Interpreting American History: Reconstruction

Interpreting American History:

Reconstruction

INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES

Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys, series editors

THE AGE OF ANDREW JACKSON

Edited by Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys

THE NEW DEAL AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Edited by Aaron D. Purcell

RECONSTRUCTION

Edited by John David Smith

INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY

RECONSTRUCTION

Edited by

JOHN DAVID SMITH

The Kent State University Press

Kent, Ohio

© 2016 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2015036113

ISBN 978-1-60635-292-2

Manufactured in the United States of America

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Smith, John David, 1949- editor.

Title: Interpreting American history : Reconstruction / edited by John David Smith.

Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2016] | Series: Interpreting American history series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015036113 | ISBN 9781606352922 (paperback : alkaline paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) | Southern States--Politics and government--1865-1950. | Southern States-- History--1865-1951.

Classification: LCC E668 .I58 2016 | DDC 973.8--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036113

20  19  18  17  16              5  4  3  2  1

Once again for Randall M. Miller—

teacher and friend

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Reconstruction Historiography: An Overview

John David Smith

2 Presidential Reconstruction

Kevin Adams

3 Radical Reconstruction

Shepherd W. McKinley

4 Reconstruction: Emancipation and Race

R. Blakeslee Gilpin

5 Reconstruction: National Politics, 1865–1877

Edward O. Frantz

6 Reconstruction: Gender and Labor

J. Vincent Lowery

7 Reconstruction: Intellectual Life and Historical Memory

K. Stephen Prince

8 Reconstruction: Transnational History

Andrew Zimmerman

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Foreword

Interpreting American History Series

Of all the history courses taught on college campuses, historiography is one of the most challenging. The historiographic essays most often available are frequently too specialized for broad teaching and sometimes too rigorous for the average undergraduate student. Every day, frustrated scholars and students search for writings that offer both breadth and depth in their approach to the historiography of different eras and movements. As young scholars grow more intellectually mature, they search for literature, sometimes in vain, that will clarify historiographical points. As graduate students prepare for seminar presentations, comprehensive examinations, and dissertation work, they continue to search for works that will help to place their work within the broader study. Then, when they complete their studies and enter the professoriat, they find themselves less intellectually connected to the ideas that they once showed a mastery of, and they again ask about the lack of meaningful and succinct studies of historiography … and the circle continues.

Within the pages of this series, innovative scholars discuss the different interpretations of the important eras and events of history, focusing not only on the intellectual shifts that have taken place but also on the various catalysts that drove these shifts. It is the hope of the series editors that these volumes fill the aforementioned intellectual voids and speak to young scholars in a way that will supplement their other learning, that the same pages that speak to undergraduate students will also remind the established scholar of his or her historiographic roots, that a difficult subject will be made more accessible to curious minds, and that these ideas are not lost among the details offered within the classroom.

BRIAN D. McKNIGHT, University of Virginia’s College at Wise

JAMES S. HUMPHREYS, Murray State University

Acknowledgments

I thank Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys for asking me to contribute this book to their series, so too to editor Joyce Harrison at Kent State University Press. Joyce also did a superb job preparing the bibliography. The contributors to the book responded thoughtfully to my requests for revisions, and I hope that they agree that their hard work contributed to a better book. Jeffrey J. Crow kindly critiqued sections of the manuscript and Michael Levine expertly copyedited the manuscript. As always, I thank Sylvia A. Smith for her unwavering love and patience.

Introduction

Writing in 1935 in his brilliant and brooding Black Reconstruction, the African American historian, sociologist, and propagandist W. E. B. Du Bois lamented America’s post–Civil War Era as a missed opportunity to reconstruct the war-torn nation in deed as well as in word. If the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, Du Bois complained, we should be living today in a different world. Seven decades following the end of America’s bloodiest war, Du Bois judged Reconstruction not just a failure, but a splendid failure.¹

Like Du Bois, historians have largely defined Reconstruction as a failed effort in what the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm termed forced democratization.² In his recent The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, historian Douglas R. Egerton rejects the notion that Reconstruction was a failure, instead interpreting the period as a noble attempt to create a more democratic America. "Too often the central question becomes why Reconstruction failed, Egerton notes, as opposed to ended, which hints that the process itself was somehow flawed and contributed to its own passing. In his book, Egerton underscores the various ways that white violence, what he terms the wars of Reconstruction, cut short the nation’s first meaningful campaign for racial equality."³

Most historians, however, who have plowed what historian Bernard A. Weisberger termed The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography, have judged the dozen years following the Civil War a disastrous moment in U.S. history—an unequivocal failure.⁴ Those, including neoabolitonists and later racial liberals, who found President Abraham Lincoln’s promised new birth of freedom unfulfilled during the postwar years, regarded Reconstruction as both a missed opportunity and a travesty of justice for black southerners and white Unionists. In contrast, those who identified with white southerners and the Lost Cause mentalité condemned Reconstruction as a usurpation of federal power and the imposition of Negro rule. According to Egerton, by the late nineteenth century the wars of Reconstruction had entered a new campaign, as writers, activists, and intellectuals sought to impose their vision of the period on American readers.⁵

The first generation of professional, scientific scholars, immersed in Jim Crow–era legal definitions of race and Social Darwinist understandings of human progress, sympathized unabashedly with the Lost Cause perspective. These scholars attacked Reconstruction as a proverbial chamber of horrors, populated by venal carpetbaggers, treasonous scalawags, and ignorant freedmen—all manipulated by unscrupulous Republicans who wreaked vengeance against former Confederates. The early historians described Reconstruction as a period characterized by unrelieved sordidness in political and social life.⁶ In 1910 William Archer, a British observer of America’s so-called race problem, captured the tone of contemporary American historians by referring to the bad old days of Reconstruction.⁷

Led by Columbia University’s William A. Dunning and his doctoral students (the so-called Dunning School of historians), early-twentieth-century scholars denounced Reconstruction because the period exemplified what they considered the imposition by the federal government of punitive, vengeful interference in the affairs of the former Confederate states and an unwise experiment in racial democracy.⁸ As historian Eric Foner explains,

The villains of the piece were vindictive Radical Republicans, who sabotaged [President] Andrew Johnson’s lenient plan for bringing the South back into the Union, and instead fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy. An orgy of corruption and misgovernment allegedly followed, only brought to a close when the South’s white communities banded together to restore home rule (a polite euphemism for white supremacy). Resting on the assumption that black suffrage was the gravest error of the entire Civil War period, this interpretation survived for decades because it accorded with and legitimated firmly entrenched political and social realities.⁹

According to historian Glenda Gilmore, the Dunningites in their writings completely rewrote the history of the conflict. They interpreted the Civil War as a tragic misunderstanding and that Reconstruction had been a scurrilous punishment foisted upon helpless white southerners by arrogant Yankees who exploited African Americans by giving them citizenship rights.¹⁰

Despite attempts by Du Bois and other black and white scholars to rehabilitate Reconstruction’s reputation, and consequently to sustain the black counter-memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, the Dunning interpretation generally dominated representations of the period in American popular culture and historiography from the turn of the century until after World War II.¹¹ White supremacy and its concomitants, including racial segregation, disfranchisement of black southerners, and racial violence held sway in these years. Throughout the period, films, novels, popular histories, and textbooks perpetuated beyond the academy the Dunning School’s version of Reconstruction as a nightmare.

Decades earlier, the liberal white historian John Spencer Bassett (who famously incurred the ire of whites for ranking Booker T. Washington second only to Robert E. Lee among southerners) urged African Americans to revise the history of Reconstruction, what he termed this much misunderstood portion of our past. Bassett believed it will be a great thing for the Negroes themselves to show them [white scholars] that the period of reconstruction was less a failure than has been said in the histories. If they can see in what respect the best representative of the race served well and unselfishly, it will be an incentive to the best they can do in the future. It will have a good effect on the whites.¹² Later revisionist scholars, including Francis B. Simkins, Howard K. Beale, and John Hope Franklin, followed Bassett in calling for Reconstruction scholarship that transcended the traditional failure paradigm.¹³

The sustained revision of the Dunning School began during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, the so-called Second Reconstruction, when racial hierarchies and proscription in American life came under heavy fire. In influential syntheses published in 1961 and 1965, respectively, historians John Hope Franklin and Kenneth M. Stampp mapped out the contours of the next two decades of historical scholarship on Reconstruction.¹⁴ Professional historians refer to these scholars and those whom they influenced as the revisionists and to their interpretation of Reconstruction as revisionist.

No longer writing from the assumption of inherent black inferiority, from the 1960s onward the revisionists accentuated Reconstruction’s successes, the positive, realistic changes it wrought, not just its failures and missed opportunities for long-term social change. The new work recast Radical Republicans as well-meaning progressives who sought to reconstruct the United States on the best possible basis, were fair to the white South, and believed in the promises of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence.¹⁵ In doing so, the revisionists corrected what they considered several false arguments espoused by the Dunning School historians.

Those scholars, for example, had exaggerated the domination of blacks in and the amount of corruption committed by the black and tan Reconstruction governments. By 1877, few federal troops occupied the South; the region never experienced bayonet rule. Freedmen’s Bureau officers provided valuable humanitarian relief to the freedpeople as well as to poor, indigent whites. Accentuating the positive, the revisionists celebrated the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, as precursors of later legislation that also revolutionized racial change. Revisionists also argued that the Radical Republicans acted with genuine concern for the welfare of the freedpeople, not merely out of vindictiveness against the former Confederates.

Denouncing the Dunningites, the revisionists emphasized that whites, including many former southern Unionists, joined blacks in the Reconstruction state governments. The new southern state constitutions they drafted enacted overdue reforms in education, public policy, and taxation. The revisionists also examined many hitherto ignored aspects of black life during Reconstruction, including African American political and religious activity, the freedpeoples’ economic hopes and dreams, and intraracial conflict within black communities. Whether liberal-integrationist, neo-Du Boisian, or proto-black separatist in their specific interpretations, the revisionists positioned the freedpeople at the center of the Reconstruction story, interpreting them as active, autonomous agents of political and social change, not as mere victims of white racism, neoslavery, and Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirt, and White League terrorism.¹⁶

The revisionists credited the freedpeople, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, northern missionaries, and teachers with fashioning an incipient interracial democracy from the crucible of emancipation. According to historian Michael W. Fitzgerald, they interpreted Reconstruction as basically a demand for equality before the law and for black political inclusion.¹⁷ Reconstruction failed, revisionists agreed, but not because of the extremes of Radical Republicans, but rather due to the intransigence of reactionary and obstructionist white southerners. Thanks to the revisionists, historian David W. Blight writes, no field of American historiography became so active and explosive, and no traditional interpretation was so fundamentally overturned as that of Reconstruction.¹⁸

Despite the importance of the revisionists’ arguments, a number of scholars found Reconstruction more limited and decidedly less revolutionary than the revisionists had maintained. Writing during the late 1960s and the 1970s, the so-called postrevisionists, including William S. McFeely, Michael Les Benedict, William Gillette, Leon F. Litwack, and Michael Perman, insisted the impact of the Civil War upon American life was less pervasive than had once been believed.¹⁹ Commenting on the revisionists, Perman stated that the postrevisionists’ work demonstrated that few possibilities existed for a Reconstruction policy capable of changing the South’s political attitudes and structures. He regretted that their scholarship confirms the suspicion that the problem was, in all likelihood, intractable. The Reconstruction episode was, therefore, not a failure. Rather it was a tragedy. Perman also explained that perhaps the problems wrought by Reconstruction were so farreaching and so complex that they defied solution.²⁰

Whereas the revisionists, living in the throes of the civil rights movement tended to understand ex-slaves and Republicans as actors in an early chapter from a sweeping and ongoing drama about the making of a more democratic America, the postrevisionists, dwelling during the Viet Nam War era and sharing the weariness and mistrust of the federal government typically questioned the intent and radicalism of political transformation during Reconstruction.²¹ Stressing continuity between the Old and New Souths, postrevisionists judged congressional Republicans too cautious, more conservative than radical, more disappointing than inspiring. They pointed, for example, to the absence of serious land reform of the plantation South. As Fitzgerald has explained, the postrevisionists emphasized the half-hearted character of Reconstruction, approaching the topic with a jaundiced view of American institutions. In a sense, he explains, this interpretation parallels the revisionists, in that it stressed the essential moderation of the Reconstruction project. The difference is the moral evaluation, and the sense that stronger remedies [to achieve legal equality] were essential.²²

Foner’s landmark Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) synthesized extant revisionist scholarship while integrating rich social history and postrevisionist insights into his narrative. At its core, Foner interpreted Reconstruction as a revolutionary challenge to white supremacy.²³ After a quarter century, his book remains the standard treatment of the subject. Reconstruction is one of the most misunderstood periods of American history, he recalled in 2013, and I hoped my work would put the final nail in the Dunning School.²⁴

Foner successfully hammered home the point that Reconstruction accomplished much good in the postwar South, redefining Americans’ understanding of freedom and setting in motion many positive changes in American life, including black voting and the drafting of new southern state constitutions. Empowered by the vote, blacks organized politically, built churches and fraternal organizations, and established public schools, newspapers, and other institutions. In initiating individual and group autonomy, blacks did much to establish Reconstruction’s political and economic agenda, Foner said. Although thwarted in their bid for land (he positioned contests over the plantation system as the key political question of the period), blacks seized the opportunity created by emancipation to establish as much independence as possible in their working lives, consolidate their families and communities, and stake a claim to equal citizenship. He wrote, Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.²⁵

But Foner also made clear that Reconstruction had severe limitations. Because most former slaves failed to obtain their own land to farm, the freedmen remained largely a peasant class—wage laborers, sharecroppers, or farm tenants with limited freedom. Others, trapped by debt peonage or the convict lease system, lived under slave-like conditions. According to Foner, then, Reconstruction, signified not a tragic era as the Dunningites had maintained; rather, it achieved short-terms gains, especially in terms of degrees of racial equality. Looking ahead to the mid-twentieth century, Foner dubbed Reconstruction an unfinished revolution. Expanding upon Foner’s interpretation, historian Mark Wahlgren Summers notes that the end of Reconstruction was not so much the end of a long fight as the end of one round in a fight that for many of the participants would last lifelong.²⁶

Assessing the historical literature on Reconstruction in 2006, Fitzgerald remarked that recent scholarship had abandoned the postrevisionsists’ argument that more radical measures [by Republicans] would have worked better in achieving more revolutionary outcomes, especially for the freedpeople. More common now, he added, is the grim suspicion that nothing would have yielded a decent outcome.²⁷ Though cognizant of Reconstruction’s failures, the historian David Brion Davis nevertheless recently framed its successes comparatively. In his opinion, few emancipations in history have been followed by anything equivalent to America’s first civil rights legislation and the constitutional amendments that for a limited time in the Reconstruction Era led to a significant number of African Americans to vote, to serve in state legislatures, and even to serve in the U.S. Senate … (two) and House of Representatives (twenty).²⁸

Interpreting American History: Reconstruction provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students with a primer on the burgeoning historical literature on the post–Civil War years that, according to Summers, has become something of a growth industry among historians.²⁹ In their historiographic essays, the contributors have focused principally on recent scholarship, much of which has followed Foner’s lead in critiquing the postrevisionists and examining Reconstruction’s achievements and limitations. But contemporary writings also have filled in the interstices in Foner’s magnum opus, paying more attention to gender and relationships between class, labor, power, and work both North and South. Contemporary historians have surpassed Foner in determining what Reconstruction meant in practice.³⁰

Today’s best work on Reconstruction focuses on integrating Reconstruction in the South into larger national and international contexts. It tends to examine social and economic questions more so than political ones. For example, scholars have studied Reconstruction in the northern and western states and how northern Republicans abandoned black southerners at the onset of southern redemption. Economic and social changes in northern society and politics during Reconstruction, especially the triumph of postwar industrial capitalism, also continue to attract attention from historians. Many contemporary scholars are investigating gender broadly defined, including understandings of women, men, families, and households. Class, especially divisions in the postemancipation South and the plight of northern workers, preoccupies students, as do questions pertaining to historical memory, education, religion, and Reconstruction in a global and comparative context. These topics and numerous others preoccupy historians as Americans commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

John David Smith opens the book with an overview of Reconstruction historiography, including the pre-Dunning historical literature. Essays by Kevin Adams and Shepherd W. McKinley treat the scholarship on the two principal chronological periods of the era, Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, respectively. R. Blakeslee Gilpin examines writings on emancipation and race and Edward O. Franz considers national politics. More recent scholarship has focused on gender and labor and intellectual life and historical memory, topics assessed in articles by J. Vincent Lowery and K. Stephen Prince, respectively. The collection concludes with an essay on the international, transnational, and comparative history of Reconstruction by Andrew Zimmerman.

Readers of Interpreting American History: Reconstruction will find confirmed Foner’s 2000 observation on the future of Reconstruction scholarship. So long, he explained, as the issues central to Reconstruction remain unresolved—the balance of power in the federal system, the place of black Americans in national life, and the relationship between economic and political democracy—the era seems certain to attract the attention of new generations of historians.³¹ Or, as historian Adam Rothman explained more recently, as long as we continue to ask new questions and question old answers, the historiography of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction will remain fascinating and controversial because it unearths the struggles at the root of American national identity.³²

NOTES

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Towards a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1973), 708.

2. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Scribner, 1975), 143.

3. Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 15, 16 (emphases in original).

4. Bernard A. Weisberger, The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography, Journal of Southern History 25 (Nov. 1959): 427–47.

5. Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 319–20.

6. Eric Foner, Foreword, in Reconstruction in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography, comp. David Lincove (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), xiii.

7. William Archer, Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), 240.

8. On the Dunning School, see John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2013). Historian Michael Perman terms the Dunningites the ‘New South school’ because of their regional mindset. See Perman, The Politics of Reconstruction, in A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Lacy K. Ford (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 324.

9. Foner, Foreword, xiii–xiv.

10. Glenda Gilmore, Which Southerners? Which Southern Historians? A Century of Southern History at Yale, Yale Review 99 (Jan. 2011): 60.

11. Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2007), 257.

12. John Spencer Bassett to Carter G. Woodson, October 20, 1917, Carter Godwin Woodson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

13. See Francis B. Simkins, New Viewpoints of Southern Reconstruction, Journal of Southern History 5 (Feb. 1939): 49–61; Howard K. Beale, On Rewriting Reconstruction History, American Historical Review 45 (July 1940): 807–27; and John Hope Franklin, Whither Reconstruction Historiography? Journal of Negro Education 17 (Autumn 1948): 446–61.

14. See John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), and Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York: Vintage Books, 1965).

15. Kate Masur, review of Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown, in H-CivWar (Oct. 2007), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13650 (accessed July 3, 2013).

16. John C. Rodrigue, Black Agency after Slavery, in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 43n6.

17. Michael W. Fitzgerald, Reconstruction Politics and the Politics of Reconstruction, in ibid., 92.

18. David W. Blight, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory, in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 71n48.

19. Eric Foner, Reconstruction Revisited, Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 84.

20. Perman, Politics of Reconstruction, 339; Michael Perman, Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2003), 3.

21. John M. Giggie, Rethinking Reconstruction, Reviews in American History 35 (Dec. 2007): 554.

22. Michael Fitzgerald, Political Reconstruction, 1865–1877, in A Companion to the American South, ed. John B. Boles (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 289; Fitzgerald, Reconstruction Politics and the Politics of Reconstruction, 93. Fitzgerald also identifies a post-postrevisionist interpretation of Reconstruction in historian Mark W. Summers’s Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity (1984). Summers considers Republican malfeasance so heinous during Reconstruction that the party deserved to lose power. See Fitzgerald, Political Reconstruction, 1865–1877, 292.

23. Michael W. Fitzgerald, review of The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox, by Stephen Budiansky, in H-Law (June 2008), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14581 (accessed July 1, 2008).

24. Eric Foner, interview with Catherine Clinton, Civil War Times 52 (June 2013): 25.

25. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), xxv.

26. Marl Wahlgren Summers, What Fresh Hell Is This? Revisiting Reconstruction, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 110 (Summer/Autumn 2012): 568n2.

27. Fitzgerald, Reconstruction Politics, 108.

28. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 335, 388n26, 332.

29. Summers, What Fresh Hell Is This? 560.

30. Fitzgerald, Reconstruction Politics, 114.

31. Foner, Foreword, xiv.

32. Adam Rothman, Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 2012), 18.

CHAPTER ONE

Reconstruction Historiography

An Overview

JOHN DAVID SMITH

In 1901 Woodrow Wilson, then teaching political science at Princeton University, commented that after thirty years, the time was ripe to study the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, not as partisans, but as historians. Although Reconstruction still remained an incendiary subject for many Americans, like a banked fire, still hot and fiery within, historians nonetheless were up to the task. Reconstruction was a period too little studied as yet, Wilson noted, but one that could be judged fairly enough, with but a little tolerance, breadth, and moderation added to the just modicum of knowledge. The topic was essential, he insisted, for understanding constitutional change between 1860 and 1876 but, more importantly, for grasping the implications for American life in the twentieth century. The national government which came out of Reconstruction was not the national government which went into it.¹

The following year David Yancey Thomas, a Kentuckian then working on his doctorate at Columbia University, surveyed what he termed The South and Her History.