Reconstruction

America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

By: Eric Foner

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 30 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's Summary

The period following the Civil War was one of the most controversial eras in American history. This comprehensive account of the period captures the drama of those turbulent years that played such an important role in shaping modern America. 

Eric Foner brilliantly chronicles how Americans, Black and White, responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. He provides fresh insights on a host of other issues, including the ways in which the emancipated slave's quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; Abraham Lincoln's attitude toward Reconstruction; the role of "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags"; and the role of violence in the period. 

This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period, an era whose legacy reverberates in the United States to this day. 

©1988 Eric Foner (P)1990 Blackstone Audio

Outdated edition!!

Even though this audio version was released in 2016, it is a recording of the first edition of this book published in 1988 rather than the much revised and updated version published in 2014.

Why in the world would they do that?

Poor quality audio, but the book was great

Over the past year I have realized how large my historical blind spots have been from the end of the Civil War until roughly the Civil Rights era. That 100 year era was almost completely absent from my education and I just didn’t realize how much that absence mattered until I kept running up against that missing historical era when reading about modern racial issues.

When I asked around multiple people suggested that I start with Eric Foner. He has several books that are roughly around this era including a shorter edition of this book that is on sale right now. There are two edition of this book and I picked the older edition because it was the one that was available on Audible as an audiobook. (The audiobook really is poorly done, lots of editing problems, lots of mispronounced words, lots of sound issues.)

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution was originally published in 1988, nearly 30 years ago with the conscious purpose of countering the myths of reconstruction that had grown up as part of the Lost Cause movement and the later Jim Crow and segregation eras. Much of the early history of Reconstruction was written in the 1920-50s from the perspective of Southern historians. Foner was the first major historian of the late 20th century to counter that myth (and I am using myth in the academic method as a founding story, not just as a false narrative.) Foner does note that WEB DuBois book Black Reconstruction in America, had many similar themes, but was largely ignored by academic historians who had adopted the common narrative for the failure of Reconstruction.

The short version of the book is that the failure of Reconstruction was a mix of economic problems, government corruption (this was present in both parties, but the Republicans as the majority party, and the party of former slave office holders in the South was blamed more strongly) and fatigue of the problems of Reconstruction, not freed Black office holders, carpet baggers and scalawags.

There were several major periods of Reconstruction. Foner starts with 1963, when the Union Army occupied large areas of the south and under the Emancipation Proclamation, operated an Army run Reconstruction until the end of the war. During this period and the next period, Foner suggests that there was far more self directed movement among newly freed slaves to lift themselves up and build institutions and community than is generally assumed.

The second major period was Presidential Reconstruction from the end of the war until Congress was convened in December 1865, but essentially there was little push back against President Johnson’s actions until roughly the first quarter of 1866. Congressional Reconstruction then runs from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 until its failure in 1877.

There is far too much history here to summarize. So I want to just comment on a couple of the themes of the book. First, there was really not a wide-spread cultural shift at the end of the war, either among White Northerners or plantation Southerners, both were still predominately (not exclusively, but predominately) operating under a concept of White Supremacy. It ranged from a soft paternalism that was attempting to educate and train former slaves to a hard version that viewed former slaves as little more than animals. That cultural attitude was not widely addressed, and in addition to the above reasons for the end of Reconstruction, make it easy to see how Reconstruction failed.

The myth of reconstruction is that slaves right after slavery were lost and in need of help. There was poverty and economic devastation in the wake of the Civil War, but many slaves actually did fairly well, they established churches and schools and subsistence farming very quickly. But soon the African-American schools were absorbed into government school systems or Northern charity schools and the African-American teachers were pushed out. That happened less with Black churches, but Black controlled institutions of all sorts that grew up in the years soon after the end of the Civil War were either overtly terrorized by armed violence or were quietly absorbed into White institutions and Black leadership was pushed out.

Corruption was a huge governmental problem in the post Civil War. Part of what lead me to pick up this book was reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt largely made his name and reputation fighting government corruption. That same corruption that he fought was part of the reality of Reconstruction. Some Reconstruction funds were misused. But a bigger problem with government investment in railroads and other infrastructure projects. Much of the investments were designed more to make legislators and businesses rich than to improve the overall economy or infrastructure of local states.

This was made worse by historic inequities in southern tax systems. Large plantations often paid little or no taxes while independent small businesses or low-income individuals paid a significant percentage of their income in taxes. In the wake of the devastation after the Civil War, there was no cash to pay taxes. And the previous bias against taxes (with government backing of railroad bonds which later failed) left many states near bankruptcy. The lack of funds then cut into legitimate projects like local schools.

It is amazing to read how much many White Planters and businesses expected to be able to treat former slaves as if nothing had changed. One of the first movements of freed slaves was to form legal families. The breakup of informal families prior to the Civil War (mostly through slave sales, but also through other owner restrictions) was a great indignity that former slaves wanted to prevent. Many women dropped out of the labor force and many children were enrolled in schools. Under slavery group arrangements for food and clothing and housing was more economically efficient but was a vestige of slavery. Families wanted to be able to cook on their own and have their own homes and garden plots. Employers wanted women and children to work the fields. Employment contracts attempted to control marriage, what employees did off their work time, to require all adults (and sometimes children) in the homes of employees to work during harvest, etc. In short, return to a virtual slavery.

Former slaves wanted to focus on subsistence farms, buy land if possible and in many cases stay away from labor situations that had overseers (and the desire to keep women out of field was in part to protect them from the sexual abuse and rape that was common by White overseers). It is hard for me to think that the Northern business assumption was that free labor would be more efficient that slave labor. Slave labor was controlled, beaten and literally owned. Freed labor was trying to establish institutions and lives outside of cotton. The myth of the ‘lazy negro’ was really a result of former slaves not desiring to spend 18-20 hours a day working in the field under whips and threats of death. But White Supremacy as a cultural idea meant that both Southern Whites and Northern business people presumed that former slaves should not be allowed to enter into their own labor contracts and even when allowed to enter freely into labor contracts, the lower yields in crops was used as an example not of the problems of the cotton system or slavery, but of lazy workers that needed government intervention.

Some of the labor laws (the Black Codes) that were passed after reconstruction were frankly incredible. These included:

-Opposition to labor unions.
-Government or private ability to remove children and bind children or teens to unpaid labor for training.
-Disrespect of authority became a crime that could require a year of forced labor apprenticeships (Some required apprenticeships were of non-minors).
-Labor contract sometimes included rights of boss to require approval of purchases.
-Some labor contracts required all adults in household to work when called (compelling women to work against their will and weakening marriage boundaries).
-Required job contract for a full year, and making civil contract of labor a criminal liability. Not having a labor contract was a crime, violating a labor contract was a crime, competing for a contract or negotiating a contract was a crime.
-Petty theft was made a significant crime. Part of the issue here is that some theft was made up. Some was ‘theft’ where the freeman was stealing the equivalent of wages that were withheld for trumped up reasons. But again, the focus was on keeping blacks as laborers and not owners
-Licensing requirements that only allowed Blacks to work as farm labor. Any skilled black workers were blocked out of the economy through licensing requirements that were unevenly applied only against non-Whites. This particularly hurt communities Blacks that were free before the war and those that were more likely to be educated (i.e. those that were more likely to have ability to protest, write, and become community leaders.)
-Pastors were required to be licensed and approved, this was sometimes a continuation of pre-war policy, but for the same basic reasons.
-Hunting was restricted (as was collecting of berries and other wild foods) in order to prevent substance work outside of regular labor contracts. In Georgia, hunting was banned on Sundays, which was the only day off for most field laborers. Gun ownership was banned and the use of dogs for hunting was restricted.

Already in 1867, there was a movement away from public education so that Black children would not be educated, or at least not at public expense. In another case, Blacks were taxed separately for Black schools while White schools were paid for out of general tax funds, which included taxes by paid by Blacks. In the only state with a wide spread public education system it was disbanded and private systems that was still tax supported but in a way that kept Black children out also eliminated the education of poor White students.

One interesting issue is that there was discussion about whether newly freed slaves would be better served by breaking apart large plantations and giving each former slave land or whether they would be better off in the long term with the right to vote, many of the radical Republicans believed that suffrage (the right to vote) was more important. It was thought that both was impossible, because breaking up land required federal government confiscation of land, which would make it politically impossible to bring the former Confederate states back into the government. Universal (male) suffrage was acceptable to the South, only if there was weak Federal government control of the process of return of the states.

What is ironic is that in the method, former slave both did not get land and only a few years later, the right to vote was significantly restricted, in part because of lack of economic opportunities available. And the end of political Reconstruction was largely based on Northern resistance to Federal enforcement of voting rights. Black voters were intimidated, threatened and killed and in some cases winning officials were simply ignored and losing officials forced their way into office through violence. After several years of voting intimidation and violence of the KKK and other groups, the Reconstruction era was over and the rise of Jim Crow and legal segregation arose. It took approximately 80 years after the fall of Reconstruction until the rise of the modern Civil Rights movement to reassert Black voting rights, which eventually required federal oversight, something that was not politically possible in 1877.

As I said above, the audio quality of the audiobook was poor. And because this book focused on many states that were often moving in similar, but not exactly the same direction, it felt a bit repetitive at times. I wish I would have read the second edition (I really wish that the second edition had a good audiobook) to see if some of the writing had been cleaned up.

But there was more than enough here to help me see holes in my understanding and to feed into areas where I need to read more.

Sound quality is terrible

Content sounded great. Sound quality of the narrator was absolutely terrible. Could not finish despite several tries.

Informative and very detailed

I certainly learned a lot from the narrative, and can recommend it as a source of great detail about the politics of the era and the effects of changing policies on freedmen, southern whites, and northern politicians. Many of the details are important to an understanding of racial tensions that continue into our own time.

The narrator has a pleasant voice and kept an appropriate tempo and range of expression. I found distracting his unorthodox pronunciation of hegemony, a word that comes up frequently in the text. There were other less frequent words that he also pronounced strangely.

This book probably had just a bit too much detail for me; the book seemed to drag on a bit. It is no doubt ideal for a historian or one researching the roots of American race relations.

Reader mispronounces lots of words!!

Does nobody check? Why didn't he look the words up if he didn't know them? I'm not sure I can stand to here him talk about "heggemony" another time!

Bring some water, because this is dry.

The roughly two decades following the Civil War is one of the most consequential but unexamined periods of American history. I'm certain there's a gripping narrative history of reconstruction to be told, but sadly Foner's book isn't it. Thorough, scholarly, almost magisterial, it's also curiously lifeless, and the narrator doesn't do the dry recounting of events any favors with his slow and ponderous delivery. (Pro-tip: speed it up to at least 1.25x, so he sounds like a normal person.).

It's interesting to contrast "Reconstruction" with "Savage Continent," which detailed the immediate post-second world war Europe. The former is thorough but colorless, while the latter book manages to capture the sweeping big picture within vivid firsthand anecdotes. Even the moments that should shock and appall the reader—the rise of the Klan, violent reprisals against freedmen, etc.—are rendered banal an lifeless by Foner.

I'm still glad I read it, but I wouldn't recommend "Reconstruction". Unfortunately, I don't know what book I would recommend in its place.

Eye-opening

Foner’s account of Reconstruction is a detailed analysis of events beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and ending with the election of James Garfield in 1876. It’s full of surprises, especially for someone like me who grew up in the South with tales of vicious carpetbaggers and scalawags and black-majority legislatures that resembled minstrel shows. Simply put, we were lied to.

As Foner makes clear, slaves in the South did what they could to assume control of their own lives even before the Union armies gave them a place of refuge. The Reconstruction legislatures that rewrote state constitutions were, even when dominated by newly enfranchised blacks, conventional bodies that engaged in dignified, serious debate. (Anyone who doubts this should spend some time reading transcripts of the 1868 South Carolina constitutional debates.) Their goals included black suffrage, hospitals for all, universal access to public facilities and the courts, and universal public education. For that, the leaders were defamed, terrorized, and sometimes murdered.

The scale of white Southern violence against freed slaves was appalling. In one incident, white supremacists broke through windows of a building where black leaders were meeting and opened fire, killing dozens. In another, a small town was decimated and its leaders hung from nearby trees. Women were raped, men were castrated, babies had their brains dashed out on rocks. The Klan began its murderous campaign against black voting rights during this period.

It was a situation that required military intervention, and at first the North supplied this. But it took only a few years for Unionists to lose interest and for the white supremacists in the Democratic Party to gain control of Congress. After the three “Reconstruction amendments” were passed and ratified, even William Lloyd Garrison believed the job was done. The troops were withdrawn, the state constitutions were rewritten to give power back to the plantation owners, and the black codes, which had held sway briefly in 1865 before Congress took over the process, were reinstated in even harsher forms.

The problem was not that Reconstruction was ill-advised. The problem was that it wasn't given a chance to work. At one time I would have said it took another hundred years to complete the job, but it's become clear in recent years that after 150 years the job is still not done. Blacks in America remain disadvantaged, ghettoized, incarcerated, and murdered at shocking rates.

Norman Dietz hasn't gotten a fair shake for his excellent job narrating this audiobook. As one example, he's been criticized for pronouncing “hegemony” with a hard G; but according to Merriam Webster, this is one of the acceptable pronunciations (although it is more typically British). In any case, his occasional mispronunciations have been exaggerated. He is an engaging narrator and is able to keep a good pace through the mass of details.

The audiobook has also been unfairly criticized for not being the most recent edition of the book, the 2014 reissue. But as with many such “revisions,” the new material consists of an additional chapter and bibliography surveying the research done since 1988, when the book first appeared. The bulk of the book remains the same as in the first edition.

Norman Dietz is a lazy narrator...

...who seems to think he csn fake words he has no idea how to pronounce. This is a pit, because he has and exceptionally mellifluous voice, which is wasted on mispronunciations so egregious and so frequent that at approximately 5 to 10 minute intervals I shouted out the name of the Christ. Eric Foner's book remains the definitive history of Reconstruction that all subsequent histories have had to take account of, Happily, Foner's titanic achiecement rings out despite Norman Dietz's unfortunate narration. Dietz should not be permitted to read scholarly non fiction , which typically has a high percentage professional language, foreign terms arcane social science terminology, and the like. Producers of such audiobooks should obtain restraining orders to keep Mr Dietz from their recording studios.

Reasonably good book, sometimes overly detailed

I like the details that the author provides, sometimes the endless political machinations get to be difficult to follow and redundant. This is probably true of the era, but for a historical tome it can be difficult to follow.

The reader is a huge detriment to this book. His is monotone and uses little voice variation even in his most emphatic moments. I turned the speed up to two times normal and found myself able to feel more interested in the performance.

All in all, a very interesting book about a very to tumultuous time.

Very Thorough and Eye-Opening

It ought to be required reading for everyone in high school since racism is so rampant in our society .