Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner

There is a lot that is deeply wrong with this book. The author’s socialist sort of mindset dovetails with his belief that the blacks of the South were right to expect the United States to embark on widespread theft in the aftermath of the Civil War to justify their own desires for 40 acres and a mule in the aftermath of the bloody war. Moreover, the author appears to have expected the people of the North to have the stomach to force unwanted social change without the consent of the governed (in this case, most Southern whites) on the people of the South that they were, not without reason, unwilling to engage in themselves. Reconstruction appears, in this light, less of the unfinished social revolution that the author laments the failures of as much as it was an engagement in the sort of disastrous radical utopianism that cannot but fail and create massive resentment of the kind that readers expect when reading about the French Revolution and the European tendency for disastrous from-the-top efforts at forcing social change on a recalcitrant conservative populace. As someone with deep emotional ties to recalcitrant conservative populaces, far more than someone with a fondness for impractical utopian reformism of the kind that passes for ordinary practice and beliefs by Progressives and leftists, this book left me with a very unpleasant feeling, in that the author considered tyranny justifiable when it was conducted for the “right” social reasons–namely those supported by the left, but abhorrent when conducted for genuinely popular but reactionary social causes. I think both the revolutionary violence of the radicals and the counter-revolutionary violence of reactionaries are both to be regretted, but the first was the cause of the second in the South as much as in Francoist Spain during the Spanish Civil War (and more generally in conflicts of this nature).

Yet despite my deep and abiding problems with this book, there are at least a few things that the author got right, and they are in terms of the connecting tissue that the author draws between reconstruction and other areas of history. The author connects the utopian idealism of Reconstruction with the similar (misguided) period of utopian idealism during the 1960’s Great Society as well as the 1930’s efforts at the New Deal, demonstrating a persistent strain of the dark side of Progressivism in fostering social dissatisfaction by ignoring the logistics and realities of change, including the need to achieve buy-in from those who are being asked to change in ways that they do not want. This is a problem no less relevant to our own contemporary political crisis than it is from the crisis of the past that is being written about here. Similarly, the author also points out that much of the corruption of the Gilded Age that is so deeply decried (and that amounts to a “Reconstruction” of the North as much as a Reconstruction of hte South) was in many ways a continuation of the development politics of the earlier 19th century supported by people like George Clinton in New York or the Whigs of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Clay. What seems almost charming and provincial about the American system when we look at it in the early 19th century appears positively malign and deeply corrupt when we see its operations in the post-Civil War world, but it amounts to the same sort of corrupt development politics that can easily be found to this day in postcolonial South American, African, and Asian regimes. The author does not draw a connection between the corruption and efforts at spurring development through government direction and fostering, but such connections are there to be drawn.

All in all, this is a sprawling book of more than 600 pages, with large chapters that are full of partially digested primary source material, the author’s own strident and misguided political screeds, and occasional unintentional flashes of insight in drawing connections where people tend not to see them. The book begins with a discussion of abbreviations used in footnotes, the editors’ introduction, a preface, and an introduction to the 2014 Anniversary Edition. After this comes a chapter that examines the world the Civil War made (1). This is followed by a discussion of the rehearsals for Reconstruction in wartime efforts at the task (2). The third chapter of the book examines the many and contentious efforts to define freedom by whites and blacks alike (3). After this the author examines the ambiguities (which the author wrongly sees as contradictions) of free labor (4). Then comes a chapter on the failure of Presidential Reconstruction (5) and the subsequent making of Radical Reconstruction in a Congress (6). The author discusses the blueprints for a Republican South (7) before discussing the political and economic aspects of Reconstruction in the South (8). This is followed by the challenge of enforcement (9), always persistent when one is dealing will illegitimate governments forcing unwanted social change. The author then tackles the issue of the Reconstruction of the North (10) before closing the main section of the book with a discussion of the Politics of the Panic of 1873 (11) and Redemption and what happened after that (12). The book then closes with a short epilogue, acknowledgements, a selected bibliography, and an index.