The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 - Softcover

Richardson, Heather Cox

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674013662 ISBN 13: 9780674013667

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901

About this title

Review

The Death of Reconstruction offers a provocative explanation of why Northerners after the Civil War gradually and often reluctantly abandoned their efforts on behalf of the Southern freedmen. Not ignoring virulent racism directed at African Americans, Richardson shows that it was less race than class that brought about the end of Reconstruction. An important, impressively documented book, The Death of Reconstruction is a work comparable to David Montgomery's Beyond Equality as a major reinterpretation of the post-Civil War period.--David Herbert Donald, author of Lincoln

Heather Richardson's The Death of Reconstruction is a work of genuine originality and imagination. Steeped in remarkable research, this is a persuasive account of how economic world views drove Northerners' retreat from Reconstruction; it makes us view Reconstruction from a different angle and helps explain, as well as any book has, the deep significance of individualism in American life in the late nineteenth century.--David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

[Richardson] makes extensive use of contemporary newspaper articles, periodicals, speeches, and personal accounts to capture this tumultuous era in American history. Highly recommended for academic libraries.-- (08/01/2001)

In The Death of Reconstruction the author's main concern is with attitudes in the North, not in the states of the former Confederacy. She notes that most Northerners had little direct contact with blacks, because only 10 percent of them lived in the North. In the years immediately after the war, the Republican press in the North took a benign view of blacks as a group, portraying them as poor but eager to work their way to prosperity as free labor...The most interesting aspect of this book is the reminder it affords that the debate over "affirmative action" is not a modern phenomenon but can be traced back to the 19th century...[Richardson's] focus on class conflict is a useful addition to other writings on the Gilded Age.-- (09/30/2001)

At last readers have an explanation of why the Republican Party, founded in antislavery, dedicated to emancipation, and the political inspiration for the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, abandoned those causes in favor of an ideology which acquiesced in the disenfranchisement of blacks and in the triumph of Jim Crow. Arguing that Republicans came to see the majority of African Americans as potential labor radicals in the tradition of the Paris Commune and the labor agitation of the US strikes of the late 19th century, [Richardson]...documents that this led to political abandonment...This is an important contribution for all historians who want a better understanding of the South or the African American experience, and anyone who wants good political history.-- (04/01/2002)

Synopsis

Heather Cox Richardson examines such issues as black suffrage, disenfranchisement, taxation, westward migration, lynching, and civil rights to detect the trajectory of Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction. She reveals a growing backlash from Northerners against those who believed that inequalities should be addressed through working-class action, and the emergence of an American middle class that championed individual productivity and saw African-Americans as a threat to their prosperity.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0674013662
• ISBN 13: 9780674013667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 332