Reconstruction: A Concise History

by Allen C. Guelzo

Overview

The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the "black codes," would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction.

While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. It also struggled to manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern free-labor economy. However, these failures cannot obscure a number of accomplishments with long-term consequences for American life, among them the Civil Rights Act, the election of the first African American representatives to Congress, and the avoidance of renewed civil war. Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the civil rights movement.

In this concise history, award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original account of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on the American social fabric.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190865696
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Edition description:	Concise
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	245,069
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. Three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, he is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which won the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Vengeance, April-December 1865
Chapter Two: Alienation, December 1865-1867
Chapter Three: Arrogance, March 1867-May 1868
Chapter Four: Resistance, May 1868-March 1869
Chapter Five: Distraction, March 1869-May 1872
Chapter Six: Law, 1866-1876
Chapter Seven: Dissension, September 1872-April 1877
Epilogue
Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

05/14/2018
According to Civil War historian Guelzo’s concise and lucidly written study, the 12-year period popularly known as Reconstruction is the “ugly duckling of American history,” representing to many a tragically missed opportunity to establish racial equality. The project was innately challenging, he argues, raising difficult questions about the meaning of the Confederate states’ secession from the Union and the position of formerly enslaved people in the postbellum United States. Guelzo emphasizes that “not everything that should have been gained was gained in Reconstruction, but not everything was lost, either.” Following a chronological approach, he briefly sketches out the methods, including overt political resistance and the substitution of “freedman” for “slave” in state legal codes, by which white Southerners tried to subvert the federal government’s attempts to restructure Southern society to empower its black and poor white inhabitants. He concurs with Ulysses S. Grant that Reconstruction’s goals could only have been accomplished through a significantly longer military occupation of the South, but most Northerners felt this “was not in accordance with our institutions.” This reluctance resulted in strict limitations on the opportunities available to African-Americans. Guelzo’s short book is highly informative for readers seeking a better understanding of a short but tumultuous era that continues to influence race relations in the United States. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2018-03-19
Eminent Civil War historian Guelzo examines the many reasons the Reconstruction era, "the ugly duckling of American history," ended in failure.Reconstruction, the brainchild of Abraham Lincoln and carried out—or not—by successors Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, was meant to rebuild the rebellious Southern states and reincorporate them into the Union while altering their political structure to allow for the suffrage and citizens' rights of former slaves. From 1865 to 1877, that federal project ground down before achieving its ambitions, though parts were put in place. As Guelzo (Director, Civil War Era Studies/Gettysburg Coll.; Redeeming the Great Emancipator, 2016, etc.) notes, there's something in Reconstruction for nearly everyone to hate but also something powerful by way of an object lesson: Much of the South's "Lost Cause" myth was born in the time, as a pointed morality tale in resisting a tyranny in which whites and not blacks were disenfranchised and the extraordinary levels of graft and corruption allowed do-gooders on all sides to point to the doomed effort with I-told-you-so smugness. For all that, Reconstruction had to grapple with large issues: Were the states formerly in rebellion still states? Who was responsible for paying Confederate debts? In the end, almost everyone concerned with the enterprise failed to press Reconstruction to its presumed end. Consequently, former slaveholders were restored to positions of power and influence that in turn subjected former slaves to peonage, which, as one former slave put it, "is not the condition of really freemen." As seems so often the case in American history, African-Americans emerge the losers in Guelzo's narrative. As he writes, it was not just property and economic freedom that fled them, but "what Southern blacks lost in wholesale amounts was political agency." Thus the rise of Jim Crow laws and the spectacle, 150 years after the end of the war, of continued disenfranchisement and de facto segregation.Essential reading for the historically minded in a time of ongoing struggle for civil rights.

Kirkus Reviews