Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #731194 in Books
• Published on: 1989-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 690 pages

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

About the Author

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

Excerpted from Reconstruction : America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New American Nation Series) by Eric Foner. Copyright © 1989. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved

Chapter One

The World the War Made

The Coming of Emancipation

0n January 1, 1863, after a winter storm swept up the east coast of the United States, the sun rose in a cloudless sky over Washington, D.C. At the White House, Abraham Lincoln spent most of the day welcoming guests to the traditional New Year's reception. Finally, in the late afternoon, as he had pledged to do 100 days before, the President retired to his office to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Excluded from its purview were the 450,000 slaves in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri (border slave states that remained within the Union), 275,000 in Union-occupied Tennessee, and tens of thousands more in portions of Louisiana and Virginia under the control of federal armies. But, the Proclamation decreed, the remainder of the nation's slave population, well over 3 million men, women, and children, "are and henceforth shall be free."1

Throughout the North and the Union-occupied South, January I was a day of celebration. An immense gathering, including black and white abolitionist leaders, stood vigil at Boston's Tremont Temple, awaiting word that the Proclamation had been signed. It was nearly midnight when the news arrived; wild cheering followed, and a black preacher led the throng in singing "Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea, Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free." At a camp for fugitive slaves in the nation's capital, a black man "testified" about the sale, years before, of his daughter, exclaiming, "Now, no more dat! . . . Dey can't sell my wife and child any more, bless de Lord!" Farther south, at Beaufort, an enclave of federal control off the South Carolina coast, there were prayers and speeches and the freedmen sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee." To Charlotte Forten, a young black woman who had journeyed from her native Philadelphia to teach the former slaves, "it all seemed . . . like a brilliant dream." Even in areas exempted from the Proclamation, blacks celebrated, realizing that if slavery perished in Mississippi and South Carolina, it could hardly survive in Kentucky, Tennessee, and a few parishes of Louisiana.2

Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship. From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development. Even as slavery mocked the ideals of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty and equality, slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth, expanding westward with the young republic, producing the cotton that fueled the early industrial revolution. In the South, slavery spawned a distinctive regional ruling class (an "aristocracy without nobility" one Southern-born writer called it) and powerfully shaped the economy, race relations, politics, religion, and the law. Its influence was pervasive: "Nothing escaped, nothing and no one."3 In the North, where slavery had been abolished during and after the American Revolution, emerged abolition, the greatest protest movement of the age. The slavery question divided the nation's churches, sundered political ties between the sections, and finally shattered the bonds of Union. On the principle of opposing the further expansion of slavery, a new political party rose to power in the 1850s, placing in the White House a son of the slave state Kentucky, who had grown to manhood on the free Illinois prairies and believed the United States could not endure forever half slave and half free. In the crisis that followed Lincoln's election, eleven slave states seceded from the Union, precipitating in 1861 the bloodiest war the Western Hemisphere has ever known.

To those who had led the movement for abolition, and to slaves throughout the South, the Emancipation Proclamation not only culminated decades of struggle but evoked Christian visions of resurrection and redemption, of an era of unbounded progress for a nation purged at last of the sin of slavery. Even the staid editors of the New York Times believed it marked a watershed in American life, "an era in the history . . .of this country and the world." For emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nation's largest concentration of private property ("the most stupendous act of sequestration in the history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence," as Charles and Mary Beard described it).4 The demise of slavery inevitably threw open the most basic questions of the polity, economy, and society. Begun to preserve the Union, the Civil War now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic.

In one sense, however, the Proclamation only confirmed what was already happening on farms and plantations throughout the South. War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution, and well before 1863 the disintegration of slavery had begun. Whatever politicians and military commanders might decree, slaves saw the war as heralding the longawaited end of bondage. Three years into the conflict, Gen. William T. Sherman encountered a black Georgian who summed up the slaves' understanding of the war from its outset: "He said . . . he had been looking for the 'angel of the Lord' ever since he was knee-high, and, though we professed to be fighting for the Union, he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom. "5 Based on this conviction, the slaves took actions that propelled a reluctant white America down the road to abolition.

As the Union Army occupied territory on the periphery of the Confederacy, first in Virginia, then in Tennessee, Louisiana, and elsewhere, slaves by the thousands headed for the Union lines. Union enclaves like Fortress Monroe, Beaufort, and New Orleans became havens for runaway slaves and bases for expeditions into the interior that further disrupted the plantation regime.

Customer Reviews

Worth Every Page
This exhaustive, comprehensive and completely detailed masterpiece is a complete post-revisionist account of Reconstruction, providing analysis of every conceivable angle. It includes a convincing refutation of the Dunning school, why a revisionist school emerged, the nuts and bolts of Presidential Reconstruction, why "Radical Reconstruction" was never truly radical. The book describes how the undertaking was too vast for a small 19th century central government, why the state governments were unwilling and unable to deliver very much, and how ultimately, the effort failed.

There is an abridged version of this work for the general reader. However, I suggest a reading of the longer book. Even at 600 pages, it is worth it. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is the definitive account of reconstruction.

Painful, Necessary
This textbook was one of the first to point out the less-than-rosy treatment of blacks in the Reconstruction era, and such a text was long overdue. However, the narrative is painfully long and regularly repeats material covered in a previous chapter. You inevitably come to feel that Foner felt - in his eagerness to show the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - that it was better to overwhelm the reader with repetition than to risk a single point being lost. One begins to crave a good editor for Mr. Foner, which is unfortunate because this book - for all its faults) really does an admirable job of pointing out the plight of the ex-slave in the South. Bottom line: Reconstruction should be read, but the reading is very painful.

Long, dry but very complete account
If you are looking for a cursory overview of the Reconstruction years following the American Civil War, this is NOT the book for you. However, if you are not afraid to take on a lot of historical facts, this is a good book that covers the political waxing and waning era. I've often wondered how we got from such a "righteous cause" to the turn of the century civil rights mess we had. This book helped me better understand the realities of the times. Not easy to read but worth the effot.