican South | 281 |
The Political Mobilization of the Black Community | 281 | |
The Republican Coalition | 291 | |
The North and Radical Reconstruction | 307 | |
The Constitutional Conventions | 316 | |
Impeachment and the Election of Grant | 333 | |
8. | Reconstruction: Political and Economic | 346 |
Party and Government in the Reconstruction South | 346 | |
Southern Republicans in Power | 364 | |
The Gospel of Prosperity | 379 | |
Patterns of Economic Change | 392 | |
9. | The Challenge of Enforcement | 412 |
The New Departure and the First Redemption | 412 | |
The Ku Klux Klan | 425 | |
"Power from Without" | 444 | |
10. | The Reconstruction of the North | 460 |
The North and the Age of Capital | 461 | |
The Transformation of Politics | 469 | |
The Rise of Liberalism | 488 | |
The Election of 1872 | 499 | |
11. | The Politics of Depression | 512 |
The Depression and Its Consequences | 512 | |
Retreat from Reconstruction | 524 | |
The Waning of Southern Republicanism | 535 | |
The Crisis of 1875 | 553 | |
12. | Redemption and After | 564 |
The Centennial Election | 564 | |
The Electoral Crisis and the End of Reconstruction | 575 | |
The Redeemers' New South | 587 | |
Epilogue: "The River Has Its Bend" | 602 | |
Acknowledgments | 613 | |
Selected Bibliography | 615 | |
Index | 643 |